When Caring Becomes Counterculture

Tim Miller on what he saw in Minnesota, why “Resist libs” turn off younger generations, and whether Never Trump has veered too far to the left. Plus: reacting to Trump’s tariff defeat and rethinking the tradition of the State of the Union.

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, Atlantic staff writer David Frum opens with his take on President Trump’s reaction to a recent Supreme Court defeat on tariffs, arguing that the real issue is not just economics but the president’s drive for unchecked power.

Then David is joined by Tim Miller of The Bulwark to unpack Tim’s recent trip to Minneapolis and what he saw on the ground amid ongoing ICE enforcement operations in the Twin Cities. They explore why younger Americans find “Resist libs” cringe and how that cynicism has helped fuel Trump’s politics. David and Tim also debate whether Never Trump conservatives are losing the core values that once defined them and whether that evolution is necessary in order to actually take on Trump.

Finally, David revisits the history and meaning of the State of the Union address, questioning whether this long-standing ritual needs rethinking in the Trump era.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Tim Miller, host of The Bulwark’s daily podcast. My literary topic this week won’t be a book; it will be a discussion of the ritual and performance of the State of the Union address, and I will get to that after the interview with Tim Miller. But first, some opening thoughts on the dramatic recent events. There’s so many that one can hardly begin to tally them all.

I record this podcast the day before the president is to deliver the State of the Union address. You will see it or hear it, at the earliest, the morning after the president gives the State of the Union address. So you will know more than I do about what happens; I have no idea, although I can make some guesses.

I’m going to guess there’s going to be a lot of ranting and raving in the State of the Union address about the Supreme Court and the recent tariff decision. And one of the questions that should spring to mind is, Why is the president so very, very upset that the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs he’s been announcing over the past year? I get it. No one likes to lose. This is an important issue for him. But it’s not like he doesn’t have recourse. He continues to hold a majority in both House and Senate. The Supreme Court has said, Your tariff measures would be fine if they came from Congress. You just can’t do them alone. Why not announce in the State of the Union, I’ve drafted a tariff bill. I’m sending it to Congress tomorrow. I look forward to you enacting it at your earliest convenience? There are enough Republicans, enough in the House and Senate, and there are some anti-trade Democrats—you might get a majority. Why not just pass the bill and do it the legal way that the Supreme Court pointed out to him? Why is he falling back instead on all these convoluted other schemes for using imaginary balance-of-payments crises, which don’t really exist anymore in a day of floating exchange rates, or false claims of unfair trade practices? Why not just write a tariff bill and send it to Congress and have them pass it?

Well, once I say it that way, you know why he’s so upset: because for [President Donald] Trump, the appeal of the tariffs was not just his primitive, mercantilist view of international economics. He loved the feeling of raw, arbitrary, discretionary power he got from a tariff mechanism that he insisted—and the Supreme Court just corrected him on—that he insisted he could apply to anyone at any time for any reason, without permission from anybody, Congress least of all. What he is mad about is not that he’s lost his tariffs; he could enact them. What he is mad about is that he has lost his power. And that, I think, will be a real theme of the State of the Union address: the president’s desire to insert personal, arbitrary, whimsical, if need be, power, unlimited by anybody or anything.

That power comes to its sharpest point when the issue is one of war and peace. Congress has not had a chance to debate, but we are very, apparently, on the edge of a major war in the Middle East against Iran. The president has assembled an enormous amount of air and naval resources within striking range of Iran. He has made threats. People around him have made threats. They say they want a negotiation, but they point to the revolver on the table and warn that the revolver will go off. And war seems to be imminent, and it may be, even, an unintended war. It may be a war that Trump thinks he can sort of bully the Iranians into acceding to what he wants to do, they don’t, and then he’s trapped—he has to go to war even though he thought he could intimidate them, and when and if that hope or expectation turns out [to be] wrong, he’s backed into a position where force is his only remaining recourse.

This, again, is arbitrary power. Congress is supposed to vote on these things. There’s no figment or tissue of any kind of authority that the president has to initiate this kind of major regime-change conflict that he has in mind with Iran without the approval of Congress. So what we’re going to see is a drama of the tension between a president who wants personal power and a constitutional system that is designed to deny the president personal power. That is why I think these alternative-tariff regimens that are being discussed by the administration are ultimately going to collapse and may well be rejected by the courts: because the alternative forms of presidential tariff power all require a lot of process, all require a lot of explanations, all have rules. They have preconditions that must be met, time limits that must be met. Some of them must go to court, where there are opportunities for the tariffed party to make itself heard and to say, I did not engage in the unfair trade practice alleged by the president, and under this trade power—Section 301, as it’s known—you don’t just take the president’s word for it; there is a process and a hearing, and the accused party gets to make itself heard.

