On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump’s behind-the-scenes strategy to subvert the 2026 midterm elections, by creating chaos to justify his use of extreme executive power. David also discusses how Trump’s feud with Elon Musk reveals a deeper truth about power in the postdemocracy Republican Party.

Then David is joined by Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego to discuss how Democrats can win the votes of young men, the importance of free trade and patriotism in today’s Democratic Party, and how Gallego has been so successful with Latino voters at a time when Latino men are trending so strongly Republican.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week is Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona, one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party.

I recorded my interview with Senator Gallego on June 5, and at that time, I also recorded a monologue talking about the White House farce, tragedy, conflict between Elon Musk and Donald Trump—Elon Musk being the richest man in the world, the biggest contributor to the Trump campaign, the de facto chief of staff and vice president to Donald Trump; and Donald Trump, the president of the United States.

But one of the lessons of the Trump years is: It never pays to do things early. You always want to leave things to the last minute because however outrageous the big story on Thursday is, there may be something that happens on the weekend that is even bigger. And so it is. So we’re topping that topper with another topper.

Over the weekend, there was an outbreak of unruly protest, disorderly protest, and even violent protest in Los Angeles against immigration raids by the Trump administration. I’m at some distance; I wasn’t an eyewitness. I’m relying on news reports, and there’s some uncertainty about exactly what happened, but it looks like rocks were thrown at ICE vehicles. Protesters tried to impede ICE officers doing their duty. Fireworks were shot off. A car seems to have been set on fire.

Now, all of this is illegal, disorderly, and must, of course, be met by the force of law. Fortunately, there are nearly 9,000 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, uniformed officers with the right to arrest. And the state of California—in cities and counties and at the state level—deploys, altogether, more than 75,000 uniformed officers with arrest powers. So given the state of the situation, there looked to be nothing that the state of California couldn’t cope with on its own.

Mercifully, at the time I record today, there were no reports of any injury to any law-enforcement personnel, which, if correct, gives you some idea of the disorderly and upsetting, but genuinely limited, nature of the lawbreaking on hand.

Nevertheless, President Trump announced an intent to federalize California’s National Guard and send 2,000 military personnel into the state, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in with an offer of sending actual Marines from bases in California. Now, this is being reported as, in some ways, an immigration story, but it’s really much, much more than that. By the way, as it happened, it looks like the National Guard was never sent (or certainly wasn’t sent in time), and the Marines also weren’t sent.

I think a way to think about what happened in California this weekend is as a trial run, a test, a practice for things that Donald Trump has in mind in 2026. Observers of the Trump administration have noted a strange paradox. On the one hand, Donald Trump is doing one after another outrageous act of seeming violation of rules, seeming illegality, selling billions of dollars of coins to persons unknown, accepting foreign jets—things that, if he loses the protection of control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2026, portend a world of trouble and even legal jeopardy for him in the second two years of his administration.

And yet, facing that danger, Donald Trump has blithely done one thing after another that seems guaranteed to lose him at least the House, and maybe both House and Senate, in 2026: the tariffs, this tax bill that offers very little to ordinary people, the economy slowly being ground into recession under the burden of all of his restrictive actions. I mean, to do tariffs and an immigration crackdown at the same time is really asking for an economic slowdown.

So how do you make sense of this? Does Donald Trump not know that the elections are coming? Does he not sense the danger that he’s in, of what will happen to him, of what could happen to him should his party lose its ability to protect him in House and Senate? Well, I think the answer is: Donald Trump does know, and he does have a scheme to protect himself, but it’s not doing popular things to keep his majorities in Congress. It’s looking for ways to subvert the 2026 elections to prevent them from happening, or at least to control them so they don’t threaten him at all.

Now, we have had some inklings of Donald Trump’s thinking along these lines. We saw them in 2020, when people close to Donald Trump—like his former national security adviser Michael Flynn—advised him to use the military to suppress the 2020 vote. But Flynn’s advice in 2020 came too late. The election had already happened. Flynn was looking to overturn an election in the past, not to prevent an election in the future. And that’s a big thing to do, especially when court after court after court has ruled that the president and his supporters’ claims against the 2020 election were utterly meritless.

Also, Donald Trump in 2020 had a military around him that was not likely to obey illegal orders. Under Secretary of Defense [Mark] Esper and under chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, the Defense Department had said, Look—we will follow any lawful order of the president. But when the president suggests shooting protesters—as he did during the George Floyd riots—we’re going say, “Mr. President, are you quite sure? I’m not gonna take a hint here. I need an order, and I need it maybe in writing, so that when I am court-martialed, I can show, ‘The president told me to shoot those people.’” And Donald Trump always backed down because he couldn’t rely on Esper and Milley to take the hint about what he wanted done.

But here’s how his mind worked. We saw this in 2018. In October 2018, as Donald Trump was heading toward midterm elections that would cost him his majority in the House of Representatives, he began to get very upset about an immigration caravan that was supposedly—a so-called caravan that was—heading toward the border. And he began talking in October 2018 about needing a state of emergency to do something about this, to freeze the border, to militarize the southern states.

Now, that didn’t go very far. In the first term, Trump’s talk was often much more radical than Trump’s actions. But you could see the way his mind was going. The president has very broad and quite messy emergency powers. He can do a lot of different things by invoking a state of emergency. He thought about it in 2018. He thought about it in 2020. He wasn’t able to do it either time.

But in 2026, he’s going to have a very different kind of administration around him. He’s got a former talk-show host as a secretary of defense, one with a long list of allegations of heavy drinking and allegations of sexual abuse against him, who’s completely beholden to Donald Trump. There are similarly beholden people running the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. There’s a striking lack of independent voices of people with substantial reputations and long-proven integrity—and, for that matter, proven loyalty to the law of the United States. He’s got the administration of his dreams, and he’s got the problem of a lifetime: the risk of losing the House of Representatives. So what’s the plan? The state of emergency. And that was tested in California.

Now, how would this work? Theoretically, of course. We don’t know any of this. I’m just telling you how a criminally minded person might advise the president. The president doesn’t have a button he can press to stop elections. Elections are administered by the states. But what the president can do is put pressure on certain states, or delay or stop elections in certain states in order to convene the House of Representatives, which will be full of newly elected people from his states and vacancies from the other states.

There’s some precedent for this. In 2018, the island of Saipan, which is a U.S. territory, was hit by a devastating typhoon, and the governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands issued a series of emergency declarations—he’s acting under federal executive power; it’s not a state—including ordering postponing elections that were to be held in the territory for two weeks, including an election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Northern Marianas have a nonvoting delegate.

No one questioned this. It’s a genuine typhoon, and things really were terribly, terribly disrupted. And two weeks is not so long to wait for the right to vote in the face of a genuine emergency. But that was a proof of the power to delay an election that could be wielded by a functionary of the executive branch.

Back during Reconstruction, the Grant administration often sent federal troops into areas where there was Ku Klux Klan activity to postpone elections, reorganize elections, redo elections. Again, that was Reconstruction; they were facing terroristic violence that was threatening the rights of, in South Carolina, half the population of the state. But there are precedents here.

Now, imagine this in 2026. President Trump provokes some kind of outbreak in California or in some other blue state. He declares a state of emergency. He sends the National Guard. And he says elections have to be postponed until order is restored. That may be weeks; it may be months. In the meantime, there are no representatives from California in the U.S. House of Representatives. With missing blue-state representatives, the red-state people will continue their majority, even though they would likely lose it in a free and fair election in 2026. I’m not saying this is something that will happen, but it’s something that could happen, and I think it was something we just saw tested.

So I think as President Trump’s mind wanders into places where no president’s mind has ever wandered before, it’s going to fall upon all of us to let our minds follow afterwards—to listen to the hints, to listen to things that sound crazy, to listen to people who sound crazy, because they may be the prophets of what’s to come.

And now some thoughts on the Elon Musk–Donald Trump dispute, and then my interview with Senator Ruben Gallego.

[Music]

Frum: Everyone’s talking about this. It’s hard to think of anything additional to say beyond what’s been said. But there’s a point that I’d like to flag that I think has not gone discussed enough, which is: It’s kind of insulting and kind of dangerous that American citizens have to care about this kind of personal dispute at the highest levels of government.

The question of whose side you’re on in this kind of personality spat is not something you expect to see in a rule-of-law government. In an authoritarian regime, for sure. Presidents and secret-police chiefs fall out, and one will assassinate the other, send the other to prison. There will be coups and countercoups. But in a democratic rule-of-law system of government, personality is supposed to count not for nothing, but for a lot less. These are all functionaries. These are all servants of the people, highly replaceable. And when they dispute, historically, we expect their disputes to reflect something other than their mere selfish-ego needs.

For example, at the beginning of the Biden administration, there was a big dispute between former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, one of the most important outside advisers of the Biden administration, and many of the economic insiders in the Biden administration. Summers warned that the spending plans of the Biden administration were probably too big for the needs of the economy and were likely to generate inflation. As it happened, he was right, but that’s not the point.

Others in the Biden administration said, No, we made a mistake in the Obama administration, not spending enough before we were out of the woods. And anyway, this is an opportunity to get done a lot of things that we and the Democratic Party think are important. So we want to proceed with these spending plans, even at the risk of inflation.

And there was a big dispute about that. As I said, Summers was right, but that was hard to know in advance. The other people were certainly motivated by sincere concerns for their vision of the public good. And sometimes it got a little testy, and some personality issues did flare up, and people made ad hominem arguments, as they will. But what everyone understood was: This is not an argument about Summers trying to dominate the insiders, and the insiders trying to dominate Summers.

They were talking about something important to the public well-being: How big should the Biden post-COVID recovery plans be? How much money should be spent? How much debt should be incurred? This was something that honest and intelligent people could have meaningful, impersonal disagreements about, even if, as I said, ego gets attached, tempers flare, and the unfortunate things are said. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

And you can find examples of this in many other administrations. Hawks during the Cold War days—there were always disputes between the hawks and the doves, between those who wanted to have a more forward policy toward the Soviet Union and those who wanted to try harder on detente, those who were more optimistic about China and those who were less optimistic. And always the question of: Where does the government spend its money? How? On what?

All of these things cause tensions and disputes. And you’ll find them in back issues of old periodicals about the events of the day. But the theory was, and the practice usually was, that the issues drove the personalities, not the personalities drove the issues. It was not a question of personalities in dispute looking for reasons, looking for weapons to use against each other in the form of issues. It was a dispute about real issues: Should the government spend more after COVID? Should it spend less? How real is the risk of inflation in 2021, versus how real is the risk of persistent long-term unemployment? That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

What’s going on between Trump and Elon Musk is like something out of (you’d read it in the pages of) Tacitus in the Roman empire, something out of postcolonial states, something you’d see in the Soviet Union when the secret police would dispute with the army. This is about egos and imperatives, about two people who see themselves as independent of anybody else and as principals, not as servants of the public. It’s a question of personalist government.

I mean, think how weird and anomalous and really sinister the position of Elon Musk was. Elon Musk was the head of a government department. Now, formally, other people were named as the head of this DOGE—whatever, the Department of Government Efficiency—but Musk was given status as a special government employee. Everyone could see he was in charge. He hired other outside people and brought them in.

All of this at the same time as he was one of the government’s largest contractors, and at the same time as he was an independent businessman who had not divested any of his companies. Normally, if you’re a business leader and you go into government, you have to sever yourself from your business interests to avoid conflict-of-interest rules, which are not just opinions in the government but are actually backed by the force of law, or used to be—that if someone in government employ uses his power or her power to do something that advantages his business interests or hers, or to disadvantage a competitor or hers, that’s against the law. And there are a variety of statutes that can catch you up.

Musk every day was ignoring all of those practices and rules and legislation, some of them backed by the force of criminal sanction. And the people who he brought into government, again, they often had outside interests or had past concerns that would’ve subjected them to conflict-of-interest rules. All of that, ignored. They imposed big cuts in important areas of government—not just the tragedy of cutting the HIV program in Africa, PEPFAR, that saved tens of millions of lives since it was initiated by President George W. Bush, but Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service. Agencies that directly bore on the active business interests of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, these were shut down by Elon Musk.

And maybe all those IRS employees who were in charge of auditing high-income individuals, maybe those SEC people who were dealing with allegations of SEC issues involving Musk, maybe they were all irrelevant and unnecessary and redundant and overstaffed. Or maybe they were just in the way, and somebody used personal power to get rid of them—personal power that was converted into state power to get rid of them.

Now, Musk is not activated just by self-interest. He does have these weird ideological ticks that seem to be getting weirder. And those have been part of what has driven the United States government too. The United States is turning away refugees from everywhere, including people who serve the United States and Afghanistan, and it’s rolling out a red carpet for white Afrikaner farmers.

I don’t know—maybe they’ve got a claim. I’m not hostile to the white Afrikaner farmers. But it is strange that there’s a locked door for everybody else and a red carpet for the people with whom Elon Musk identifies, as his family originally comes from South Africa. Again, this is a question of using state power for personal ends.

Look—the statement that is supposed to define the United States government is that it’s a government of laws, not men. The rules and regulations, the government is always supposed to be more powerful, more enduring, more important than the people who work in it. And the people there are there to serve. But that idea really does seem to be jettisoned—not just abandoned, but actively jettisoned, repudiated—in the Trump years. And this dispute exemplifies it.

Musk’s particular criticisms of Trump’s so-called big—what do you [call it]? Big, bouncing baby boy—whatever he calls that bill. Musk’s may well be valid. The bill is irresponsible; it does add a lot of money to the debts and deficits in the out years. There’s a kind of card trick going on here, where, in 2017, when Trump passed his first tax cut or the tax cut of the first administration, the only reason it met the deficit-and-debt rules that it had to be passed under was by saying it would expire in 2025.

Now that it is expiring in 2025, the Trump people say, Well, it doesn’t really cost anything, because we’re largely extending tax cuts that were passed in 2017. Yeah. But in 2017, you said they would expire, and that’s why they had one price. If they don’t expire, they have a different price, and you’re engaged in a kind of hustle.

And so Musk’s criticisms of this, they may well be true. But he’s not criticizing because he’s motivated by a disinterested concern for the public finances. Remember how his interests were exempted from all the budget cuts that were imposed on other people. He’s mad at Trump for his own reasons, and so he’s using a weapon at hand.

In his case, at least one of the things he’s reaching for is true. The others—accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files—those may be more far-fetched. But he’s reaching for everything he can get—but not because he cares about these issues, but because he’s asserting his own ego to punish someone he’s mad at. And Trump is doing the same. Trump is threatening to withdraw government business from Elon Musk’s companies.

And, again, look—there’s a strong case that Starlink and SpaceX should not be in private hands, the United States government should take them over. These are essential to national security. And if it’s true that Elon Musk turned off Starlink to disadvantage the Ukrainians, he was using his corporate power for personal, ideological, or other interests at the expense of the public welfare. So that has to be dealt with.

But Donald Trump, again, is not motivated by impersonal concern for the public welfare. He’s punishing an opponent. And so suddenly, conflict-of-interest rules that didn’t interest him 15 minutes ago are suddenly the order of the day. We are having a breakdown of the rule-of-law system in the United States. I’ve often worried that you could have a Trump administration, or you could have the rule of law in the United States, but not both. You could have Elon Musk in government, or you could have government be pure of conflicts of interest, but not both. The law is the victim of both these men. And both of them need to be run out of town as fast as possible, after which, let the law take its course.

And now my conversation with Senator Ruben Gallego. But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: The story of Senator Ruben Gallego is both an amazing story of personal achievement and also a classic American narrative of what this country can deliver. A son of immigrants in this country from Latin America, Ruben Gallego grew up in Chicago in a single-parent home. He joined the Marine Corps while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He served in combat in Iraq in a unit fiercely engaged with the insurgency. He settled in Arizona after his military service, was elected to the state assembly as a Democrat, then defied the red wave of 2014 to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives in that difficult year.

Here’s where the high political drama begins. In 2018, Arizona Democrats elected Kyrsten Sinema to the U.S. Senate. In office, Sinema became alienated from her party and ultimately declared herself an independent. Congressman Gallego emerged as the leading challenger to Sinema’s reelection. She decided not to run again, rather than face him. He then faced the ultra-Trumpy election denier Kari Lake in the general election of 2024, and beat her too. Along the way, Gallego’s own image as a fighting progressive has shifted toward the political center. He’s now regarded by many Democrats as one of their brightest future stars, and it’s a pleasure and honor to welcome him to The David Frum Show.

Senator, thank you for joining us today.

Ruben Gallego: Gracias, David.

Frum: I’m speaking to you from about as deep inside the beltway as you can get—like, almost the buckle of the beltway. And some of our viewers may share that same condition with me. So just to enlighten all of us, when you said your constituents want a “big-ass truck,” how big-ass is the truck they want?

Gallego: (Laughs.) Well, big enough for them to feel like they’ve succeeded in life. And I think that’s, basically, what I’m trying to say. And when I joked about it, it really is somewhat true. Like, if you grow up, like I did, in a working-class Latino family, your measure of success was what people would consider artificial, but is actually real. It’s the real, tangible things: Buying a home, being able to get a nice truck that is responsive to the fact that you worked hard for this, and you took a lot of pride in that truck. You wash that truck on the driveway every weekend, with your kids.

And when we can’t deliver that as a party—me and Democrats as a party—if these men feel that we’re not able to get them that future that can allow them to buy that “big-ass truck,” or take that vacation, or feel a little more comfortable, or buy that house, or start that business, then we’re going to lose their votes.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about that lesson. So I was going through the leadership of both parties, House and Senate, and I’m struck that leader after leader comes from about as safe a state as you can get: South Dakota; Wyoming; or New York, New York. And that’s true, by the way, with the executive branch too. Donald Trump used to be a New Yorker, but he became a Floridian to run again in 2024. J. D. Vance comes from what used to be a swing state, Ohio—not a swing state anymore.

You’re one of the very few people who’s in the national conversation who comes from a highly competitive state, possibly even the most competitive state. So as someone who’s won elections in a competitive state, what lessons do you think you have for the people who are looking at politics from the safety of the sidelines?

Gallego: Well, I think one of the things that you could give the credit to, really, me and Mark Kelly, for example, my senior senator, is that we don’t have the luxury of being in anything safe.

And one of the benefits about Arizona, too, is that there is no real bubble in Arizona. I guess you could be in a political bubble if you want, but, you know, Democrats and Republicans live next to each other. They’re still friends. They still hang out. They still work together. This is why you saw so many Gallego-Trump voters, right? Because these are the people that can make these nuanced separations of who they want, who they think best represents them.

And it also means that you can’t avoid what is going on or what people’s fears are. You know, one of the things that I think was very instructive for us—at least, like, just generally for my campaign—is that one of the things that that helped us is that we were very realistic about what was happening out there, what people were feeling. And while everyone was trying to say that the economy was getting better—because I think I’m in a competitive state, and, generally, I don’t really live in an uppity area; I live in a working-class area in South Phoenix; I really get to touch real grass all the time—and I heard it from people at the grocery store, at the gas stations that they were just having a tough time making ends meet. And this isn’t 2022 when I’m hearing this. I’m hearing this in early 2024. I’m hearing the sense of desperation that they’re just working so hard, and they’re just not getting anywhere.

Or these young men and women that are looking at the world that they don’t understand anymore, because, you know, for Arizona, four years ago, if you had a family making middle-class, middle-income salary, you could afford a house. Now the average house in Arizona is about $530,000. And good luck, you know, finding that house; it’s probably far out in the middle of nowhere and, on average, a 7.5 percent mortgage.

And so we talked to the voter about what they wanted to hear and talk about and what they were worried about. When everyone was trying to deny that there was a problem at the border, every Democrat was trying to deny the problem at the border, we knew that that was just not the case. And people were still talking about the border. They were worried about it, and they were mad at Democrats for allowing this chaos to happen.

Instead of running away from it, we ran right to the fight and brought the arguments about why we were better than our opponent on these issues. And I think that ended up being one of the saving graces, why we’re able to outperform really all Senate Democrats in the country, considering, especially, that Arizona does have about 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.

We have no choice as candidates—me, Mark Kelly, other statewide candidates—to make sure that we are actually figuring out a way to win in a bipartisan manner, by keeping our values also as Democrats but also delivering to Arizona. We have no choice. We have to do it.

Frum: One of the things I noticed about Democrats from sort of the safer areas is: They attach a lot of importance to words, and often more importance to words rather than to things. And I’m struck here—

Gallego: Or deeds, yeah.

Frum: There’s been a project to evaluate why Democrats are doing poorly with men. And when you read the discussion about it, it’s all about changing the way we speak, changing the way we frame things. The idea that there might actually be something of substance that is the problem, that’s not something that seems to be very acceptable. Now, you don’t have that luxury.

Gallego: I don’t have the luxury. But also, it’s like you don’t—the Democrats are all about data until they don’t like the data. The data for men is: They’re just not doing well. This is not just Black men, Latino men. This is all men, right? We have the lowest amount of college attainment. Salaries are going down. Life expectancies are going down. There’s just this general discontent within the male population. If you just look at the data, you would say, Hey—this population of the United States is not doing well. We should figure out what to do about it. Let’s have conversations. Let’s have town halls. Let’s have real studies about this.

And what you see, and what I’ve seen in the past, is there’s this—I try not to exaggerate how sometimes the Democrats can be anti-male, but there is a certain amount of that that does happen. When you start talking about it, people are saying, like, Oh, you’re concentrating on males and forgetting X, Y, Z population, which I don’t think is the case. I think we care about Americans. We should care about all Americans. And if men aren’t doing well, us as a party who are supposed to care for the people that are not doing well, we should do something about it.

And we could do, at the same time, making sure we’re protecting women’s rights, making sure that women are also at the forefront of everything, that we’re protecting the LBGTQ community, all these kinds of things, right? But the fact is, for some reason, Democrats have gotten sheepish about this. You know, there’s people that are involved in different types of think tanks about the status of men and boys, and they’re largely frozen out of the conversations around Democratic policy making, because what we want is: We want the male vote, but we want it cheaply. We want the male vote to come to us without us getting some other interest groups pissed off. And we also want the male vote to come with us, and we want it to be within our safe little tent of ideas and ideology, and we want them to be perfectly fine to fit with all of our other friends.

Which, guess what? That’s just not how we’re going to win. We’re going to have to accept that some of these male voters are not going to be aligned with certain sectors of our tent if we want to win. If we don’t want to win, then fine. Accept that we’re going to be a small tent, and hopefully we win once in a while. But in reality: The Democrats want the male vote without actually having to work the male vote. And they think they can just throw a bunch of dudes on podcasts and, you know, bro it up, and that’s somehow going to solve the problem. It’s not going to solve the problem.

Frum: One thing that has been attended in the Trump years—and you can say this is actually a good thing about America, and maybe even one of Donald Trump’s few positive legacies—is the American melting pot does continue to bubble along. You can see it as early as the 2010s, but you can really see it happening in the 2020s, that we are seeing a big decrease in race and ethnic polarization in the United States.

But we’re paying for it by having this big increase in sex polarization. So men are men. Women are women. Wherever they come from, whatever the color of their skin, the women are voting more like each other; the men are voting more like each other. So the melting pot is bubbling, but the wall of separation between the sexes seems to be getting higher and higher.

Gallego: Yeah, a hundred percent. And look—some of it is COVID-induced. Some of it is: They’re listening to different things. One of the things we knew instinctively, because growing up Latino and working class: Latino men do not intently watch Univision, Telemundo. They don’t intently follow politics. They largely are disconnected from the normal avenues of—well, I would say that normal people kind of consume news and political news.

And one of the things that I emphasized on my campaign early on is a nontraditional way to reach these men, because you’ve got to understand the way these guys are. I mean, when I was in construction, I would wake up at 6 a.m., go to the site. Hopefully, it’d be done by 3 p.m. but probably not. So maybe you’re back at home by 5 p.m. You’re dirty as hell. You’re smelly as hell. You’re jumping in the shower, and then maybe, you know, you’re in time—you’ve made it home in time for dinner, right? You’re sitting down to dinner, and then you have probably a couple hours before you zonk out to start the next day.

Do you want to spend that time watching the news? Do you want to spend that time talking politics? No. You want to spend time with your family or with your friends, because your day sucked, and it’s going to suck again tomorrow. And so you do this rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

So where are they getting all their information from? Well, a couple places. Number one, they’re getting it from their other coworkers at worksites—which by the way, people forget when it comes to Latino men, the people they’re most likely to work with besides other Latino men are white working-class men, right? And white working-class men are very much politically involved and have a lot of political information that they’re getting. And they’re sharing it with their Latino coworkers, right?

And number two, they’re living off their phones through different social media, whether it’s Instagram, Snapchat, or all this kind of stuff, Twitter. So one of the things that we emphasize is trying to figure out how to get a message, a vibe, about who I was to these Latino male voters early on, so that way they understood, like, Ruben Gallego is a Democrat. Ruben Gallego says he’s for the working class. But then we also had a very strong cultural attachment. Like, He understands me. He actually worked at factories, worked in construction, understands the dignity of work, the responsibility of a man to his family, to provide for his family, and how important that is to me as a man.

And that kind of stuff, we are afraid to approach to get these men to start considering us as Democrats. And then, because we never talk about it, we never give them the dignity of allowing them to be family leaders and not making them feel bad about being family leaders. And then we’re surprised when, year after year, we don’t continue to have this conversation with us, they keep on moving away from us. And it’s a dumb trade-off, because we continue to do that because we think that somehow we’re going to piss off female voters.

And I don’t think that’s the case. Female voters are worried about their sons or daughters and their husbands. They’re worried about the fact that they’re becoming less social. They’re worried about the fact that they’re not actually being productive in life. And they want to have good husbands—heck, they want to have good ex-husbands that are involved with their kids’ lives, and they’re making good pay and paying their child support, things of that nature.

But for some reason, the Democrats have continued this trade-off, and it’s going to continue going until we realize: Making sure [of] people’s economic needs will cross all racial barriers and, if you do it rightly, will also cross these gender gaps that we’re seeing.

Frum: Well, let me ask you: You’re famous for having banned the use of the term Latinx from any communication you do. But let me ask you about a term you’ve been using: Latino. You’re originally from Chicago. If someone practiced politics in Chicago 100 years ago and someone said there’s this thing called an Eastern European o—Croat, Serbs, they’re the same; Poles, Ukrainians are the same; everybody loves the Ashkenazi Jews—it’s just one thing.

Gallego: I think if Chicago, like—if you weren’t Irish or Scottish or Polish, you were Bohemian. That’s the way they would describe any European that they couldn’t describe. Yeah. And then me, growing up, you were Spanish or Mexican, if you were lucky, or Puerto Rican.

Frum: But let me ask you this: Is this concept of Latino helping anybody understand anything at all? And as particularly the Democratic Party, that a lot of Democratic Party politics has been driven over the past quarter century by the idea, Okay, there’s this new minority. They all come from the same continent and half a continent—because Mexico, of course, is in North America—and most of them speak Spanish, some speak Portuguese, some speak indigenous languages. But we’re going to group them into a thing, and we’re just going to assume we own them, and they’re going to naturally gravitate to voting for us. They’re going to be in opposition to the standard organization of American society, and they’re going to want minority set-asides. And that’s the way to talk to them. And the very invention of the concept of Latino has been a disabling—part of your family comes from Colombia; part of your family comes from Mexico. Those are very different historical experiences.

Gallego: Oh, hell yeah.

Frum: And with Eastern Europeans, we would understand if your father was Serbian and your mother was Croat, that didn’t make you an Eastern European o; that made you a person with two different heritages that you had to balance.

Gallego: I think the mistake that happened, it’s like the names don’t matter so much. Now go back to why Latinx matters versus Latino: What happened within the progressive left, as well as the Democratic Party, is that you had all these Latinos that kept voting Democratic, right? Yeah, no matter what.

And the difference was two things. Number one: There was discrimination against Latinos. I mean, you saw signs going into the 1970s, you know, no spics, no dogs allowed. In the Southwest, there was housing discrimination, there was educational discrimination. And of course, that drove those voters to the Democratic Party, because we were the only party, really, that was outright for equality. The level of income attainment was extremely low. So the Latino population on average was poorer than the Anglo population. And the Democrats were the party of the middle class, a working class of: Who’s going to protect your rights? Who’s going to protect your wages? Who’s going to give you an opportunity to go to a good school and live the American dream? That was the Democratic Party.

What happened is: the Democratic Party kind of kept on evolving, and the Latino population kept growing bigger and bigger. The Latino population changed—and I don’t mean change, as in there was new populations that came in, except for the Cubans; that’s another tangent and a weird story there. But we got bigger, and we also got richer within our population. And even though, on average, Latinos are poorer, we have a lot of great success stories in America, right?

If you look at the police forces in a lot of our big cities, you have a lot of Latino police forces. You have a lot of Latino firemen. So there’s been this—and this is a good story, by the way. This is a good story. This is what you want to happen to your immigrant communities, right? This is the story of the American dream. We are moving up to middle class; we’re moving everything else. And so the Democratic Party just never changed as the Latino population was changing, right?

And if anything, it actually went further away from what they were, right? Focusing more on social issues and not so much on the economic issues that we were known for. And then also, just adopting things that the Latino community would naturally be against, right? Open borders, for example, was something that if you had Latino friends, they would’ve told you, Well, that’s dumb. Like, why? Why would you do that? Kind of the anti-police rhetoric. We live in neighborhoods where we want police to treat us well but also to be present, and this anti-police rhetoric that took off for many years affects them, especially, again, when we have so many people that are in the military—sorry, in the police force.

