Hopelessness Is a Resource for the Tyrannical: Katie Couric with David Frum

Katie sits down with David Frum, Atlantic writer and host of an eponymous podcast, to take stock of a dizzying news cycle: a government shutdown framed around false claims about healthcare for immigrants, a surreal Quantico meeting where military leaders were treated as political props, and Donald Trump’s vow to punish his opponents through prosecutions. Frum explains how the U.S. budgeting system turned into a "failure machine,” what’s happening to Supreme Court neutrality, and what it means when Trump spreads vulgar AI videos of his opponents. Frum’s bottom line? This might be a fire hose of news, but it's our duty as citizens to keep up, not tune out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Sometimes I think the only thing predictable about Donald Trump
is that he'll find a new way to shock us
every day, sometimes multiple times a day. In the last
week alone, he posted an AI generated video of Chuck
Schumer and a keen Jeffrey saying we're just.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
A bunch of woke pieces of shit.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
He pushed through the Komi indictment. He told military leaders
who were summoned to Quantico, Virginia that they should use
quote some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for
our military. And despite the fact that the military is
supposed to be apolitical, he urged them to applaud.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
I've never walked into a room so silent before. This
is very Don't laugh, don't live. You're not allowed to
do that, you know what. Just have a good time
and if you want to applaud, you.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Applaud by the way they didn't. And oh yes, we're
in the middle of a government shutdown. It's exhausting and overwhelming.
But as my next guest, Atlantic writer and host of
the eponymous podcast, David from has said, hopelessness is a
resource of the tyrannical. I love talking to David about

(01:12):
all of this and more so. We covered a lot, because,
let's face it, there's a lot to cover, David from
It's always great to see you. Gosh, so many stories,
so little time. Where do we begin, I guess with
the government shutdown before we talk about this particular shutdown, David,

(01:34):
as somebody who's covered politics, gosh, probably as long as
I have, if not longer, can you explain to folks
listening why we are faced with this dilemma on a
regular basis?

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Well, I don't know that I may have covered it longer,
not with as much distinction.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
But I would argue with that. But thank you for
the sweet compliment.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
So the Constitution of the Knights says that every money
bill must originate in the House of Representatives, must be
voted by the House, then approved by the Senate. That's
how the government of the United States gets money to
pay for all the things the government does. And the
theory is that the Congress is supposed to every year
pass a budget that gives the executive the money they

(02:19):
need to pay for the military and fund pensions and
pay for health care and all of that. Now, the
practice has been the system broke down a long time ago.
A lot of the federal budget is on autopilot. That
Congress no longer votes about what the pension should be
or what the health care should be. That just happens
on autopilot. And there aren't regular budgets anymore either. Instead,

(02:40):
there are a series of funding measures that the House
votes and the Senate votes and the President signs, and
they passed with continuing resolutions, not with the formality that
used to prevail, but in this kind of held you
skelter way. There's one other problem, which is unless this
rule meets very very strict conditions. There are strict conditions
where you can pass it through the House with half
the vote, it's in the Senate with the majority of

(03:01):
the votes, but oftentimes you need sixty votes to pass
things through the Senate. That's new that it also wasn't
in the olden days. That's not in the sixty vote
requirement is not in the Constitution, but it's something that
has developed. So you have this failure machine, no regular budget,
these stop gap resolutions. Much of the government, the health
care and the pensions ticking along anyway, and this need

(03:21):
to pass things through the House with half the votes
plus one, but the Senate with sixty and that creates
these deadlocks, and as the parties have lost the habit
of any kind of cooperation, we've had these increasing government shutdowns.
They happened, just to take one more sentence, In the
seventies and eighties, they would happen sometimes for like a
day or half a day as kind of symbolic expressions

(03:42):
of dispute. But in the nineteen nineties there was a
government shutdown that went out for quite for more than
I think nearly a month, or maybe even longer. And
since then they've flared up whenever the parties are especially
at loggerheads, and we've had a number of these shutdowns.
During Trump one, I think that was the second longest,
and now in Trump two we're going to have another.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
It looks like, David, it sounds like such an fed up,
antiquated system. Right. There's got a better way to build
a better mouse draft? Right?

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Well, one way would be to say that the budget
of the United States gets passed by fifty votes plus
one in the Senate fifty plus one in the House,
the way any other democracy would do it. And another
thing that is really fed up is we have this
crazy debt ceiling, which is the same problem, only only
with nuclear weapons, and that happens in intervals where the

(04:30):
Congress has a limit on how much the federal government
can borrow. No other democracy does anything like this. And
if Congress votes a lot of spending, votes less taxes,
creates a budget gap, and that budget gap accumulates, Congress
has to have a third vote to say okay, and
we agree to borrow the difference. And if they don't
do it again, all kinds of bad things happen. But
the government is shut down, and this may go on
for a while.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
What does it mean? I think people here, you know,
a government shut down, and they don't quite appreciate what
that entails.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, well it entails again. Social security payments continue to
flow because they don't go through the regular budget process,
and a lot of health care spending continues to flow
because it doesn't go through the regular budget process. But
everything that does go through the regular budget process, like
the military, for example, many of those functions continue. The
air traffic controllers continue, but the people who do the

(05:20):
functions don't get paid. They get their pay at the end.
But this can have a catastrophic effect for you know,
imagine you're a young military family. Maybe they're children, and
so maybe the mother is not in the workforce at
that time, the family lives on its pay and they're told,
you know, you're going you'll get the money five or
six weeks from now. You know, I hope you can

(05:41):
negotiate a deal with your grocery store. I mean, what
happens to them. I mean, it's just it's beyond irresponsible.
But it's become a bad habit of American government.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
What else though, I mean, other than those situations with
military families or other people who rely on the federal government,
you know, to live, can you enumerate some of the
other repercussions of this.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Well, the United States federal government is the biggest purchaser
of goods and services in the entire world, so it
spends trillions of dollars, and much of that money goes
directly into people's pockets, like Social Security, but a lot
of it goes to people who provide services like Medicare
and Medicaid. The sick person doesn't get the money the
person who provided the healthcare to the hospital, and so

(06:26):
those a lot of those providers get hit by long delays,
and they have bills too. I mean the hospital, probably
the hospital can do better getting a little bit of
credit than the young military family that has to buy
pampers and groceries. But the hospital also has suppliers that
need to be paid. So this reverberates all through the
US economy and it raises all kinds of questions in