So we are going to see a drama of the individual will meeting institutional limits. And that may be the theme of the rest of this political year and the rest of the Trump presidency. The Trump drive to individual, unchecked power has met some rebuffs, but with war in the offing, he may have his greatest opportunity yet to remake the United States as the kind of one-man system that he wants it to be.

And now my dialogue with Tim Miller.

[Music]

Frum: Tim Miller is known to all, or should by now be known to all, as the star host of The Bulwark’s daily podcast. He is also the author of the 2022 New York Times best-seller Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.

Tim is a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns: [John] McCain ’08, [Jon] Huntsman 2012, Jeb Bush 2016. He built a consulting business before switching to full-time journalism for the Never Trump fight.

I’ve been privileged to be his guest on many, many occasions on The Bulwark, and it’s a pleasure to be able to return to the hospitality at last. Tim, thank you so much for joining me today.

Tim Miller: Let’s do this. My gold-jacket guest, David Frum. It is my honor to be in the other seat.

Frum: [Laughs.] I wanna ask you just a brief question because it’s not impossible that there is someone who is unaware of The Bulwark. Can you take us through the rich and varied Bulwark cinematic universe? What is The Bulwark? Where did it come from? How did you join this crew?

Miller: Sure. Before you started your podcast, it was the unofficial podcast of The Atlantic—I had so many Atlantic guests—so I assume most people do know us, so I’ll keep it brief. But The Bulwark was—the shorthand version of it starting was it was built out of the destruction of The Weekly Standard. My old friend Sarah Longwell had a terrible idea, which was to start a Never Trump aggregator website. I told her as much. But she just wanted to do something. She was so mad about Trump. She, like me, had a past in conservative PR and communications work. And the site had been around for a couple of months or whatever when the owner of The Weekly Standard, the old neocon magazine, shut it down, and so a bunch of people were out in the wilderness. Sarah had met Bill Kristol, in particular, at a lot of meetings of sad Republicans in the basements, some of which you’ve attended—

Frum: I’ve attended some of those sad meetings.

Miller: One was called “The Meeting of the Concerned.” I love that name—“The Meeting of the Concerned.” We were all very concerned. And they were just talking. They’re like, What can we do? And it’s like, Hey, maybe this little aggregator thing I had, we can start something else, and see how it [goes]. And that’s how The Bulwark was born. It was basically a side hustle for a lot of people. My colleague Jonathan Last took over the editorship, and it was a real hustle for him, but for a lot of folks, it was something that they were doing ’cause it felt good to have a place for Never Trump Republicans to gather and to write and to give their opinions and to vent and lament. And I had been friends with Sarah, so she asked me to do it. As you mentioned in the intro, I was still doing PR work full time. And it took off beyond our wildest imaginations. Charlie Sykes did the daily show at that time, and he brought over his audience from The Weekly Standard, and [Last’s] newsletter writing enraptured a lot of people, and we brought in a lot of guests from the universe.

And I just would hear from people that the audience wasn’t just Never Trump Republicans—that was kind of the core base; a lot of people that had used to be Republicans were turned off by Trump. But it was also a lot of liberals—I’m sure you hear this, David—who were like, I have this uncle or best friend or son or mom or whatever who I used to argue with, and I can’t argue with them anymore because they’ve gone so insane. And now you guys are the “Oh, this is what it would be like if my beloved family member who is a conservative had not totally lost their mind and we can have legitimate disagreements about this issue or that issue.”

And that was kind of the genesis of it. It went from being everybody’s side hustle to a real deal really, I think, during that crazy summer and a half ago with the [President Joe] Biden debate, and then Trump getting shot, and we had gone onto YouTube, and kind of, it really just took off.

Frum: Can we sum up the politics of The Bulwark as pro-market, anti-polio?

Miller: Pro-market, anti-polio? (Laughs.) Yes. My favorite summation that anyone ever gave us was “the capitalist wing of antifa.”

Frum: (Laughs.)

Miller: Maybe not quite right, but I did like it. It has a nice ring to it.

So, yeah, look, we’re pro-markets, anti-polio, anti-illiberalism. And I think a lot of folks now come to us because we’re no bullshit, honestly. And that was the point I was trying to make about YouTube. There are a lot of people who don’t know this backstory, who just saw our material on social media now and are like, We like the cut of their jib. And they don’t have to know about [Friedrich] Hayek or [William] Buckley or the history of conservatism to appreciate the content.