And this kind of moving away from this idea of patriotism being a core value of the Democratic Party and understanding that America is an exceptional country and we should pride and value that, it goes against the grain of what Latinos know, right? Our kids serve in the military. We actually come here because we think it’s an exceptional country. And when Arizona—sorry, when Democrats are sheepish about talking about the country in that way, it does an impact.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about the military. So you were in Iraq. You served with a unit that took a lot of casualties. You saw some hard things. Some of the people in your cohort who returned from Iraq, like the serving vice president, have been radicalized and embittered—or so they say that’s why they’ve been radicalized and embittered. He wasn’t radicalized and embittered. I knew him when he immediately came back from Iraq, and he wasn’t radicalized and embittered then, but the farther the experience recedes, the more embittered he becomes about it.

Other people who have served in the post-9/11 wars—like your former House colleague Dan Crenshaw, like some of your Senate colleagues, Tammy Duckworth—they retain their faith in America’s purposes in the world, that American military power is a necessary thing and a force for good. How do you process your military experience, and how does it affect the way you think about America’s role in the world and America’s military in the world?

Gallego: Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s pretty interesting just because, I mean, the vice president and I were actually in Iraq at the same time. He was serving on a base called Al Asad, and I was a frontline infantry unit that was never on base. And actually, my unit was from Ohio, so the Reserve unit I served with, Lima 3/25. And as you know, we ended up, unfortunately, seeing a lot of combat and lost a lot of men.

And I actually did come back embittered. I came back embittered at the administration for sending me to a bogus war to begin with. And they sent me to a bogus war without the equipment that I needed, that got a lot of my men killed—and the manpower, by the way, because I was covering an area the size of West Virginia with only a company of men, or battalion, I should say. And so I was very embittered at our government about that. But it never made me an isolationist, because I think, looking at the world in a rational way, we can’t afford to be isolationist.

I want security for the future of my kids, and I want economic security too. Part of that is going to be that we have to have friends, and we need strong friends. Because we don’t have the mass that China has. And I’m not talking about the military mass—because I don’t want to go to war with China—but we don’t actually have the actual manpower, economic leverage that we have, unless we have other friends, unless we have other allies. And when it comes to any kind of military support, having other friends that are with us.

And I want to prevent wars. I think the best way for us to prevent wars is to have alliances, is to believe in actual treaty obligations, and also to find ways to prevent wars through multilateralism, through investments in bringing down, for example, poverty around the world. I mean, one of the reasons why I had such a hard time fighting over there is because everybody in western Iraq was trying to kill me, and some of these people weren’t even trying to kill me because they were idealogues, but because they were poor. Some insurgent was going to give him a hundred bucks just to drop an IED at the side of the road, right?

Like, I saw the actual results of instability in the world. And yes, there was a lot of bad leadership decisions and somewhat criminal decisions that came from the Bush administration. But tearing down the system that has actually brought the longest amount of peace, in general, in the longest time since World War II is just plain dumb. And some of the things that I think actually motivates these people to actually try to destroy these institutions is because: If there’s less institutions that are connecting us, if there’s more isolationism, it actually empowers the most powerful people within this country, which I don’t think we want either.

I see this as the opposite way. It doesn’t mean we have to be everywhere. I certainly have not supported engagements or potential engagements all around the world. I supported us, for example, when it came to the JCPOA, because I don’t want to go to war with Iran, under President Obama. I’ve been against some of our potential expeditions and long-standing, overstayed, and out of compliance with some of our rules and regulations in terms of operating overseas, like in Syria and other countries. And I think we should have deep oversight.

But this idea that we’re just going to go to zero and close down the borders, I think is just not, when it comes to our alliances, is just not realistic. It’s not going to happen, and I think it’s going to make more unsafe than anything else, and I think will actually lead us to more of a situation in terms of a confrontation with China than less.

Frum: You’re on the border, and the Trump administration, one of its areas of greatest military adventurism has been with increased military activity in Mexico. They’re overlying drones. They say the drones are unarmed, but they’re drones that are capable of being armed. It looks like they didn’t give the Mexican government advanced notice of all the drones that are flying. President Trump, the vice president, many others in the Republican Party have spoken about taking some kind of military action inside the territory of Mexico or on the seas that are just outside Mexico’s territorial waters. How do you think about that as someone who represents Arizona?

Gallego: We want, and we do have, a good relationship with the Mexican government in Arizona. Our police forces will talk to their police forces. They have problems. There’s no doubt there’s corruption. There’s no doubt. But what you’ve seen is when some of the best outcomes have always been when we’ve actually worked with our friends and treated them like friends and allies, and helped them build their capability to fight back, fight corruption, fight these cartels, fight these terrorists.

You’ve seen some of the best COIN operations in, for example, Colombia that were effective. And I think we could continue doing that. But if we decide to do these unilateral actions without working with these countries, without giving them some level of respect, we’re going to end up having less support from that government, but less support from the people who will continue to hide these horrible, horrible humans that are also terrorizing these communities.

It’s also very insulting to a lot of—and this is something that I’ve seen that we’ve done, not just to them but to sort of Afghan allies we’re not rolling in. It’s insulting to them as if they don’t have some agency, right? Thousands and thousands of Mexican police officers, government workers die every year fighting these cartels. And the fact that we kind of give this whole broad brush and say they’re all corrupt, they’re all evil I think is something that’s going, again, to not help us make friends where we need friends to fight these organizations.

Frum: Well, you mentioned Colombia. Until a little while ago, it looked like one of the big successes of American policy in the 21st century: Plan Colombia that restored order, the reorientation of the Colombian economy away from drugs to exporting agricultural goods that serve people rather than killed people.

Colombia got hit with a wave of tariffs by the Trump administration. Now he’s helped to legitimate the far left that has come back into Colombian politics. Is that a situation that you follow, and what lessons do you see for countering surgency from the Colombian experience?

Gallego: Yeah, I do follow it a lot. Look—you know, when President Petro of Colombia really used this opportunity to kind of create this jingoistic situation where you’re able to draw attention to the sins of what the United States is doing, and not necessarily the things that are occurring in Colombia, which economically aren’t great. And when you’re putting tariffs, you’re creating two things: Number one, for your kind of marginal farmer, especially out in rural Colombia, doing, you know—export farming is profitable, but not that much. And it is also fairly marginal, right? It is a lot more profitable for you to farm and harvest cocoa, right? And other, drug, products.

And so you’re making an economic incentive for people to move away. You’re also messing with our economy, too (the United States economy), because talking to some of these big industries down there who import American flour, corn, soy—they’re right now looking for new partners anywhere else besides the United States because they don’t want to deal with the drama of Am I under a tariff? versus Am I not under a tariff?

You know, their biggest import from the United States is actually soy, which is ridiculous considering they’re essentially next to—they share a border with—Brazil. Now, you know, the Brazilian soy market is hunting around in Colombia, trying to basically say, like, We’re your better partner. They’re gonna—look: They’re gonna try to get flour from somewhere else. You know, the Colombian farmers, because it’s a very volcanic earth, really value American tractors and farm equipment because they’re solid. You know, they have a great reputation. They’re easy to fix. The parts are easy to get. And now they’re trying to get new products from Korea, from China, from Europe, because they don’t want to deal every year, again, with whether your tractor is going to end up having a 10 percent, 20 percent tariff or counter-tariffs. So this is the instability we’re causing.

That what was essentially unnecessary instability, right? Because Colombia has always accepted Colombians that are being returned for deportation. All they were asking is, like, Hey—just don’t bring them in a military plane and we’re fine. And I think that’s some of the least thing we—one of the things we could do to keep relations, to keep the flow going, obviously, people that should be deported. But, you know, we end up, again, shooting ourselves in the foot because the way that this administration does security is they focus on being tough and not smart. They focus on showing, like, We’re gonna do these things, but at the end of the day, all they’re doing is causing more chaos.

They were talking about criminals, and now they’re rounding up kids, rounding up parents, rounding up workers that we need, just so they could prove that they’re wrong, when the voter really did not ask for that. They didn’t ask for this, they asked for criminals. They asked for a tighter border; they got a tighter border. But now you’re deporting families just so you could say you’re hitting these arbitrary numbers that Stephen Miller wants.

Frum: A lot of you—you talk about the harm of tariffs very eloquently. A lot of people in your party have been having a difficult time articulating a tariff message because they actually kind of like tariffs.

If President Trump has been the most protectionist president since 1945, President Biden was the second-most. And so you hear a lot of Democrats saying things like, Well, I’m against dumb tariffs. I’m for smart tariffs, implying they’re for smart tariffs, implying that there is or could be such a thing as a smart tariff.

And the result is you have a very narrow difference. And to your point just now, I mean, when Democrats say, I want to do the same thing as Donald Trump, but I want to do it smarter, what a lot of people hear is not, Well, you are smarter. [It’s] Oh, you’re the party of people who think they’re so smart, but you don’t actually have a principled criticism of what the president does. You’re just showing off that you think you’re better educated and more intelligent. But you want to do the same thing, only with fancier words, the way you always want to do it.

So are there Democrats who are going to be able to say, You know what? Tariffs are just dumb. Don’t do them. We should trade in peace and freedom with the rest of the world?

Gallego: Are there? —I mean, I’m not a miracle worker here, David. But look—what we’ve seen in terms of the turnaround in our economy, right? If you would’ve said eight years ago that the United States was gonna be able to manufacture the majority of the chips it needs within 10 years, we would’ve been like, You’re freaking nuts, right? Because all the chip manufacturing was being done overseas. And within that short time period, we were able to stand up and move U.S. manufacturing of advanced chips to a point where we’re going to be net exporters in the next couple years.

That wasn’t from tariff policy; that was from an actual industrial policy about how we’re actually gonna brick this back, right? And we need to figure out how we can bring certain industries back and how we could do it smartly by competing, right? By having the best workers possible, by having the best industry possible, with having the best regulatory frameworks they could add to the tax policies, everything else. Like, that’s how you make it.

So you could actually bring these middle-class jobs back. But the other thing that really annoys me is that, like, who do they think works these middle-class jobs? Who do you think works these factories? Right now they’re about, last I heard—I’d have to go back and check. But, you know, we’re probably close to a million—sorry, we’re at about a million factory jobs that are opening right now. Those are immigrants that work those jobs. When I was working at a meat factory, growing up, I got $1 more because I was the only one that spoke English—or, well, I spoke English. I’m sure there’s others that spoke English too.

But the people that worked at that factory were Mexican immigrants and Polish immigrants, right? So let’s say we do build that steel plant here. First of all, let’s find the investors that are willing to put in the seven to 10 years to build it. Like, the people that work in a lot of these places are the people that we’re trying to kick out of this country right now, or won’t let in.

And so how are we—how is this smart in any way?

Frum: You come from one of the most outward-facing states in America, in the country—a border state, a state with a dynamic economy, a state of entrepreneurship and immigration. If anyone’s gonna carry a flag for open trade, free trade, it’s gonna be a senator from Arizona. John McCain was a great free trader. Can we look to the senators from Arizona to lead the fight against tariffs and for free trade?

Gallego: Yeah. No, like, I think I can’t speak for the other senator, but what we’ve seen is, like, Arizona is richer because of trade—and not just, by the way, [with] Mexico, which, by the way, has definitely been a big driver, besides the fact that everyone just focuses on the security side of it. We are actually a richer state, and the country would be much richer if we actually made our ports of entries faster, more aggressive, and predictable in some regards because some people don’t know when they’re gonna come in.

But we are now trading with, you know, all around the world. We just opened up a direct airline route, or will be soon, from Phoenix to Taiwan. Our jobs, our high-skilled jobs, our highest-paying jobs are due to trade. And in some regard, if we actually want stability, especially in the Western hemisphere, we should embrace free trade that, you know, emphasizes our brothers and sisters south of the border getting good-paying jobs, getting those industry jobs that we don’t want to do in the United States, so they could stop the migrations that are moving here to the United States. There is a way for this all to be a win-win for the United States. And I think using our ability, in terms of our superpower—which I think our biggest superpower is actually human capital—where we can bring anyone from all around the world and use their drive, their brainpower and put it into this massive other amount of brainpower to experiences all around the world. We could outcompete anybody, but we actually have to believe in them. We have to make the investments in them. And I think that is going to be a better way to actually move the middle class, get them those jobs that they need, than these types of, like, ham-fisted tariff policies.

Frum: Last question, because I know we have a hard out, and you’ve been very generous with your time. You came from a tough background. You had an astonishing career. Your talent was picked out early. You went to Harvard. You volunteered. You saw some dark things in combat. You came back. You chose politics after that background at a strikingly early age. You didn’t get rich first. You went into politics directly.

Gallego: I did want to get rich first, to be honest. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Why did you choose politics?

Gallego: You know, I think it really chose me. I always wanted to do government service. I actually thought that I was going to end up in the State Department, or the FBI, or something of that nature. I got back from the war—I mean, I was fucked up, to be honest. You know, my best friend died. It was seven months of just hard, hard combat.

And then we got back and, you know, we were Reservists, and they just let us go, right? So two weeks after I get back from Iraq, I am given my orders, I throw my stuff in my sea bag, and they’re, Right. You’re out; you’re gone. You know, no housing, nothing. And luckily, I had friends and family to fall upon.

But then the stories started coming from my guys that they were having problems getting jobs. They were having problems getting VA treatments, getting into the VA—all these things that were just terrifying to me. And I was already pissed from the war because, again, they sent me to war without the proper armor on our vehicles, proper intelligence, without enough manpower, all this kind of stuff.

And so I found myself talking more and more to these guys about—these guys, my brothers—trying to help them get into the VA, trying to help them get into school. You know, some of them were living on my couch for a little bit to keep them off the streets. And I started complaining to the state reps, to the state senators, Why can’t my guys have in-state tuition? Marines would be overseas for three years, and they’d come back to their home state or to another state, and they say, like, Well, you never lived here. Like, Yeah, well, I’ve been gone forever.

And it just kept on coming back and forth, back and forth, and I just kept complaining to congressmen and to everybody. And I realized that, I mean, everyone talks a big game, but no one really gives an f about us until they really need us.

But I have a purpose here, and it’s going to continue to service. You know, my guys and I are going to have our 20-year reunion this year. I’m 45. I’m one of the older side of veterans, and if I’m not doing this right now, you know, who’s going to hold this administration to the fire? They want to cut 83,000 veteran—VA employees arbitrarily, right? And for me, I’m able to use my position as a veteran, as a combat veteran, and I’m pushing back on them. I’m not sure if I was here, would someone be doing as aggressively as I am? And I think that that tells me I’m doing something right.

Frum: Thank you. Thank you for the time today. I’m really grateful. Thank you for the candor. It’s been an interesting conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time for us. Bye-bye.

Gallego: Appreciate it. Adios.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Senator Gallego for joining me here on The David Frum Show. Remember, if you enjoy this dialogue and similar content, please subscribe to The Atlantic. That’s the best way to support the work of The David Frum Show and all of my Atlantic colleagues.

I’m going to close with some farewell thoughts about the weekend ahead. If you are planning to fly into Washington, D.C., over the weekend of June 14, be prepared for a lot of airplane closures. Reagan National Airport will be closed, and traffic at the other regional airports is likely to be disrupted. The reason for this is the big parade scheduled for June 14.

Now, ostensibly, this is a parade to salute the 250th anniversary of the United States Army, founded in June of 1775. But we all know this story is not true. The Continental Navy was founded in the fall of 1775, and the Marines shortly thereafter. They, too, are celebrating 250th anniversaries this year. No parade for them, because their anniversaries do not coincide with the birthday of President Trump. President Trump is throwing a big birthday bash for himself at public expense, making a parade, which he has wanted for a long time.

And the Army is his excuse but not his motive. As I say, if it were the real thing, you would find a way to honor the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps together, all of them celebrating their 250th anniversary this year. Now, President Trump has wanted a big military parade since he saw one in France in his first term, on Bastille Day. The Army and the other services, the Department of Defense, resisted this demand for a long time, and for three main reasons.

The first was the reason of expense. The Trump birthday party, the military component of it, will cost, all in—both the cost of the parade and the cost of repaving the city streets afterwards—probably in the vicinity of $100 million. That’s a very large amount of money, even by military standards. And in the first term, at least, the money would’ve been spent at a time of general prosperity and pretty lax controls of spending. In the second term, President Trump is engaged in massive budget cuts throughout the rest of the government. We’ve eliminated the PEPFAR program for Africa that delivers anti-HIV drugs to Africans of all ages, and especially children. People’s lives are at risk to save the $7 billion that PEPFAR costs. It’s indecent to be cutting PEPFAR and throwing the president a $100 million birthday party. So the military has resisted on grounds of expense.

They’ve also resisted on grounds of uselessness. Look—parades used to serve a purpose. The skills on display in a parade—marching in step, the cavalry trotting in line—those were highly relevant military skills in the days when armies fought in formation, when infantry formed into line, when cavalry moved at a trot. But in today’s world, the skills that you need to do at a parade have nothing to do with how armies fight.

And the weeks and weeks of preparation that the units have to do in order to be ready for the parade is just a waste of time. And these are all, by the way, highly paid, highly skilled professionals. Their time is valuable. We want our war fighters, as Secretary of Defense Hegseth calls them, to be preparing to fight actual 21st-century war, not demonstrating their skill and readiness to fight the wars of the 18th and early 19th century.

But there’s an even more fundamental reason that the Army resisted for such a long time, and that was: They sensed there was something political about these parades. Trump was not doing this, really, to salute the military. He was summoning the military to salute him. And the military, rightly, would never refuse an order, but they would point out, This is expensive. This is a distraction. And if you order us to do it, we will leak the details of how expensive and how useless it is to the newspapers, so that everyone will see what you are doing.

That was the first term. But in this second term, the military is headed by people who—unlike the military leadership in the first term—under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, pose no resistance to the orders and demands and wishes and imperatives and whims of President Trump. The Hegseth DOD is an arm of Trump’s PR politics. And so it’s all parade, all the time. There is no one now to advocate for the interests of the national defense against the whims of the president.

I think this you’ve all heard before, but there’s something else I want to point out here. The idea that a president would cause massive inconvenience to the traveling public, disrupt the traffic of the District of Columbia, all to honor himself is a real slap in the face and a real denial of the fundamental relationship that the constitutional system envisions between the president and the people.

The president is a public servant. He is the highest-ranking government employee. He’s not the master. He’s not the king. He’s not the emperor. Traditionally, presidents receive no honor of any kind in their own lifetimes. If they had distinguished themselves in office, after they had passed then they would be honored in all kinds of ways: the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Monument. Everything’s the other way around. I think it’s the Lincoln Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. You’d issue postage stamps for them. The streets would be named for them, counties. There are Jackson Counties all over the United States. Presidents were honored after the end of their lifetime. But in their time, they were just another government employee, like the undersecretary of agriculture. And there certainly was no public commemoration of their birthdays.

Donald Trump does not see himself as a public servant. He sees himself as a public master. That’s why he’s always demanding thanks for his allocation of government resources. When President Trump sends emergency assistance to a county that’s in need, it’s not his money. No one owes him any thank-you. He’s doing his job, sending the public’s money to the place where public law provides for it to go. And yet he thinks, because he is the president, he, therefore, is owed deference, he is owed obedience, he’s owed thanks, and he’s owed a parade.

And this habit of thinking is spreading through his government. Other Cabinet secretaries have also given themselves birthday parties of public expense and have issued statements on Twitter saluting the Cabinet secretary for the birthday. It’s a habit that grows from the top down, and it’s a violation of the way that Americans used to conduct themselves.

Look—in Britain, there’s a long and lively tradition of military parades on the monarch’s birthday. They troop the colors. In fact, this year, the trooping of the colors for King Charles’s birthday will be June 14. Charles’s birthday will be June 14, just like President Trump’s parade. But Charles’s parade is not on his actual birthday; his actual birthday is in November. but he’s going to have his parade on June 14 because that’s the best day for the public to watch it and enjoy it, and it’s also the easiest day for the troops to parade. If you know London, you’d much rather parade in the June sunshine than in the November gloom and rain.

So Charles, the king of England, is thinking of others when he arranges the continuation of the long-established tradition of the trooping of the colors on the monarch’s birthday. President Trump, ostensibly a servant of the people, ostensibly a lowercase r Republican official, ostensibly just the highest-ranking person in the government bureaucracy—he’s doing more than King Charles to honor himself at other people’s expense and other people’s inconvenience. It’s not the biggest scandal of the Trump administration by any means, but in some ways it’s the most revealing.

Thanks so much for joining me today. I’m David Frum. I hope you’ll return next week for another episode.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

In Donald Trump’s first administration, he was surrounded by buffers and filters—but in his second, he’s surrounded by amplifiers. On a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic, the foreign-affairs columnist Thomas Friedman joins to discuss the chaos of Trump’s conflicts, and how world leaders are viewing the instability.

Meanwhile, the end of Donald Trump’s friendship with Elon Musk was never really a question of “if,” but “when.” “Nothing here is modeled, nothing here is stress-tested, everything is a riff,” Friedman said last night. “The country is being run like the Trump Organization today, not like the United States of America.”

When it comes to Trump and Musk’s feud, “we’re dealing with two extremely unstable characters,” Friedman continues. “But what’s really more important is: What’s the wider world audience saying?”

Watch the full episode with Friedman and The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, here.

On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about how Donald Trump’s second term has brought a more systematic and punishing assault on American media, through regulatory pressure, retaliatory lawsuits, and corporate intimidation.

Then David is joined by the legendary newspaper editor Marty Baron to discuss how today’s media institutions are struggling to stand up to power. Baron reflects on his tenure at The Washington Post, the new pressures facing owners such as Jeff Bezos, and how Trump has turned retribution into official policy. They also examine how internal newsroom culture, social media, and a loss of connection to working-class America have weakened public trust in journalism.

David closes the episode by reflecting on the recent media overhyping of President Joe Biden’s age issues.

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 9 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, I’ll be joined by Marty Baron, formerly executive editor of The Washington Post during the first Trump term and during the transition of ownership at The Washington Post from the Graham family that had led it through so many years to new ownership under Jeff Bezos.

Marty Baron is one of the most important media leaders of our time and has spoken forcefully, both in person and in his memoir, Collision of Power, about the threats to free press and the responsibilities of that press. I’ll finish the episode with some thoughts about the way the media have covered the old age and infirmity of former President Joe Biden. But let me begin by addressing this larger topic of press freedom and press responsibility in the second Trump term.

President Trump began his campaign and has spent much of his first term attacking the media, coining phrases, calling the free media enemies of the people, enemies of the state, and huffing and puffing and complaining, and generally persecuting and often inciting dangerous threats against individual members of the press.

If you covered the Trump presidency in that first term, especially if you were a woman, you suddenly found yourself being attacked, both digitally and often in person, in ways unlike anything ever seen before: death threats, harassment, abuse, anti-Semitic and misogynistic, racist—the worst kind of garbage. I even got a little splash of myself. I had an FBI man come to the house to warn my wife that there had been some threats against me. The Atlantic is kind of high-toned, and I think a lot of the people who make the worst threats don’t read The Atlantic, and so we get spared to some degree, but it was nasty. But it was also mostly ineffective.

The press worked during the first Trump term. Institutions like The Atlantic, like The New York Times, like The Washington Post, like CNN kept bringing to light important stories about what the Trump presidency was doing, about corruption, about ties to Russia, about many things that people needed to know. And while their lives were much more difficult than they had been in the past, and while the pressures on them were real, it did not, in the end, detract from getting the job done, for the most part, in the first Trump term.

In the second Trump term, things have been different. President Trump has been much more systematic, much more deliberate, much more sustained, and much more effective in putting pressure on America’s free media. He does it by squeezing the corporate parents of media institutions, making it clear that mergers of the upstream parent will not be allowed or will be harassed or even illegally prevented in some way, unless those institutions change the way that their reporting arms behave themselves.

And we have seen media people end up paying what look very much like inducements, material inducements, to Trump. Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, paid millions of dollars for the rights to make a Melania documentary, money it has to know it will never see back for a documentary that will probably never be produced. ABC paid millions of dollars directly to President Trump’s so-called library, but really to himself, because of pressure put upon the Disney Corporation, ABC’s corporate parent. CBS offered a settlement to Trump for an even more vexatious and absurd lawsuit: Trump complained that he didn’t like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris—which, So what? You don’t like our editing? You have no claim on that. That gives you no right of due action. I mean, send us a letter if you don’t like the editing. And other people don’t like the editing of the interview we did with you; that’s not lawsuit material.

The Atlantic, too, after our Signal story, a that reported that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been added to what should have been a more sensitive discussion of a military operation in Yemen: In addition to the usual concerns for accuracy that, of course, we had, we knew that there was a chance that the federal government under President Trump would pursue some sort of baseless, legal retaliatory action against us, and we had to fear that in a way that probably in another time we would not have had to fear.

So there are real things to worry about, and they’re not just specific to Trump. We’ve seen other people in American politics do the same. When Ron DeSantis was governor of Florida—or he is the governor of Florida. When he was running for president, he made one of his signature issues threatening the Disney Corporation for exercising its free-speech rights to comment on some of his social legislation by stripping them of various business privileges that they had long had and punishing the corporate parent for exercises of corporate free speech, because Disney was unhappy that the DeSantis administration was penalizing what they saw as the free-expression rights of gay and lesbian people in the state of Florida. So DeSantis took the Trump path. In the end, it didn’t do him any good, but Disney still took the blow.

We have seen this kind of acceleration of new kinds of threats, and they’re working because media institutions of the traditional kind are more vulnerable than they ever used to be before. Look—the companies that were powerful in 1972 are a lot less powerful in 2025, but they remain the main sources of dispassionate, fact-checked, accurate information about the events of the day. New media does not see that as its mission, but the old media do. But because they’ve been losing audience share, because they’re less wealthy than they used to be, they’re subject to various kinds of pressure, and those pressures are being imposed on them with real-world consequences for all of us.

Meanwhile, the whole mental landscape is being altered by the rise of different kinds of media institutions. TikTok has to be regarded as the most important media company in America today, alongside Facebook and other social-media platforms. These are shaping the minds and mentalities of Americans, especially Americans under 40, especially those Americans who are not closely involved with the political process, and so whose votes are maybe more up for grabs and are therefore some of the most valuable voters to politicians. We have a new kind of landscape, and it’s one that we all have to navigate with great care and one in which our responsibilities as citizens are as much at stake as our rights as citizens.

The information landscape is being reshaped, and Trump is abusing the powers of state in this new landscape to hasten the reshaping in ways favorable to him. Congress passed a law putting TikTok out of business. The Supreme Court approved that law. Trump has postponed enforcing the law long past all the deadlines that were supposed to be there, because he likes the way TikTok covers him. Remember, one of the rules of authoritarianism is: The protection for the culpable is as much a resource for the authoritarian as harassment of the innocent.

The goal and end state of all of these evolutions, of these pressures, of these changes in the media landscape is to create a world—or create an America—in which nobody will know anything that can be relied upon and shared with neighbors. Instead of knowledge informing our politics, our politics will inform our knowledge.

Now, there’s no ready answer to this, but each of us as an individual has a power to do something about it, to be a better consumer of news, to be a wiser user, to read more carefully, to question more of what we see, to fortify our immunities against the coming wage of AI-fed distortion that is surely on its way.

It’s going to be a different kind of country, different kind of way of processing information. But the task of democracy and the challenge of democracy remains eternal, even as the challenges and threats change. And we’re all going to have to step up and be the best kind of citizens, the best-informed citizens that we know how to be, even as it becomes more difficult in the face of authoritarian pressure and new technology.

And now my dialogue with Marty Baron, formerly editor of The Washington Post. But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: Marty Baron is a newspaper editor whose real-life story inspired an Academy Award–winning movie. After reporting for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, he was appointed executive editor of the Miami Herald. From Miami, he moved to Boston, where he led the Boston Globe’s coverage of sex-abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That coverage won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and inspired the 2015 movie Spotlight.

In 2013, Marty Baron moved to The Washington Post. He led the paper through its purchase by Jeff Bezos and through the first Trump term, winning more accolades and prizes for himself and his reporters along the way.

He retired in 2021 and published his memoir, Collision of Power, in 2023. Marty, thank you so much for joining the program today.

Martin Baron: Thanks for inviting me, David.

Frum: All right, so we’ve got some things to cover, and we’ve talked about what those might be, but let me start off with a straightforward question: If you were editing The Washington Post today, do you think you’d keep your job?

Baron: (Laughs.) I think I would, actually, because I think I did a good job while I was there, and I think that was appreciated and I was supported by the owner and the publisher at the time. Obviously, some things have changed. But I think it would be very risky for them to fire me.

And the news department continues to maintain its independence from the owner. The owner has not interfered in the news coverage, as far as I know. And I think all of us would know, because there would be an explosive reaction within the newsroom if he had interfered. So yes, I think I would keep my job.

Frum: It’s a major theme of your memoir, Collision of Power, that first-term Trump tried to pressure The Washington Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, into submission, and that Bezos consistently and courageously resisted. Bezos paid a price for this. Amazon lost a $10 billion contract with the federal government because of Trump’s unhappiness with The Washington Post coverage.