(06:49):
the rest of the world about the stability and seriousness
of the United States government.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Tell me how this government shut down is perhaps different
than ones that have come before it in your view.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
Well, here's one way that it's the same. It is.
The most famous government shut down, probably to this point,
was the one back in the nineteen nineties between New
King Rich and Bill Clinton, and that was about the
Republican desire to cut health care spending, especially Medicare and Medicaid,
and Clinton saying no, and the Republicans tried to force
Clinton's hands and they ultimately failed. This one is also

(07:20):
about health care spending. That there are a lot of
subsidies that go to the Affordable Care Act that Democrats
want to make permanent. Republicans don't, And so the Democrats
are withholding that this the measure passed that got through
the House with Republican votes. I finding measure went to
the Senate and got some Democratic votes, but not enough
to get it up to sixty. And what the argument

(07:40):
is about is, well, the forward argument is about should
the Affordable Care Act be funded in full? But there's
a back argument because one of the things that Trump
administration is claiming is that the president has the right
to refuse to spend money that Congress has voted. Now,
the courts have said that's illegal. The president doesn't have them.
Once Congress votes to spend the money and the president

(08:02):
signs the spending bill, he's obligated to spend the money,
whether he likes it or not. That's what his signature
on the funding measure means. I agree to spend the
money that Congress has voted in the way the Congress
said I should spend him. But Trump has claimed a
bright not to spend money to withhold their technical terms
of recision impoundment. But what that means if you're a Democrat,
you say, wait a month, I'm going to strike a

(08:23):
deal with you guys, and we want to spend a
little more, you want to spend a little less. We're
going to strike a deal on a certain funding level.
And then the president says, okay, but I have a
right after I sign the bill to Renegg, I can
renegge at any time. And so one of the questions
that Democrats are struggling with is, how do you do
business what people say they're not bound by the deals
they strike.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
How unusual is this? How unconventional is this kind of arrangement,
given that Congress does have the power of the purse right,
and that Donald Trump or the chief executive the US,
basically has to sign it into law, but it's sort
of kind of a half assed signature.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Basically, yeah, well, he's an especially untrustworthy person and that
makes it hard to do these kinds of deals. Now,
in a lot of states, governors have the power to
impound funds or to do a line item veto, so
the legislature votes, the governor says, no, I zero this out.
I'm not doing this. And that's true in a lot
of states because the state constitutions permitted. And in the

(09:18):
nineteen seventies President Nixon said that would be a useful
power to have. It's not in the US Constitution, but
let me find out whether I've got it or not.
The Constitution doesn't say I don't have it, so let
me try. So President Nixon tried it and there was
a big crisis. This is during the water Gate buried
he's unpopular. Congress objected, it went to the Supreme Court,
and the Supreme Court said, unlike many governors, the president

(09:39):
does not have an impoundment power. Once the president signs
the spending measure that comes from Congress, he's obliged to
spend the money whatever he personally thinks about the spending measure.
If he doesn't like it, he can veto the spending
measure and ask for another one.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
So who looks bad in this scenario.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
Well, that's going to be the real test of strength here.
And one of the things I find interesting about this
is the Republicans are much more in The Republicans in
Congress are much more cohesive group. They hold together in
a way that Democrats don't, and they're much more audacious.
They're willing to try crazy things that a lot of
Democrats are frightened to try. But the Democrats have that
advantage of suit. So that's the Republican advantage. They're more cohesive,

(10:18):
they're more audacious, or one more advantage. They also were
the first movers that they set up. They said This
is the confrontation we want to have, because we're going
to say the reason the Democrats want to spend all
this extra money on healthcare is to give it to
illegal aliens, and everyone thinks they don't like those and
don't you count on people. It's not true. But even
if it were true, tell me if the person coughing

(10:41):
next to you in the subway has pneumonia and you're
worried about whether you're going to get that cough and
that pneumonia, do you care about the citizenship status of
that person or do you want that person to be
treated so that you don't get pneumonia from them? That
the viruses and bacteria don't care about status. The reason
we would want illegal aliens to be treated is we
don't want to get sick from the illegal alien. It's

(11:03):
not It can be charity, but it's also self preservation.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
You say it's not even true, But it's not even true.
So why are we even hypothesizing about this.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Well, I want to take this one a little bit
on the whole, because even on its face, even if
it were true, I said, Okay, a school bus crashes
and the kids are all hurt, and you bring the
kids to the emergency room. Do you want to treat
the kids or do you want to check whether some
of the kids are not in the country with legal status.
There's a school vaccination program to make sure that the
kids don't spread measles to each other. Do you want

(11:33):
to check the status or you say, you know if
they're not if they're not legal, I'm happy to take
measles from them. Fine, give me the measles. I need
to make that point so firmly. But in any case,
Medicaid Medicare are not illegal. Aliens are not eligible for those.
So the Republicans are gambling. They've got they've chosen the fight.
They've got the more cohesive group, they're bolder, but the
Democrats have a bigger potential coalition bhyd them. More people

(11:53):
are on the Democratic side of funding Medicare and Medicaid
than on the Republican side, and the Democrats also have
a more popular the issue. So we're going to see,
we're going to have a little test and that's a
little bit of what this is is kind of a
mock contest in advance of the twenty twenty six elections,
and the Republicans are going to see how much can
we get away with because their polls are looking bad.