Frum: So you had a big outing last week. You took much of the staff, maybe all of the staff, of The Bulwark to Minneapolis to do a live performance there but also to do some on-the-ground observation of a situation you have spoken so much about. What did you see, other than, I assume, a lot of snow and ice?

Miller: Yeah, I did get a cold; I was not built for Minneapolis. And so it gave me even more respect for the folks who’ve been in the streets protesting, exercising their rights.

Yeah, we ended up having to do two shows. We planned to do one. We wanted to do it in support of the people of Minneapolis; it sold out in, like, two minutes. And so we did a second one, where it was more of an interview show. We brought in [Governor] Tim Walz and [Senator] Tina Smith. We appreciated them for coming.

And so, look, my main takeaway is that I was a little bit humbled about something. I was wrong about something. I sit here in my room, and it is important to leave my hole and not just talk to the camera because you can learn things. And I was really seeing Minnesota through a political prism, right? Obviously, I was just deeply just angered and saddened by what happened to Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and so there was a human element to it, but just my analysis of it was very political. And the political analysis was that it was a win, that the people of Minneapolis won; they defeated Trump. And they made him do something he doesn’t like to do, which is back down. He does it a fair amount, but he doesn’t like to do it.

And so I went there in this mindset that it was almost—not celebratory, but almost there was a little bit of a waving of the shirt. It was like, Yeah, congratulations to the people of Minneapolis. And when I went to the Whipple [Federal] Building and talked to people that showed up to the events and had meals with activists, what I found out was that, yeah, they had had a political victory, and that’s not nothing. It’s meaningful. But the occupation is ongoing, and the only difference is the tactics with which the government’s using, right, and they’ve dispersed. And so I was talking to one woman, for example. She lives across the border in Wisconsin, she said about a 45-minute drive. She drives to the Whipple building, which is the main headquarters of where ICE has been staging. She protests every day for three hours. And I was talking to her, and she was like, Look, my neighborhood in Wisconsin, we had seen, I think she said, four ICE or CBP agents in our little community text; we’d heard about four in the past couple months. In the past week, there’d been 10. And that was just one anecdote, but there was more of that, going out into north Minneapolis and even into South Dakota. And so [whereas] I think the government feels like the thing that has worked with the resistance, which is monitoring and videoing and documenting their actions, that is easy to do in Minneapolis, where there’s these built-in networks, it’s harder to monitor and document if they go out into other regions of the country, other areas.

Frum: Are the tactics of the authorities less confrontational and, one hopes, less violent than we’ve seen in the recent past?

Miller: Well, again, this is all anecdotal, but there’s some elements of demonstrating that it’s craftier, like the ICE agents have been putting on their cars—it’s just like point-counterpoint. It’s like any sort of battle, right? The tactics shift. One thing that they’ve done is they start putting like gay-pride stickers on the cars and other things to try to trick people into not seeing that it was an ICE vehicle.

And so I think that the violence towards the protesters has dissipated, but is that because their tactics have dissipated or because the manner in which they’re doing this means that they’re encountering organized protests less, you know what I mean? I think that still remains to be seen. I think that we can say meaningfully Greg Bovino was trying to instigate fights. When he was walking around town, he wanted violence. And so God love the people of Minneapolis that this did not turn into anything that was like 2020, that there was not really any of that.

So I think, in some ways, the tactics have modified a little bit and the idea that people in Minneapolis and the surrounding areas are still having to deliver food to families under cover of darkness, and there’s a network of doulas—Tim Walz was telling us about this network of doulas that is helping people give birth because they don’t wanna go to hospitals.

Frum: You described it as an occupation. Does Minneapolis still feel like a city under the hand of an unwanted police presence? Or does it feel like the hand is hidden, and therefore, it’s not such an unwanted police presence?

Miller: I would not say that it felt like they were still under the hand, as if things were everywhere, as if these secret police were everywhere. I will say this, though, here’s the way in which it still felt like an unwanted occupation: When you talk to people, everyone had a story. Everyone had an example of someone they know at the school that their kids go to or at work or in the community, right? And I think that they were all still very conscious of the fact that this is ongoing. It’s not back to normal. And in that sense, I think it’s still ongoing.

Frum: This leads me to a more challenging question that you and I have talked about in the past, and I wanna hear your views, and I think many people will wanna hear your views on it. Actually, I’ve got a couple of them that are a little more to challenge you with.