Amazon and the Post don’t have a relationship, but Bezos is the owner of both. They’re the largest shareholder in Amazon and [he’s] the sole owner of the Post. Second-term Trump seems much more deliberate, methodical, purposeful, and effective in his pressures on the Post and other media institutions. And this time, he also seems more successful, and not just with the Post but with many others. I described in my opening monologue some of the other cases—CBS, ABC. What are media owners so afraid of?

Baron: Well, I think what they’re afraid of is they’re afraid of being made a target by Trump, that he’s going to do severe damage to their other commercial interests. I think in the case of Bezos, he’s afraid of the impact that Trump can have on Amazon, which has enormous contracts—particularly in the area of cloud-computing services—with the federal government.

And he has a private, commercial space venture called Blue Origin, which had fallen well behind SpaceX, the Elon Musk company, but was at the point of launching a rocket into orbit and then being able to start to compete, really, with SpaceX. It has now launched that rocket successfully into orbit. But it’s highly dependent on contracts with the federal government, and I think that’s true of the other companies as well, the parent companies of CBS and ABC. So in the case of ABC, Disney depends on the federal government for approval of mergers and things like that, and does not want to be in conflict with the president of the United States. And of course, Paramount, which owns CBS, wants to execute a merger with Skydance, and that requires approval by the FCC.

Frum: You know, you’ve had a long and storied career through many, many different institutions, and I’m sure along the way, you have observed close-up and directly how angry mayors, governors, and presidents and members of Congress can get at media coverage. And there’s always a lot of huffing and puffing and bluster and anger. What is happening since the election in 2024 seems qualitatively different from anything that I’ve observed. Is that your observation?

Baron: Well, absolutely. Look—I mean, Trump, during his campaign, promised to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies. That’s what he’s doing right now. You can see that, of course, in his attacks on law firms that have represented individuals and institutions that were opposed to him, seeking to bar them from access to federal-government buildings, seeking to deny them any contracts with the federal government—basically, punish them in every conceivable way—and really, he’s seeking to destroy those law firms. The same applies to universities, first with Columbia University and then now with Harvard, of course. You can see that he’s applying all of the not just threats, but actually, use of force and denying billions of dollars in grants to Harvard in an effort to force them to submit to his wishes.

So that’s what’s happening. It’s qualitatively different from what we’ve seen before. And of course, the federal government has enormous power. And Trump is exercising that power—actually, not just exercising it; he’s abusing it.

Frum: Why is it so much more effective now? One of the semi-remembered details of the Watergate scandal was that President Richard Nixon tried to put pressure on The Washington Post at that time because the Post was then seeking permission, or the Graham family was seeking permission, to acquire some radio stations, which required FCC approval. And there’s a famous crude quote about it, We’re going to put Katie Graham’s tits through the wringer. And what that was referring to was that her family wanted to buy these radio stations—or maybe sell them; I can’t remember which. But either way, they needed an FCC permission, and Nixon said, Aha! I have the brain wave. We’ll use that as a pressure on the Post. And it spectacularly backfired. It didn’t work for Nixon at all.

Now, a half century later, similar kinds of threats do seem to be working, at least for now. What’s the difference? Why was the press so much more robust in the 1970s than the prestige press seems to be in the 2020s?

Baron: Well, I don’t know if it was more robust. Certainly, in the case of The Washington Post, they resisted. And I wish that Jeff Bezos would do the same. As I said, I think the news department continues to operate independently, and it’s doing a great job, an admirable job of investigating what’s happening in this administration. And yet he has sought to repair his relationship with Trump by doing all sorts of things, the first one being killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris and then, of course, donating to the inauguration, appearing at the inauguration, Amazon agreeing to a contract to buy the rights to a Melania Trump documentary about her own life for an extraordinary sum of money, and then Amazon agreeing to buy the rights to The Apprentice.

I think what’s different now is, well, you don’t have a Congress that’s doing its job. I mean, at the time of Watergate, you actually had some confidence that the other pillars of government would stand up, would hold up. And in the case of Watergate, you had a Congress that conducted an investigation that obtained internal tapes, and that made all the difference in the world. And now you have a president who has control of both houses of Congress, and you have a Congress, a Republican Party, that is a completely servile.

Frum: Mm-hmm. Is there something different about the media institutions themselves? Have they changed in some way, as compared to what they were half a century ago?

Baron: Good question. Look—in the past, I think sometimes we romanticized what the media was like. Keep in mind: We used to have incredibly wealthy owners of media, people like Hearst, who often collaborated with government and abused their power.

I mean, the Chandler family, you know, remade Los Angeles, brought water from the Owens Valley in the north down to L.A. to essentially enrich themselves. So I think we romanticize what media ownership was in the past. I think that now, you know, a lot of media—big, institutional media—is owned by, first of all, very wealthy people who have other very substantial commercial interests.

And you have, also, these parent companies, which have other substantial commercial interests. And they’re highly dependent on the federal government, and the federal government has probably more power today than it had back in the previous years, previous decades.

Frum: One reason it seems to me that media institutions are weaker in the 2020s was because they went through a self-imposed spasm of self-cannibalization in the late 2010s, culminating in the events of 2020. The most famous example of this is the forced resignation of James Bennett from The New York Times op-ed page for the sin of running an op-ed that some of the staffers thought was too interesting. They claimed that the op-ed would lead to violence, which was, on its face and certainly by the result, a false claim.

But Bennett was forced out, and other institutions saw these kind of little staff mutinies. You experienced many at The Washington Post, and the hypothesis is: Was there some kind of weakening of the sinew, some kind of weakening of the courage, some kind of weakening of the solidarity between staff and leadership at the institution that happened between 2015, culminating in 2020? And is that in any way responsible for the weakness of institutions today?

Baron: Well, I don’t disagree with you that there has been a certain ideological rigidity within newsrooms and unwillingness to recognize nuance, a tendency on the part of, particularly, the younger generation, I think, to divide the world into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed, and basically see the world without a nuance, see it through sort of a binary separation. I think that what that has done—I don’t know that it has weakened. Certainly, there have been rebellions within newsrooms. I did experience that due to my efforts to try to enforce social-media guidelines, for example, and then, also, in reaction to the George Floyd killing, the demand for greater diversity in the newsroom and in leadership.

But I think that the unwillingness to sort of recognize nuances has hurt our credibility with the general public. That’s where I think it’s done real damage, is that it has contributed to the decline in confidence in major news institutions. And that’s a perilous place to be.

Frum: You know, diversity is a complex concept with many different meanings, and I think what it can sometimes mean and has sometimes meant for many institutions is that while the staff become more diverse in a series of biographical attributes, they become more monolithic in the way they think and more different from the people to whom they want to deliver their product.

So if you’ve got a newsroom that is all full of—from every background, every climb, but—all graduates of certain four-year institutions with certain common outlooks, and the readership doesn’t meet those qualifications. I mean, they may, you know, have different biographies, but they have similar outlooks, and it’s one that puts them increasingly at odds with who their consumers are, in a way that just wasn’t the case when you went to a newspaper from high school, not from college.

Baron: I think that’s true. I think that we do not have a certain level of diversity that we should have. It’s people from a lot of different backgrounds, people who didn’t go to all the same sorts of schools.

I certainly didn’t, by the way. I did not go to an Ivy League school, and I grew up in Florida and not in the Washington area. And I just ended up there because I was approached about taking on the editorship of The Washington Post, which was a surprise to me. So I’ve always seen Washington as a bit of a bubble, and I think it is.

Look—we did work when I was at the Post to increase the diversity, in and in respects other than demographic. We tried to hire more military veterans. We thought that was important. The country had been at war for so many years, and yet we had very few military veterans in our newsroom. We needed more. We hired people who came from evangelical Christian colleges. I thought that was really important, given the importance of religion in this country, and particularly evangelicalism in this country. And to try to get more people from working-class backgrounds as well. And we need to do more of that. There’s no question. I think there are a lot of people in the newsroom who don’t understand the struggles and lives of ordinary people in the middle of the country, and we need to work harder at that. There’s no question about that.

Frum: One thing I think that gets lost sight of—and I’m old enough to remember it, and maybe you are too—was: In the middle of 1970s, most of the people who worked for a newspaper were engaged in a form of manufacturing. The paper, yes, it was written. But after it was written, it was then composed by people who worked for the newspaper, and it was then physically printed and then physically distributed. It was a giant manufacturing enterprise, and most of the staff were blue-collar people who had nothing to do with the content of the paper and everything to do with the physical existence of the paper.

And this was brought home when my wife’s stepfather created a newspaper in Toronto—which was created in the early 1970s, The Toronto Sun—which was like this. You saw it when you went to the athletic events, or the picnics, the softball games that the reporters might have had a slightly more-educated background. But most people who were there were blue-collar people when they played softball together, when they did picnics together, when they socialized together—that the newspaper affirmed its identity as part of the culture of the city, and it was a manufacturing enterprise.

Well, technology has changed that. Newspapers don’t manufacture anymore. They deliver a nonphysical product. The people who produce the product are highly educated. The production staff are probably even more technically skilled than the content staff. And all of them are more and more unlike the rest of the people of the city or country in which they serve.

Baron: Well, I agree with you on that. Look—this was evident prior to Trump being elected. People have asked me what our failures were prior to Trump being elected, and I always say, It wasn’t the coverage of the campaign. It was what occurred prior to that—years prior to that. It’s that we didn’t understand the country well enough.

We just did not understand people’s struggles, their expectations, their aspirations, and we needed to do that better. And there’s no question that—look: Everybody, people talk about their life experiences these days, but everybody’s life experiences, by definition, are narrow. It’s just them. Our job as journalists is to get outside of our life experience and understand the life, the experiences of other people. And we need more people in our newsrooms who come from a variety of different backgrounds. And I think we should get to work doing that.

Frum: A point I made in my first Trump book about this is a way of driving it home. So the great opioid toll begins in 2014. By 2016, it’s killing more Americans than Vietnam. I went to The New York Times search engine and typed in, for the year from January 1, 2016, to the end of 2016, the two words opioid and transgender. And I don’t want to derogate from the importance of any issue. If I remember right, there were, like, 80 or a hundred times more stories about transgender issues in The New York Times in 2016 than there were about the opioid epidemic. Now, that would change the following year, but it just marked that something could be happening in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and it was invisible to the people who produced the country’s most elite newspapers.

And one of Trump’s secret weapons in the campaign of 2016 was he would campaign in these places and just say the word opioid. He had no plan. He had no concept. And indeed, the problem would continue to get dramatically worse under his presidency, but at least he knew it was there, which other people seem not to know.

Baron: That’s a very interesting data point, that research that you did. And I think it does highlight just how sorely disconnected we are from so much of what is happening in the country, and I think that’s something that definitely needs to be corrected, and corrected quickly. It’s cause for a lot of self-reflection on the part of all of us who are in the media, and we need to make sure that that doesn’t continue.

Frum: As we talk about media, of course, people of a certain generation have an idea of what media is, and we often have a way of using that phrase to mean institutions that were important in 1972—The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News. And it’s a little hard to absorb that everybody who has one of these devices, which everybody has, can communicate instantly any image or any language to anybody on the planet on a scale that would’ve staggered the editors of The Washington Post in 1972, or even the CBS Evening News.

And I suppose one of the questions we have to think more philosophically about is: What is media in the 2020s? I mean, TikTok shapes more minds than The New York Times, and Joe Rogan has a bigger audience than 60 Minutes. And we have a kind of anti-media that creates relationships with its consumers by presenting itself as non-media, by attacking the institutions that were important in 1972 but that are themselves also forms of media, obviously, and that are different from the traditional institutions only in that they seem to have no code of conduct, no code of ethics whatsoever.

Baron: Well, clearly the definition of media has expanded tremendously. We’ve seen a radical change in the kind of media there is, and a radical change in the way that media is consumed.

And a lot of the new media is communicating with a level of authenticity—or at least perceived authenticity—that institutional media has been unable to deliver. We in the traditional media have always focused on our authority, the reporting that we do, the verification process—all of which, of course, is essential and core to who we are and what we ought to be doing, what our mission is. At the same time, we are not communicating the same level of authenticity that a lot of the new media are. And because we don’t do that, because we don’t communicate authenticity, we’re not getting credit for the authority that we have. And people who do communicate authentically, or perceived authentically—a lot of the new media—they’re being given credit for authority that frequently they don’t deserve. Not always. There are people who are quite capable who are doing that, but a lot of them don’t deserve the authority.

And look—this is a huge challenge. I mean, it’s an opportunity, of course, to reach more people. But it is a huge challenge to traditional news institutions, and that’s one that we clearly have to confront and we have to change.

Frum: Well, you’re very polite about it when you call it authenticity. I think one of the lessons I think from a media-business point of view: The media of the 1970s ignored large parts of demand. It turns out, there’s a much bigger demand for virulent anti-Semitism in America than anyone in 1975 thought there was. There’s much more demand for crackpot medical advice than people used to think.

And in 1975, if you’d said to The New York Times or The Washington Post or CBS, You know, you could make more money by serving the anti-Semitic market or the medical crackpot market, they would say, You know what? We’re making enough money. Thanks, but no thanks. We don’t need to tell people the polio vaccine is no good. But people, entrepreneurs have discovered there is a big market for anti-Semitism. There is a big market for The polio vaccine is no good, and you can get very rich—or at least selected individuals can—meeting that demand, which is not infinite but large. And we are in a world that is, you know—the price of the internet may be the return of infectious diseases that had been banished in 1998.

Baron: Look—they are an enormous number of bad actors. By using the word authenticity, I don’t suggest that many of them aren’t bad actors. There are good actors too. There are people who are doing really good work. And I think there’s a reason you have a podcast, that you developed a podcast because you saw it as a better way of communicating with people or, at least potentially, a more-effective way of communicating with people. And there are a lot of other people who are doing that as well.

So I don’t want to discredit everybody who’s in new media, because they don’t deserve to be discredited, because many of them are quite good. But there are a lot of bad actors in spreading crazy conspiracy theories and a lot of hate. And that is the nature of the internet these days, is that it allows for that because it’s a highly fragmented market, and people are going to exploit that fragmented market for their own personal, professional, political, or commercial gain.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. I would say, however, that traditional media is not irrelevant, as is often claimed by people in that new-media field, by a lot of our politicians today, including Trump and Musk and whoever. The reality is that we remain relevant. There’s a reason why Trump is completely obsessed with traditional media. He would not be obsessed with traditional media if it were irrelevant; that would be insane. And by the way, when Elon Musk just recently stepped away from the White House, who did he give interviews to? Amazingly, traditional media, the very media that he had denigrated all along.

Frum: How should we think about what is and what isn’t media? A person offering makeup advice on TikTok to a million viewers, is that media? I don’t know anymore.

Baron: Yeah, it’s media. I mean, I think it is media—media writ large. Absolutely. People who are on TikTok are having an enormous impact. I mean, people are forming their opinions of what’s happening, let’s say in the Middle East, based on a 15-second TikTok. They think they know everything based on the 15 seconds that they saw on TikTok. Now, that is appalling, of course. Anytime you’re dealing with a complex subject, like the Middle East, which has centuries of history behind it, you don’t want to think that you’ve absorbed everything you need to know based on something you saw in 15 seconds on TikTok. But there’s no question. That’s media. That is how people are receiving their information, like it or not.

Frum: Let me offer you a last question, some advice for the viewers: How does one become a better consumer of media content in this day and age? Are there any guidelines or advice you can offer to the viewer who is not selling makeup tips to a million people, but who has a phone, uses it, looks at it. How do we use this incredible new device, this incredible new power, responsibly and effectively to live better and more informed lives as citizens and individuals?

Baron: Well, look. I mean, one of the biggest challenges today, a huge challenge and problem for us, is that we can’t agree on a common set of facts. We can’t even agree on how to determine what a fact is. All of the things that we’ve used in the past—education, experience, expertise, and actual evidence—have all been discredited. Not discredited, but denied and dismissed and denigrated.

I think that consumers should be looking at that. They ought to be looking: Does this person actually have an education in the field? Does this person have experience in the field? Does this person have expertise? Is there actual evidence? Can I see the evidence? Who is behind this? Use your critical faculties to judge the quality of information and the quality of the people who are disseminating that information, and determine whether in the past you’ve relied on them.

I mean, one of the interesting things about traditional media is that when there’s a natural disaster, guess where people turn? They turn to traditional media. They don’t turn to some of these fringe outfits to tell them where the hurricane’s going to hit and what they ought to be doing, or where the tornado is, or anything like that, or where the flooding is going to be. They turn, typically, to traditional media because, look—there’s a reserve of confidence in them because they know that they’re going to get accurate information. And so I think consumers of information need to look for that education, expertise, experience. And what is the evidence that they are providing? Are you just relying on your beliefs, or are you confusing your beliefs with actual facts?

Frum: Maybe the good news or the bad news of the same, which is we all have many more opportunities, but we’re all going to have to work a lot harder to make sure that we are accurately and truthfully informed. And while it’s never been easier if you have some medical symptom—never been easier to find out for yourself what that probably is—it’s also never been easier to be deceived by people who, for reasons of gain or sociopathy, want to make you sicker or want to deny you the medicine you really need.

And so we have seen the decline in vaccinations. It’s still more than 90 percent that are properly vaccinated. So nine out of 10 people are doing the right thing. But five or eight out of 100 are doing the wrong thing, and they pose risks not only to their own children, but to everybody’s children.

Baron: And I think the consumers of information have to work harder, but also, those of us who are delivering information have to work harder to show people our work, to show people why they should believe us—not just to tell them what’s happening but to show them the work that we’ve done, the evidence that we’re relying upon. Be as transparent as possible, communicate more effectively, and make sure that we’re covering the entirety of our communities and our society and our country, and do a better job of that.

Frum: Marty, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your candid memoir—it’s going to be an important resource for anyone who wants to understand the Trump era, and also the transformation of media under new kinds of ownership, and, above all, your extraordinarily important institution, The Washington Post, which you led to such heights, and which we hope is able to retain at least most of the glory that you delivered for it.

Baron: Thank you, David. I appreciate it.

Frum: Thank you. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Marty Baron for joining me today. If you appreciate this dialogue and the others like it, I hope you will subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you use. I hope you’ll also consider subscribing to The Atlantic, in print or in text form. That is how we under support all the work of this podcast of myself and of all my Atlantic colleagues.

As we wrap up this all-media day today, I want to delve into one final topic, and that is: the way this scandal, this outrage, this outcry that has been womped up about the age of former President Joe Biden.

Everyone saw the debate that President Biden had obviously become infirm, and now there is a lot of accusation that this was somehow covered up or neglected, and that not only were the people around President Biden culpable, but that somehow the press was implicated, too, in its failure to address the question sufficiently and in time. This strikes me as something with a kernel of truth to it, but more distraction and misleading than truth. And let me explain what I mean.

Now, I’m proud to say that The Atlantic was early and direct on the Biden age story. We ran a piece in June of 2022 by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich saying Biden was too old and should not run again. Had Leibovich’s advice been followed, history would’ve taken a very different course. And I think you’ll find many other examples in many other places—Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine—of people who brought attention to the President Biden’s gathering infirmity.

Obviously, there were people around him who tried to put the best face on the president’s health. That’s always true. President Kennedy was much sicker than anybody knew at the time when he was president in the early ’60s, when he seemed to be a model of physical fitness. President Eisenhower, the severity of his heart attacks—again, that was not known to people at the time. The full seriousness of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981—his recovery, it was much more touch and go than people were allowed to think at the time.

People are invited to think of the president as healthier than the president often is. It is a body-killing job, and nobody comes out of it in the same shape that they went into it. And surely, the people around President Biden tried to represent him as healthier than perhaps he was, especially toward the end. And it is an important news story to cover the capability of the president. Kudos to those who dig into that topic, who separate what is true from what is rumored, and who alert people when the president isn’t as capable as the president should be, or as those around him want to be.

That’s a job that continues even after the presidency. As I said, with these previous presidents, the full degree of their infirmity was often not known until sometime afterwards. Woodrow Wilson was struck down by a stroke in October of 1919. Now, people understood that he was ill and was invalided, but how radically invalided he was, that was something—and he was invalid from October of 1919 until he left the presidency, in March of 1921, almost a year and a half—that was covered up by his wife and his doctor. And the full truth was not known for a long time, and that really did change the course of history.

Many of the worst acts of the Wilson presidency happened after the stroke of October 1919, and it’s not clear whether Wilson approved of them, authorized them, or even was aware of them. The Palmer Raids, for example, where immigrants were rounded up and deported without much of a hearing, if any—those started in November of 1919 and were at their peak in January of 1920. Not clear that Wilson even ever knew about it. So bringing the truth retrospectively, also an important task. And I understand that journalists, when they follow these stories, can sometimes lose perspective.

You know, if the school superintendent is stealing pencils from the supply cabinet, that’s probably not the most important story in the world. But the only way you’re ever going to find out about it is if one person in the local paper decides that for him or for her, that story will be the most important story in the world for however long it takes to get to the bottom of it. And only a person who acts as if the superintendent stealing the pencils is the most important story in the world will bring the story to light at all and give it whatever attention it deserves. So their tunnel vision is kind of a bona fide job qualification for being a reporter.

But when you consume and read and react to news, that’s where the perspective comes in. And you need to say, Okay, maybe the people around Biden did try to hush up how sick he was. And maybe not every journalist worked as hard as Mark Leibovich to get the truth. Not every journalist worked as hard as Olivia Nuzzi to get the truth. Not every journalist was willing to brave the blowback that Mark Leibovich and Olivia Nuzzi got for their reporting of the truth.

But how important was this story, really? And today—when there is an effort to make it seem like this is the biggest scandal in American history, or at least the biggest scandal going today—at a time when the present president is pillaging billions of dollars, the story now that is the overwhelming story here in Washington is corruption on a post-Soviet, postcolonial Africa scale. Billions of dollars going into and affecting everything, every decision that this administration makes, from pardons to foreign policy. That’s the story. Everything else, also interesting. But don’t oversell it, and don’t overbuy it.

Thanks very much. I hope to see you next week here on The David Frum Show.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

Donald Trump’s willingness to mix public office with personal benefit is facing scrutiny, as are his latest pardons. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss how the president may be using his power to profit, and more.

Meanwhile, Trump’s battle with Harvard continued this week. Panelists considered how that fight is being received by voters and Republican lawmakers—and whether the president’s continued crackdown on higher education could have political consequences.

For Republicans, Trump’s action against Harvard is “not something that they want to break with the president on,” Leigh Ann Caldwell said last night. “This is not an issue that they’re willing to stand in front of him on, like most issues.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; and Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch.

Watch the full episode here.

On this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a Memorial Day message about corruption and extortion in the Trump White House, including revelations about meme-coin pay-to-play schemes and foreign-financed golf courses.

Then David is joined by his Atlantic colleague George Packer to discuss Packer’s new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance. They examine Vance’s sharp political turn from thoughtful memoirist to contemptuous shape-shifter, and debate whether Vance believes what he says or just knows what power demands.

David closes the episode with a reflection on Edward Luce’s new biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski and what Brzezinski’s legacy says about American power today.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 8 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be George Packer, an Atlantic colleague and author of an incisive new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, “The Talented Mr. Vance.”

At the end of the program, I’m going to discuss a little bit—I have some thoughts about an important new book, a biography of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski by Ed Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times.

But first, let me offer some thoughts on the week just passed. I record this discussion on Memorial Day 2025, the day when Americans honor those who have served America to the utmost of human capability by laying down their lives for their country. It seems a fitting occasion to try to address the monstrous display of self-service we have seen in the past days from the Trump administration, this staggeringly corrupt administration—not just the most corrupt administration in American history, but one of the most corrupt administrations in any democratic country ever.

Two things just from the week’s docket. This past week, President Trump hosted a dinner for more than 200 people who were invited to dinner with the president of the United States because they had purchased souvenir meme coins directly from his company. They paid millions of dollars. Many of them were foreign nationals. We don’t know their names, because those have not been disclosed, but they directly bought access to the president of the United States by putting money into the hands of his own company in exchange, really, for nothing because these are just souvenir meme coins. They’re not worth anything. And everyone who’s invested in them has lost money because they devalue once you’ve had your access to the president. Maybe you’re investing in the hope of continued future access to the president, but they have no function, no purpose, no value. They’re just ways for people who want access to buy it, and buy it directly from the president himself and his family and his companies.

The same week, The New York Times obtained a copy of a letter from inside the Vietnamese government explaining why they were bending their own laws to make possible a golf course—a Trump golf course—in Vietnam, which the Vietnamese government is largely financing, and for which it’s providing land and other services. The letter explained that the golf-course project was, quote, “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Trump personally.”

Since Donald Trump became president, billions of dollars have flowed from Americans and from people worldwide into his pocket—billions of dollars. And the largest share of those billions of dollars has been from his meme-coin business. Some estimate that the president has more than doubled his net worth just since January, all because of these direct payments to him and, of course, these golf courses that he’s opening in the Persian Gulf and in Vietnam, often financed by the host governments looking to achieve Donald Trump’s failure. Sorry—looking to achieve his favor. The projects may be failures, but the favor is real.

Now, some trying to explain what is happening invoke comparisons from American history: Watergate; Teapot Dome, a great scandal of the 1920s; if you’re very historically minded, you may mention the scandals around the Ulysses Grant administration. But all of that falls so far short of the truth, as to create and enter this world of mind-bending alternatives. Donald Trump’s corruption cannot be compared to anything in American history.

I have an article this week in The Atlantic that goes into some of the details, but just to refresh memory: In the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was trying to place bugs or get some information from inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. He used campaign funds to hire burglars to break into the premises and do their mischief. And then when they were caught, he organized further government funds and—sorry; not government funds, further campaign funds—to try to buy the burglars’ silence and to use government power to cover it up.

It’s a big, big, serious scandal. But Nixon was not doing any of this to enrich himself. He was doing it to compete and win in a presidential election in a way that was beyond the rules. That was illegal but was not motivated by his personal appetite for wealth and position. Teapot Dome, which was a scandal in the 1920s, involved people in the Harding administration—not President Harding himself—accepting bribes to open government oil reserves to private exploration. And the Grant administration was riddled with all kinds of scandals: people cheating on excise taxes on whiskey, speculating on gold and silver and paper money.

But again, President Grant, although he was protective of the people in his administration who did these wrong things, he himself was completely uncontaminated, as was, as far as anybody knows, President Harding in Teapot Dome. Nixon was contaminated, but he was not taking money. He was using campaign funds to support his reelection in a dishonest and illegal way.

What is happening with Donald Trump cannot be compared. The scale of the self-enrichment—billions of dollars flowing to the president and his family, not just from American donors, which would be shocking enough, but from people all over the world—this can’t be compared to anything in American history. It’s more like something from a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African state. It is a scale—in terms of the money being diverted to the president, it’s on a scale as big as anything the world has seen in the modern era.

You might call it bribery. Except there’s something about the word bribery that conjures up the image that the bribe taker is kind of passive: A bribe taker is in office doing some function, and then there’s a rap on the bribe taker’s door, and there’s the briber offering a bribe to pervert the bribe taker from the bribe taker’s proper, official duty.

What’s going on in the Trump administration is not so passive as that. It looks like Donald Trump is taking the initiative. The Vietnamese were not urging the Trump family, Please, please, please accept a golf course from us. Donald Trump was squeezing them, as they wrote in writing, in a letter published by The New York Times—Donald Trump was squeezing them—to approve his golf course. It wasn’t someone else who said to Donald Trump, Here. Please, take our money. He invented the meme coin—or he and his confederates invented the meme coin—that offered a way for people to seek his favor.

And to back all of this up, at the same time as he was selling these meme coins, his administration has undertaken a series of arbitrary and punitive executive actions that threaten people, If you don’t get in my good graces, bad things will happen to you. As a law firm, you will be punished in various ways unless you submit to me. As a private university, you’ll be subject to personal reactions that we’ll single out a university, and we will say you can’t have foreign visa holders. He has attacked other kinds of businesses and institutions. He’s got this whole tariff schedule that allows him to retaliate against businesses that incur his disfavor. There’s one tariff for Apple. There’s a different tariff for other people. There’s one tariff for businesses in one set of countries, different tariffs in other countries. And the tariffs, of course, can be laid on and alleviated, laid on again, and alleviated according to his personal whim.

This isn’t bribery. This is extortion. This isn’t centering the bribe taker as the target of someone else’s action, but as actually the architect and author of the scheme. And what we’re seeing here is extortion on a kind of scale, again, unlike anything in American history: billions of dollars from people who are seeking favor, seeking to protect themselves from disfavor, and finding ways—not finding ways, being offered by the president and his family ways to buy the favor of the president and his family.

If the president likes you—if you’re a candidate for mayor of New York and the president likes you—you get pardoned for your crimes. If you’re a candidate for the mayor of New York and the president doesn’t like you, he opens an investigation into you. As the president of South Africa said when Donald Trump was lecturing him, “I wish I had a plane to give you.” Because, of course, if you give the president a plane, there’s no limit to what you can get.

It’s hard for Americans to wrap their minds around the idea that this country is not an example to others—a positive example—that its institutions are not somehow robust, that everything won’t be all right. But what we are watching here is an attack on all of those foundational premises of American life. This is a scene not out of American history; it is an orgy of extortion and corruption unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in this country, and only comparable to things seen in the countries of the world that Donald Trump once called “shitholes.” Why are shithole country shitholes? Not because they’re poor, but because the authorities are not responsive to the people. The authorities are perverted from their duty and use that perversion as an opportunity for self-enrichment and aggression to the detriment of their own societies.