(12:14):
But this is the way to test. You know, maybe
our more cohesive group doesn't care so much about would
the big numbers in the polls say, because those are
kind of misty.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Your colleague at The Atlantic, Russell Berman wrote, and letting
the government close and risking an even more aggressive assault
by Trump on the federal workforce. Democrats have shown they're
ready for a fight they avoided in the spring. What's
less apparent, however, is whether they've started one they can win.
That is the key question, isn't it, David, Well.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Whenever you start a fight, you have to take on
board the possibility that you can lose. And fights fights
only happen when both people in the fight think they
have a chance of winning, Because if one of them
thought they wouldn't, then the fight, then the fight would
be backed away from. But Trump is vowing to take
action again federal workforce. But you know, I think a
lot of people don't understand what the federal workforce looks like,

(13:06):
you know, the federal workforce. When people think of the
federal workforce, they may think about the way state governments work.
State governments provide a lot of services to a lot
of people, and so their workforces are quite big relatives
to their local economies. Their workforces are very female heavy,
their workforces are very people of color heavy. Typically, the

(13:27):
federal workforce isn't like just just think, think what it
took in nineteen sixty two to mail a Social Security
check file, Clerks all kinds of things. Now, what does
it take to send a social serority country. It's like
one person running millions of machines with vast computing power.
So the federal government, where it employs people, it runs
federal prisons. Where are those Red states? Who works in

(13:50):
federal prisons Red state voters? Typically federal government spends a
lot on the military and military suppliers where military services bought,
typically in sun Belt State, if people not just the
navy personnel, but the suppliers to the Navy, the people
who do the laundry, the company that pays the people
they're not getting paid. That is felt in Florida and

(14:11):
Texas and North and South Carolina. So it is the
risks here are pretty complicated and hard to compute, and
that's one of the reasons why this kind of behavior
is usually unwise, but right now that feelings between the
parties are so strong and the Republican moves are so
bold that a confrontation was growing for a while.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Once again we find ourselves living in a parallel universe.
According to this Fox headline, GOP accuses Dems of risking
shutdown to restore illegal immigrant healthcare subtitle. Republicans accuse Democrats
of prioritizing healthcare benefits for illegal immigrants over paying US troops.

(14:54):
Can we go back to the veracity of that claim, David,
because it's so much a the center of this whole debate,
because you have both sides or each side saying different things,
and I would love for you to clarify once and
for all if this is happening, and how the Republicans

(15:15):
are getting away with perpetrating this falsehood.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Yeah. Well, at the center of this dispute are the
subsidies under the Affordable Care Act that have extended Medicaid
to more Americans and that support hospitals and others who
provide services and also help people pay for their insurance premiums.
So Republicans tried in the first time term to abolish
the Affordable Care Act. They didn't have the votes even
within their own party to do that, So they're now

(15:40):
trying to starve the Affordable Charact by turning off the
flow of money. Problem is, the Affordable Care Act is
pretty popular. The people who get the Medicaid who are
newly eligible for Medicaid because it's now available to a
much wider population than it was before, they like it.
The hospitals who get reimbursed for emergency care people who
they didn't used to get for they like it. And

(16:01):
the many many people who are buying health care benefits
for themselves and individual marketplaces who get a subsidy to
do that. They like it. And Republicans still don't like it.
And there's an argument. They have an argument to make,
but they're afraid that they're true argument, the one that
actually motivates them will not be acceptable, which is which
is the Republicans basically healthcare as a services service like

(16:21):
anything else, and if you can't afford it, you shouldn't
have it. We don't subsidize people's Netflix subscriptions. If you
can't afford a Netflix subscription, you don't get one. You know,
we don't subsidize your groceries. You need food to live
but you know, if you can't afford a steak, you
don't get one. And they think it's a commodity in
the marketplace, something you should buy. And there's certain classes
of Americans, older Americans who get it no matter what,

(16:43):
very poor Americans who get it no matter what. But
if you're not very poor or old, if you can't
afford it, you don't get it. That's their view of this.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
But where does the undocumented immigrant come in here?

Speaker 2 (16:53):
Well, under the Affordable Care Act made very clear, illegal
aliens cannot get directs up cities under the Affordable Care Act,
that's completely forbidden. They can't get them from Medicaid, they
can't get them from Medicare. But the little bit of
wiggle room truth is hospital emergency rooms are not allowed
to turn away anybody by law. You show up, you've

(17:14):
been in a car accident, you've been shot, you've been stabbed,
the hospital has to take care of you. And I
think most us think, yeah, obviously, sorry, mister shooting victim, card,
mister burne victim. You know, a child in a school
bus accident, person coming in with and you know you've
got the plague, And if we don't treat you you're going

(17:35):
to spread the plague to all your neighbors. People think, yeah,
the hospital should treat it. So the hospital says, well,
how do we pay for that? Especially if you don't
think of like a giant, big city hospital, but lots
of hospitals are smaller, they're in smaller towns. How do
we pay we? Okay, we treated, we did thirteen hours
of life saving surgery. We had doctors, we had nurses,
we had you know, all kinds of equipment. Well, how

(17:55):
do we pay for that? And we look to the government,
state or federal support our operating costs. And if the
hospital isn't checking whether the person who receives the emergency
service is illegal, then yeah, there is some flow of
government funds. But that's the picture they're trying to conjure
up is not that one.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
What is the picture they're trying to conjure that illegal
immigrants are flooding emergency rooms and costing taxpayers boatloads of money,
and somehow if we deny this care, they are not
going to come to this country.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
Yes, I think that's the idea. And what they're also
trying to do is put together a bunch of words,
and this is the way our minds work that whatever
your political point of view, there are words that you
don't like, and if I can string them in a sentence,
I can activate your emotions. And you know, okay, let
me give you one that made liberal more liberal mind
than people may understand. So I just finished work on

(18:51):
an article about this so called bailout for Argentina, which
I'm in favor of, and we don't have to talk
about that today. Why I'm in favor of it doesn't matter.
The point is when I think the typical non Trump
voter here is bail out for the Central Bank of Argentina.
You're putting a lot of things they don't like into
a sentence. And maybe they'll read my article in the
Atlantic about why this is actually a good idea and

(19:12):
why it's not going to be as costly and it's
not taking home. But maybe they're busy, maybe they have
something else to do, and so they just the power
of these words lands on the earth, all the things
you don't like. Bail out Central Bank Argentina. No, and
Trump is trying to do the same thing, or Jade
vance even more with Illealaliens healthcare. No.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
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(19:58):
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(20:18):
or book your own free personalized fitting. I wanted to
ask you, David about this AI generated video of Chuck
Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Donald Trump posted it on

(20:42):
x and probably I'm true social, but I just watched
it on X and it was so fascinating for me
to read the comments and how people thought it was
hilarious and so funny, and of course many people on
the other side of the aisle were completely outraged by this,
and you know, it was just fascinating because basically the

(21:06):
take on the Republican side or the MAGA side was,
you know, Democrats have no sense of humor, right, And
yet I couldn't get over that the president of the
United States is posting something like this on social media
that basically is undignified at best and really just vulgar