The first is—so I’m not aware of this. I’m not at the cutting edge of the latest in internet culture, by any means.

Miller: Yeah, okay.

Frum: I’m not—

Miller: So you don’t know about “bone smashing”?

Frum: Unfortunately, I do know about bone smashing, but that’s only because people tell me. Sometimes the internet culture gets to a point where I’m not even sure it exists. I think it mostly exists in order to upset and shock people like me, not because there’s any actual consumer of it. (Laughs.) Why, I’m reading here in The New York Times about this very distressing thing that the young folks are doing online. (Laughs.) [Insert] sound of newsprint shuffling.

Now, I wanted to ask you about something that—and I don’t know how real this is, but people who keep up with this more than I do tell me that there is a mood among the young that there’s something lame about the project that you’re engaged in, and I guess I’m engaged in, too, of standing up for what they would call “resistance liberalism.” And this is somehow unfashionable, uncool. And I wonder, is this a perception of something that actually exists, or is this just chat? And if, to the extent it exists, let me ask you about two different strains that I can see for what’s motivating it.

One is—and there’s just nothing to be done about this—is real leftists who say, Look, you’re standing up here for the Constitution, the rule of law, for international free trade, for—you don’t wanna say open borders; you just wanna say orderly police procedures without abuses and without violence. So you’re not a real leftist. You’re not smashing the system. You’re not overturning the hierarchy. You’re not socializing the means of production. You’re not globalizing the intifada. It’s just lame. So, okay, real leftists, I get why they would have a beef.

But the other thing that seems to be going on, to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I’m describing, is a feeling that simply having beliefs is, in itself, a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any. Am I talking about anything real? You’re at the center of this business. Do you see this? Am I describing something you recognize?

Miller: You are describing something real, unfortunately, and this stuff’s all evolving and changing, but I think that there is a sense among some, particularly, younger folks in the public that “resist libs” are corny and cringe, and I think that what is underlying this—like you said, for some people, there’s ideological elements to it. But to me, what is underlying it is that the most visible elements of resist liberalism are people that seem like they are in the establishment or in positions of power, right, that they are protecting an existing order, right?

And if you were just putting yourself [in] a stereotype for a second, an imaginary 23-year-old, whether they’re a Joe Rogan 23-year-old or a leftist Hasan Piker 23-year-old, who are they seeing as the avatars of resist liberalism? It’s their parents, right, probably, or people that seem like they are part of an established older culture that they’re trying to be a counterculture to, right? In a lot of this, this is a story as old as time, right? It’s like thesis, antithesis, synthesis, right? They have to rebel against something, and the resist liberals got in this weird position—it’s something I think about a lot—where we have no power, basically, right? (Laughs.) But we’re also seen as the establishment. And so how, then, can people that have these views start to change that and start to appeal to a broader audience?

And I think that Trump is doing a lot of favors right now in that sense, right? And I think that Trump, by engaging in such obvious corruption, but also in sidling up to the richest people in the world and having all of the trillionaires at his inauguration and caring about what Jamie Dimon thinks and also using the spy state of Palantir to go after people. I think there’s a combination of different things where you’re starting to see cracks in this, and you are starting to—less so on the left because they have an ideological incentive to continue to position resist liberalism as cringe, but more in the center, in the comedian podcast world, where they kind of went along with Trump because it was counterculture. to whatever extent. You’re seeing, now, elements of them start to say, Wait a minute. (Laughs.) Maybe MSNBC had a few things right. (Laughs.) So I do think that there’s a little bit of that cracking, but it is a problem, and it exists. It’s real.

Frum: Two of the three presidential candidates running against Donald Trump were women. And when people mock the resist libs, they often feminize what they have in mind: wine moms. I don’t imagine Hasan Piker’s audience is very female. And is there something that there’s a kind of leftism or nihilism that is especially attractive to young men and that is sort of uncomfortable with the idea—the anti-Trump movement is, in many ways, a female-led movement: Sarah Longwell. And they’re a little—

Miller: Look, I just said MSNBC. Look [at] who are the big faces—Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow, right? Yeah.

Frum: There’s a little bit of alienated young men being alienated not against their parents, but against their mothers.

Miller: Absolutely. It’s funny that you say that because I don’t even actually remember what I said when I said that when they see the resistance, they—did I say their parents? Because in my mind, I was thinking their mothers, I swear to God. (Laughs.) I don’t know if I said parents, but in my mind, I was thinking their mothers. And I think, absolutely, there is something to do with that. And I think that a lot of these young men—and, look, Scott Galloway is good on this. I think that there are some legitimate issues that young men have in this country and ways in which they’re left behind and ways in which—I rail at Democrats all the time about this, where I’m saying, Look, you care about representation and making sure people feel seen in every instance, for every group, except for young men. That’s the one group that you don’t think needs to feel seen. And if you understand the value of “feeling seen” and of representation you should understand it.