It’s on this day when we ought to honor everything that is good, we ought, also, to hold the measure in our minds of what is happening that is wrong, and not accept easy excuses and not shrug it off and not allow ourselves to find some kind of consolation, that maybe there’s something in the 1870s that is like this. There is nothing in American history that is like this, ever. And if we absorb that knowledge and if we feel it, and if we feel the proper shame and anger, only then will we be in position to take the corrective action that your national duty calls upon you. So much was asked from others on this Memorial Day. That’s what’s asked from you on this Memorial Day.

And now my dialogue with George Packer. But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: I’m so glad and grateful to welcome my old, dear friend George Packer to The David Frum Show. George is a writer who braves the darkest and most dangerous places, beginning with his observations as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa in the 1980s. His book The Assassins’ Gate is a wise, humane, and chastened account of the American experience in Iraq.

It was followed by The Unwinding, which told the story of the Great Recession and its aftermath, jump cutting from the lives of the casualties of the Great Recession to the men and women in the halls of power. George’s biography of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, is a subtle, often hilarious, study of great power in the hands of not necessarily quite so great power holders.

I’ve known George since the fall of 1978, when he was the bright, shining star of a freshman seminar at Yale University. I’m proud and grateful now to call him a colleague at The Atlantic. We will discuss today his most recent piece for The Atlantic, a profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, “The Talented Mr. Vance.”

George, welcome to the program.

George Packer: David, it’s great to be with you, and I’m thrilled that you’ve got a show of your own, which you’ve sort of been preparing for all the years I’ve known you.

Frum: Thank you. Let me test a thesis on you. Donald Trump is, perhaps, not that interesting a human being. I mean, obviously, it’s a hugely consequential presidency, shocking in its effects on the United States and the world. And understanding why Donald Trump is doing what he’s doing, that’s important and necessary. But as a person, there doesn’t seem to be much in there. He’s like some beast, some crocodile: He eats. He dominates. He hurts. He’s an adaptive predator, but his interior story is not that interesting.

Great villains require more of a backstory, more interiority, more rise and fall. And—let me keep testing this—J. D. Vance has that backstory. You know, the greatest of all literary villains is John Milton’s Lucifer, who starts as the brightest of the angels and then has the steepest fall. Maybe there’s something kind of Luciferian about J. D. Vance. I mean, he’s someone—we know this from his own words—that he knows the difference between right and wrong. He saw Donald Trump as wrong. He became one of the most eloquent critics of the wrongness of Donald Trump. And then when opportunity beckoned, he chose wrong. He chose wrong, fully knowing what he was doing, aware of its consequences. He took a long time. He brooded over the decision, and then he made the choice. It’s epic. It’s literary. It’s Luciferian. And it’s more interesting than the crocodile that simply bites children and drags them under the Nile and drowns them for fun.

Packer: Lucifer’s strong, David. That’s a tough one to embrace. But I was with you most of the way, and here’s why: You’re right about Trump—completely right. Crocodile is the perfect analogy, and Vance is a far more interesting creature because of his life story. He came from nowhere and from a lot of deprivation and abuse. Because of his talent, because he’s thrived in so many different environments—whether it was the Marine Corps in Iraq, or Yale Law School, or the world of Silicon Valley investors, or the world of the far-right MAGA politics—he’s risen through all of those.

And so he is sensitive. He is empathetic. He is capable of self-criticism and self-reflection. Just pick up Hillbilly Elegy and open it anywhere, and you find this voice of someone who you want to talk to and who perhaps could have been a writer, because of that ability to think about himself and the world in ways that are surprising, complex, and, above all, honest. There’s none of that skimming and shining the surface a little bit that so many public figures do when they write a book.

He was not a public figure when he wrote it, a bit like Barack Obama with Dreams From My Father. He was not a public figure when he wrote that, and it’s a far better book than anything Obama has written since then. And I don’t expect J. D. Vance to write a better book than Hillbilly Elegy at this point.

Where I might disagree, or at least question, the Lucifer thesis a bit is: I am not certain that he knows that he chose wrong. I’m not sure about that. I think he convinced himself, because it’s very hard to live with yourself if you know you’ve chosen wrong. Just day after day, it’s hard to live with yourself. I think he convinced himself sometime after 2016—when Hillbilly Elegy became a sensation and Trump won the presidency, he convinced himself—that what his people, the working-class people, especially the white working-class people of the Rust Belt, needed was Trump’s policies. And from there, it was another step to Trump’s manner, to Trump’s rhetoric, to Trump’s whole thing.

And so I think at some point, he decided, Those Yale Law School people, those FrumForum people, those moderate conservatives have no real interest in my people. And in fact, their policies have hurt them, and so I’m going to go all in with Trump. It just so happened that that coincided with the path to power because it was the only way a Republican was going to rise at that point, was to go along with Trump. So I think he persuaded himself he was doing the right thing, even though he was so blatantly betraying just about everything that he had written in Hillbilly Elegy.

Frum: You allude to my own personal history with J. D. Vance in our days together from FrumForum, a website I ran from 2009 to 2012. But before I get to that, let me just pick up on your answer with a reference to the title of your story. The story is called “The Talented Mr. Vance,” which is a reference to a novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a sociopathic killer who has no interior life at all, who simply adapts himself, sequentially becoming one person after another with nothing on the inside. That play on words in the title, is that supposed to tell us your idea about who J. D. Vance is?

Packer: Again, I can’t read the book—and even more than that, listen to him talk about the book as he did a lot back in 2016, 2017—without feeling that there is a thoughtful, decent, reflective man inside this sort of unformed, not-quite-there 30-year-old who had suddenly jumped onto the scene. I can’t help thinking that he was not a hollow man, that he had gifts—not just the gifts of rhetoric and intellect and appetite for power, which clearly he has and had—but gifts of thought and moral reasoning. And so in that sense, even though that title was very clever—wasn’t mine, but I salute whoever came up with it as having put a clever title on the piece, because there is something about Vance that makes you think, Is there anyone there? He seems able to move from A to Z without blinking.

Nonetheless, I think maybe compared to the original, there’s more there. And that, too, makes him interesting. And I think you mentioned this, maybe—I don’t know: There’s a Nixonian comparison to be made. There’s a comparison to a man who came out of nowhere with a very rough upbringing and a grievance, a sense of having been wronged, who had tremendous talent and intellect, and could have risen to greatness, and then also chose wrong. So of all the figures from our lives, David, that I would analogize him to, it would be Nixon.

Frum: George, your reference to J. D. Vance and his attitude toward “my people” summons to mind a story. I didn’t spend a lot of time close-up to President Obama, but I had one occasion to have a close-up view of him when he came as near to losing his cool as I can imagine Barack Obama ever came. We were in a group of writers, and one of the writers arraigned President Obama for not doing enough for Black America. And Obama, he just seemed to tighten up, and he explained, I’m not president of Black America. I’m president of all of America. And he said, in fact, They’re all my people. And that’s the attitude we hope to see from the leaders of the nation: however the route you took to power, that when you get there, you get this wider view. That doesn’t seem to have happened to Vance at all.

Packer: Vance does not see himself as the vice president of all Americans, and he behaves as if he’s the vice president of MAGA and of, quote, “his people.”

But “his people” is—I think it’s become a very instrumental term for him because anything can be justified in the name of the mistreated working class of America, any policy, any lie—for example, the lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He was called out on that because he had to admit that he had made up the story, or the story had been made up and he had amplified it. But when he was called out, he said, I’ll do anything to get the media to pay attention to the suffering of—he didn’t put it this way, but—my people. In other words, I can lie. I can justify cutting off aid to Ukraine and anything else you’d like, in the name of where I come from.

It reminds me of his speech at the Republican convention, where he made a point—something I’ve never heard an American politician at that level say—which was: We’re really not so much about ideas, or not only about ideas. The great principles of the founding documents were about a home and a place you’re willing to defend. And he began to talk about the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where his ancestors are buried, and where he hopes to be buried, and he hopes his kids will be buried. It was a little bit of a disturbing image to me. That’s America. So, It’s soil. In fact, it’s blood and soil. And now we’re nowhere near liberal democracy. We’re in another place. And so I think however much he believes in that, that is where J. D. Vance has gone. And it makes him not the vice president of America, because to be the vice president of America, you have to believe that those ideas are vital and foundational and for all of us.

Instead, it’s class war. And he once said, Everything makes sense when you realize that culture war is class war, meaning: All the culture-war issues that he has been using in the last few years to rise in power, he turns into class war against the elites and is therefore, in his own mind, justified in using them.

Frum: To what class does he think Peter Thiel and Elon Musk belong? Because he works for them as much or more than he works for anybody in Ohio.

Packer: Yeah, he has swapped one set of elites for another, and in that sense, there is a kind of “Talented Mr. Vance” quality because he had to be, in a sense, civilized by Yale Law School. And he writes about this quite candidly in Hillbilly Elegy, partly with the help of his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Usha. He had to learn the ways of the Ivy League. He had to learn how to use the silverware at a dinner party. He had to learn that when someone asks whether you want white wine, you then have to figure out which kind of white wine you want.

All of that took a toll, I think, but he did it brilliantly. Then he abandoned that elite, the meritocratic elite—the Ivy League elite—for a different elite. He swapped one for another. And as you say, David, the new elite that he’s part of—and they are an elite—is the elite of the far right who are billionaire tech investors and entrepreneurs and media figures: Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr. Those are his patrons now. Those are his friends. And so it’s a bit rich to say, Yeah, we’re fighting on behalf of my people against the elites.

Frum: Yeah. It’s a funny construction of social class when you say that the real elite are people who say, I have read some books, not people who say, I have some billions of dollars.

One of the things that makes you the great writer that you are is your wide human sympathy, your ability to go into all kinds of situations and see people, both what they are and what they could be. And that’s your genius as a writer. And my limit as a writer is that I don’t have that, and I take just darker views of why people do the things they do.

So I was present at the creation of Hillbilly Elegy. I met J. D. Vance—I think it was maybe the summer before he started Yale Law School, or the summer after his first year at Yale Law School, and he began submitting articles to my website. We had lunch in Washington, D.C. I got to know him. He came to my house a few times, sometimes with his wife, sometimes not. And I wouldn’t say we were exactly friends, but we were friendly. And I thought I knew him, and when the book was in the genesis stage, he originally sounded me out on: What did I think of the idea?

And the idea was, he wanted to do a book about practical solutions to the problems of poverty in white, rural America. And this is—the FrumForum website was very technocratic, very solutions oriented. I thought this was a fantastic idea. It’s a fantastic idea, and I encouraged him and promoted it and urged him to go forward with it. Along the way, another of his mentors at the time, Amy Chua, said, This book would be even better if you wrote a short, personal introduction describing who you are and how you fit into all these solutions you’re about to offer. And then this package fell into the hands of a genius editor, Eric Nelson, who’s also the editor of my Trump books. And Eric said, Fine. Let’s take those two pages. That’s the book. Let’s throw away all the rest, because no one’s going to read that.

And look—from a literary point of view, yes; from a commercial point of view, yes. But you know what, I think? I think he couldn’t write the other book. I think he actually didn’t have any ideas about what to do for Ohio and rural America, and that he went into the personal end into the story then with the grievances a minor theme, later to the grievances—because when you say, Okay, well how do we get them better internet? If we can’t bring jobs to them anymore, maybe we should encourage, you know—find ways that the federal government can help people to move to where the jobs are. People—you know, as our colleague Yoni Applebaum [writes in] his new book out—people move less. But all the things using the mechanics of government and public-private investment to help people.

And he came to that point in the project and was just rendered mute because it wasn’t the way his mind worked. It wasn’t the way his nature was. It wasn’t what he was interested in. And so he doesn’t want to help his people; he just wants to use his people. Where his heart is—you know, he now claims to be a Christian and a Catholic. But as the holy book that he claims to believe in says, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” and his treasure is with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, not with the people back in Ohio.

Packer: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I wasn’t there at the creation, so I didn’t have that that moment of revelation that you did when you realized, No, he actually can’t write this book, whether it’s because he doesn’t have the answers or doesn’t care enough about the answers, or there are no answers. It’s a pretty compelling insight into him. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

As I said earlier, David, I think he thinks that tariffs; and mass deportation; and telling the Supreme Court, The Chief Justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it; and deification, as he wants to put it, of the civil service; and all of the destructive (really, the nihilistic) policies that MAGA at least claims to be for—I think he really does believe that those are somehow in the interest of his people. Are they? I don’t think so. In fact, I could go through each one of those and say why it’s not going to work or it has nothing to do with his people.

And the proof of that is: well, look at the bill that is slowly limping its way through Congress. What does that bill have to do with the interests of the son or the daughter of a waitress and a laid-off steel worker? Almost nothing. It has a lot to do with the interests of Elon Musk. And J. D. Vance will say anything at this point to let Donald Trump know, I no longer think you’re cultural heroin, as he wrote in The Atlantic. I no longer think you might be America’s Hitler, as he wrote in a private message. I think you’re the greatest president in history. He has to prove his loyalty every day in order to have a shot at the next level. Because all Trump cares about is loyalty, and even that, he doesn’t care all that much about, because he’ll certainly cast you aside if you’re no longer useful to him.

And so he’s going to go to bat for every one of these policies, and he’s going to do it, in his own mind, in the name of his people because it gives him a sense, I think, of moral purpose, of political destiny. And his trajectory is—it’s fascinating. As I wrote in my piece—and I’m getting a bit away, now, from what you just said, but—he has been there at every interesting moment of the American story in the past 25 years.

And in a sense, at every step that he has risen, America has declined a little more. His rise coincides with our decline, and in a way is an emblem of our decline. Because why does he say the things he does and has been saying since 2021 or 2020? Because that is what his political movement requires. It requires him not to be, as you said, vice president of all America. It requires him to actually be actively hostile to a lot of America, to target them, to speak ill of whole groups, large groups. So that’s in a sense, in order to succeed in the political world, the culture we live in, he had to become the figure that he is. And whether or not there was anything authentic in that conversion, whether or not he is a deeply believing Catholic or has used Catholicism in a way to get bona fides with a certain kind of intellectual, conservative movement. I don’t know. I just can’t say.

Frum: Yeah, let me ask you one more. I mean, in the end, you say in the piece that what we pretend to be is what we become. And there are very few consistent phonies or self-conscious phonies because it’s too hard. But to a point about who he is and how real it is, you wrote your own origin story, Blood of the Liberals—and it’s a very powerful and beautiful book, and it’s about the coming together of, among other things, two different lines of American life, your father’s line and your mother’s line. Very, very different stories of very different kinds of people, and they produce you. And probably almost every American can say the same thing. You know, On the one hand, I’m this. On the other hand, I’m that.

So when Vance gave that “blood and soil” speech about seven generations of Vances buried in this cemetery and, I hope my kids will be there, the little bell didn’t ring. Well, that’s true of one side of your children’s life. But the other side is not seven generations of Americans. There’s seven generations somewhere—everyone has seven generations somewhere—but they came here, they’re new, and they’re part of the American story too. And do you not honor your wife’s place in the American story? And do you dishonor, therefore, half of your children’s existence? That only one side of their family story deserves to be told?

And if writing the newcomer out of the American story is un-American, there’s something even more strange, unfatherly, about writing your children’s mother out of your children’s life story.

Packer: Mm-hmm.

So there was a moment when his wife was introducing him at the convention, and she mentioned that she had taught him to make vegetarian Indian cuisine, and there was a sort of gasp or unsettled murmur in the crowd. That did not go over well with the delegates at the Republican convention.

What I’ve read and heard is that his children are being raised with both Catholic and Hindu traditions, that they were dressed in traditional Indian clothing when he went to India with his family and met with [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi, that, in other words, he hasn’t written that out of the story. And he got married in two ceremonies: one Christian, one Hindu. So I don’t know that he is unfatherly in that way. I wouldn’t say that.

But I would say that we don’t hear much about it, that a lot of what he says could be taken as a kind of an affront to that other side of his family and his children’s family because he has nothing good to say about immigrants. Even legal immigrants, they’re just not part of his vision of what makes America great. It’s, What makes America great is the soil, the home, the willingness to defend the home, the ability to trace your home back a long, long way. And anyone else—including you and me, David, because we’re coastal elites who despise, supposedly, the people buried in that cemetery—we are to be targeted as well. We are to be mocked and written out of the American story.

And so it’s gotten narrower and narrower, that vision. Until now, it’s about as narrow as a grave in an Appalachian cemetery. And it’s chilling because, as you said earlier, very wisely, it should be growing with each rise to a new level of power. But that’s not his America, and it may not be the America we’re in right now, where a politician rises by having an embracing vision of the country.

Frum: Let me ask you one last question, then I’ll lead the mic to you because I know you have some things you want to say.

Is it worthwhile, judging him at all? Are we going through a worthwhile exercise? And let me elaborate: There’s a school of political science called functionalism that studies authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany but others too. It says it doesn’t matter who these people were, what their backstory was. It only matters what they did, and the way we understand the regime they served is by looking at the regime’s actions.

And one of the things I notice is—and there’s a lot of chaos, of course, in the Trump administration. But as you watch who lost employment after the Signal scandal, who is being purged now from Pete Hegseth’s chaotic Department of Defense, what’s happening at the State Department, what’s happening with the departure of a hundred professionals from the National Security Council—and each of these events has its own complex history and its own explanation, but—the net effect of them has been, as I see it, to disempower the more inherited Republican Party. And the test for that is support for Ukraine.

And [the effect is] to empower—I wouldn’t call them the Vance faction, because they’re not necessarily Vance’s particular people, but they’re—people who share his view and the Musk view and the Thiel view and the Tucker Carlson view of, America is just another predatory great power with no friends. And there are no moral constraints on American action. And by the way, if the president steals or extorts or takes bribes, that’s not a problem from an American foreign-policy point of view. In fact, that’s kind of a feature. That’s a microcosm of the way the whole country is going to treat the rest of the world.

That’s the way the administration is going. And, again, Vance doesn’t exactly articulate it. I don’t know that these are people who are loyal to him. I don’t know how much personal say he has in saying, This person leaves the Defense Department, and this person comes in, but add it all up, and it’s the administration becoming more Vance-like all the time.

And maybe the question of who he is and why he is doesn’t matter very much. Maybe we just need to understand what he’s doing and what is happening around him.

Packer: Well, I was interested in who he is, because I’m interested in human character, but I think if you simply are interested in the present and future of the country, of course, you’re right. What matters is what they do and what they are willing to do.

That’s the thing that frightens me about Vance, is not only what he’s doing now—and perhaps he is having a hand in the purging of those internationalist Republicans who are the last of that dying breed in the Trump administration—but what he’s willing to do, because he does seem willing to do or say a great deal that you would never have anticipated 10 years ago or even five years ago. And whether or not we should be judging him morally, he is constantly invoking morality in what he does and invoking his Catholicism in what he does.

He was in Rome just twice in the last few weeks, the first time as the last foreign leader to see Pope Francis before he died and then one of the first foreign leaders to sit down with Pope Leo. So there’s a kind of moral story that he wants to tell, which is the story of the return of the oppressed. And those oppressed are not just any oppressed—they’re his oppressed. But [it’s] to justify, as I said earlier, almost any policy, any cruelty, any violation of, whether it’s the Constitution, the law, or just decency, including sending, first, noncitizens and then possibly citizens to foreign gulags. So that’s all of that somehow in the name of making this class of Americans the center of our life.

Again, once you’ve decided that that’s your mission, then there really isn’t much of a limit, because you have a moral justification in your own mind. And I do think the administration—I mean, Trump, was already there, so it’s not as though Vance is pushing Trump in this direction. Vance has aligned himself with this direction and has said essentially to Trump and to the country, In four years, in three years, I will be the reincarnation. I will be the next installment of this brutal, narrow vision of what America is—this bully, great power, this Russia of the West that simply does what’s in its interest and has no friends, no allies, and is just looking out for the next deal.

And that means that we will be looking at more of it in the indefinite future from the Republican side because Vance is the heir apparent, and there he will allow no daylight between himself and Trump.

Frum: There was a saying in the days of the Habsburg monarchy that ruled Austro-Hungarian [empire] from 18th, 19th century, that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a system of despotism mitigated by Schlamperei, which is a Viennese German word that translates as a “slovenliness,” but funny, desperate, doesn’t admit it. So the saving grace of Trump is always the slovenliness, the carelessness—that he has an executive order to cancel the free-trade agreement with South Korea; his top economic aide steals the executive order off his desk before he can sign it, and then he forgets all about it because he’s consumed with Shark Week. I mean, it’s not a very appealing escape clause, but it did provide some relief, especially in the first term. He was just so chaotic and incompetent and forgetful and didn’t have object permanence.

There’s no slovenliness with J. D. Vance. I mean, now, he has probably less of a connection to the actual vote. For all the talk of “my people,” they probably like him a lot less than they like Donald Trump. They may do less for him. They may be less likely to turn out for them. But he is an ideologue, and he may be more than a believer. And his people serve as a justification for the ideologue. He’s not actually serving them, but he’s invoking them to justify what he wants to do.

He may be the most ideological person in one of the two top jobs. I’m trying to think of who would be the previous example of someone who was. I mean, Reagan was pretty Reagan ideological—

Packer: Reagan.

Frum: —but it was tempered by his good nature.

Packer: —and long experience and practicality. Yeah, pragmatism. Sure.

Yeah, I think that’s right. He is an ideologue, and he reads—at least claims; his friends say. You know, in the Marine Corps, they talked about [Christopher] Hitchens and Ayn Rand and even Locke and Hobbes, and before he ditched the classical liberal writers for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and the new right of Patrick Deneen, who he considers a kind of mentor, I think.

Yes, he’s an ideologue. And what is it that motivates his ideology? I find it hard to describe it in any positive terms. I think it’s motivated by the enemies who he hates. What groups are the outgroups? What groups need to be punished because they have somehow betrayed America, whether it’s Harvard or Paul, Weiss law firm or the bureaucracy in Washington.

And so there is that kind of malignant impulse to hurt, to punish, that seems to drive him more than any shining vision. And that’s always been true of Trump at the moments when he is capable of articulating anything. Vance articulates it all the time because he is disciplined and intelligent and hardworking, and actually has thought through who he hates and why he hates them. And that’s maybe—what you’re saying, it seems, David, is that there’s more to worry about in three or four years, even, than there is now.

Frum: Well, I don’t know that I would say that, because the lack of, I think in the end, the thing that’s going to maybe be his great impediment—I don’t know what the lord of the world will think about the various patterns of vices in Trump’s nature versus Vance’s.

But the ideologues and intellectuals tend not to go far in American politics. It may be that Trump is successful precisely because of the part of him that is chaotic and the Schlamperei, not the despotism. And when Vance says, I’ve got my five-year plan for American purification, that’s—we are here for the show. This sounds like work.

Anyway, your last statement was so powerful. I would almost want to end it there, but let me give you the last word. Is there something that we haven’t said here that you’d like to say before we wrap all of this up?

Packer: Really, David, just that, for me, it’s a deep satisfaction that you and I are sitting here having a really lively, interesting conversation about this man. You and I go back to college. We were rivals. We both were columnists for the school paper, and we probably named each other in our columns. And over the years, we went far apart—right and left—and then maybe came back a bit toward the center, both of us. And I have so many memories of seeing you at different intervals, especially after William F. Buckley [Jr.]’s funeral, when you told me, you know, If it’s going to be Palin, I’m not sure I can be for the Republican ticket, which was the first time I’d heard you say anything like it.

And you have made a very—I’ve got to say this—a courageous journey in which you were alone or could have been all alone for long periods of time and lost friends, I’m sure lost homes, institutional homes, lost a kind of identity. And you’ve made a new one, which is as a truth teller. And what you’ve been saying today is, I feel, the kind of the sharp, hard edge of someone who’s been refined by loss and by this journey into someone who, when you open your mouth, I think truths come out that are pretty painful and that are worth listening to. And so here we are in our 60s, 45 years after we met, still talking, and maybe talking almost as fluently as we did when we were young.

So I just want to say thanks for having me on your show.

Frum: Well, thank you. No, the memories go very deep. I hope we’re talking less fluently, but more worth listening to than we spoke 45 years ago.

Packer: Please let that be the case. I do not go back and look at those columns, and I hope you don’t either. We need to keep our eyes on the future.

Frum: Thank God we lived before the internet. That was our greatest privilege.

Packer: Exactly.

Frum: George, thank you for making the time today.

Packer: Thanks for having me, David.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to George Packer for joining me today. George Packer is a colleague of mine at The Atlantic, and if you like George’s work and want to support it—if you want to support the work of all of us at The Atlantic, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing so if you don’t do so already.

And of course, please subscribe to and share this program on whatever platform you like best.

Before I wrap up with the concluding thoughts of this program, I need to make a correction of something that was said mistakenly on last week’s program, on Episode 7. A listener flagged this error in my discussion with former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Susan Rice referred to Canada, or described Canada, as a participant in the Vietnam War, alongside the United States. Canada was not a combatant in the Vietnam War, as was mistakenly stated. Now, thousands of individual Canadians saw combat in Vietnam as volunteers in the United States armed forces, by some estimates, as many as 40,000. And more than 100 Canadians fell in action in Vietnam, fighting with the United States. But unlike Australia, and unlike Canada’s own role in the Korean War, Canada was not a belligerent nation in Vietnam.

As we conclude the program, I want to finish with some thoughts about an important new book by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce. The book is a biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under President Carter in the late 1970s.

The book is called Zbig: [The Life of] Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. Now, Zbigniew Brzezinski died in 2017, at the age of 89. His lifelong friend and rival Henry Kissinger, who made it all the way to 100, jokingly said at the end of his life, This is so tragic. He was so full of promise to be cut off so young.

That jokey remark sums up a comparison and a contrast that might serve us well to think about in these times. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger were both exiles: Henry Kissinger, a German Jew driven into exile by the Nazis; Brzezinski, an aristocratic Polish family also driven into exile by the Second World War, cut off from their homeland of the Second World War, and then permanently exiled by communism.

These exiles from different traditions reached the very highest levels of the American power structure. They both served as national security adviser—Kissinger as secretary of state as well. But they’re both very different men with very different outlooks. And it’s that contrast that I want to talk about.

It’s not the whole subject of Edward Luce’s book, which takes you all through Brzezinski’s fascinating life and deals with many of its most-important challenges in the Carter administration and after. But I want to focus on this one thing: The best book to my mind—the book I like best—about Henry Kissinger is a book by a writer named Barry Gewen called The Inevitability of Tragedy. And it describes Kissinger’s worldview being formed by the experience of being driven into exile by his neighbors, the people that he grew up amongst turning against him and his family for no rational reason they could see. And although he found refuge in America, he was never entirely confident that Americans were altogether different from the Germans who had driven him into exile.

He was a remarkably pessimistic student of American life and always believed that something could go badly wrong here. And in all of his management of American foreign affairs and all of his advice to presidents, that undercurrent of doubt and despair and anxiety is present. Kissinger was the very opposite of utopian. Sometimes he sold America a little short as a result, and he never took seriously—and in fact, to the extent he took it seriously, he disliked—the concept of the ideals and principles of America being a driving force in how the country could, should, and would act.

Brzezinski, as Luce describes him, was very different. Although he, too, started a life of tragedy—lost his country, could never return—he came to believe very much in the promise and ideals of America. Although not idealistic in the way we use that language, he always was optimistic that America could and would prevail. Henry Kissinger saw the Cold War as an enduring problem to manage; Brzezinski thought the United States could and would win. Kissinger doubted that democracy was better than other systems; Brzezinski believed that it would be not only morally better, but actually practically better too.

Now, the dialogue between these two men will be with us forever, much like the Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton dialogue. We’ll find in future generations sources of truth in both of them, and we’ll constantly need to check our instincts, one against the other. Sometimes it’ll be Kissinger’s pessimism we need to hear; sometimes, Brzezinski’s optimism. But at this moment, when the future of the country seems so doubtful, when American power is being used for such bad ends, it’s a great moment to rediscover this man who, through all the realism he learned from hard experience, never stopped believing in the possibility of America.

He believed that America could and would prevail against enemies, internal and external. I think we need a little of that faith, too, which is why I so enjoyed this book this week. Thank you so much for joining me on The David Frum Show. I’ll see you in this place again next week. I hope you’ll return.

Thank you.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

On a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper and the Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson joined Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss Original Sin, their new book about when Joe Biden started showing signs of decline—and how some people behind the scenes questioned his fitness to serve as president.

In the four months since Biden left office, a consensus seems to have emerged that the former president’s bid for reelection all but guaranteed Donald Trump’s return to power. “There was the fine Joe Biden … and then there was the nonfunctioning Biden,” Tapper said last night. “And the nonfunctioning Biden would rear his head increasingly and more and more disturbingly as time went on.”

“Now the question is,” Tapper continued, “when did the nonfunctioning Biden emerge so often it was a real question as to whether he should serve for president?”

To see Tapper and Thompson discussing this and more with Goldberg, watch the full episode.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET on May 22, 2025.

In this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a response to a listener’s question about working-class wages, unpacking the economic story lines that have shaped American politics over the past 40 years. In his answer, David challenges the idea that grievance politics are always rooted in material decline.