(21:29):
and racist at worst.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
There's something else that's going on, though, and that sort
of gets to something that is deep about well, why
the government is shut down right now. So just think
about any negotiation you've ever been in, in a price
of a house, buying a car, contract your contract. So,
I mean, there are may be certain psychopaths who begin
a negotiation by insulting the person on the other side

(21:52):
of the table, but most of us understand that the
beginning of a negotiation is a very good time to
be polite, because you're trying to get to yes. But
you're trying to get the other person to say yes
to something you want, and if you insult them, either
you wreck the yes, or at least you make the
yes more expensive, probably than it otherwise would have been.
So negotiations are usually conducted in an atmosphere of at

(22:14):
least pretend respect, because otherwise things don't get done. But
Donald Trump's vision of how he should work with the
world is that he never negotiates as an equal with anybody.
He's the king. He dispenses and so one of the
reasons we're going to this maybe for a while is
he's going to have to yield somewhere. And Trump's whole
theory of whether he's talking to the Chinese, whether he's
talking to Democrats in Congress, whoever he's talking to, he

(22:37):
decrees what the result will be, and then they submit
to his power, and he does these demonstrations seemingly counterproductive
of obnoxiousness. To make clear, I haven't given up on anything,
but that makes it very hard to get to yes,
because what may happen. Look, it may happen to the
democratic position to disintegrates in public opinion. They are under

(22:58):
a lot of trouble and they have to completely surrender.
But it's also possible that the reverse happens, or something
in between, and at some point this will have to
be closed. And at that point all of this becomes
more difficult and more expensive for the president. And maybe
the president can't even be in the room because he
so offended the people he needs to get to yes.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
When you saw that video, what did you think, David?
And just like on a human level.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
You know, I think it's been a decade now since
I had my first shock that somebody so crude and
ridiculous and offensive could be an aspirant for president of
the United States. I think those of us who came
a political age before twenty fifteen, you know, you had
presidents you like more, you had presidents you liked less.

(23:46):
But there's a certain style and music that you expected
of the President's a.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
Certain threshold of behavior.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, exactly. And even the ones like Lyndon Johnson, who
is so crude in private, I mean just he would
do the most disgusting thing in private, but when he
went out in public, he was the president and the
rule descended on him, and he behaved in a certain way.
It wasn't natural to him, but he did it. And
then there are people who were more naturally gracious and proper,
But even the ones who weren't, there was just an
idea the president. This is what not what a president does.

(24:17):
Like the president doesn't ask people come to the Oval office.
Did you stay in the hotel last night? Did you
stay in the hotel? I earned I own, yes or no?
I need to know that I have two hundred dollars
in your viewers in my pocket before we can discuss
the arm sale to Turkey. Presidents didn't used to do that,
and now they do, so I'm no longer shocked.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Well, now one does one does.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
One of the questions I ask is do we ever
go back? Is it going to seem kind of phony
or artificial for a president to try to behave in
a dignified and solemn way, Because if Trump had lost
forever in twenty twenty, then the lesson would have been,
don't do this this kind of behavior. But the American
people do put up with it, and it did work,
and in twenty twenty four he won an actual popular

(24:59):
vote mandate, which he didn't do in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
So, in other words, the floodgates have been open and
there's no shut Potentially there's no shutting them in the future,
which is really depressing to me. And maybe that's because I, too,
like you, observe presidents my entire life who had a
certain amount of decorum and dignity and graciousness and all

(25:24):
the words that, honestly that I would want my children
to aspire to. As my father in law says, the
sewer was always there. Donald Trump simply opened the lid.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, I think that's right. And the look Gavin Newsom
is now testing does this kind of style work on
Democrats too? And Newsom's doing it in a kind of
one step two step way that he's saying, Look, it's
not me, Gavin Newsom who's personally doing this. It's this
artificial character. It's pretend Gavin who have created tatroll and
mock Republicans. But if I were president would be a

(25:58):
completely different person. I swear this pretend Gavin is the
one who's doing much better as a politician than real
Gavin was doing. And I think pretend Gavin is going
to end up being in charge of whatever presidential campaign
the real Gavin Newson tries to run.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Well, it's interesting because I agree he's gotten much more pugnacious,
But I still think there are certain lines that even
the pretend Gavin isn't crossing, right, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
I mean, yeah, yes, I mean overt racism. He's probably
not going to cross that line. But we're just into
and maybe this is a consequence of social media. Maybe
this is Donald Trump changing the United States, or.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Maybe it's a combination of the two.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
Maybe It's also I think a lot of Americans are
giving up on the idea that the United States should
lead the world. That's I think one of the messages
of those who support Donald Trump really well, as long
as any of us can remember, the job of President
of the United States is more than just the leader
of a country. There's something different in being president the
United States and Prime Minister of Denmark. President of the
United States had this global role, these global responds abilities.

(27:00):
Everything the president said. You know, when I work for
President w. Bush as a speech writer, and one of
the things that people said that was always weird about w.
Bush was we referred to terrorists as evildoers, which sounds
in English, sounds a little theatrical. And so the question
is why did he hit that word? And it's because
everything he said after nine to eleven he had to
weigh how will this sound when it's translated into Arabic.

(27:23):
How do I make sure that the word I'm using
is translated into the Arabic word I want the translator
to use, and not an Arabic word, because there are
words for there are words for irregular fighter that in
the in Arabic have a positive connotation and their words
are irregular fighter then the in Arabic have a negative connotation,
and Bush was trying to drive the negative connotation choice,

(27:46):
and so he used where it sounded often quite weird
in English because he was thinking in more than one
language at the same time. And a president has to
think that way.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
And I think Donald Trump thinks that way.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Certainly, certainly not no, certainly not. You know, I just
think of it. I mean, I'm originally from Canada. I
spend a lot of time there. Canada's politics like everybody else.
It has liberals and conservatives like everybody else. And in
normal times, the conservative Canadians are more comfortable with Republican
presidents and the liberal Canadians are more comfortable with democratic presidents.