So there’s some legitimate element to this, but I think that those legitimate grievances are being preyed on and that there are a lot of influences of folks that are either trying to ideologically prey on young men by turning them into right-wing nationalists or far-left agitators like Piker or to the other thing that you mentioned: just black-pilling them—nihilism, right? This idea that nothing matters, that there are these powerful institutions out there that are gonna prevent you from having the success that your parents had or having the glory that your father or grandfather had, and so why care about this? And that’s a powerful message, right? I can understand why it’s persuasive. And so I think that we can recognize that there is misogyny that is maybe, if not at the heart of this, a big element of it, while also saying that, okay, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t potentially powerful counter-messages that could be delivered to these young men if an effort was put in.

Frum: So your background is in the world of messaging and political communication. And so it is not your nature ever to say to any substantial group of people, You’re just wrong. (Laughs.) But my business has always been a much less popular one, so I’m prepared sometimes to say to people, You’re just [wrong]. Isn't [it] the job of saying, You know what? The United States, in the summer of 2015, it hadn’t recovered fast enough from the Great Recession. Many of its foreign-policy commitments were not working as advertised, and people were frustrated with them. Got it. And there does seem to be a slowdown in the rate of growth compared to what previous generations had, and obviously, there are the chronic problems of climate change—and all true. Nevertheless, all of that calls for reform, not revolution. The system is basically good and fair and worth defending. And not only that, but individual action matters, and you shouldn’t just tune out and defect from the political process. Sometimes you have to say to people, You’re wrong. You’re wrong about [it]. And cynicism doesn’t make you smart; cynicism makes you vulnerable.

Miller: I had a whole project that was centered around this with Cameron Kasky before he decided to run for Congress—he’s a young guy that started March for Our Lives—where we did a show where we interviewed young people. So it wasn’t entirely about this, but this topic came up a lot, right, particularly with young men. And I found myself in the shoes of you, making that case a lot, which is, like, Okay, I hear you. Your complaints are legitimate. But in the grand scheme of things, a young man that was born in 1999 or, whatever, 2002 has had some challenges, but they are a lot better off than young men and women who were born in almost all of the years of the past, frankly. (Laughs.) And so, at some level, you wanna say, Oh, poor baby, right?

Frum: Yeah. Well, congratulations on your high school diploma, class of 1932.

Miller: Yeah, right. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Class of 1941. (Laughs.)

Miller: Think about the class that graduated into World War I and then the first plague, and you had the Depression, yeah. So there were a lot of bad years out there.

That said, okay, great, wwe’re right, but Donald Trump is the president, and the head of the FBI is a podcaster who is a total buffoon, who preyed on these fears and did so successfully. So I guess my response to what you said is, yes, it is true that it is overstated, the grievances and the complaints of young men in the year 2026, but some of their complaints are real, and the job of people who are political practitioners is to win people over. And I think that there was insufficient effort in winning people over, in part because a lot of people on the left got into a bubble of their own, where they were made to believe that these young men were something that they weren’t, that they were deeply, irredeemably racist, misogynist, problematic, whatever followers of Joe Rogan. And it’s kind of like, no, actually, when you talk to most of them, they’re like a lot of young men: They’re reckless and dumb and have some strong views on things and have some unformed views on other things, and Barack Obama appealed to that group very easily, and I kind of feel like, had Barack Obama been the candidate in 2016, he would have appealed to them very easily again.

Frum: How do you personally adapt to this? You have a style that is very contemporary and very humorous, very demotic, and you’re trying to bring people in. Does that work?

Miller: Very demonic?

Frum: Demotic, not demonic.

Miller: (Laughs.) I knew. I was just making a joke. (Laughs.)

Frum: The demos is the voice of God, not the voice—anyway. But is that calculated as a way to overcome this problem, or is that just who you are and you couldn’t be any other way?

Miller: It’s mostly the latter, and I think that one of the things that has worked for The Bulwark is that all of us were cast out and were just able to kind of be ourselves and say what we really thought. And I had a Democratic strategist once tell me after I got off TV, and they’re like, I’m so jealous of you. I was like, Why? And they said, Well, even if I don’t think I wanna be White House press secretary ever again, there’s this little person in the back of my head that’s saying, Maybe I will be, and so I should soften the edges of whatever I’m gonna say. And I just don’t think any of us ever—I don’t know. I think we all felt like, Okay, that part of our life is over; now we can just say what we think, and that’s freeing. So part of that is, I think, natural.