David is then joined by former Ambassador Susan Rice for a sweeping conversation on the disintegration of national-security processes under Trump. They discuss the implications of “Signalgate,” the absence of a full-time national security adviser, and the staggering national-security risks posed by a $400 million jet gifted by Qatar. Rice offers a sobering look at what the breakdown of structure and accountability means for America’s alliances, adversaries, and the rule of law.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 7 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Ambassador Susan Rice. Susan Rice represented the United States at the United Nations during the first Obama administration. She was national security adviser to President Obama, and then director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Joe Biden.

[Music]

Frum: Before my conversation with Ambassador Rice, I want to open the show by doing something a little different. I’ve often taken questions at the end of the show. This time I’m going to take a question—just one—at the top of the show and try to answer it here because I think this question is so important, such a key in the lock to all of our contemporary debates. It comes from a young viewer named Joe, in Florida, who’s a friend of our family’s, and he asks, “Given that working-class wages have been in decline for 40 years, especially for men, why would you expect anyone to sympathize with the idea of the American system, with free trade? Why wouldn’t they back Donald Trump, given the pressure they’re under?”

The reason this question is so important is because it reflects an attitude that many liberal-minded people have, which is: Where you see a grievance, where you see behavior that is self-harming or harmful to others, there has to be some rational cause behind it, some material cause behind it—that when people do something destructive or self-harming, they’re acting out some understandable, cognizable grievance they’ve got that somebody could do something about. And if only we could meet that rational, material basis of their grievance, we could turn things around and put us all on a better path.

That’s the idea you hear from many Democratic candidates or would-be candidates for 2028: Let’s hear what people are saying and find some way to meet these grievances. And I do not want to dismiss that. A lot of politics is about the rational. But what reactionary and fascist forces have always understood is there’s plenty of irrationalism in the human being, and that’s a real resource. And sometimes when you have a grievance, it expresses itself in ways that sound like material grievance, but it’s really not. So let me take on this point about 40 years of decline, take it apart and see whether a better understanding can put us somewhere.

Now, when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America, they use certain numbers and not other numbers. Depending on the numbers you use, you get a very different story. And unfortunately, we often choose the story we want and then choose the numbers that fit the story, rather than the other way around. So when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America for 40 years—which takes us back to 1985—they look at a series called hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers, or even hourly wages for nonsupervisory production workers.

That’s manufacturing, people who get a paycheck that is measured by the hour and who answer to some kind of supervisor. And if you look at those numbers, you see they rise basically pretty steeply for the 40 years from 1945 to the early 1980s. Then they flatten out or even go into a little bit of a decline in the 1980s. They jump up a little bit in the 1990s. Then they’re hit by the Great Recession, and they go down again and only pick up after about 2015. So that is a story of stagnation, decline, some improvement in the ’90s, some improvement in the 2010s, but basically not a very happy or healthy picture from 1985 forward for that kind of worker.

The problem with looking at those numbers is that those numbers describe fewer and fewer people in America. And they describe—even for those people—less and less of those people’s lives.

Here’s a different number. If you remember that a lot of the way that people get an income in modern America is not just from their job, but also from various kinds of government benefits—the earned-income tax credit, the child support from the government of various kinds—and if you also remember that fewer and fewer of us work as nonsupervisory hourly workers, especially nonsupervisory hourly production workers. If you just look at what happens to American households (now, households can be as few as one person)—that is, Americans who live in some independent domicile of some kind, whether it’s one person, a single worker, whether it’s two people, whether it’s a whole family; any one of those things can be a household—what you see is that in 1985, the median American household (that is, we’re not averaging in Bill Gates; we’re just taking the American in the middle) that household made about $60,000 present-day dollars, and 40 years later, in 2025, that household made about $80,000. And it wasn’t all from work. Some of it was from government benefits.

But clearly, a big jump from $60,000 to $80,000. Now, it’s not as steep a jump as they made from 1945 to 1985. If you look at the 40 years immediately after World War II, the median did better than it did in the 40 years after World War II, from 1985 to the present. But I’m not sure you can really rationally compare those things. Remember, if you were starting in 1945, you’re missing that that same person or family or group had the experience of World War II and the depression. There had been a lot of bad times before then, and there’s a big catch-up that happened in the 40 years after 1945.

There’s also something else that was different in the 40 years after 1945. In 1945, about 17 percent of Americans still lived on the farm. You get big gains in efficiency when you move people from farms to cities. America did it in the ’50s. Many European countries did it in the ’50s and ’60s. The Chinese, of course, have done it since 1990. And you get a big surge in productivity. You get a big surge in household wealth. But, of course, you can only do it once. It’s not a commute. You move from farm to city. That’s it. You’re in the city. You’re not going back to the farm. And further moves into the city—when you move from factory to office—you don’t get the same bump that you get when you move from factory to farm.

So the idea that ’45 to ’85 was the norm, and ’85 to 2025 has been some kind of sad falling off, mistakes a lot of what happened in 1945. And also, it overlooks: Yeah, it’s good to be going up, but you need to remember, America in 1945 was quite a poor place by today’s standards, and even in 1985, it was not as affluent a country as it is now. In 1945, about a third of American households lacked indoor plumbing. In 1985, only about 70 percent of American households had air conditioning, whereas now, virtually everybody does.

So when you’re making those first steps, it’s easier. The technology of indoor plumbing exists. You move people from farm to city—they get the indoor plumbing; they get a big jump in their standard of living. It’s a little harder once they’re already in the cities.

So Problem 1 is what we’re measuring. If we look at all forms of income and not just the wages of a particular group of people, you see a bigger rise in incomes. And if you understand that something special happened between ’45 and ’85 that probably couldn’t have been reproduced between ’85 and 2025, no matter what, maybe you feel a little less angry about it.

But the second thing, when we’re trying honestly to evaluate how Americans are doing, you have to ask the question, What does your money buy? In a modern technological society, a lot of your improvements in standard of living show up not as increases in wages but as improvements in the quality of the products you get—in other words, as a decline of prices. So 2025, 1985—we both have cars, but the 1985 car is likely to kill you in circumstances where the 2025 car will keep you alive. They’re the same object. They may cost the same amount of money. But the car that doesn’t kill you is clearly a huge improvement over the car that does.

In the same way, there were color TVs in 1985, but they were not flat. You couldn’t put them in every room of your house. And they showed many, many fewer different kinds of programs. That while we can do a kind of food basket, we should remember that in 2025, more fresh fruits and vegetables are available to more people in more months of the year than were the case in 1985. In 1985, for most people, vegetables meant canned or frozen. In 2025, vegetables, for a lot of people in a lot of places a lot of the year, can mean fresh, and that’s a big improvement in quality. It’s a little hard to capture with a price signal, but that really is meaningful.

In the same way, how do we measure the improvement in well-being that comes when you want to write a letter to a friend or loved one, [and] you no longer have to handwrite it or type it, fold it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, walk into the post office, and drop it in a box, but you can hit send instantly on a text message or some other instantaneous form of communication. In 1985, there are no mobile phones. We were only five years away from paying a lot of money for long distance. So incomes went up more than the sad story tells us. What those incomes can buy has improved dramatically.

There’s one other thing that we really lose sight of here, which is: When we use these averages and say, The average American was this in 2025, and the average American was that in 1985, we need to remember, we’re not talking about a stable population of people. In 1985, there were about 107 million Americans in the workforce. In 2025, there were 170—107 to 170 million in the workforce, bigger workforce. But almost all of that growth—not quite all, but almost all of that growth—is the product of immigration. Almost all the growth in the American workforce over the past 40 years has been either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants.

Now, it’s a very contentious question. I’m not going to discuss here all the merits of the immigration question, all the costs, all the benefits. But very clearly, immigration is a benefit to the immigrant themselves, and it’s a benefit in almost all cases to the children of the immigrant.

When I say the average American had this in 1985, and the average American had that in 2025, and then I focus specifically on one household, which is the household of immigrants and their children, should I be comparing them to the Americans of 1985? Or should I be comparing them to what was their choice, their lot in life? Which is: If they hadn’t moved to the United States and maybe made the aggregate statistics a little worse, they’d be living in Mexico or Guatemala or the Philippines or wherever the family came from.

And maybe you should compare them not to what they have in 2025, not to what other Americans had in 1985, but to what people back in the Philippines or Mexico or Guatemala had in 1985, and then they look dramatically better off. And we can say, Okay, if this family of immigrants who are the cause of the growth of the workforce is so much better off, and if also all the people whose parents and grandparents are already here, if they’re better off because their wages have gone up and because their money buys more, and if what we’re measuring here is an impact on the aggregate statistics caused by the inflow of a lot of immigrants—whatever you think about immigration, it’s kind of strange to describe this as people becoming materially worse off.

And a lot of the situation that my friend Joe describes is kind of a statistical illusion. If you could spend 10 minutes back in 1985—I promise you, I was there—I promise you, you’d be shocked. You’d be shocked by all the things, all the conveniences, all the luxuries you take for granted. You’d be surprised at how much better the food is, how much cleaner the air is, how much less acidic the lakes are. In every way, you are so much better off. But it’s often hard to capture. And statistics often give us a false image of reality that is used by people who want to sell a case, but not to actually tell you what really happened.

And the reason why this is also misleading and dangerous is two points. The first is: Again, it makes our problems look too easy. It makes it seem like, well, if only we could find out what was—we could solve deindustrialization or meet whatever economic grievance that we hear cited as a cause of the Trump vote, we could make the Trump problem go away.

But then we’re faced with things like the fact that Trumpism exists in every country, in every place, regardless of that country’s particular economic history. There are Trump-like movements in Germany and France. There are Trump-like movements in South Korea. This seems to be something going on in the modern world and has some deeper causes—in sexuality, in mass culture, and just the resistance of the human mind to orderly, liberal progress. There’s parts of it that people just don’t find that very satisfying, don’t find it very exciting. They want more. Also, ordinary liberal progress, while it may meet our demand for prosperity, it may not meet our demand for status, and it may not meet our demand to subordinate others whose status we think needs to be lower, as well as to make ours higher. So I worry it disarms us in the face of a real challenge.

The second thing is: It also empowers some people who have agendas of their own, of a kind that aren’t helpful either. There are a lot of people on the left wing of the Democratic Party for whom Trump was a kind of godsend. They have long wanted to do a kind of more economic, planned economy. They wanted to do more protectionism. And Trump then became a justification. And the text to read on this is a speech given by former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in 2018. Great respect for Jake Sullivan; this is not any kind of personal criticism of him.

But he gave a speech called, if I remember right, “a foreign policy for the middle class” that cited Trump’s success as a reason that the United States needed to have a much more planned economy and a much more protectionist economy. And indeed, if President Trump was the most protectionist president since World War II, President Biden was the second-most. Biden did not repeal very many of the Trump tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump term, and he didn’t reopen the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was the real answer to the problem of how we integrate China peacefully into the world trading system.

Biden, in many ways, was quite continuous with Trump on trade, and he was because there are people in the Democratic Party who wanted to be, and because they used a misreading of what the Trump experience was as a justification for things they wanted to do anyway. And the result was that we got some disappointing results during the Biden years.

Trade is a convenient target for a lot of people, and there are a lot of statistical papers. There’s a paper by a man named Autor, A-U-T-O-R, called “The China Shock”—I think it’s by group; Autor’s not the only author—that shows that areas in the United States that were exposed to a lot of trade competition from China did worse than areas that were not. They didn’t say those areas got poor. They just said if you compare an area that was hard hit by Chinese imports to an area that wasn’t, the area that wasn’t grew faster than the area that was. But they don’t prove whether that area that was hard hit shrank or whether it just grew more slowly. There’s a lot of gaps there.

The paper is used to prove many things beyond what it actually proves, even assuming it’s accurate. And it’s not trade that explains the many other problems in American life. It’s not trade that explains why Americans find it harder to get married. People in every country—every developed country—find it harder to get married. It’s not trade that explains why we see more gun violence, more substance abuse. Those things seem to have deeper causes. But trade is something we do with foreigners. And if you’re trying to come up with an explanation of the problems of American life that leave Americans out of it—that don’t call on anybody in America to do anything different from what they’ve done before—trade allows you to say, It’s the foreigners that are to blame. It’s an easy way to think. It’s an attractive way to think. But it’s not a helpful way to think.

I don’t want to gainsay everything in the argument I’ve just made here. I mean, obviously, working-class wages have been under pressure, and they may be under more pressure in the future as artificial intelligence and robotics advance. But if you think about what we could practically do for people under the situation, I would say, You know what they need first and foremost? Universal health insurance. That’s got nothing to do with trade.

And you can be a protectionist society, as the United States now is, thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Biden before, and not have universal health insurance. And you can be a free-trade society, like Denmark, and have universal health insurance. That’s maybe the first thing that people would want if they were thinking, How do we make the life of a person at the average in American life better, especially for their children? But it’s an appealing answer, and it’s got a lot of interest groups lined up in it.

But I think what we need to do as we confront Trump is confront the irrational. It exists in ourselves, as well as in other people. I’m not just making a finger-pointing exercise. Confront the irrational. We respond to violence. We respond to hate. We respond to intimidation. We respond to the desire to make ourselves more by making other people less. It’s not nice to think about those things, but the fact that they’re not nice doesn’t make them less powerful.

Trump is a successor to many dark movements in the human past that have occurred when trade was going up, when trade was going down, when industry was booming, when industry was shrinking. Prosperity makes everything easier. But prosperity does not make the irrational go away. So while we should certainly work for prosperity, and while we should certainly think very hard about how we improve the condition of the median American, the American at the center—after all, it’s a democracy; we’re running the whole country for that person—they are the judge and jury and how we’re doing. And if they’re not happy, well, they’re the ultimate boss.

But we shouldn’t be pulled into false arguments against international trade, and we shouldn’t believe a false story about the promise of America and accept the idea that there was some magical time when America was great, and now we have, sadly, fallen off. In every way you can measure, America is a better place today than it was 40 years ago. And if it isn’t as much better as we would like, well, the future is open. We can do more to make it better, faster for more people. But it is better. It was better. You have to believe in your country, and you have to not give an inch to those who defame the country in order to maximize their own power and their own cruelty.

Now my conversation with Ambassador Susan Rice. But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: I’m delighted and honored to be joined today by Ambassador Susan Rice, a name that is famous in the United States and around the world. For deeper perspective, I strongly recommend her autobiography, Tough Love, which describes a multigenerational family commitment to ardent love of learning and public service. There’s a personal connection that the ambassador and I have that I won’t go into here, but that she describes, very movingly, in the book.

She was educated at Stanford, then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, after which she began a meteoric ascent through the American national-security system, serving first President [Bill] Clinton and then President [Barack] Obama, rising to be ambassador to the UN National Security Council, national security adviser, and then under President Biden, switching to the domestic-policy shop, where she ran his domestic-policy council.

So, Ambassador Rice, thank you so, so much for joining us.

I want to start by mentioning that as you and I speak, the United States doesn’t have a national security adviser. So how big a gap is that, and what can we learn from this crazy Signal scandal that means that the national security adviser’s out, and the secretary of defense is very likely on his way out?

Susan Rice: Well, David, it’s great to be with you, and congratulations on the show.

You know, we have Marco Rubio playing four simultaneous roles: secretary of state, national security adviser, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development—what’s left of it, which is very little—and as the acting national archivist.

Having had at least one of those jobs, the job of national security adviser, I can tell you it is a 24/7, relentless, incredibly intense job, done correctly. Your role is not only to brief and advise the president but, very importantly, to manage the National Security Council staff of over 300 professionals and to coordinate the Cabinet-level national-security Principals Committee, which should be carefully assessing and exploring the most significant national-security challenges of the day, weighing options, making recommendations to the president, and ensuring that the decisions that the president makes are being implemented.

No human, however competent—let alone Marco Rubio, who’s barely been in the role of secretary of state for four months—can do all of those jobs, or even two of those jobs, effectively. So when you say there’s no national security adviser, what you’re saying is that this is a job that is a more-than-full-time job being done, if at all, on a very part-time basis.

I can’t imagine what that must be like for the national-security staffers, those that are left, that are true professionals who come from the various agencies and are working very hard on behalf of the American people to have no leader. [It’s] not clear if the deputy national security adviser is there for long and if so, what role he’s playing. I don’t know if Marco Rubio is sitting in the White House or at the State Department or in the National Archives or wherever, but he’s got a big job, and he’s got now four big jobs, and for a president who doesn’t like process and doesn’t like the rigor that national-security decision making is typically conducted with.

Frum: Well, when I said we don’t have the national security adviser, yes, as you say, Rubio has the title, as he has the title of national archivist, but those jobs are not being done. They are, in fact, for all practical purposes vacant. I’ve sometimes had the opportunity to interview national security advisers and secretaries of state, and one of the questions I always ask them, or I try to, is, How do you spend your time?

And there’s a huge difference, because at 300 people at the National Security Council staff, that’s a significant number of people, but it’s not a major bureaucracy the way the Department of State is. The secretary of state has to worry about personnel matters in a way that a national security adviser does less. The national security adviser is the first point of contact for every national emergency the United States faces. The secretary of state should be taking somewhat longer views, doing some planning work, as well as responding to emergencies. They’re very different, and as you say, Henry Kissinger tried it, but that was more an act of bureaucratic imperialism.

Rice: And at a time when things were much less demanding and complex. And by the way, he failed at it. (Laughs.) So now we’ll see how Marco Rubio does.

The other thing, David, to mention about the difference between the jobs is, you know, the secretary of state is supposed to travel and do a great deal of personal diplomacy all over the world. You cannot do that effectively and man the fort at the White House, where the national security adviser’s job is really properly a more inward-facing role.

Frum: Especially if, as so often happens, different parts of the foreign-policy apparatus are in disagreement: So State says one thing. Defense says something else. Other agencies say a third thing. The national security adviser is supposed to help the president broker those disputes by saying, I’m here to represent the president and no agency. And if you’re there representing an agency, too, how does any decision get made?

Rice: That’s part of the challenge. The national security adviser is meant to be an honest broker. He or she ultimately gets to make a recommendation to the president as to the appropriate course, but taking into account—and fairly and accurately without spin—representing the views of the other national-security Cabinet members. So there’s a conflict of interest inherent in those two roles being occupied by one individual.

Frum: I want to ask you about the scandal that may have laid low Mike Waltz, although there may be other reasons. There was this very strange person. Laura—what was her name? Loomer?

Rice: Laura Loomer.

Frum: She has some unusual kind of influence or hold on the president, and she recommended that he get rid of a lot of people in the national-security apparatus. Maybe that’s part of what’s going on. There may be some fight over Iran policy. That may be what’s going on. Trump may have remembered that Mike Waltz had a previous history as a congressman, where he was not as infatuated with Donald Trump as Donald Trump would wish him to be. There may be many other issues.

But how do you read the Signalgate scandal? It’s often true that senior national-security people don’t use the means that they’re supposed to use. They’re just too inconvenient. It’s not just Hillary Clinton. Colin Powell, many others have sought shortcuts or some more convenient method of communication. How do you understand what happened and how serious it was?

Rice: I think, David, it’s extremely serious. This wasn’t a case of somebody sending an email point to point or using texts for scheduling. This was a case where the most sophisticated and complicated deliberations among the national-security team did not take place in places they should have: in the White House Situation Room around a table for several hours, probably on multiple occasions, to weigh the question of whether, how, when, and with what preparation the United States was going to launch attacks on the Houthi militants in Yemen.

This is one of the most important kinds of decisions that the national-security principals make, or they make a recommendation to the president after a lot of assessment and analysis. And these guys did it, you know, with emojis and shorthand on Signal. So the first problem, before you get to how they communicated, is the extent to which they communicated and deliberated, which was de minimis. And the question of the use of force and putting American men and women in uniform in harm’s way is one of the most significant types of decisions that gets made, and it deserves thoughtful and thorough consideration. That didn’t happen.

Secondly, you’re using a commercial application, Signal, which is not encrypted to the same degree that classified U.S. government systems are. And they were inherently discussing classified information. Whether and when to engage in military operations is, by definition, classified. The details—the operational details—that Pete Hegseth put into the chat were extraordinarily sensitive and highly classified. Then you had J. D. Vance weighing in on even the question of whether there should be such military strikes. And frankly, that’s the discussion that should be happening around the Situation Room table.

The reason it’s so dangerous is not only that they give scant and superficial consideration to such important issues, but it’s because we know that our most sophisticated adversaries—and indeed, some of our allies—can hack into personal phones and into Signal and learn in advance what we are planning. And if the Chinese had done that, or the Russians, and handed it off to the Houthis or to the Iranians to give to the Houthis, or if the Iranians had done it—they have highly sophisticated capabilities—that could have meant that our operational security was compromised and that our pilots and others engaged in the operations were at direct risk.

It was incredibly reckless and incredibly dangerous behavior. And they seemed to do it, David, as a matter of course. I mean, now we’re learning that there are multiple regular Signal chats between and among the national-security principals. The last photograph that a journalist captured of Mike Waltz’s phone right before he was fired showed that he was sitting in the Cabinet room, in a Cabinet meeting—where, by the way, you’re not supposed to have your phones; you’re supposed to leave them outside in a secure container—using Signal to communicate with the vice president and other senior officials, Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Frum: You know, as we talk about this, I’m very conscious that a lot of people will say, Signalgate, that that was when, like, Louis XIV ruled France, or maybe Pontius Pilate was in charge of Judea.

Rice: (Laughs.)

Frum: That was a long, long—that was, like, 18 scandals back.

Rice: (Laughs.) How many Scaramuccis?

Frum: Right now, the new scandal is the Emirate of Qatar has offered the president of the United States his own personal jet to take away with him after he leaves office. One of the trademark—I don’t know whether it’s a strength or a weakness or both—features of this Trump administration has been, you pile scandal on top of scandal on top of scandal, and no one can keep track of them. And it does seem like if you’re going to do one bad thing, you might as well do a hundred, because the average survival rate seems to go up.

I ask you this because you were at the center, or you were sort of caught up in a decade ago, scandal politics—in retrospect, a kind of contrived-looking scandal—but looking back on that and comparing it to Trump 1 and Trump 2, do you think there are things that this administration knows about scandal politics that other administrations have not known?

Rice: Well, that’s a great question, David. I mean, I think first of all, the Trump administration—Trump 1, but in particular, Trump 2—just doesn’t give a goddamn about what they say or what they do. Trump 1 was characterized by nonstop lying. That is certainly the case in Trump 2, but combined with a sense of impunity and complete lack of accountability to the American people, to the truth, to the Constitution, to anything.

And so they lie and gaslight on a daily basis. And it’s so extreme that I think the media has a difficult time keeping up, though credit to the many that are trying. The opposition—the Democrats—can’t make a storyline stick. Signalgate should be as big a national-security scandal as any we’ve seen in decades. It is that bad. And it’s been in multiple iterations. Now Pete Hegseth, we’ve learned, shared the same operational details on a Signal chat with his family members, which is ridiculous. They have no need to know.

And it goes on and on, and yet they flood the zone with so much crap on a daily basis—so many lies, so much obfuscation, so much gaslighting—that their BS just overwhelms people’s capacity to absorb it. And obviously, they know that, and that’s part of their, as you suggest, their modus operandi.

Frum: I have a private theory that I developed during the first Trump campaign, back in 2016. I remember seeing a poll at the time that asked Americans what they thought of the two candidates: Hillary Clinton and President Trump—or Donald Trump, as he then was. And this was not a good poll for Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton beat him—she’s more intelligent, more knowledgeable, cares about people like you. She won in every single category that the poll asked. I forget every question, but these were the important questions that you would want in a leader of the nation.

But there was one category where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and that was honesty. You think, like, Well, that’s weird because he lies all the time. And I thought about this a lot, and I realized that, of course, politicians have a way of speaking that sounds dishonest. The question is, Did you eat the last piece of pie? And the politician who ate the last piece of pie doesn’t want to say yes, because they might get in trouble. Doesn’t want to say no, because that’s an outright lie. So they haver, they equivocate, they temporize, they put things in context, and they talk like a politician. They equivocate. You know, that we have to put pie eating into a larger context, that certainly, among those in the vicinity—I was one of those in the vicinity of the refrigerator at the time that the pie was eaten, but I do not have direct personal knowledge of exactly the consumption pattern. Donald Trump would just look you in the eye and say, Nope, I didn’t, when he did. And because—

Rice: Or he’d say, No, I didn’t eat the pie. You ate the pie.

Frum: You ate the pie. And so because he will flatly lie, he doesn’t equivocate. He doesn’t temporize. He doesn’t haver. He just flat out lies. If you don’t know the facts or if you’re ready to believe him, he sounds honest. Whereas the person tiptoeing around the question, Did you eat the last piece of pie? they sound like a crook.

Rice: I think there’s something to that, David. I do. But, you know, I think the broader point is that this Trump administration has no interest in, no pretense of, no commitment to doing anything that doesn’t suit their interests at the time, whether legal, illegal, truthful, untruthful, moral, immoral.

And you started this discussion with something that I think really deserves careful scrutiny and outrage: The notion that a president of the United States would accept a $400 million 747 from a foreign government—any foreign government, much less the Qataris, whose loyalties and interests only occasionally, to put it kindly, align with ours—is truly outrageous.

And it’s not just the corruption this represents, which is massive and mind-boggling. It’s the national-security consequences. Air Force One is a flying, secure environment. It is as secure and classified as the White House Situation Room. If a foreign government has built or overseen the production of an aircraft and then hands it off to the United States, the first thing is we have no idea of knowing what kinds of listening or other devices they’ve put in it.

Secondly, to accept a gift of that sort and then to keep it for your personal benefit after you leave office is giving a foreign government a huge amount of influence over the president of the United States and the United States of America, and leaves us susceptible not just to all forms of espionage that the Qataris could potentially conduct, but leaves us vulnerable to exploitation by the Qataris or those acting in concert with the Qataris. And Qatar is close to Hamas. Qatar has got a sort of funky relationship with Iran.

It just blows the mind that we would put ourselves in that kind of vulnerable posture vis-à-vis the Qataris, much less any other foreign government. And the fact that, you know, yeah, there’s outrage, but Republicans are like, There’s nothing to see here. No problem. Trump says, You’re stupid to turn down any gift. We have laws, and the Constitution itself is black-and-white clear that the president of the United States cannot, without Congress’s approval, accept a gift of any significance from a foreign government.

Frum: Yeah, it’s not only that this is clearly illegal, whatever Pam Bondi may say—who was herself a foreign agent for the Qataris. It’s clearly illegal. It’s also, if you go back and read The Federalist Papers, the receiving of a large gift from a foreign potentate is their definition, their paradigmatic example, of what counts as an impeachable offense. This is the one thing that they are most frightened that the president will do—take payoffs from foreign rulers, especially foreign monarchs.

And the idea that—it’s like birthright citizenship that Trump also denies. There are a lot of things in the Constitution that are murky. What process is due? Well, argue. You know, we’ll never settle that question. Your Fifth Amendment: You’re not to have property taken without just compensation. What’s just compensation? We can argue about that.

But if you’re born on American soil, are you a citizen unless you’re the child of a diplomat? Yes. Clearly, no question about that. And can the president take a present from a foreign king? No. How is this question even on the president’s desk? This would normally be something, you would think, that the ambassador to Qatar would say, Your highness, what a wonderful, magnificent gesture. But all things considered, if you just would get one of those beautiful cards, send the president a handmade card saying how much you like him. He’ll like that a lot more than this jet, which, of course, you understand, he cannot even consider accepting.

Rice: It’s just insane. And it’s indicative of what you were describing, which is a “flood the zone with crap” strategy that overwhelms the public, the media, the courts, everything. But this is blatantly illegal, blatantly unconstitutional, and a supreme act of unprecedented corruption.

Frum: Can you take us on a little tour in putting on your national security adviser cap from a while ago? Take us on a little tour of how much damage has been done to America’s alliances, to its position in the world, to the respect in which adversaries hold it over the past few months of extraordinary, unprecedented activity. Just—we can’t do everything, but what in your mind are the things that people most need to know, but what is different today than was the case in the fall of 2024?

Rice: Well, David, so much damage has been done, and it’s very hard to see how it’s reparable in any reasonable length of time, even with a new president and a new administration. The most important thing that’s been lost is the trust of our allies in American commitments, in America’s loyalty and solidarity with our allies, and the ability to believe that we will do what we say.

And when you lose that trust, particularly among your allies, you can’t get that back. When you think about Canada—a country you know well, I know well—Canada has shared with the United States the longest peaceful border in the world. We are democracies that share values and history. Canada has fought and died alongside the United States in war after war after war, from the Second World War to Afghanistan. They have bled and died with us. And like our other NATO allies, the only time that our Article 5 mutual-defense commitment that we make among the NATO allies has ever been invoked, as you know, was after 9/11, when the allies came to our defense and served with us for years and years and years in Afghanistan to try to defeat al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts.

So we also have the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, which serves both countries enormously well. And Donald Trump woke up one morning and decided arbitrarily to cripple the Canadian economy—Mexican too, to the extent he can, and Europe—through completely arbitrary tariffs that do very little for us, do a lot of harm for Canada, and weaken our supply-chain connectivity as we should be working together to deal with countries that pose a real threat in certain strategic sectors, like China. Instead, Trump imposes tariffs designed to bring the Canadian economy to its knees and speaks repeatedly in terms of turning Canada into the 51st state, which, as you know and I hope all the listeners know, is not only never going to happen but is incredibly offensive to every Canadian, and has done more to unite Canada—Anglophone, Francophone, First Nations—than anything in a long time.