(28:18):
So the systems are so intermixed, and people know each
other so well, and they have family on both sides
of the border. I mean Donald Trump's greatest station with
where everyone in Canada is offended by him because he's
spoken about Canada and ways that give offense to every
single Canadian. I mean all Canadians, liberal, conservative, socialist, radic,
whatever their views, they all agree Canada should exist, a
Canada should be an independent country. And when the president says, okay,

(28:40):
my starting point is Canada. There shouldn't be a candidate
at all. And he said, look, I might agree with
you on eight issues out of ten, but when you're
attacking my national existence, how do I agree with that?
But I think a lot of Americans say, you know,
we want to step back. We don't want to be
responsible for the world. We don't want all these cares
and concerns. Let China take over half the world and
let Russia take over the other half, and we'll have

(29:02):
Greenland and Venezuela and that's enough for us. We're not
going to be world leaders anymore. That's why we put
off all these tariff walls.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
What do you think is the danger in that?

Speaker 2 (29:12):
So in the summer of nineteen forty one, President Franklin
Roosevelt gave a speech to Americans who imagined that they
could do this with the access powers. We could let
the access take over the world and we would have
our little island of safety. And Roosevelt tried to explain
to them in nineteen forty one, the world is too
small and the United States is too big for Americans
to be unaffected by what happens elsewhere. You can't draw

(29:34):
a line around a country as big as the United
States and say to the rest of the planet what
happens over there doesn't matter us. Whether it's environmental like
hurricanes and climate change, whether it's epidemiology plagues, diseases, epidemics,
whether it's military threats, whether it's the movement of people.
If you want to stop illegal immigration, it's going to
be a lot better to have the countries of the

(29:55):
Americas as your partners rather than as your enemies. If
you want to stop the flow of drugs, stop the
flow of drigs by blowing up speed boats in the Caribbean.
If you want to stop the flow of dogs, you
have to work with the governments of those countries, and
they will have asks because they also politics. I'll say,
you know, yes, we'll help you, but this, you know,
you're asking us to do something that may be a
little expensive here at home politically, there are people. We're
going to be arresting people or doing things that they

(30:17):
don't like. So get there's something we need from you.
You know. The way the United States helped Columbia to
break the power of drug cartels in Columbia was by
helping Colombia to become the world's largest producer of cut flowers,
all of which are flown into the United States, and
it's had some impact on the American flower industry. But
the United States said, well, to get Columbia to go
on board with their anti drug efforts, you know, we're

(30:38):
going to have We're going to buy a lot more
flowers from Columbia than we ever imagined we would or could.
That's the kind of thing that if you are globally minded,
you realize as other countries exist and they affect the
United States, and you can't hide from that.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
And let's take it a step further, David. You know,
to give so much power to Russia and China has
huge global implications.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, and that power is felt in all kinds of
ways that people don't have reason to think about every day.
So Argentina, to go back to the subject I'm writing
about for The Atlantic this week, Argentina is in a
terrible currency crisis this month as a result of some
good things they did. They tried to do some very
positive reforms, but they made some mistakes and they now
have a currency crisis. And the Chinese are saying, you

(31:18):
know what, Argentina. You're a huge producer of agricultural products.
We will take all of those agricultural product We will
stiff the United States take your products, and we want
to integrate you into our currency block as the price.
I don't think there are many Americans who think much
about our Argentine grain production, or are the Argentine Peso
or the Chinese China Argentina relationship until it goes wrong.

(31:41):
When it goes wrong, then you'll notice it.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
Talk a little bit more though, for us about China
and Russia, and if we basically abdicate half of the
world to those countries.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Yeah, it's not half, it's a lot more than half.
And look, Americans, over our lifetimes have built a world
that looks more and more like the United States. It's
got rules of law, it's got concepts of human rights.
It's got democratic ideals, even if people don't always live
up to the ideals. It's got a concept that war
should be the last resort and that war has to

(32:15):
be justified to other kinds, to the community of nations.
You've got the habit that you can speak English almost
anywhere you go, and use a visa card almost anywhere
you go and if you have a dispute with a
merchant in Thailand over the purchase on visa card, that
dispute will be adjudicated by visa in ways that you're
familiar with and that will seem that will make sense
to you, and that you've been warned about. And you,

(32:37):
as an American, don't probably have to learn a second
language except as a luxury. So the United States has
built this world. If China and Russia are running the world,
they'll make the world suit them very Here's one very
dramatic example of this is so long as the United
States is the most important economy in the world, the
United States can say to others, you know what, in America,
we don't pay bribes, or at least we didn't used to.

(32:58):
And now the president wie, but before Trump, we didn't
used to pay bribes. And because we have anti bribery
is such an important principle, we are going to enforce
on American corporations that do business anywhere in the world
an anti bribery law. So even if they're in a
place where there are bribes, we're going to say, in
the American corporation, you can't do that. And when the
corporation says, but that's unfair because the French corporation will

(33:19):
pay bribes. The United States says, we have enough power
to put weight on the French not to pay bribes either.
And what we're going to do is we're going to
equalize the playing field, but with the lowest level of bribery,
not the highest. In China and Russia, they pay bribes
all the time. And if they're writing the rules of
the road, international bribery will be the normal way you
do business everywhere on the planet, and Americans will just
look like suckers and losers if they follow but played

(33:40):
by the same rules, so they won't be able to
So the United States, well, companies will begin paying bribes abroad.
And the more you pay bribes broad the more you
develop the habit of paying bribes at home too.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
And that's just one example. I mean, I think there
are a myriad of examples of how treacherous it could
be if Russia and China ruled the world.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, the American since the Second World War, the United
State has always said when people propose to carve up
the war world and the pieces of this idea that
Donald Trump likes, the American views, we're not. I mean,
sometimes you can't help it. There was an Iron curtain
and countries under communism, But the American idea has always been, Look,
we're not going to be impracticable at this, We're not
going to take crazy risks. But our idea, the thing

(34:21):
we're going toward, if we can do it, is a
world where it's all one world. It's all one world.
We're not allowing some thug to rule a piece of it.
We're going to have one world that tries to work
by an increasingly common set of international norms and standards,
from everything from environmental protection to corporate corruption to human rights.

(34:41):
And we're going to try to encourage and promote the
idea that governments everywhere should rule with the consent of
the government to the extent we can. We're not going
to be gamblers, but we have a vision of the world.
We're not going to allow others to carve it up
and say, in our piece, we do torture people and
it's fine.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
What do you think has created this backline against having
the United States as sort of a world leader. Do
you think it's anti globalization? Do you think it's you know,
pro isolationism. I mean, what do you think is fueling
this retreat for so many Americans.