But there is a calculated effort to try to reach different demographics. And I saw a pretty concerning poll over the weekend about the Michigan Senate race. And I like Mallory McMorrow the best of those candidates. In candor, she’s about my age and is very online and casual in the way that she speaks. And there’s more establishment—Haley Stevens is perfectly fine. And then there’s a lefty candidate, Abdul El-Sayed. And if you looked at the polls, McMorrow was doing the best among 60-plus. (Laughs.) And there’s something to be—and I feel this, right—there’s something about, I think, a generation older than me, my parents’ generation, who are like, Oh, that’s a young person that talks like a young person, and I like that. It’s a little different. It gets me out of my bubble. I learn some new things. And—

Frum: But then you get to the Maine race, where you see the same process sort of in play and likely to cost Democrats the Senate seat.

Miller: Right, yeah, with Graham Platner. I don’t know about “likely to cost,” but potentially, it could cost them. It’s a risk to have somebody like Graham Platner in that race, right?

Frum: Actually, we should probably hit the pause button to explain who Graham Platner is and what’s going on in Maine.

Miller: Sure. Yeah, yeah. So the Maine race is Janet Mills—it’s funny, this race is, for me, such a microcosm of the problems of the Democratic Party, of the two different factions. Janet Mills seems like a perfectly competent person. Present governor, in her late 70s, she kind of represents a lot of what Biden represented—has been a very competent governor but seen as not exactly inspiring, seems out of touch with what people want. Then you have Graham Platner, who is this kind of left, populist, younger candidate, oyster fisherman, tattoos, and speaks more normal and casually, and so there’s an appeal there—I think that there’s more excitement around him—but has a lot of the baggage that left populists have with their online past, saying crazy shit, saying far-left stuff.

So now you get into a situation where it’s like, well, okay, there are these two groups that the Democrats need to do well with, right? It’s our people, right: centrist, college-educated folks; Democrats have gained a lot of ground with them. And so Janet Mills will do fine with that group, right? But then there’s this other group of working-class folks—the Obama-to-Trump voter, to just use a shorthand, right—working-class voters that have traditionally voted Democrat that started to move more to the right, and there’s a theory of the case that Graham Platner types might appeal more to them. And so who can appeal to both, right?

It becomes a fundamental problem because you imagine there’s this college-educated group that has moved more toward the Democrats. Maybe some percentage of them will look at Graham Platner and Susan Collins and say, Susan Collins, not my cup of tea, exactly, but I know what I’m getting with her—responsible, blah, blah, blah. It’s not my point of view, but just political analysis. And that costs Democrats a Senate race. You can imagine that. You can imagine on the other side Janet Mills eking it out against Graham Platner, and the types of people that Platner appeals to don’t turn out to vote in a midterm election—they’re just like, I’m not the type of person to vote in a midterm election—Susan Collins wins. So it’s a conundrum. It’s a pickle. Hopefully, Donald Trump screws things up enough that there’s a big enough wave to carry either of them through. But I do think that it’s a problem with the party, and just one last thing to—circling it back to how I think about my role. I do think about, How can I talk to the people that Platner’s appealing to?, particularly in the younger men side of things, ’cause maybe I’m the type of person, as a former Republican who watches football and talks casually, that they would listen to, when they might not listen to, because of misogyny or whatever, some of the other voices.

Frum: Last thought before we close this subject: On the rare occasions when anyone asks me for political advice, I always say, When you get to the final round, there are two candidates. You have a one-in-two chance of winning, a one-in-two chance of losing. So there’s a reasonable statistical probability that you’re going to lose. You should think in advance, if you lose, how and why would you like to lose? Because it’s a terrible thing to lose for things you didn’t believe in, to lose because of positioning, to lose because you weren’t yourself. If you lose because you were yourself, you can live with that. If you lose over issues that you feel are important, you can live with that. And so I sometimes think, as I listen to this detraction, You know what? If democracy loses because the defenders of democracy were too serious about it, too earnest, believed in it too much, then at least we lost the fight the way we wanted to fight the fight.

Miller: I’ll just say one thing about this. We totally agree at the candidate level, and having worked for a lot of losing candidates, particularly in primaries, I’ve given this same speech to probably four or five people and said, Hey, go down with integrity. Go down with dignity. Don’t do it any other way, and then I agree with you.