So it’s really—it’s horribly damaging. And I talk to Canadian friends. I’m sure you talk to friends and family. And they’re pissed off, and they don’t understand why their good friend and best friend would do this to them. And it’s not just about Trump. I mean, they’re just pissed off at the United States broadly. They’re not traveling here in the way they used to. They’re not buying American products the way they used to. And this is not going to go away just because they’ve elected Mark Carney, and he’s determined to stand up for Canada’s interest. This is long-term damage, as I’m sure you would agree.

Frum: Let me ask you about adversaries, because among Trump supporters is a view that because Trump is so crude, so obnoxious, so overbearing, so insulting, he must impress the Chinese—no end. They must look at him and say, There is one rough, tough guy whom we better not fool around with, and, you know, Obama was so polite, and George W. Bush was so affable, we don’t respect them. But we can respect this guy, and that the world now fears to cross Donald Trump. What is your assessment of what the adversaries think?

Rice: China’s laughing, okay? China plays a long game. They understand that in a trade war with the United States, in many ways they have the upper hand. Why? In large part because they’re not a democracy. And they can withstand economic pain, blame it on the United States, and their people will eat it. That’s not going to work here in the United States. And plus, China is looking at the damage that we are doing to economies around Asia and seeing an opportunity for them to fill a vacuum in a bilateral trade relationship that we’ve left.

Moreover, China played Trump’s game with him, and he said—Trump said—We’re going to tariff you this amount. And China said, Okay, I’ll call you and raise you. And they went back and forth until it got to a crazy level. But the Chinese are not backing down, and the Chinese, moreover, are saying, Beyond the trade realm, we’ve got a whole bunch of non-trade things we can do to make your life miserable, Donald Trump. And that’s when they went after rare earths and a whole bunch of other important products, commodities, that we depend on that China only can provide.

So they go to the negotiating table. You can see the Trump administration sweating as the impacts on prices and supply chains and small businesses and the stock market begin to mount, with inflation looking to increase substantially. So they create a pretext and go to the negotiating table with the Chinese. And basically, without getting any concessions that are in the realm of what Trump suggested he wanted when he started this trade war—whether it be on fentanyl or whether it be on manufacturing or anything else—they’ve negotiated a face-saving climbdown for 90 days. It basically takes us back to the status quo ante. We got nothing for all this disruption. So the Chinese understand that Trump’s not a tough guy. Trump is somebody who is a bully, and bullies understand other bullies, and they back down when people stand up to them. That’s the message I believe the Chinese have taken away.

The Russians—you want to talk about adversaries—a completely different story. Guess how much tariffs Trump imposed on Russia? Zero. Why? Why? Russia is playing Trump in a very different way on Ukraine, on many other things, but they understand that, for whatever reason, Trump bows down to Putin, tiptoes around him, and sells out our allies and Ukraine and anybody else to benefit Putin.

Frum: Well, this is where I wanted to build to as our second-to-last question. Can Ukraine survive Trump? Can it stay on the battlefield, or is he going to break it and betray it in a way that all the Ukrainian patriotism and courage and sacrifice will not be able to overcome?

Rice: Well, it’s an interesting question because if Trump were to decide that he’s cutting off intelligence support on a sustained basis, cutting off military assistance, doing nothing with the frozen assets, leaving Ukraine to the mercy of the Russians and what the Europeans can do without us, I think it’s bleak for Ukraine. Not impossible, but bleak. And the degree to which the Europeans—who already, as you know, have contributed more to Ukraine in dollar terms, militarily and economically, than the United States—but if they step up even more, can that suffice? I think [it’s] tough to be confident in that.

So, you know, I think that the real question is: Will Putin overplay his hand? And he’s obviously holding out for not only the great deal that the Trump administration unilaterally proposed to him—which would require the Ukrainians to give up vast quantities of their territory more than the Russians currently occupy; foreign recognition of Crimea as Russian, which is insane; not to mention, no NATO membership and no U.S. security guarantees. That’s a ridiculously favorable set of terms for Putin, and he’s sitting back there saying it’s not enough. And if at some point, the Trump administration determines that Putin’s humiliation of Donald Trump is untenable, then maybe that changes the Trump calculus and Ukraine has a bit more of a lifeline.

Frum: Presidents build policy systems around their own personal natures. President Franklin Roosevelt liked creative chaos. President Eisenhower liked orderly, tidy systems. Some presidents like to see arguments battled out in front of them. Some presidents want the battle to happen before the president is in the room and wants to have a consensus among the advisers. Some people want the discussion, want to hear all the reasons behind the conclusion. Some people just say, Cut to the chase. Tell me what you all think.

And you’ve dealt with different presidents who have their own different styles, and I’m sure you have opinions about which work better, and of course, in the end, it has to work for the particular person. But imagine the Trump administration as kind of a silhouette. Take the president out of the picture. Look at the reactions of the people around, of the way you would as a senior staffer and say, If you just knew about the process he’s got, the process that has grown up around him, what would you say about this presidency, based on your observation from domestic- and national-security councils?

Rice: Well, David, obviously I’m not in the White House, and it’s not always easy from the outside to make these kinds of judgments. But it really appears to me that 99 percent of the time there is no process.

The process is, as you hear many of the Cabinet officials and those closest to the president say all the time, Donald Trump will decide this. So it seems like everything, small and large—even though sometimes when convenient, he denies any knowledge of issues—is a Trump decision. And it’s not clear that anything like the structure or the rigor that you would find in normal administrations exists in this context.

Do people write him memos? Does he make decisions on paper, as is the custom and the Presidential Records Act anticipates and requires? Do people sit around the table in the White House Situation Room and discuss and debate options and make recommendations to the president? Does a president ever chair the National Security Council principals, or does he simply make his own decisions? It’s been recently reported, David, that the president of the United States, who’s been in office well over a hundred days now, has only received the presidential daily briefing—the most important, highly classified daily intelligence briefing—some 12 times, some 12 days of his hundred-plus days in office.

What is he doing if he is not reading the PDB? And I hate to say this—you could say it about the airplane; you could say it about Signalgate; you could say it about so many different things—but if any other president had refused or opted not to receive the presidential daily briefing from the intelligence community on a regular basis, it would be a huge, huge scandal with massive investigations in Congress and huge speculation that the president is not playing with a full deck. That’s a key part of the job. So there is no process, as far as I can tell.

Frum: For those who’ve never seen one, can you just give some indication of what’s the difference between the presidential daily brief and, say, the morning news on FOX TV? Which is better?

Rice: (Laughs.) I don’t watch Fox morning news, so just to be clear, although I’ve seen snippets of it.

Frum: What kinds of things does he not know if he’s not listening or reading to the brief?

Rice: What he does not know is what our intelligence community has been able to collect and analyze and assess through all the various means that we have of intelligence collection and provide to the president that information and analysis that he would otherwise not have. I don’t want to get into any level of description of what is in a PDB, but trust me—it’s very different from Fox News. It’s different from The New York Times and from even The Economist, because we have sources and methods of collection and analysis that far exceed what is often available through what we call “open sources.”

Frum: You can see administrations develop trajectories. You can see at the beginning, often, where it’s going and where, if it goes wrong, how it might go wrong. If you look ahead just to the end of 2025, what are the dangers that you see that we seem to be navigating toward rather than away from?

Rice: Well, I mean, there are many dangers, as we’ve discussed, of process, of care with the most sensitive information that is available. We’ve talked about allies and adversaries—adversaries taking advantage of us, allies losing trust in us. All of that, obviously, matters enormously. The lack of truthfulness—trustworthiness, whether domestically or internationally—the gaslighting.

But I am also extremely worried that the president and those around him are so dismissive of any degree of law or accountability, even to the Constitution, that we could soon potentially see them outright, blatantly, and unapologetically defying court orders, including orders from the Supreme Court. And this blatantly illegal threat to suspend habeas corpus and, perhaps with it, implement some version of martial law based on a completely false pretext is something that I think is not far-fetched. I wish it were, and one we have to be very, very vigilant about.

Frum: They’ve built bureaucracies that are getting in the habit of breaking the law, and when you build a weapon, the weapon tends to go off.

Rice: Well, look—that would be a nuclear weapon going off in the heart of our constitutional republic. And whether you voted for Donald Trump or not, whether you support Donald Trump or not, poll after poll shows that Americans want and expect their president to adhere to court orders, to respect the Constitution and the rule of law. And all of us, regardless of party affiliation, regardless of how we voted, have an obligation to insist and demand that the president and his administration abide by the rule of law in the Constitution, and when they don’t, that they pay for it in the way that we hold our leaders accountable, which is at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion.

Frum: Ambassador Rice, thank you so much for your time.

Rice: Thank you, David.

[Music]

Frum: I’m so grateful to Ambassador Susan Rice for joining me today. Thank you, too, for joining. I hope you’ll share the program with your friends, subscribe to it, or share it on whatever platform you follow us on. And I hope you’ll consider subscribing to The Atlantic. That’s what you can do immediately to support the work of this program and so much other content that you get from The Atlantic.

Please subscribe. Please follow us. Please share the content. Thank you for joining. I’ll see you next week.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

This article originally misstated that Canada fought alongside the United States in Vietnam.

This week, Donald Trump returned from the first major foreign trip of his second term. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss what the president’s visit to the Middle East reveals about America’s place in the world.

The time Trump spent abroad has reinforced an approach to foreign policy that is “malleable” and “not always predictable,” Peter Baker said last night. “He went to the Middle East to re-alter the dynamics by recognizing Syria’s new government, announcing that he’s going to lift sanctions, and effectively moving closer towards a deal with Iran that sounds an awful lot like the deal he threw out in his first term.”

This, Baker continued, “is a different dynamic than we saw even just a week ago.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; David Ignatius, a columnist at The Washington Post; Andrea Mitchell, the chief Washington and foreign-affairs correspondent for NBC News.

Watch the full episode here.

In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum breaks down what he calls “the week of the four scams”—a stunning display of misinformation and corruption from President Donald Trump involving fake trade deals, manipulated markets, and even a personal jet from Qatar.

David is then joined by Indian Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Committee on External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor to examine the recent India-Pakistan cease-fire and just how much (or little) credit the Trump administration can fairly claim for brokering peace.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 6 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

At the very beginning of the first Trump presidency, back in 2017, I posted on Twitter the following thought: “Regular reminder that Donald Trump’s core competency is not dealmaking with powerful counter-parties. It is duping gullible victims.”

That warning has seldom been more needed than it has been needed in the past days, which I call the week of the four scams. Over these past few days, Donald Trump has taken credit or introduced one after another piece of outrageous fiction, which he is presenting to the world as some tremendous achievement. And we need to be warned against it and to protect ourselves against it.

Now, the first of the scams will supply the matter of my main conversation on the program today. That is Donald Trump’s attempt to take credit for the India-Pakistan cease-fire. The India-Pakistan cease-fire is a real event. It actually happened. But Donald Trump’s role in it was negligible, to say the least, as you’ll hear when I speak to my guest today, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, who is chairman of the External Affairs Committee in the Indian Parliament and one of that country’s leading voices for liberal and humane values.

But now let’s talk, in the interval, about the three scams that took place here on the home front. Two of them are the so-called trade deals that Trump has taken credit for: one with Britain, one with China.

Now, these aren’t deals in any traditional sense of the word. A trade agreement must be approved by Congress. It’s a treaty. These are executive announcements, PR, press releases, concepts, plans, projects, noise. They don’t amount to anything. Today, in May, American tariffs are dramatically higher than they were the day before Donald Trump took office. And the effort to make them scale up and to scale down is just a distraction, the way the dealer in a three-card monte game keeps up a line of pattern so that you don’t notice that you are being deceived and robbed.

The fourth of the scams is Donald Trump’s project to accept from the Emirate of Qatar the personal gift of a jet—a jet plane—that would accrue to him personally during his time as president and that would then be kept by him and by his heirs, through the guise of the Trump Library and casino and fast-food restaurant, or whatever he calls it, but nothing that is going to be like any kind of charity. And it looks like the plane will keep operating and be available to him and to his family for use afterwards.

It is the most astonishing act of brazen corruption in the history of the American presidency—in the history of many post-Soviet presidencies. I mean, it’s un-American. It can’t be compared to anything that has ever happened in American history. And it comes on top of the flow of funds to Donald Trump from all over the world via these strange meme coins that he keeps issuing, that someone is buying for no obvious business reason but as a way to direct funds to the pockets of the president.

Let’s talk a little bit more about these two trade deals because there’s going to be an enormous attempt to make them seem real. You know, in a three-card-monte game, and as well as the dealer, there are often people in the crowd who are there to back up the dealer stories, to nudge people away from the tables if they look too closely and to entrap victims. And a lot of the pro-Trump media plays the role of these kinds of ropers and bumpers, as they’re called.

But those even in the independent media, we’re not really very good at saying, This thing the president said, it doesn’t mean anything. All that is happening here is the construction of a new apparatus of taxation that is imposed by the president at the president’s discretion, that can be exempted by the president to people who give them favors or in exchange for various kinds of benefits—all of which is to shift the burden of taxation of the country from those best positioned to pay to those least positioned to pay.

Swirling around all of this commotion, all of this noise, is massive amounts of insider trading. We have had volatility unlike anything seen in financial markets since the great crisis of 2008–09, and people who study the markets notice a lot of short selling and a lot of rapid buying just before the president makes major moves, as if important market players have been tipped off and are making bets in the trillions on which they’re reaping profits in the hundreds of billions. It is just an astonishing thing that is happening.

Meanwhile, the central act is the movement of taxation—because tariffs are taxes—from those best positioned to pay to those leased positioned to pay. A tariff is a tax on goods. It is a tax that falls on the consumer of those goods, and it is a tax on the consumer of anything that has any kind of imported component in it.

Now, maybe a way to think about this is: Imagine a poor family eating a meal at home. Their table is tariffed. Their chairs are tariffed. The plates are tariffed. The knives and forks are tariffed. If they’re having a frugal meal of pasta or spaghetti, the Canadian wheat that probably is the major ingredient in that pasta—that’s tariffed too. Now imagine a wealthier family enjoying a meal in a restaurant, perhaps to celebrate the enormous reduction in their taxes that they’re going to get as a result of the Trump tax deal. Now, their tables and their chairs and so forth, the knives and forks—they might be tariffed too, although they probably come from Europe rather than China, so they’ll be tariffed at a lower rate.

The most important cost in a restaurant meal is not the plate, not the chair, not the table, not the knife and fork, not even the food. The most important expenses are the wages of the chef, the wages of the server, and the rent on the space in which the restaurant is located. None of those things are tariffed. They are services, not goods, and so they escape the tax entirely.

Richer people tend to spend more of their income on services than they do on goods. Poorer people spend more on goods than on services. And richer people, of course, can save and invest more of their income, and that escapes tariffs entirely. And the more of the income you spend on the services, the less you pay in tariffs. The working man’s car, that’s tariffed; the rich man’s chauffeur, not tariffed. The poor girl’s dolls, of which she’s allowed so few by the Trump administration—those are tariffed. When the rich family hires a nanny to play dolls with the girls, the nanny salary is not tariffed. Towels are tariffed. Membership in a swimming club, where you use the towel, that’s not tariffed. The doorknob is tariffed, but the doorman on Fifth Avenue: no tariff on him.

It is very important when you listen to the Donald Trump show to keep your eye not on the game, but on the players and what they’re about. And this jet story, this jet scam, is maybe the most revealing thing of all. It is just beyond shameful that such an offer would even get two minutes of consideration.

Look—foreign governments, authoritarian governments, especially those like Qatar, which have these bad ties to Hamas and Iran and which are trying to buy favor in the United States, they’re always approaching people. There’s a whole apparatus of distance to keep things like that away from the president. The president doesn’t normally say no. The president normally never even learns that the offer was made in the first place. But in this case, there are no guardrails and no protections. And so in our fourth scam, the offer comes to the president, and the president wants to say yes.

Now, he may ultimately not be able to say yes. The gift of a jet to the president of the United States personally from a foreign Emirate, that may be too much even for Trump’s usual apologists. But look how far we’ve come. Look how low we’ve sunk. It’s a shame. It’s a scandal. And the test for all of us is whether we can keep our eye on the main thing and to keep being shocked by things that are shocking.

And now my discussion with Dr. Shashi Tharoor. But first a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: A terrorist outrage in Kashmir killed some 25 Indians on April 22. India and Pakistan have since mutually retaliated one upon the other. As we record this dialogue on the morning of Sunday, May 11, in Washington—the evening of Sunday, May 11, in the subcontinent—a cease-fire has taken hold. To discuss the very distressing and worrying events in the subcontinent, I’m very proud and pleased to be joined by Dr. Sashi Tharoor.

To say Shashi Tharoor is an author and a member of the Indian Parliament is accurate so far as it goes but inadequate to the reality. His books have been massive sellers in India and the United Kingdom, and have had a great influence on all debate about Indian politics. He himself occupies a very important place as a politician that goes beyond the merely parliamentary. In a country where politics has for a long time been drifting in sectarian and authoritarian directions, Dr. Tharoor’s public advocacy and political work elevate him as one of India’s preeminent voices for secular and liberal politics.

A graduate of the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, here in the United States, Dr. Tharoor spent much of his early career working in international organizations. He rose to be undersecretary general of the United Nations. In 2009, he was entered into Indian electoral politics and was elected to Parliament. He has been reelected three subsequent times, for a total of four—an unbroken career of success. He now heads the Parliamentary Committee on [External] Affairs in the Indian Parliament.

Thank you so much for joining us today at this time of tension. Maybe you can begin by talking about the cease-fire. A cease-fire has taken hold. The Trump administration claims a lot of credit for brokering it. Do they deserve that credit?

Shashi Tharoor: We were all a bit puzzled by President Trump’s posts on Truth Social and on X, because India has historically been allergic to mediation. It doesn’t believe it needs it, and it’s unlikely to have invited mediation in a formal sense. On the other hand, it’s true that the U.S. administration—in particular, Secretary of State and now also National Security Adviser Marco Rubio and, to some degree, Vice President Vance—have been speaking to Indian officials, as indeed, Indian officials have acknowledged. The foreign minister’s tweets will tell us about these calls.

But it’s one thing for the Indian foreign minister to say to the Americans, Look—if the Pakistanis do this, we will do that. Or if they hit us, we are going to hit them harder back, and quite another for the foreign minister to say, Would you mind relaying this message to the Pakistanis? India would never do the latter. They would do the former, and I think what happened then, perhaps, is that Rubio then called the Pakistanis and said, Look—I’ve been talking to the Indians, and this is what they’re saying, so you might want to take this into account. And would you not like to move in a different direction? That kind of thing.

The initial Trump announcement gave the impression that the Americans and Indians and Pakistanis have been pulling an all-nighter, discussing everything jointly. That simply hasn’t happened. And I think that’s a misrepresentation of what role the U.S. played. But I certainly don’t want to sound ungrateful for anybody who is willing to pull the Pakistanis down off the escalatory ladder that they had climbed onto.

There was a terrorist outrage in India. India chose to react in a very careful, calculated, calibrated, and precise way only against terrorist infrastructure. It didn’t strike any Pakistani military installations or any civilian nor governmental installations, and basically signaled, Look—we are only after terrorists, and we did this strike at 1:30 in the morning so there wouldn’t be too many civilians about. We want to avoid all collateral damage. It was a very responsible strike that the Indians conducted.

The Pakistanis chose to react with unnecessary escalation. They shelled very heavily civilian and occupied civilian inhabited areas of India, killing 22 civilians and hospitalizing a further 59 in the district of Poonch in Kashmir. And frankly, India had to respond—and did—very, very strongly. And when India responded, it also attacked places it had so far kept off limits. It hit Pakistani air bases, for example, very hard. Pakistan has, because there are no terrorist infrastructure in India to attack—Pakistan was assaulting Indian cities where ordinary human beings live. And that was simply unacceptable. We were able to use our air-defense shield to stop that, but we hit the Pakistanis hard where it hurt.

Now, this escalation was leading nowhere for nobody. As far as India was concerned, they delivered their message to the terrorists. They were willing to stop. As far as Pakistan was concerned, they didn’t know when to say that their honor was satisfied. And if the U.S. helped them to step off that ladder, the U.S. gave them an excuse to climb down off it, so much the better, because India had no interest in a prolonged war.

What was very clear from the manner of the Indian strike to begin with, David, was that India was trying to signal from the very start: This is not the opening salvo in a long conflict. This is just a one-off retaliation to a terror attack, period. Nothing else. It’s Pakistan that was taking it in the wrong direction, and I’m glad that stopped right now.

Frum: Well, let me ask you more about this American mediation. You’ll remember that in 2001 there [was], again, another outrage against India. [Former Secretary of State] Colin Powell personally inserted himself and worked very hard, deployed a lot of threats, actually, against the Pakistanis to bring about a cease-fire in 2008 after the terror attack in Mumbai, another outrage on Indian soil. [Former Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice was in person in the subcontinent and flew back and forth.

That’s what American mediation has looked like in the past, from our point of view. And not to make this story about the United States when it’s a story about the people of the subcontinent, but it does look like the Trump administration showed up, took credit for something that had already happened, and now its main interest seems to be not a structure of peace but scoring some Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Donald Trump.

Tharoor: (Laughs.) Oh, you said it, David. I didn’t, and I probably would be unwise to say very much along those lines myself. I will say that mediation is possibly the wrong word. Mediation implies a request by both parties to be involved. In the two examples you gave, and a third example—the 1999 Kargil conflict, when President Clinton summoned the prime minister of Pakistan to Washington and told him to lay off, which he did—all those three cases were essentially the U.S. putting pressure on the Pakistanis, who in every case were in the wrong. They were the perpetrators of terror. They were the perpetrators of violence. And in the case of Kargil, they were the ones who had led an invasion of Indian territory. So in all those cases, the U.S. was telling one side.

I would say that in this particular instance, in as much as there was any strong American messaging coming, it was almost certainly directed principally to the Pakistanis, because India at no stage wanted to prolong a war. See, India, David, is a status-quo power. It is a country that basically would be very happy to be left alone. There’s nothing Pakistan has that we want. We would be very happy to focus on our own growth, our own development, the well-being and prosperity of our own people. We are a high-tech economy, moving in that direction. We are trying to find a way forward in the 21st century. We are already the world’s fifth-largest economy in dollar terms, and in purchasing-power-parity terms are third-largest. So that’s where our ambitions and aspirations are.

We don’t want to get bogged down into a meaningless war with a bunch of Islamist fanatics whose lust for our territory is what motivates them. When you are a status-quo power, what you want to do is to just continue with the way things are. Next door to us, unfortunately, is a revisionist power—a power that is not happy with the existing states of regional geopolitics and wants to upend it, and that’s what the Pakistanis, sadly, are.

So they couldn’t do it by conventional means. They kept losing formal wars against us. So from 1989 onwards, having learned an unfortunate lesson from the success of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, from Pakistani soil, the Pakistanis decided to turn that technique against us. And they started unleashing mujahideen by various names and various terror organizations, front organizations, into Indian territory to wreak havoc against innocent Indian civilians. They’ve been doing that since 1989. This is year 36 of Pakistani terrorism. You can understand that we really have lost patience with this.

Frum: One last question about the American role, because when you line up—and I should have mentioned—in 1999, 2001, 2008 and you see the pattern of the American involvement there, and then you contrast it with the pattern of American involvement in 2025, it does really look like the United States is a receding power in the world that mattered much more a quarter century ago than it does now, and that the Trump administration seems to want the accolades that it would get domestically from the assertion of great power status. But actually, it has given away that status, and maybe by its own neglect, maybe by some objective reality.

Tharoor: Yeah, and there was some slightly confused messaging also coming out of all of this that the first statements of Mr. Trump were that, Oh, these Indians and Pakistanis have been fighting for thousands of years, which is slightly odd because Pakistan has only existed for 77 years as a country. So they haven’t fought anybody for a century, let alone centuries or thousands of years.

Then we had Mr. Vance saying, Oh, we have no business in this fight. Let them sort it out themselves. And then suddenly, within a day or two of these remarks, the same two people are taking credit for the cease-fire. I’m at a bit of a loss, frankly, about what they did. Certainly, there is no independent confirmation from the Indian side of any successful or serious negotiating effort by the U.S. here.

It’s possible that they did this with the Pakistanis, and we might learn more from the U.S.—there’s always stories coming out in the U.S. media from reliable sources in Washington as to what exactly America did with Pakistan. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough. But for now, I am at a bit of a loss, to answer your question, David. But the desire for accolades without too much of effort is a human foible, isn’t it? It’s something which too many people tend to want to do.

Frum: It runs stronger in some human beings than in others. In a few, it’s the overwhelming passion of life.

Let me ask you: You alluded, I think, a little bit to what will be your answer to this question, but why is it so hard to reach an enduring peace in the subcontinent? The one smidgen of truth in Donald Trump’s post about a thousand years is: For a thousand years, Hindu majority and Muslim majority—Hindu-ruled and Muslim-ruled—states have coexisted peacefully and successfully in the subcontinent. Why can’t they do so now?

Tharoor: Well, I mean, that’s the irony of all of this. I mean, it’s utter nonsense to imply that there is a thousand-year battle between Hindus and Muslims. On the contrary, every great Hindu king had Muslim soldiers and generals on his side. Every great Muslim king had Hindu generals and soldiers on his side. And the two communities have coexisted ever since the advent of Islam on the Indian subcontinent, which was within a century after the birth of the prophets. Indeed, in my own state of Kerala, Islam came peacefully through traders and merchants bringing it as news from the Arab world rather than coming as some sort of foreign conquest.

So there’s been a long and complicated history. But it’s not all been hostile. The British during the colonial regime chose a very deliberate and deliberately militant policy of “divide and rule,” where they actively fomented a distinctive Muslim identity as distinct from, a separate from a Hindu identity in order to prevent the two uniting against the British, as they had done in the revolt of 1857, when Hindus and Muslims alike rose up in arms against British rule. It was ruthlessly suppressed. The British butchered 150,000 civilians in Delhi alone in putting down that revolt.

And then they adopted a conscious policy of divide and rule. Divide and rule meant that when the Indian National Congress was established as a representative body of Indian nationalists—in those days, very decorous Indian nationalist agitation for rights and political rights in India against the British—the British actually paid to establish a rival Muslim organization, called the Muslim League, in order to undermine the Indian National Congress.

Finally, partition happened. Pakistan was carved out of the stooped shoulders of India by the departing British in 1947. And ever since, it has had to justify its existence as a separate country by an increasingly belligerent Islamism. This is why Pakistan was not only the source of these horrific attacks, such as the 26/11 attack, to which you alluded to—the butchery of 166 innocent people in Mumbai in 2008, all the earlier attacks on the Indian Parliament, the invasion of Kargil, and so on—but Pakistan was also the place that sheltered and protected Osama bin Laden for many years, until, as you know, he was found living in a safe house right near a Pakistani army encampment. This is Pakistan’s history.

It is a country that has, unfortunately, armed, trained, equipped, guided, and directed terrorism from its soil for decades as an instrument of state policy. It is a malcontented state that wants territory that India controls and that it can’t have. It is a bigoted state that believes that all Muslims belong to it, so that the first loyalty of Muslims, even in India, should be to Pakistan, which—I’m sorry—is never going to be the case.

It was very striking that one of the daily briefings that were being done by the Indian military featured an Indian woman colonel who was a Muslim. It was a very powerful message that India stood united. It was not about Hindu, Muslim. It was all about India standing united against terror.

Pakistan doesn’t understand that, because their state is built on a totally different set of premises. It’s also, to paraphrase Voltaire on Prussia, a situation where India is a state that has an army; Pakistan is an army that has a state. And that army really controls the state, runs the state, controls the largest share of that country’s GDP and governmental budget—larger than any army of any country in the world controls of its GDP and national budget. So for the army to continue its disproportionate dominance of Pakistan, it needs to be able to have enough external demons, in addition to the demons it has nurtured in its own backyard, in order to be able to point to the fact that it is the sole savior of its people.

It’s a very, very sad and pathetic story. The Osama bin Laden story was merely the tip of a very, very large mountain, I’m afraid, of this kind of thing. Hillary Clinton, rather memorably, said as secretary of state, when Pakistan tried to plead victim about its own terrorist problems with a group called the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, initially created by Pakistan, but which has deemed Pakistan to be insufficiently Islamist to its taste and that has turned out to be attacking Pakistan’s military and political institutions—Hillary Clinton said, Well, if you nurture vipers in your backyard, some of them would turn around and bite you. And I think that was absolutely the right metaphor. That’s what Pakistan has done. Vipers in your backyard is really a case of—to mix up the animals—the chickens coming home to roost in Pakistan.

Very sad story, but that’s the problem we are living with next-door to us.

Frum: Pakistan is ideologically committed to the conflict, for reasons you described, but the wealth gap between India and Pakistan has been growing and growing and growing. Presumably, the power gap follows, although India has historically had difficulty turning wealth into power, for reasons you may want to explain.

At some point, you would say, However ideologically committed you are to this conflict, it’s not working, so peace becomes your logical outcome. But in the subcontinent, as indeed in the Israeli conflict with the various anti-Israel rejectionist groups around Israel, the logic of power that political scientists would predict doesn’t seem to work. Why does it not work between Pakistan and India, where they say, You know what? We’ve just lost too many times.