Speaker 2 (35:18):
Well, look, in some ways it's the default setting for Americans.
The country's so big geographically and in population, it's separated
by oceans from everybody except the Canada and Mexico. So
it's natural if you're an American to to feel wrongly
that the world is far away. And leaders have had
to introduce Americans to the idea that what happens in

(35:38):
the rest of the world matters, and Americans got a
real lesson about that through the Two World Wars. We
never want to fight a war like that. So the
best way to fight a wars to prevent wars, and
that means some American commitment to keeping the peace. And
then the economy grew so strongly after the wars that
Americans of the idea, yeah, we're all better off if
we buy and sell with Germany and Japan and France, Britain,

(36:00):
in Italy and Belgium. So I think two things have
changed that one is the China Shock, where the United
States is under enormous economic pressure from a huge country
with a very sophisticated economy, and Americans say, well, maybe
the best way to do that is to hide in
the basement and lock the doors and turn on the taps,
and we won't hear the Chinese economy. We can just
make it go away. And the second is the shock
of the Iraq and Afghanistan experience, where Americans fought these

(36:23):
protracted wars that didn't feel successful, didn't feel worth it,
and where Americans felt, you know, why do we do that?
And the next time anyone asks us to do anything,
it's going to be like that all over again. And
they're both Americans who feel that. Sincerely.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
Well, I think there are reasons too, David. I mean,
I think there are reasons for if you look at
sort of I mean, you know this better than anyone,
having worked with George W. Bush, If you look in
hindsight about the rationale for some of those wars, at
least Iraq, and you know, the whole fraud of weapons
of mess destruction and the cherry picking of intel and

(37:02):
the neocons and all that jazz. I mean, there's some
legitimate regret by a lot of people for those wars,
don't you think.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
I think a lot of people feel that way. I
think it's wrong, but I don't need to litigate that here.
But well, I says that feeling is a resource and
that feeling can be used. So when Donald Trump wants
to sell out Ukraine, that he invokes that feeling. As
I said, I don't think it's a justified feeling, but
it doesn't matter. Many people do that That is there
is a resource. It's also there as a real thing,

(37:33):
Like even if Donald Trump never existed, people would feel
that way. Look, basically, the United States goes through these
mood swings about the rest of the world. So after Vietnam,
a lot of Americans said, that's it, We're giving up
on the planet and we want to retreat. Then after
the Reagan years and the fall of the Wall and
the triumph over communism a lot, and then the victory

(37:54):
of nineteen ninety and the Gulf First Golf War, a
lot of Americans said, huh, you know what, maybe we
do have something to offer and maybe our leaders do
know what they're doing. And so there was this emotional
high and then Afghanistan and Iraq lowered it. One of
the things that's at stake in the Ukraine War is
this is a hugely important global conflict fought for extremely
good reasons where the United States and its friends could

(38:17):
win if they weren't being sabotaged by a president who
sympathetic more sympathetic to Russia than the Ukraine. I think
one of the things that a lot of the people
on the anti American side abroad and this doubtful about
the reason they want Ukraine to lose so badly is
because Anderson. If Ukraine prevails, and it calls into question
a lot of the downbeat mood this country has been in,
you know, violent. This recent phase in the Ukraine, not

(38:40):
the most recent phase, but the backdrop to the war
that started in twenty twenty two was this moment in
twenty fourteen where Ukrainians went into the streets and drove
out their corrupt pro Russian government and the flag they
waved was the flag of United Europe, the blue banner
with the gold stars. We want to be a part
of that. And although a lot of Europeans are complaining
about it, and it's not very popular with the far right,

(39:02):
we here on the streets of Kiev where we're living
with these hard lives and we want access to what
you have, and we think we have something going to
contribute and we believe in these ideals that you seem
to have forgotten a lot of people are doing. That's
those are dangerous people. They're reminding us of things that
people might think again if they're not discouraged and dishearten.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
Hi, everyone, it's me Katie Couric. You know, if you've
been following me on social media, you know I love
to cook, or at least try, especially alongside some of
my favorite chefs and foodies like Benny Blanco, Jake Cohen,
Lighty Hoyke, Alison Roman, and Ininagarten. So I started a
free newsletter called good Taste to share recipes, tips and

(39:48):
kitchen mustaves. Just sign up at Katiecuric dot com slash
good Taste. That's k A t I E c o
U r I c dot com slash good Taste. I
promised your taste buds will be happy you did before

(40:13):
we go, and you've been so generous with your time.
Can I just ask you about a couple of other
big news events, David to get your take? Sure, let
me ask you about what happened in Quantico, Virginia yesterday
with Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump gathering the top leaders
of the military and basically I don't know giving them,

(40:37):
depending on your perspective, a PEP rally or a lecture.
What were your thoughts.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Well as with the big parade Donald Trump wanted. I
think Trump and Hexath don't take seriously that. You know,
the people in the military have jobs, very difficult jobs,
and especially the senior levels of the military, they're under
enormous time pressure. So it's not an they're not working
for just for the president and the Secretary of Defense.

(41:03):
They work for the country, and if you're subtracting their
time for something stupid, you're burdening them, and you're also
burdening the taxpayer because we don't pay their salaries for
them to do stupid things. They were being there as props.
I think the behavior of the generals and admirals was
really admirable. They were polite, and I'm sure some of
them support the president, but they all understood we are

(41:25):
not political. We are not a prop for your rally.
So when you tell us about your big victory, we
sit on our hands. We do not clap because as
a military we are we had no opinion on any
of those elections we fought. Whoever is the legal commander
in chief, we follow we have as individuals are our opinions,
of course, but as an institution, we don't, and so
we will not applaud you when you ask us to applaud.
And Trump at one point threatened them that if you

(41:47):
don't applaud me, you're going to be fired. But their
safety and numbers none of them applauded. So the danger
is that haig Seth and Trump took the measure of
what they saw there, and they also in the first term,
saw that the military didn't want to do illegal things,
and they're thinking, how can we transform this officer corps
to make the upper branches of the military as political
as we want them to be as valuable?

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Really, right, David, Right?