At a macro level, though, at a scale, I think, I guess, I have a slight disagreement. I do think it is incumbent upon the people who see the threat to our country, to our democracy seriously to try to grapple seriously with how to thwart it. And I guess my point is I don’t want people to not do things because they’re high on their own supply about their norms and their values. And be true to yourself, be true to your values, but also, look, we only have two parties, okay, so you’re getting 60 million votes, right? The country is big and diverse. Every successful winning coalition in the history of this country has had cranks in it, has had racists in it, has had stupid people in it, right? That’s just how you have to win. And this is not like a European country, where there are seven parties and you only need to win 22 percent of the vote to get a [plurality], right? That’s part of the deal, and so I just don’t wanna write people off. And I think sometimes my critique of people in our movement is that they write people off because they don’t have the right thoughts or the right views on everything, and so then they’re problematic and they’re not worth appealing to. And I guess that’s all I’m arguing, is that it’s worth at least trying to appeal to them.

Frum: Well, since you raised coalition politics, let me ask you—and this is the last challenge I wanna put to you. As you said, The Bulwark began as an extension of The Weekly Standard, of a certain kind of subsection of conservative politics, and that’s the life story of the core group that runs The Bulwark. But you have discovered this extraordinary new appeal in a much wider set of viewers and listeners who tilt more to the liberal side and even to the left. Probably, the median Bulwark fan in 2026 was not voting for George W. Bush in 2003, if they were active in 2003. How do you find a stopping place?

And when you and I were talking about this in advance, I mentioned that there is a kind of very favorable treatment of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by you and by Bill Kristol. You had Zohran Mamdani on—and you gave him a tough question, and indeed, you asked the question that has caused him the single greatest difficulty of anybody, so I don’t wanna slight that. But how do you say, This is who we are, and this is who we used to be; this is who we are not going to become, and this is where we don’t go? How do you think about those questions?

Miller: I appreciate this because it’s complicated and I’m evolving my views about it all the time, and I say that because one of the benefits of having a daily podcast is getting to bring smart people on, is I get to hear smart people’s opinions, and sometimes people say things that makes me think about things in a different way. And so I wanna frame this up in that sense, where I’m trying to think about the best way to solve the last question, right: “How do we protect the country?” And sometimes the answer to that, it does not necessarily align with what my particular policy priors are, right? And so how do you think about that? How do you integrate that information? And how do I talk about those types of politicians or those types of issues without being untrue to myself or without doing audience capture, etc.?

The audience-capture problem is easy ’cause, like, once a month, I do my best to just piss everybody off as much as possible about a topic. (Laughs.) I find a topic that I know that the left part of the audience does not agree with me on, and I’m like, You know what? I’m gonna do two more segments on this than I should just so we can clean out any false assessments that I’m gonna go along with every crazy thing that the left wants me to go along with.

But what the red lines are—the best way to answer this question, I think about, and we’ve all talked about this and thought about it, is around the word illiberalism, right? What is our core mission right now? And to me, it is in defense of liberal democracy, not necessarily limousine liberalism, not liberalism in that sense, but in the sense of the values that undergird liberal democracy, that have made our society work, and which is not too dissimilar to the constitutional values, right, to our old conservative points of views, the values that are in the Declaration [of Independence]. And so to the extent that there is illiberalism that spouts up on the left, I think that it’s important for us to oppose it or call it out. I think it’s also important for us to think about, just because you are in favor of liberal values and American traditions doesn’t mean that there can’t be reforms. In order to defend liberal democracy, you have to defend every institution that has become sclerotic and that has developed in our liberal democracy, and I don’t think that, but I just mean the underlying values.

And so the threat from illiberalism, to me, very clearly at this point comes from the right. And one line I like to use is if somebody came up to me with a gun and said, You get to be the one that decides the future of the country. Do you want it to look like [Viktor] Orbán’s Hungary, or do you want it to look like a Scandinavian social democracy? They wouldn’t have to even put their hand to their holster before I would say a Scandinavian social democracy. It doesn’t have all my preferred economic views or any other views, but it’s just not close; the threat is from illiberalism. And so when I look at a person like Zohran or AOC, I think what we see is there are definitely some illiberal left views that they’ve held in the past. I think, also, that both of them have demonstrated that they are trying to appeal to folks outside of that, whatever, that [Democratic Socialists of America] cul-de-sac. They’re trying, so it’s important to talk about that.