Tharoor: Yeah, but you’ve left out a very important force, unfortunately, in this equation, and that is China. China is sitting on our northern borders, nibbling away at our land. They have a long-standing frontier dispute with India. And Pakistan has been reduced to a client state of China over the years.

China’s single-largest project under its Belt and Road Initiative is a massive highway through Pakistan called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is of inestimable economic value to China because goods coming from the Suez Canal and from the Gulf countries can now be offloaded at the Port of Gwadar—in the southwestern tip of Pakistan, in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province—and transported on this Chinese-built highway all the way directly into western China. Whereas in the past, and right up to then, these goods had to go all the way around India, through the Strait of Malacca, into the South China Sea, be offloaded in ports like Guangzhou, in southeastern China, and then transported laboriously overland all the way across to western China.

They save 90 percent of the cost and 95 percent of the time by just being able to use Pakistan as a conduit for their goods into western China. So China has a huge interest in keeping Pakistan safe and secure and an obedient vessel state, which Pakistan is, indeed, happy to be. And China also has its own problems with India, which it would dearly like to cut down to size as a potential geopolitical rival in the area.

So when you talk about the power gap between India and Pakistan, the difficulty we have is: We have two fronts we need to be worried about. We have a Pakistan front and a China front. And cumulatively, I’m sorry to say, we are not in a position, most unfortunately, to fight a two-front war. So we have a very complicated mix of diplomatic, military, and geopolitical calculations to make every time Pakistan triggers a problem with us. We’ve got to make sure we hit Pakistan hard so that they learn a lesson, but we also have to make sure we don’t go to such a point that China feels obliged to come directly to Pakistan’s rescue.

The overwhelming majority of Pakistani weaponry—which means, I believe, as high as 90-odd percent of Pakistani weaponry—comes from China. That includes China’s latest 4.5 generation J-10[C] fighter aircraft, their PL-15 missiles, and various other kinds of ammunition. So India’s problem is that it is essentially having to juggle a number of geopolitical, diplomatic, as well as military considerations when it reacts to Pakistani provocations.

We want to send the terrorists a message. We want to hit back whenever Pakistan hits us, but we don’t want to get to a situation where we might end up, quite frankly, provoking a more direct Chinese involvement, because India is not particularly keen on entering into a two-front war with both Pakistan and China.

So it’s a complication. When you look at the power asymmetry, as you mentioned, you are not just comparing India and Pakistan; you’re comparing India against both Pakistan and China, and then the comparison doesn’t look that good for India.

Frum: But as China has colonized Pakistan in this way over the past generation, a succession of American presidents—starting with Bill Clinton, developing very rapidly under George W. Bush (the president for whom I worked), under President Obama a little maybe less energetically—have sought to build an American-Indian partnership that is closer and closer. And there are a lot of difficulties in the way of this, but there has been effort very much on the U.S. side, a little more doubt on the Indian side.

President Trump has just slammed India with a whole new set of punitive tariffs, undercutting all the fine things that he and his vice president say about India. How would you assess the state of that U.S.-India partnership so founded by Bill Clinton and nurtured by W. Bush and President Obama.

Tharoor: Well, you know, and even in the first Trump administration, it was going fine. I mean, I would’ve said that, in many ways, the India-U.S. relationship was above partisan politics, that it certainly transcends the political divide within India, and appeared to have transcended the political divide of the U.S.—because both Bush and Clinton, both Obama and Trump 1.0 all supported a very close relationship.

But everything has become very confused in Trump 2.0. There have been the tariffs, which certainly have hurt India quite significantly. There have been the very, very stringent policies with regard to immigration—including legal immigration, H-1B visas, spouse reunions, and so on—which tends disproportionately to hit Indian techies who provide a lot of IT services in the U.S. and who obviously want their families to join them and so on, who are going to find that challenging.

But even more, Mr. Trump’s statement yesterday and today has been very troubling because it de facto handed Pakistan a victory that Pakistan has not earned. By choosing unnecessarily to imply an equivalence between India and Pakistan, it was equating the victim and the perpetrator. By speaking in terms of getting the two to sit down together and talk to end their thousands of years of conflict, apart from the fact that it hasn’t been thousands of years, there is a fact that we are certainly not going to give Pakistan the satisfaction of earning negotiating rights at the point of a gun. We are not going to talk to the Pakistanis after what they have done to us by killing innocent civilians. And I’m sorry—if that’s what Mr. Trump wants, he’s not going to get it.

Thirdly, he has given the Pakistanis the victory of re-internationalizing the Kashmir dispute, which had been off the international agenda for quite some time, and he has done India the grave disservice of re-hyphenating India and Pakistan in the American imagination, which had been de-hyphenated since the days of Clinton. You will notice, David, that since the days of President Clinton, no American president has actually visited both countries on the same trip. They have very deliberately sent a signal that India is a country you deal with in its own right. It’s not something we twin with Pakistan in the American imagination.

Sadly, Mr. Trump’s post has done all of these four things, and I think it shows that he has not yet been rather well briefed. What’s striking is that he has named a proposed assistant secretary of state for South Asia who is a very knowledgeable scholar about South Asia and about India, and who is himself partly of Indian American origin, and who would, I believe, know far better than to say the kinds of things that President Trump has said on Truth Social—which are, in that sense, an embarrassment to the last quarter century of American policy. It has really upended all of these fundamental assumptions of the U.S.-India relationship.

Frum: Now, let me ask you a question about—speaking about Indian in its own right—about Indian domestic politics. The political tradition from which you come and, indeed, your life’s work has been to speak for India as a nonsectarian state, a state of Muslim and Sikh and other minorities. And I will note here for those who—you will know this history, but—many forget that the Indian army that liberated Bangladesh in 1971 was led by a Jewish officer, which is a detail that is often forgotten.

Tharoor: Yeah. Not led; it was more complicated. We had—the army was commanded by a Parsi Zoroastrian, the tiny minority. The general officer commanding the Eastern command, the forces that marched into Bangladesh, was a Sikh. The vice chief of the air staff was a Muslim. And the major general who was helicoptered into Dakar to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani army at the end of that war was Jewish. Major General J. F. R. Jacob was a friend of mine, a remarkable gentleman, now no longer with us. But that was India, David. That’s what India is all about. It’s just a country of such immense diversity that it really is a microcosm of all that’s fine about pluralism as a social construct.

Frum: That said, over the past decade and a half, India has emigrated away from that tradition to a great extent. And you see a rise of sectarian and authoritarian politics in India. And I don’t say this to cast aspersions. We have seen it in the United States. Why should you be any different from the rest of the world? But it has become to the point where people sometimes fear India becoming a Hindu Pakistan—chauvinist, sectarian, authoritarian. How worried should we be? How strong are the forces of opposition to the tendency? And the last question—maybe we can break this into a separate part: How is this affecting the way the authoritarian and sectarian elements in the United States think about India?

Tharoor: Okay, so first of all, as far as India’s concerned: I mean, this is a battle we fight daily on our own soil. And I have been—I hope I’m acknowledged as—being a very strong voice against sectarian tendencies in our politics. I believe strongly and passionately that every Indian has the same rights as every other Indian and that their religion, their language, their ethnicity, their color, the region or the state they come from have absolutely no bearing on their rights as an Indian and their contributions to this great country.

And in many ways, my notion of Indianness is comparable to most Americans’ idea of civic nationalism in America, where you all belong and you’re sheltered by this collective identity. You can be Jewish. You can be—whatever—Californian. You could be Hungarian speaking, whatever. But you are who you are because being American makes it possible. And it’s the same for us in India. And you can be a good Muslim, a good Gujarati, and a good Indian all at once because that Indianness is what protects your ability to be all of that. And I fought for that idea, and I will do so till my last breath.

But having said that, when it comes to something like a conflict with Pakistan, it’s very interesting how quickly some of these divisions in our internal domestic politics disappear. And as I mentioned to you, the striking sight in the daily briefings of an Indian woman military officer who is a Muslim sent a very powerful message, both at home and abroad: This is who we are. That’s not who we are, not the guys across the border with their sectarian bigotry. And to my mind, that was actually a very welcome reminder.

The second paradox, David, is that this government—despite the fact that it has presided over some of the worst tendencies of bigotry and encouraged intolerance within Indian society—has actually been a remarkably good government when it comes to strengthening India’s relations with the Arab and Muslim world. It’s quite astonishing to see, for example, the closeness of India’s relations with Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. and Egypt, all of which have never been better. And it’s striking that’s happening on the watch of a government that domestically has been rightly criticized for some of its statements and actions with regard to the Muslim minority.

So there is hope yet. I do believe that we are going through a certain churn in our politics. You are quite right that it’s reminiscent in many ways of what we’re seeing around the world—the same degree of xenophobia and rejection of the “people not like us” kind of thing that you’ve seen in the U.S., in Brexit in Britain, in Hungary, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, and so on. Right across the world, there’ve been a lot of these tendencies, and we’re seeing it rising in many parts of liberal Western Europe with the rise of AfD in Germany or the equivalent party in Austria. There have been suddenly elements given a free reign to say, We are more authentic representatives of the country than these people who worship foreign gods and speak foreign tongues. And that sort of thing, I’m afraid, is what has also been rising in India.

But I do believe that liberal, pluralistic, humane values have not been snuffed out. We are going to continue to keep them aloft in my country.

Frum: Well, you’ll remember the Howdy Modi event in Houston, Texas, where in Trump’s first term—

Tharoor: Right.

Frum: —where he gave a very personal greeting to Prime Minister Modi, of a kind that previous American presidents have tried absolutely to subordinate—to say, This is not a personal relationship. It’s: Bush Clinton doesn’t matter; whoever is the head of government in India doesn’t matter. This is a national, nation-to-nation, people-to-people relationship.

But there do seem to be elements in the Trump administration (the vice president is one) that—I don’t want to overstate this, but—seem to be indicating that a more Hindu, chauvinist India is what they want, just the way they want to see neo-Nazis or neofascists prevail in many European countries. And I know you’re speaking to an American audience, and you want to preserve national unity, but can you talk a little bit about, from an American point of view: Are they right that the United States would be better off with a more Hindu, chauvinist India?

Tharoor: Look—I don’t think the U.S. would be better off with one or the other kind of group in India. I think that the U.S.—this particular administration—may be equally comfortable with people of that persuasion. Whereas arguably, someone like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would not have been comfortable with a more explicitly sectarian Indian government.

In fact, Obama made a famous speech in Delhi calling for greater religious tolerance at a time when Mr. Modi’s government was still pretty new. So there is a difference, yes, in your domestic politics between a more liberal government and a government that considers itself more conservative. But ultimately, I still would like to believe, David, that this relationship is above and beyond that—that if tomorrow, a more liberal Indian dispensation came to power, that there would still be enough forces in America that would want to preserve a good relationship with it.

One factor, undoubtedly, is the extraordinary influence of the Indian American diaspora. It’s now 3.4 million strong, which is, oh, a good 1 percent of your population, heading a little above 1 percent. And these are people with a tremendous contribution being made to America. They have the largest single median income of any ethnic group, higher than Japanese Americans, higher than white Americans. They’re making significant contributions in a number of cutting-edge sectors. They’re technologists. They’re computer geeks. They’re doctors and medical people. They’re bio-technologists. They do all sorts of things in fields that America values.

They’ve not only done all of that—they’ve also got involved in your politics. There are Indian Americans among top fundraisers going back to George Bush Sr., whose leading fundraiser was an Indian American dentist in Florida. You’ve had Indian Americans on the campaign trail. You’ve had Indian Americans getting elected to office. Nikki Haley is an Indian American. Bobby Jindal is an Indian American. And of course, there will be more. There are half a dozen people of Indian origin in the U.S. Congress right now, today—six of them.

So you’re looking at a community that’s not only made a valuable contribution to America but that is visible, is active, is engaged in your social and political life, and therefore cannot be ignored. By extension, the country they came from and still in many cases care about cannot be ignored. Just as, you know, Jewish Americans have an impact on America’s policy towards Israel, I expect Indian Americans to continue to have an impact on America’s policy towards India.

And I believe that will be the case, whoever forms the government in India. I may be wrong, David. We’ll find out the hard way. But as of now, the changing complexion of Indian politics may not make such a difference to the U.S. attitude to India, because there are now more and more sort of permanent structural factors sustaining that relationship, including the presence and role of the Indian diaspora in America.

Frum: Will the cease-fire hold?

Tharoor: I think so, yes. I don’t really think that Pakistan has much to gain from starting a new misadventure, because India has been able to demonstrate that they can hit very hard. They’ve destroyed the runway in a major air base, called the Rahim Yar Khan Air Base, and have severely damaged another air base, the Air Marshal Nur Khan Air Base, which is right next to Pakistani military headquarters GHQ Rawalpindi, not far from the capital of the country. So I think it’s been a sobering wake up to the Pakistanis that this is not an adversary you want to monkey around with.

Now, did they achieve their goals? Partially, yes. And Mr. Trump’s statement would be cause of rejoicing in Islamabad, that, Look—we are back on the map with the U.S. They’re treating us as the equal of the Indians. So they might feel that, Look—we pulled off something very good by doing what we did. I don’t think they would see a reason now to get back again to the battlefield and possibly risk further defeat and further opprobrium.

They would actually feel they’ve actually pulled off something here. So I think not, and as far as India’s concerned, India has never been the belligerent, has no interest, whatever, in initiating conflict, and ideally wants to be left alone by Pakistan to get on with its own business and focus on its economy.

So for all these reasons, I believe the cease-fire could hold, can hold, should be holding. But it’s not even 24 hours yet. And in fact, on the first day of the cease-fire—which in our time zone, it’s yesterday evening—I’m afraid the Pakistanis violated it in three places by sending missiles across to Indian cities, hitting civilian targets, homes, and cars. We were able to stop many of those missiles, but we did take a few blows. And we hit back, as well, in retaliation.

So the message is very clear, David. If the Pakistanis can’t curb their hot heads and if they fire at us, we will fire back, and we will fire back very hard. But if they are able to curb their worst instincts and behave and actually hold their fire, we have no intention whatsoever of initiating any action. We would like the peace to hold, and we’d like to get on with our lives.

Frum: Thank you so much for making the time for us today.

Tharoor: Thank you, David. Really good speaking to you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks to Dr. Tharoor for joining me on the program. Because of the substance and length of our discussion today, we’ll omit the viewer-question part of the program this week. I hope you will send questions for next week’s programs to producer@thedavidfrumshow.com, and I hope you’ll join us again next week for the next episode of The David From Show.

Remember, if you like what you hear at the on The David Frum Show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at theatlantic.com/listener. That’s theatlantic.com/listener. And please like, subscribe, rate, review, share it any way you can, the content of this program, if you enjoy it and find it a value. We are already past in our first five episodes 1.5 million views and downloads on video and audio platforms. We hope to keep growing. We need your help to do that. So please rate, review, like, subscribe, share in any way you can, and subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/listener.

Thank you. I’m David Frum. See you next week.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

President Donald Trump is about to begin the first major foreign trip of his second term, traveling next week to Saudi Arabia, while also making stops in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, nations that play a key role in mediating conflicts in the region. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss.

Trump’s Middle East visit comes at a crucial time, as America’s role and influence in the world under his leadership are being tested by the escalating conflict between India and Pakistan, the Israeli government’s controversial moves in Gaza, and the war in Ukraine.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, are Susan Glasser, a staff writer atThe New Yorker; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; David Sanger, the White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times; and Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum reflects on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, examining how postwar reconciliation—not battlefield triumph—became America’s true finest hour. He contrasts that legacy with Donald Trump’s recent bombastic Victory Day statement, urging a rededication to the values that built a more peaceful world.

David is then joined by The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum to discuss the astonishing and brazen corruption of the Trump presidency, how authoritarian regimes seek to break institutions, and the hardship of losing friendships to politics.

Finally, David answers listener questions on fostering open-minded political dialogue among polarized high-school students, why America hasn’t developed a strong worker-based political movement like its European counterparts, and how to think about class in modern U.S. politics. He also weighs in on the risk of data suppression under the Trump administration and reflects on whether his long-held conservative values still belong to the political right.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 5 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This week, I’ll be joined by my Atlantic colleague and dear friend Anne Applebaum, one of the world’s leading authorities on democracy and authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and the rule of law. I am so looking forward to the conversation with Anne, but first, some thoughts.

[Music]

This podcast will post in the week that the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. The Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. After his death, the German armies in Europe, one by one, began to approach the Allied commanders to surrender—in Italy, in Northwestern Europe. Finally on May 7, the overall command structure of the German armies approached the supreme allied commander, Dwight Eisenhower, to discuss an instrument of surrender for all the remaining German forces.

The original instrument of surrender was rejected by the Soviet army. It didn’t mention the Soviet Union explicitly, and they had some other objections to it, and so the final instrument was negotiated during the day of May 8—was agreed about shortly before 10 p.m. on the 8th of May—and went into effect a little past 11 p.m. on the 8th of May. Eleven p.m., May 8, was, of course, the early morning in Moscow, May 9, and so this chain of events has left ever afterwards a question mark about what is the exact and proper date of the end of the Second World War in Europe: whether it’s May 8—as it was in Berlin and where the Allied armies were—or May 9, as it was in Moscow.

Of course, the war itself would continue for more months. As the Germans surrendered in the West, American forces in the Pacific were fighting a brutal battle on the island of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the whole war—certainly, I think, the bloodiest battle of the American Pacific campaign. And no one knew on the day that the Nazis surrendered how long that war in the Pacific would last, except for a handful of Americans who were party to the secret of the atomic bomb. Most Americans—most people—assumed that there was probably another year of fighting ahead, an invasion of Japan, and many thousands, maybe many hundreds of thousands, of American casualties and Allied casualties, too, because the American army that entered Japan would be supported by Commonwealth forces: Australia, British, Canadian. But the atomic bomb did explode. Japan did surrender, and the war came to an end—a final and formal end—with the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September, 1945.

So this is a time of commemoration, and in this time, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, issued a very strange post about the event on the 8th of May. He wrote:

Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II. I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I. We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything—That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore, that know how to do so! We are going to start celebrating our victories again!

Now, that post was such a perfect crystallization of the Trump style: bombast, boast, all of it making Trump himself the center of a story that he had nothing whatsoever to do with. The statement is unwise and unattractive in all kinds of other ways too. It denigrates the sacrifices and heroism of others. And it turns the tragedy and horror of war into a triumphant narrative that was completely alien to almost all the people who experienced it as nothing but a tale of suffering and waste and cruelty and misery.

I want to draw attention to something maybe less obvious about what is wrong—what is missing—from the president’s statement. The first is, as so often when Donald Trump talks about American military history, he emphasizes power and success and triumph and military genius, but always lacking is any mention of the values for which Americans fought. America didn’t go into World War II—or even World War I—to be top nation, to beat and dominate others. It went to defend things that Americans regarded as precious, and not only Americans but others too—and one of the measures of how precious those values were, not only to Americans and to others, but to the world that has grown up as a result of the war.

Because at this interval of eight decades, I think it’s maybe most useful and most necessary not to think about the war that ended in Europe on May 8, or the war overall that ended on September 2 in Tokyo Bay. I think it’s more useful to think about what began the process of reconstruction and reconciliation that occupied the next eight decades: the way in which former enemies became present partners, the way the Germans and the Japanese themselves discovered, in their own defeat, their own liberation because they came to accept the values for which Americans went into battle.

The story of how we turned the chaos and trauma of the Second World War into something better—and not Americans alone but Americans working with allies, working with defeated adversaries—that is not as dramatic as the battles of World War II. I don’t know that people are going to make successful documentary series out of trade negotiations in food aid and the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But those achievements were great, and they are the things that at the eighth-decade interval require us most to be mindful, because they’re the things that are most in danger of being lost. You know, they’re marble and bronze statues that commemorate all the horror and bloodshed of the war. But those quiet victories of peacetime that built a better world, we’re in danger of forgetting them because right now, the United States is, step by step, unraveling its own great achievement.

You know, Winston Churchill described the Battle of Britain, in 1940, as Britain’s finest hour. If Americans are looking for a finest hour of their own, it’s not anything that happened during the war—when America was, by the way, a late entrant. It’s the five, seven years, 10 years after the war, when Americans and others learned from the mistakes after the First World War and built a better world that we still enjoy. Now all of those lessons have been forgotten, and Donald Trump is single-handedly determined to repeat all the mistakes that after the First World War put the world on the path to the Second World War: protectionism, isolationism, narrow nationalism, lack of forbearance, lack of mutual understanding, lack of any understanding of America’s place as a leader—because of its values, because it’s a country that is admired and trusted, not just because it’s a country that is strong and powerful and feared.

We should think of the 8th of May, and the Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day, as the beginnings of our modern story. And maybe the message that we need to hear from leaders is not a message of self-congratulation and self-celebration but a message of rededication to the work that was done after the end of the war to build a better world that those of us who grew up in it had the privilege of enjoying and that we are at risk of not bequeathing to the generations that come after us.

And now my conversation with Anne Applebaum. But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: I am so pleased and happy to welcome today Anne Applebaum to join the conversation. Anne Applebaum is one of the world’s leading thinkers on problems of authoritarianism and democracy. Normally, you have to say, “English-speaking world,” but not in Anne’s case, because she’s just been awarded a prize as a hero of the German nation. She’s, of course, a colleague at The Atlantic. She is a dear friend. She is the author of books that have shaped the way we all think about these issues. Her book Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. She really did win a prize as hero of the German nation. Other prizes, too many to count. She’s also a long-standing, dear, dear friend of mine and my wife. My wife and Anne wrote a cookbook together. So we’re going to be making a lot of references to a lot of common points, and I hope they’re not too obscure.

But before we begin, I have to ask Anne about the president’s comments this weekend about Americans, especially American girls, owning too many pencils. And the reason I’m raising this is: On my way into the little home studio I use, I accidentally tripped over the case in which my wife keeps her art supplies. So I found not one case of two dozen pencils, but all of these pencils, and I feel a certain shame that America can’t be great again so long as we are indulging this insane accumulation of excessive numbers of pencils per person, especially per female person.

The president’s words reminded me of a line from a movie I think we both love, Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo, in which she explains as a Russian operative that the goal of the Russian state is fewer but better Russians. And I think we’re all looking forward to a world of fewer but better pencils. Well, maybe worse pencils. Is there some phrase from the Soviet Union about people who accumulate too many pencils?

Anne Applebaum: You know, I don’t think, like, even Stalin had a thing about pencils or about there being too many pencils, although it’s funny—I do remember there was a shortage of pencils in the Soviet Union, and it was a big problem. I know that, for example, accountants in the Gulag often had trouble getting pencils to make their accounts, and they talk about creating them from bits of charcoal, and people kept records with all kinds of things because there was a scarcity of pencils, even out there. So maybe, you know, it was a decision that Stalin made without telling us.

Of course, there’s the more-famous line attributed, probably incorrectly, to Marie Antoinette, which is when she was told that the people of France have no bread, she said, “Let them eat cake.” And so I suppose we’re now waiting for Trump to say, They have no pencils. Let them use fountain pens.

Frum: Yeah. (Laughs.) Well, there’s something that’s also quaintly old-fashioned about this. Like, you realize the last time he thought about getting gifts for the children, pencils were a big item, along with a tangerine, perhaps, and maybe, like, a wooden doll. The idea that you would to modern American children say, Here you go. Happy Birthday. Pencils. (Laughs.)

Your most recent book is a book about the intersection of autocracy and corruption. And that’s the theme of your most recent article, a very important article for The Atlantic. I want to start by raising a problem that you and I were talking about just before we began, which is: In the Trump era, there’s just too much bad news to keep track of. There’s one appalling incident after another. There’s one absurd incident after another. There’s this pencil matter. And so the way I thought to set you going was: I think I can group the things that have happened in this first term into six major headers, of which the corruption theme is the last and the binding one.

So the first is attacks on due process and individual liberties for disfavored entities and persons. So that’s the attacks on law firms. That’s the removal of due process from people who are suspected of being in the country illegally, and bags are put on their head, and they’re sent to El Salvador without a hearing.

The second category—so the first is attacks on due process and rights for disfavored. The second is impunity for the favored, so pardons for the January 6 criminals, lots of pardons for, you know, Republican officeholders who get caught up in corruption charges. There seems to be one of those a week.

So due process for the disfavored, impunity for the favored. Then a foreign policy that attacks allies and then sympathizes with foreign dictators. Then the reconstruction of the whole American economy along lines that empower the state and create more favor—ability of the state to dispense favors. Attacks on science, medicine, and otherwise objective sources of information. And then, finally, self-enrichment by the president, his family, his friends.

And your—one of your many great contributions—is to say this last is the binding agent that unites all the others. Can you take it from there and explain how we should think about this?

Applebaum: So if you look around the world, if you look at what links modern dictators and stipulate that modern dictators have very different ideologies—you know, you have nationalist Russia and Communist China and theocratic Iran and whatever North Korea is and the Bolivarian socialists in Venezuela. And you ask, What is it they have in common? Why do they support one another? Which they do. Why do they help keep one another in power? Which they do. There’s a whole consortium of countries keeping the Venezuelan dictator [Nicolás] Maduro in power, for example, even though they would seem to have nothing in common.

One of the answers is that they all share an interest in stealing and hiding money and in helping one another evade the sanctions that have been set up to prevent them from doing that and in perpetuating not just their own power but their own wealth. And that’s a—there is now a set of systems that exist, some of which are facilitated by the Western financial world, by the offshore banking havens that we’ve created, and the shell-company system that we created that helps people hide money. But it’s the one thing that they have all in common, and it’s the one thing that they all pursue.

It’s also true that when you have a declining democracy—or a mixed system, as you had in Russia, for example, in the ’90s—the moment when the regime begins to really earn money is also often the moment when they really feel the need to crack down on civil liberties. Because the most effective protest movements—and Russia is the best example of this—are often the ones that organize around corruption, because people can see and feel corruption. Ordinary people, you don’t need to know—you don’t have to read John Stuart Mill or know the history of the American Constitution, you know, or even have much of an education. You can be living in rural Ukraine or in Somalia and you can intuitively understand that it’s wrong for some people to be able to steal and keep their money, whereas other people are very poor. And so this is often the motivating and organizing idea of antiauthoritarian movements.

I mean, actually, the Ukrainian revolution of 2014—which was the moment when a lot of young Ukrainians went out on the street; they were waving EU flags; they were calling for an end of their authoritarian regime, which was at that time closely linked to Russia—that was an anti-corruption movement that was classic in this sense. So Ukrainians understood that they were poor because their leaders were rich. They understood that their leaders were tied to Russia. They imagined being part of Europe, being part of the transatlantic world as a way to have the rule of law. And to avoid that—and when they won, this was the thing that panicked Putin because it’s that kind of rebellion and that kind of movement that he’s most afraid of inside his own country.

And indeed, the one really successful opposition leader in Russia over the last decade was Alexei Navalny. His movement was an anti-corruption movement. His organization was called the Anti-Corruption Foundation. And he was murdered, in essence, for successfully galvanizing Russians around that theme. So this is both the thing that unifies modern dictators, and it’s also the thing that often unifies their opponents.

And so the fact that the Trump administration is moving so quickly in a kleptocratic direction and beginning to eliminate, one by one, all kinds of norms, defying all kinds of laws, changing existing laws to enable theft, essentially, and to enable corruption should really alarm us because this is very often what precedes a broader crackdown on civil society. Wherever you see a regime that is rapidly accumulating money and is rapidly enriching itself, you will see some kind of resistance movement and some kind of crackdown afterwards. And that’s, I suppose, why I’m so concerned about it.

Frum: In President Trump’s first term, he directed money to himself in a way that had never before been seen by an American president—never remotely. Like, not in the same neighborhood. He would stay in his hotels, so the Secret Service would pay him money to protect him. He would make clear to anyone from foreign nations that if they wanted his attention, they had better stay overnight at his hotel and hold their events in his hotel. At the beginning of his presidency, when he won by surprise in 2016, a number of the Persian Gulf states, which had planned events at other hotels in early parts for Christmas 2016, hastily rebooked at the Trump Hotel to gain favor. He also moved a lot of party money—not only public money, but if you were a Republican and you wanted his endorsement, you would have an event at his hotel.

That’s a lot of money. On the other hand, it’s like something you’d expect from, like, a crooked governor, not someone who controls the United States. And it looks like in his second term, he thought, You know, if I ever get another chance, this time I’m going to think big. And it looks as if through his various mysterious crypto ventures, hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, are moving from all kinds of people all over the planet to himself and to his family. And again, this is shadowy. It can’t be very precise, but it looks like vastly more money than in the first term has already moved into his hands in the second.

Applebaum: It is really an extraordinary transformation. I can only attribute it, one, to greater preparation. This time, his family and some of his business contacts were prepared for him to win and had a set of plans ready to go, you know, should he become president.

Also, it’s true that, as you say, in the first term, there were these small violations. There was another incident when Mike Pence went many miles out of his way to stay at a Trump Hotel in Ireland. I mean, there are all kinds of things like that that happened, and there was really no resistance. Nobody ever said, You’re breaking the law. Nobody stopped him. It wasn’t even really a major topic of concern among the many things that people were concerned about.