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Right? So now that's a process that starts. You know,
let's pit colonels who share our ideology, make them one stars.
Let's find one stars who share our ideology and make
them too. You can't do it overnight, but I think
that's going to be a big heg Seth goal. What
we also saw, I think was heg Seth trying to
position himself as the biggest jerk in the Republican Party,

(42:30):
remembering that in the last cycle, the biggest jerk in
the Republican party won the Republican nomination, and well, Vice
president of Vance can often behave in kind of loudmouthed ways.
He's not by nature as big a jerk, and so
I think we may be watching the beginning of an
anti Vance drive for the Republican nomination in twenty twenty eight.

Speaker 1 (42:47):
It was more than just a military event, though. I
think that forty minutes forty four minutes into his Quantico speech,
Trump slipped in something pretty startling and stating, I told
Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as
training grounds for our military. That was a whole different

(43:08):
ball of blacks, was it not.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
Yeah, Yeah, that is something I've worried about a lot.
That they have in mind is deploying military units and
testing it in twenty five to see can we use
them to frighten away voters in the polls in twenty
twenty six. And here's how this would work. So here
in DC, the National Guard comes as no shock there
here every four years to protect presidential inaugurations. We have

(43:31):
a lot of big demonstrations and other kinds of events.
They come out to protect those and keep those orderly,
so we're what used to them and we welcome them.
But in this case, the Trump deployment has really depressed
the city so much that you can see a decline
in traffic to bars and restaurants, especially in the central
area of the city where the Guard are being deployed.
They're not being deployed where the crime is in the

(43:51):
poor areas. They're being deployed near the official areas to
keep making impression. So if the kind of person who
goes to a bar and restaurant is Central DC, they're
pretty expensive. These are not illegal aliens. These are people
on educated people with legal status who are I'm earning
a good salary, but they want to keep out of
the way. Now, imagine what happens if you deploy the

(44:12):
National Guard in Atlanta during election time. In Charlotte, in Phoenix,
there are a lot of people who are themselves legal
to be in the United States, but are maybe married
to somebody or living with somebody who's not. There are
a lot of people are legal to be in this country,
but maybe their parents aren't. And so those people when
they see that this kind of force, they are afraid
and they stay away. The way that people go to
the bars and restaurants in DC have been staying away,

(44:35):
and if they stay away, you can use the military
to suppress turnout in elections in blue and I think
the real target are blue cities in red states. And
given how tight American politics is, you don't need to
scare a lot of people to make a big impact.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
Do you think that's the goal.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
I think that's I think they've been experimenting with that.
I think they're discovering the goal. I think that with
a lot of Trump works by instinct. He doesn't know,
he doesn't have plan, goal, method and arrange that, but
he has a kind of instinct, but what do I
need to do to survive? And then he tests who
do I bully and intimidate? And then he sees what works.
And often his ideas don't work, but sometimes they do.

(45:14):
And I think this is one that they're experimenting with
to see again, not in the kind of scientific mastermind way,
but in a kind of crude survivor way. Let's see
if this works. Let's see if that works.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
James Comey, the indictment of Jim Comey thoughts.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Yeah, a lot of people begin their thoughts of saying
whatever you think of James Comy, and I say to
everyone says that you need to hit the backspace key
a few times. It doesn't matter what you think of
James com You shouldn't even introduce the thought. If James
Comy was a genuine bank robber, really personally had robbed
a bank, and the president of andited Slates gave orders
to prosecute this particular bank robber ahead of that one,

(45:51):
that would still be wrong because the system does not
work by the president telling the Attorney general who to prosecute.
The President and the Attorney General they lay down lines
of policy, and then individual prosecutors, who are chosen for
non political reasons, use this awesome power of the state
in an independent way. Once the president is telling people,
I want this person prosecuted, but not that one. That

(46:12):
one I like. Maybe he took money in a paper bag,
but I like him, so he's scott free. But this
one I don't like, So go after him. You have
lost what it means to be a free society. He
lost what it means to be a rule of law society.
And it's really ominous. And there are more of these.
We've seen some of the past with the prosecution of
John Bolton, and they are more coming. And I think
the target here, and Trump has said this in his

(46:34):
first TV broadcast after the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirks.
He wants to use the power of the presidency to
go after the donors to left wing causes, by which
he means to the Democratic Party. He wants to shut
down Democrats. He wants to use these methods to shut
down the financing of his political opponents.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
And the rhetoric he's using constantly, you know, he's very
good at, I think creating these earworms, like fake news,
and now he's like radical left, radical left, radical left,
the war within. These are very purposeful uses of language,
are they not.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yeah, well, of course there is such a thing as
the radical left in any society, and it's a small
number of very disaffected people. But Alex Soros, the billionaire
in his Tribeca triplex, he's not a radical. He's just
a standard liberal Democrat. And if he's your target, what
you're saying is, I think the real crime President Trump
is saying is giving money to the Democratic Party. Reid Hoffman,

(47:33):
who'said the big investor in Silicon Valley liberal views. Obviously
he's there. He is in Silicon Valley investing in profit
making corporations every day, picking winners and losers in the market.
He's not an end he's not a rout. He's more
pro capitalist than Donald Trump with his tech protectionism in
his special favors. But he's a person of liberal views
and he's giving money to the Democrat Party, and Trump

(47:53):
named him as an example of somebody he would like
to see targeted. So the goal here is not to Obviously,
if someone throws a Molotov cocktail at a military recruiting station,
that person should be prosecuted and I found guilty punished.
But what he's talking about are people who say I
think I'm for Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and that's the
crime he wants them punished for.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Is this not insane?

Speaker 2 (48:17):
It's wicked, but it's not insane.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
I'm curious, just to bring the conversation full circle, you
were talking about Richard Nixon and how the Supreme Court
provided you know, gosh, what would the word be a
bulwark against his wanting to exercise so much executive power.
But you tweeted this recently, the new Supreme Court doctrine.
Trump's probably doing unconstitutional things, but these plaintives don't have

(48:44):
the right to object. Neither do these nor those. But
go ahead and keep trying if you haven't gotten the
message yet. Oh and not you either.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
Yeah, So I was making fun of a particular decision
they had where Trump had tried to hold back some
money for that Congress had voted that he should spend
and that he had signed, so he had no right
to withhold his money, and the people were to receive
the money. Took the case of the Supreme Court, and
the Supreme Court said, we won't hear the case because
you don't have what is called standing, meaning this is