Frum: I wanna put a pause button there because I think you’re combining two things that, in my mind at least, are different things. So let’s bracket Zohran Mamdani, who I regard as a more sinister figure than maybe you do. But let’s talk about AOC. I agree—I think AOC is absolutely a normal American politician. And I have no doubt that if she were to somehow become president, if she got a Supreme Court order saying, Don’t do this, she wouldn’t do it. And I don’t think she would run a meme-coin business while being president.

So if the question is, “Is this person an acceptable and an unthreatening participant in American democracy?,” yeah, absolutely, she is. The scope of unthreatening American politics extends Marco Rubio to AOC—that’s sort of the universe. If, however, you say, I, David Frum, at this microphone, or you, Tim Miller, at your microphone, do I support her?, I can draw a line by saying, I don’t find her threatening, but no, no, I don’t. And I’m not determining the outcomes of American politics; I’m just speaking for myself. And if the choice were AOC or Trump, I would, very unhappily and with a lot of foot-dragging and grumbling and complaining to my loved ones, have to put up with AOC. But if the choice is AOC or somebody else, I choose somebody else, and I remember that when I talk and write about her. Again, Zohran Mamdani, I wanna bracket because I think that’s a different kettle of fish.

So you in your work, one of the things that I think that led to the favorable treatment she got was a misstatement she made, and I don’t wanna mock her for it; it’s a natural one. She said “Trans-Pacific” when she meant “transatlantic,” which is not such a big mistake, except the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a very specific piece of legislation that the left destroyed and that I, for one, lament,and the transatlantic partnership is a much vaguer, more notional idea.

Miller: Okay, I wanna talk first about the question of whether we support her, and then we’ll get to the favorable treatment that me and Bill gave her on the podcast about a week ago.

I wouldn’t say that I support her, no. Look, Donald Trump got elected twice in this country—Donald Trump, who I regard to be totally unacceptable and moronic and unappealing and for whom there was never even a moment for me where I was like, I get it. I see what people like in this person. I find him repulsive, and I have all the way since 2012. And so if Donald Trump gets elected, the first time, it makes you think about some things. If then he tries to overturn our democracy and instigates a riot at the Capitol that causes the death of police officers, and then people elect him again, that makes me think, Okay, well, look, sure, the easier thing to do is say, Well, it was bad luck ’cause of inflation. But to me, I think that there should have been no type of inflationary environment that should have led to Donald Trump getting elected again after January 6. And yet he did. And so I, as an analyst of our politics and as somebody who cares deeply [about] trying to get us out of this, have to look at that and say, Okay, well Democrats have to do something differently. Doing the same thing over and over again, and putting up somebody else in the Hillary–[Clinton]–to–[Kamala]–Harris kind of wing of the party or those with their similar positions and with their similar affect, that would be a mistake. And so as I look ahead to 2028, I feel like what my job is, as a podcast host, is to try to encourage Democrats to look at different options.

Now, AOC is not gonna be my kettle of fish, as you said. I think that, God willing, there’ll be multiple candidates that I prefer a lot more. But I think that there’s things that she’s doing that’s very interesting and important that other Democrats I like better should learn from. Like, for starters, she has a differentiated brand from an unpopular Democratic Party. Number two, she talks like herself on social media; she’s very relatable and authentic. Number three, she has some—again, these are all towards the left—but she has heterodox views that differentiate herself. I think that, for a Democrat to be successful, barring luck—sometimes you get successful luckily, as you mentioned; if there are only two candidates, it’s like, you have a coin flip’s chance—but for them to be actually successful, Democrats should learn from Obama and Trump and the successful politicians and differentiate themselves from an unpopular establishment of their party. And AOC is doing that. I have not seen a lot of that from the center-left. I hope to encourage some of them to learn from the good parts of AOC and not take some of her more troubling positions.

And so now getting back to Bill Kristol, to the extent that I give her plaudits for anything, it’s usually, one, for doing that thing I think Democrats need to do. And two, it’s when she shows some glimmers of saying, Hey, I plan to be more responsible than some others on the left, I think it’s okay to note that. I think it’s okay to note that AOC, while she flubbed it and fucked up, we gotta grade her on a curve, but so did George W. Bush, flubbed it and fucked up his first appearances on the world stage, and we graded him on a curve. We can both say she flubbed, and also, I thought her speech was more responsible than Marco’s. That’s my final sentence. I thought her speech was more responsible than Marco’s.

Frum: I love the flub. I got excited about the [flub]. The Trans-Pacific [Partnership], be still my heart. Trans-Pacific free trade, you’re talking my language. (Laughs