(49:13):
a legal doctrine that not anybody can sue for anything.
You have to have an interest in the matter before
we're entitled to sue. So that's not a crazy thing.
But this court has often used these technical methods as
a way of avoiding saying no to Donald Trump. Now,
my late father had a joke. We used to travel
a lot in Europe in the days of handwritten restaurant

(49:34):
and cafe bills. My father, who grow up in the depression,
always scrutinized these with great care, and he had this
funny line. He said, if these waiters were just bad
at math, you would think half the mistakes would be
in my favor. Okay, So when all the mistakes go
one way, the problem is not that they're bad at math.
And when the Supreme Court is constantly find we've got
some little dodge here where we were not saying we're

(49:55):
in favor of Trump. We're just saying that the person
whos opposed to Trump can't have a hearing today maybe tomorrow,
but not to and not you and not you. That
the Court is using what is called it's shadow docket,
that is, the things it's doing but doesn't admit it's
doing in ways to help Trump. And that has been
a real theme of the Supreme Court, especially since twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
So have you lost faith in the High Court? I mean,
do feel like when you look at ways to contain
these impulses and you know, not just impulses, actions that
are anti democratic? Is the Supreme Court a lost cause?

Speaker 2 (50:31):
Well, nothing's a lost cause. I studied law a long
time ago, and one of the things that is good
about setting laws it reminds you that judges are human
and that courts are very imperfect instruments. But one of
the things I've been saying consistently since twenty fifteen is
we use these phrases institutions and norms, but they don't
mean anything. It's just people, that's all. There are, just people,
people doing right things, people doing wrong things, and the

(50:53):
people include each of us. And so the idea that
I can sort of offshore my responsibility as a citizen
to somebody's going to look out for me, that's always
an illusion. In more peaceful times than we have right now,
more quiet times, the challenges are less, and so maybe
you can pay less attention. But these times you have
to pay a lot of attention because it's you and

(51:14):
that's all there is. It all comes down to you.

Speaker 1 (51:17):
In fact, I like your expression hopelessness is a resource
of the tyrannical.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
Yeah, thank you. They want to make you feel like
it's all lost. And so you see this a lot
in certain circles where people say, well, you know, because
people want to look smart and worldly, like, well, you
were naive ever to think anything would make a difference.
I believe everything makes a difference. It's just a lot
of everything, and what we do matters, not what I
personally do will decide everything. But what I do does matter,

(51:44):
and what you do does matter, and the third person,
and if enough people are motivated to do the right thing,
it matters.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
I want to ask you one question, a personal question,
before I bid you adiou, and that is, you know
a lot of people ask me about how I'm covering
the Trump administration and benow this sort of more objective
era of news coverage, and you know, I have wrestled
with that a bit, but not really because I feel

(52:15):
compelled to speak out about some of these things and
to not cover them as a passive observer. And I'm
just curious if, as a result, does the media and
that's of course it's not a monolith, certainly more than ever,
but does that contribute to a loss of faith in

(52:37):
the media. I wrestle with this, and I'm just curious
for your thoughts as someone like me, because I think
you've known my work and I've been sort of on
the public stage for gosh for decades now, you know,
about covering these stories and trying to help people, or
covering these events and covering this administration and helping people understand.

(53:00):
You know, I don't want half the country just to
say I am a partisan.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, well, you made your career at a company that
was when you were there, one of the if not
the very most powerful media corporation of the world. Certainly
one of the three or four most powerful media corporation
is certainly because whoever's the most powerful media corporation in
the United States is the most powerful in the world.
That world is gone, and our understanding of media has
to adapt. What is the most powerful and important media

(53:28):
company in the United States? TikTok? And who's second? Maybe Facebook,
maybe YouTube? The company that the fact that you were
an institution was important in nineteen seventy five doesn't tell
us much about how important it is in twenty twenty five. Second,
I say that media objectivity is not a matter of
finding something nice and something bad to say about everybody,

(53:50):
because some people are better, have more good qualities and
bad qualities, and other people have more bad qualities and
good qualities. And you know, look, if a hurricane strikes
the Louisiana coast and shatters homes, there's somewhere somewhere in
the world that is getting a little bit more rain
than it otherwise might have. So there's a positive sign
even to a hurricane, but you don't have to balance
your coverage of the hurricane. I say, well, yes, all

(54:10):
these people have been driven from their homes and many
are dead, but the flower gardens in Idaho are going
to be much better next spring than they were last spring.
You don't have to cover it that way. And the
Trump people always want to say, well, wait a minute,
because we were we were on the receiving end of
legitimate bonified a prosecutions for genuine criminal activity trying to

(54:31):
sack the capital and murder the Speaker of the House
and murder the Vice President of the United States. And
that means that you can't complain when we do non
bonified a personalized prosecution of people we don't like, because
fair is fair. That's not how this works. I don't
have to cover the bank robber the same way that
I cover the person running the town soup kitchen. They're
not the same, and so it would it's an injustice

(54:53):
if I treat different things the same way. So I
do try to be aware of things that the administration
has done, right. I mean, the headline on the article
I'm going to publish today or tomorrow is the Trump
administration got this one right about something I think that
they did right, and where they do write on things
that are important. It's useful to say so, but we
don't do readers a service if we blind them to

(55:15):
the way that things are different from the way they've
been in the past, the way that Donald Trump's presidency
is different from previous presidencies. And I think one of
the lessons a lot of people I will thinking about
George W. Bush for whom I worked. I think a
lot of people who said hard things about George W.
Bush will look back and say, I don't recant those
hard things. I genuinely disagreed with them and just like that.

(55:36):
But I may not have had the right perspective on
how grave the situation was then as compared to how
grave it could be. And so it's important to keV
to have a perspective. It's important not to overreact, but
it's also important not to underreact.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
David from I really always get so much out of
our conversations. Thank you for your time, and I know
you've got that piece to finish. I'll let you go.
Really enjoyed being with you.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
Thank you, Hi, bye, Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Thanks for listening. Everyone, If you have a question for me,
a subject you want us to cover, or you want
to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world,
reach out send me a DM on Instagram. I would
love to hear from you. Next Question is a production
of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers are Me,

(56:27):
Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz,
and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian
Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode,
or to sign up for my newsletter wake Up Call,
go to the description in the podcast app, or visit

(56:48):
us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me
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podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio appp podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Hi everyone, it's Katie Curic.
You know I'm always on the go between running my

(57:09):
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