But you’re right—this time around, it’s very, very different. I mean, there are about four different kinds of things happening, and this is one of the reasons it’s so hard to keep track of. One is violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution. This is essentially the clause that says the U.S. president isn’t supposed to benefit in any way from relationships with foreigners. Clearly, Trump benefits directly from relationships with foreigners.

You know, he was just at his golf course a few weekends ago, where a tournament was taking place that’s sponsored by state-owned Saudi companies. The head of the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, which is one of the sponsors, was actually there. So he would’ve met many Saudi people who are his investors, essentially, and clients who, of course, are also interested in his Middle Eastern policy and in American foreign policy. So you could argue that they were there if—maybe it’s touchy to say they were trying to buy American foreign policy, but they were certainly trying to influence it. Why else? Why else would they be? Why else would they be there?

Secondly, there are conflicts of interest, and this, again, is on a scale that we have never seen before. Elon Musk has been put in charge of—with his group of DOGE, whoever they are, engineers and internet trolls, have been in charge of—taking over and managing regulatory bodies who regulate Musk’s own companies. He’s also got control and the power to hire and fire people at agencies that subsidize his companies.

So in other words, he can determine government policy towards his own companies. He can direct money towards his companies if he wants to. He can eliminate regulations of his companies if he wants to. And he is somebody who has been found in violation of all kinds of regulations—pollution regulations, other kinds of legal issues have plagued a lot of his companies from the beginning. And he now has been given a mechanism to escape that. And I should say, he’s just the most egregious version of this. There are many people throughout this administration who have kept their private interests, who haven’t recused themselves from investment issues, you know, who have nevertheless kept their jobs.

Thirdly, there are legal changes. There are laws that were on the books that the Trump Department of Justice or the Treasury Department will not enforce. There’s something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This was designed to forbid U.S. entities from bribing companies abroad. That law is now not being enforced. There’s also a Corporate Transparency Act, which was designed to force the owners of shell companies and anonymous properties to register their names so that when someone bought, for example, an apartment in a Trump building, we would know who the real owner was—you know, is it Joe Smith down the street, or is it a Kazak billionaire who’s interested in having influence on the U.S. government? And they have now said they will not be enforcing that law either.

And then finally, there is outright corruption. So Trump has created a cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, which appears to be attracting investors who have a direct interest either in escaping a regulation or, in some cases, a lawsuit or an indictment by the federal government, or who have some interest in influencing Trump or his family in some other way. And as you say, there may be hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into this project and into others. We have no clear way to keep track of it. We don’t know the exact relationship between those investors and decisions made by the Treasury Department or the Justice Department. And it is, again, corruption and self-dealing on a scale that we’ve never seen in American history. And this really puts this administration in a completely different league.

Frum: There’s nothing like it, because the presidencies that are thought of as corrupt—Harding, Ulysses Grant—what happened there was you had a typically inattentive president, or in Grant’s case, a president who was a little too protective of his beloved wife’s relatives and turned a blind eye to corrupt practices by people around him, and maybe the president should have known what was going on. In Grant’s case, Grant was obviously no fool. He should have known what was going on. Harding was more of a fool.

But the presidents themselves, the money didn’t stick to them. And people remember Teapot Dome as being associated with Harding, but Harding didn’t benefit from Teapot Dome. He just was ineffective and inattentive. In the same way, Grant didn’t get rich as president. His wife’s family picked up some lucrative positions and made dirty tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars in the money of the day. But again, Grant was inattentive and overprotective. FDR allowed some of his children to engage in business practices that they should not have—no suggestion that any of it stuck to him. Again, inattentive and overindulgent. Those are the practices. It has never been a case of money flowing into the hands of a president as president on this kind of scale.

Now, one of the questions that will, I’m sure, be occurring to many people who watch and listen is, Isn’t this illegal? And you’ve cited some specific laws. There’s also—we discussed this a couple of weeks ago with Peter Keisler, the former acting attorney general—there are general background statutes that say you can’t use public office at all, in any way that benefits yourself. You know, even if we haven’t specified, This is forbidden, there’s a general, Oh, and one more thing. You can’t do this. But as you were saying, all of this depends on the president to enforce the law. And if the president is determined not to, and punishes those who try and removes those who try, the system in the end cannot be enforced against the wish of the president, at least not so long as he has Congress on his side.

Applebaum: Presumably, the body that would be responsible for enforcing, you know, corruption laws against the president is the Department of Justice. And the Department of Justice in this administration is fully controlled by the president. There’s a very political, very partisan group of people in charge of it.

We are hearing all the time—I’m sure you’ve heard this, as well—about current employees of the Department of Justice resigning. Some have done it publicly; some have done it more quietly. They’re, you know, looking for jobs afterwards, and they don’t want to be in the newspapers. But there are many people who are resigning because the department isn’t doing its job, not just in terms of enforcing the laws on the president but everyone else.

And so what we’re going to have very soon is a very, very partisan group of lawyers—or pseudo-lawyers—who are supposed to be enforcing the law but who are all there serving at the pleasure of the president, not there to enforce the Constitution or the legal system. You know, it’s always a tough thing. I’ve encountered this problem in other countries. I mean, sometimes it’s called the chief prosecutor. In our system, it’s called the attorney general. It’s always a tough thing to say that that person is independent of the president, even though they’re appointed by the president. I mean, they’re meant to act independently. In theory, they should have the mentality of someone acting independently. And it’s always—that’s always a touchy thing to ensure.

But at least in the last, you know—in modern American history, those people have, you know, sought to attain and to portray some kind of independence. They take an oath, not to the president personally but to the legal system, to the law. They attract the best lawyers in the countries—very young, idealistic people, because those are people who want to work for the U.S. government, for the American people, not for the personal benefit, the financial benefit of the president.

I’m sure, you know, listeners can point to many exceptions and moments when, you know, the system hasn’t worked. But that was the theory of it. That was the idea. You know, how do you get and ensure rule of law? You get it by having people inside the system who have some kind of independence, some sense of independence. And some of this is not ensured by some statute in the Constitution or some legal rule. It’s assured by the ethos of the people who go to work for the Department of Justice or the ethos of people who become judges. You know, people don’t become a judge—they don’t become a federal judge—because they want to enrich the president’s family. They do it because they feel some fealty to the Constitution. And that system has worked up until now, and now we will see whether this second Trump administration can break it.

I would add one other thing, which is that we know that people who were being asked for promotion and who are being up for promotion inside the Department of Justice, some of them have been asked very political questions. For example, What do you think happened on January 6? And the right answer, of course, is that, you know, The great American patriots arose up to ensure that the correctly elected president, Donald Trump, would remain in office. And people who are unable to say that—because, of course, it’s not true, and so if you’re saying it, you’re lying—they’re not going to get promoted in Trump’s Department of Justice. So we’re going to have a very different body of people seeking to enforce the law, and you can already see the results.

Frum: Yeah. Bad character becomes a bona fide job qualification.

You point to something here, and this is how this becomes a linking theme: When you’re doing a backsliding democracy—we’re not, of course; this is not a full-blown dictatorship like Maduro’s Venezuela; this is a backsliding democracy like those we’ve seen in other parts of the world, in Central and Eastern Europe and perhaps in parts of East Asia, as well—it becomes quite dangerous to be the chief executive, because you’re accumulating all this money.

There are, actually, statutes on the books that say you’re not supposed to do this. And there are broken but still present parts of the bureaucracy that are theoretically supposed to enforce these laws against you. So you need, for self-preservation, one by one to shut them down. And that is, I think, the linking point between Donald Trump’s repressive agenda and his corruption agenda. The corruption agenda is possibly legally dangerous, unless you break, also, all the rest of the state.

Applebaum: Yeah, no. He’s going to have to break a lot of institutions. I mean, he’s seeking to break the Department of Justice right now. He will have to break the FBI, which he’s already partway towards doing by putting, you know, the extreme partisan Kash Patel in charge of it. He may eventually have to break the federal judicial bench. I mean, you know, the people who are the judges in our political system at the federal level are all people—I mean, including and maybe even especially the conservatives are all people—who have made the Constitution a kind of fetish. You know, these are often constitutional originalists, you know, people whose theory of the judiciary is that we should hew as closely as possible to the letter and the spirit of the law as it was written in the 18th century. So he will have to either defy all of those people or find some way of getting around them or find some way of intimidating them if he is to continue.

So you’re right: This creates an enormous interest that he has—and many of the people around him have—to continue breaking and subjugating those institutions. Plus, there’s a whole host of other—I mean, anybody whose job is transparency (that includes journalists; that includes investigative groups, you know, the consortia of journalists and NGOs who’ve been created over the years to do investigative reporting), a lot of those are going to become targets. And some already have been, you know, either targets of smear campaigns on Twitter, or maybe they will even be investigated by the administration itself. All of those things—those transparency bodies, those legal bodies, all of them—will have to be somehow pushed out of the way if this accumulation of funds is to continue.

Frum: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that Trump and his defenders often say is they feel uniquely persecuted: No president has ever been investigated as much. No president has been convicted of crimes before. No president has been impeached twice. And they don’t connect any of these results, the predicates of their own action.

But what is revealing about those comments is they reveal how endangered Trump and the people around him feel. I mean, even if, in the end, the American political system cannot hold a president to account, which looks like something we discovered about the system in the Biden years. That had a president who tried to overthrow the government of the United States; there’s lots of evidence he’d taken bribes, he’d stolen documents, and everybody seemed to make a kind of collective, unspoken decision, You know what? Too big. We can’t deal with this. But lots of other people went—a thousand people who took part in the January 6 crime were prosecuted and were sentenced. The others are also in danger, so they become co-authors of the need to break institutions with the president, who may, in the end, get away with it because the American system can’t do that to its own president.

Applebaum: That’s interesting. I mean, I hadn’t thought of that psychological insight, namely that they talk all the time about being prosecuted and being victims and so on, and maybe it’s because they, you know—of course, they know they’re guilty. They know they broke the law. They know what happened on January 6. They know how much money they’re stealing. So you’re right. Maybe they do feel—maybe it’s a reflection, a kind of authentic reflection of how afraid they feel. And they are all people who are engaged in breaking the law and in destroying and undermining the Constitution. And they’re, perhaps at some level, consciously or unconsciously afraid eventually they might pay a price for it.

I mean, this, of course—we see this also in other countries. I mean, you know, why is Netanyahu, for example, so keen to break the Israeli judicial system? It’s partly because he, too, is worried about being held to account. You know, why is Viktor Orbán so determined to stay in office despite the fact that his—this is the prime minister of Hungary—you know, his numbers are falling? He has a real political opponent. You know, what might persuade him to try and to, you know, block that political opponent, maybe even through illegal means? It’s also, again, the fear that the very real crimes he’s carried out—the money that he stole and the money that his family have benefited from taking from the Hungarian state—you know, maybe that’s going to be investigated. So their anxiety and paranoia has a real basis. You’re right.

Frum: And if there are free and fair midterm elections, given the very bad economic news that seems to be arriving day by day, Congress can be an investigative body, even if you can shut down the Department of Justice. So you have to worry—you just have all these points of danger, and you have to shut them down one by one, the free press being one of the most important.

Now, historically, Americans have seldom cared all that much about corruption and government. People always cite Watergate. But I think one of the things I think we’ve all learned from the Trump years is: If 1974, if instead of being the worst economic year since the Great Depression, the year of Watergate—if it had been a great economic year, I am no longer very confident that Richard Nixon would’ve been in much trouble, and that people were ready to hear bad news about Watergate because it was a terrible year economically: inflation and unemployment and oil shortages and gas lines. But 2017, 2018, 2019 were pretty prosperous years. And although the offenses that were happening over those years—not as big as now, but bigger than anything ever seen before—Americans tended to shrug as, by the way, they mostly shrugged through Teapot Dome.

Applebaum: I wonder if it’s that or whether it’s the extreme, you know, partisanship that we now live in that makes people literally unable to see Trump’s corruption. And this is a theme you may also be interested to discuss. I have one or two friends who, during the Biden years, became very angry by what they perceived to be as Biden’s corruption—nothing that was ever proven, nothing that was ever shown.

There were a lot of rumors about what Hunter Biden had done or not done. You know, as far as I can see, Hunter Biden was guilty of taking advantage of his father’s name, and he got himself appointed to a couple of boards. But there is no—you know, we’re not even living in the same world, you know, the world in which it’s very bad that Hunter Biden was on a board of a Ukrainian or any other company because of who his surname was, and the world in which the president himself is openly taking hundreds of millions of dollars in de facto bribes from all over the world. These aren’t really the same planet.

And yet, you can find people who will say, What about Hunter Biden? Or Joe Biden was very corrupt too. And that’s a fallback position that people continue to find very useful. And if you live in the media bubble where you watch Fox News and your information comes from the right, then you probably haven’t heard very much about the scale of corruption in the Trump administration, and you’ve probably heard endlessly about Hunter Biden.

And so that’s the other piece of the story that’s, I think, maybe even different from the 1970s. I don’t think we were that divided. I don’t think we were that partisan. I mean, of course, in the 1970s, the other thing that happened was that we had—you know, it was the Republicans, ultimately, who held Nixon to account, and the Republican Senate and the Republican Congress who put pressure on him to resign. And we don’t have that anymore either. We’re missing this really vital piece of the U.S. Constitution. We’re missing—as you said a minute ago, we’re missing Congress. And if there are no leaders on the right—if there are no Republican leaders who are willing to stand up to this—then maybe it’s not surprising that ordinary Americans who take their steer from their political leaders don’t see it either. They’re not hearing anyone talk about it. They’re not hearing anyone investigate it or say anything about it at all.

Frum: Well, Hunter Biden stands in a long and rather dismal American tradition of the bad relative of the serving president. And there is almost always one of these. Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy. You go through the list. George H. W. Bush had a son who traded on the family name. There’s almost always a relative. I think Eisenhower is the only one where all the brothers were as exceptional as Eisenhower himself, each in his own way. Usually, there’s a disgraceful relative out there. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s children—my God—they were the Hunter Bidens of their day, and they did all kinds of shady business deals.

But this maybe does create some shadow of permission for those who want to believe in Trump, because if you are minded to ignore what’s going on, you can say, Well, every president has a son or brother, a nephew, who is making a dishonest living of hundreds of thousands of dollars by trading on the president’s name and selling paintings to people who obviously are not interested in the quality of the art in the painting. And therefore, that practice inures you or predisposes you, as you said, if you’re partisan, to say, And therefore, there’s no difference between the president himself taking hundreds of millions of dollars—not hundreds of thousands—and using it in a way that that directly influences American politics in ways we can see.

The crypto industry is going to go unregulated, in part because the crypto industry has directed so much money to Donald Trump. Or the direct benefit—apparently, as best we can tell—to Elon Musk’s companies and interests have flowed from his actions in government. These are different kinds of things, but if you want to give yourself permission to cite Franklin Roosevelt’s children or Joe Biden’s, you can do that, but you’re not telling yourself the truth. You’re saying, here are two things, and we can apply words to these two quite different things and use words to make them seem similar, even though they’re not.

Applebaum: Yeah. No, but it’s effective. I mean, you know, I have heard people use this logic and make these arguments, and it seems to be useful in, you know, convincing people who might otherwise have some doubts about Trump and the Trump administration, who might otherwise feel a little uncomfortable about supporting something that’s this obviously corrupt.

I mean, there’s another mechanism that I’m also worried about, and this is something you get in authoritarian regimes, which is: When you have a political leader who so constantly and repeatedly lies himself—I mean, Trump was lying just the other day about gas prices, for example. He says they’re lower than they are. And he will lie about the effect of tariffs as they come in. He lies about things that people can see and feel. I mean, Americans who buy gas know what the price of gas is, you know, so Trump saying it’s something else doesn’t change that.

But when the president lies like that, he creates, also, an atmosphere where people say, like, The president is lying, and who knows what’s really true? I have no idea what any of this means. I’m just going to stay out of it. Like, I’m staying home. I’m not going to involve myself in this totally corrupt, dishonest world that is our political system. I’m not going to participate. I’m not going to engage. How can I have any influence in a world where—as my friend Peter Pomerantsev used this Hanna Arendt quote for his book title, you know—nothing is true and everything is possible? Anything can happen, and I don’t have any control on it.

So you can see, you know, the beginnings of, really, an attempt not just to keep journalists out and people who are interested in transparency and accountability out, but also everybody out. You know, nobody’s going to want to be part of this completely corrupt system where everyone is bad.

Frum: Some of this, I think, is an unintended result. And I think I’ll give two examples from the weekend that I suspect even the politically engaged people who would listen to a podcast like this will recognize in themselves what I’m describing.

So over the weekend just passed, President Trump tweeted about restoring Alcatraz as a federal prison. Now, this can’t happen. I mean, Alcatraz is an ancient prison. It’s been a federal museum, I think, for half a century. The cells are not to modern standards. You can’t do it. And it looks like what happened was a TV station that he was watching had a movie that was set in Alcatraz, and he watched the movie and thought, Alcatraz, I’m going to make that a prison again. And as the whim formed itself in his impulsive brain, he put a message on Truth Social that he wants to do this.

Should you react to that or not? And I think most of us react, I’m not going to react to—that’s so obviously something that’s not going to happen. That’s not a real thing. It’s just noise. And I’m sure that’s the correct response for each of us as working individuals with finite time and finite energy. You know, you can’t react to everything crazy he says, because he says more crazy things than you can have reactions to. On the other hand, it opens a process of endless devaluation of the president’s words, that what the president says really doesn’t matter.

So in that same weekend, President Trump posted on Truth Social a comment about how he wanted to have tariffs on movies to create an all-in-America movie industry. So that’s a little less impossible than turning Alcatraz back into a federal prison. It’s also pretty impossible and something that he’s probably not going to do. And again, but it’s something that could happen, unlike the Alcatraz example. And so should you take the energy—if you’re a journalist who writes about these things, if you’re a concerned citizen—to react to the movie thing, or should you let that one go?

And there’s this endless pushing of just, he says so much stuff that’s nonsense that you actually begin—and your more sophisticated peers will say, You’re kind of a sucker. It’s just something the president said. He says things all the time. You can’t react to that. And then when he says, I don’t know whether I’m bound to—in the same weekend—I don’t know whether I’m bound to obey the Constitution or not, which is something he said, is that something we should dismiss? Is that Trump just gassing? Or is that something that is directionally significant?

So he wears down people, even who are the most committed, by saying so many things that are just ridiculous, but buried in them are little poison barbs of danger.

Applebaum: No, I mean, and he devalues the word of the president. Nobody knows whether to take him seriously or not. And you’re right: And then when we come to a moment where it matters what the president says, and it matters what decision he takes, and it matters whether he believes in the Constitution or not, there will be a lot of people who have tuned out because there’s so much noise.

You know, the president a couple of days ago posted a photograph of himself dressed as the pope, a kind of AI image of himself—you know, profoundly insulting to millions of Catholics around the world who are still in mourning for the late pope. And all of it contributes to this atmosphere where people just want to say, Well, I don’t—this is too much. I can’t stand it. I’m not going to participate, and I’m going home.

And that is that is the quintessential authoritarian tactic, you know? Because what you want is to rule behind a shadow of secrecy. You know, you want to be able to steal the money or take the money and have no one know about it. You want to be enacting, you know, laws and rules of your own design in the dark, without courts, without judges, without attention. And you want the population to be dulled and bored and angry and cynical, and you want them all to stay home. And so we see all that. We’ve seen this movie before in other countries, I should say, and we’re seeing it happen in the United States right now.

Frum: Well, let me wrap up by taking us in a slightly different direction to something that it’s a little uncomfortable for us to discuss. When you and I talk about people who do this or people who do that, it’s not just a figure of speech. We’re talking about people oftentimes who we know personally, know sometimes quite well, because—I think you a little less than me, but I very much come from the conservative political tradition, very much a conservative legal tradition. I was a president of the Federalist Society on a college campus a long time ago. And many of these people are people you also have come into contact with. And we watch people we know, sometimes cynically—or at least at the start, it’s cynical, and then it becomes more fanatical—you know, people we knew from the Claremont Colleges, which has somehow become a center of right-wing anti-Constitutionalism.

How do you cope with this in your—and I’m not going to ask you to use names or anything like that—but in your private life, how do you cope with people whom you once held dear going off in these bad paths?

Applebaum: So this was a topic of my previous book, Twilight of Democracy. I had this experience, actually, in multiple countries because—I don’t know if you would call me conservative or Republican, but I was certainly an anti-communist, and that put me in that camp for many years. And my friends in Poland, where I lived part of the time, and in London, where I worked for many years, and in the United States also I came from that world. And I watched that world divide in many places.

And it’s funny: I thought that in 2016, I’d been through that—in 2015 in Poland, 2016 in the U.S., that I’d been through that, that the divisions had resolved themselves, that the people who were really fanatical and wound up being pro-Trump or fanatically pro-Brexit in some cases, you know, that they had sort of faded out of my life. And then I discovered in this election cycle in 2024 that there were new incidents of it, and there were new friends who were put off, whether it was by transgender issues or whether it was by economic issues, who found themselves wanting to support Trump. And I, frankly, don’t cope very well with it. I know some people are better at separating their political views and their private lives than I am. I know a lot of people have relatives who are on the other side of a divide, and they have to live with them because you don’t desert your elderly father for something like that.

But I have found it difficult because this story comes so close to, I want to say, values that I hold but also values that I thought all of us shared, you know? So the people who I know and who I consider to be friends, I think of them as people who believe in the rule of law, who support the Constitution, who think, you know, a democratic political system is better, who are bothered by lying in politics. And, you know, it’s not that we all share—we don’t have to have the same views about everything, but there are these kind of basic values that we share, and I’ve discovered that that’s not true. And I find it now difficult to deal with people who now live in this other reality.

And the thing I’m most afraid of now is that once you made the decision to vote for Trump in 2024, especially—in 2016, it was different because we didn’t really know what kind of a president he was going to be. It could have been a protest. You didn’t like Hillary Clinton, whatever. There were reasons why people did it. When you chose in 2024, you chose someone who had broken the law in multiple ways, and you knew it. You know, you chose someone who sought to overthrow the results of the election of 2020, and you knew it. So you were choosing someone who you knew to be lawless, who you knew had disdain for American institutions. And I think that the people who made that decision are going to have a lot of trouble backtracking, moving back on it.

I’ve seen lots of commentary now about, you know, Trump did this or that, you know, Are the people who voted for him going to be sorry now? And I think it’s going to be a long time before they’re sorry, because they made this intellectual commitment to something that was against many of the things that they stood for. They had to justify it to themselves in many different ways. We just talked about one of them—because, you know, because Biden is corrupt, whatever.

And now it’s going to be very hard to turn around and say, That was wrong. You know, it’s going to be—you know, they will stick to this. They will go stand by it. They will find new reasons to support Trump, precisely because it was such a bad choice, and precisely because they had to overcome their own internal doubts, and precisely because they know he broke the law, and precisely because they know he has disdain for things that they say that they value. And so I worry that it’s going to be very hard to make up with them at some point in the future.

Frum: Anne, let me end with this last, more hopeful thought. Maybe what happens in the lives of countries is: You get these periodic moral crises as a sort of prod to alert us. I mean, American politics was much cleaner after Watergate than it had ever been before. Before the Second World War, America was a democracy for some people; but for many, not. I mean, there’s a lot of research now about how much of the Nuremberg laws the Nazis imposed on German Jews in 1935 were based on the everyday practices in southern American states in 1934. And not only did the Nazis notice it, but Americans noticed it, too, and became ashamed. And you wonder: If there hadn’t been a World War II, and if there hadn’t been a Cold War, would the transition away from racial segregation in this country have been as dramatic and decisive and more or less peaceful as it was?

So maybe this is one of those—I think, doesn’t Lincoln say something in the second inaugural address about how this is one of those offenses that needs to come? And maybe it’s an offense that needed to come because the people who’d grown up since the Cold War had lost sight of some of the things that we experienced during the Cold War, but why democracy was precious and worth fighting for.

Applebaum: The feeling of losing things and the understanding that something is slipping away can be very dramatic. It can galvanize people to resist. That’s true. And you can hear in the national conversation—I had a conversation with a niece yesterday, and I’ve talked to a lot of other younger people. They feel and understand that something is wrong and that something is being lost, and they are beginning now to reorient themselves to think about how they protect it or how they save it, or how they change the country in ways that make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I mean, it may be that, you know, certainly as we’ve been discussing, there has been a long slide in this direction. You know, it wasn’t just as if Trump, you know, arrived in January and suddenly began to do things that had no precedent. I mean, he had a precedent in his first term. The decline of the electoral system began, you know, much longer ago with Citizens United [ v. FEC]. You know, the role of money in politics has been increasing. You can trace—he’s part of a path. But he is now creating a crisis that takes us off that slow glide and makes this into a moment that could galvanize people. And you’re right. I hope it will.

Frum: Anne, there’s never a conversation I have with you where I don’t come away feeling I’ve learned something and maybe also steeled myself to try a little harder and better. So thank you. It’s such a pleasure, and it’s such a kind act that you would come and talk to me. Bye-bye.

Applebaum: Thank you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks to Anne Applebaum for that fascinating and inspiring conversation. I’m so grateful to her for joining The David Frum Show. Now I’m going to put in a commercial here for The Atlantic because Anne and I are colleagues there. If you like what you see and hear on The David Frum Show, remember, you can support Anne’s work and mine and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at theatlantic.com/listener. Repeat that slowly: theatlantic.com/listener.

And now some questions from viewers and listeners that I’ll try my best to answer. The first question is from Soren. Soren writes: “I’m a high-school student in Seattle, and I’ve noticed many of my peers are deeply polarized, often echoing media talking points and struggling to engage in thoughtful political discussions, especially across party lines. How can I encourage more open, level-headed political conversations among young people who seem entrenched in tribal thinking?”

Well, Soren, I commend you for this open-minded approach and for your patience with your peers, and I salute the question you’re asking. It’s a difficult problem. And look—it’s not like those of us who are older succeed any better at it than those of you who are younger.

I think one thing—I remember doing this when I was in high school and debating with my friends—is sometimes saying, Look—I’ll tell you what: I’m going to give you one thing to read, and you can do the same for me. You give me something you want me to read; I’ll give you something I’d like you to read. Let’s read them both together and then talk about afterwards what we’ve read. And if you can limit the conversation to what’s on the page—no “what about” questions, no Well, what do you also think?—just what’s on the page, I think the more you channel a conversation, the more productive it can be. And at the very least, you can introduce your friends to a better quality of reading material than maybe they’ve been reading so far.

Here’s a question from Bruno: “In the latter part of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, working classes supported political movements that bettered their lives against the so-called robber barons. Now it seems they support political movements which worsen their lives to the benefit of billionaires. Why?”

Well, congratulations, Bruno, for putting your finger on one of the most vexed questions in all of American history and political science. In the 19th century, across most of the industrial world—Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy—there arose social democratic parties associated with trade unions that tried to advance a worker-focused agenda. The United States never produced such a movement, such a party. Instead, the United States produced protest movements that operated within and against both the Republican and Democratic Parties, never producing a really effective broad-based social democratic movement. So that’s the historical part.

To your question about the present day, I think the problem is: In the modern world, the idea of working class is an idea that makes less and less sense. So many people claim to be working class, and it’s often very hard to understand exactly what they mean, or they mean contradictory things. Very classic example: Imagine an argument over Thanksgiving dinner between one brother-in-law with a high-school diploma—is working as a car salesman, and in a good year might make $120,000 and in a bad year makes $60,000, but has not that much status in society and is a little insecure about his academic bona fides—and he argues with his brother-in-law who is an adjunct professor at a local college and who makes maybe $45,000 a year but who has a Ph.D. Which of them is working class? Well, they will argue about that all night.

I think just generally, class-based analysis doesn’t really work all that well in America, because it’s a country with so many differences of people’s situations that people often end up transposing class as a marker of attitude and consumption patterns.

I remember, a political scientist named Charles Murray wrote a quiz years ago in which he asked the question, How thick was your bubble? And he had a set of questions, and they were all cultural. What kind of clothes did you wear? What kind of cars did you drive? That’s what made you working class. And the idea was: He was very hostile to people who got a lot of their position in society from their levels of education. But if a person with a lot of education is economically precarious and works under the direction and control of others, I don’t know what we are saying when we say that that person is or isn’t working class.

In 2024, Donald Trump did very well among the most affluent people in society. The Republican vote still skews rich. There are a lot of people who will tell you it doesn’t. But the way they get to the claim that the Republican Party is a working-class party is by using education as their metric, rather than income or rather than working under the supervision and control of others.

From Jeff: “At what point will the Trump administration start fudging or outright falsifying economic data, such as jobs reports, inflation measures, and consumer-confidence data, and other traditional information put out by the departments of labor or commerce? And how will we even know the information is bogus?”

This is a great question and an important question. A big part of the project of Elon Musk’s DOGE—I don’t know if I’m supposed to pronounce it “dog” or “doja”—group was to break a lot of the conveyor belts for reliable public information, not so much to create false information but just to withdraw accurate information. And we see the president himself doing his bit by making up these crazy stories about the price of gasoline, based on strange data sequences like wholesale prices, not the price of the pump.

Mercifully, there is abundant private-sector data on many economic issues that you can get some idea of whether things are right or wrong. The government produces jobs reports, but there is a lot of information on purchasing and things like that that tends to be proprietary and is sometimes expensive. But the people who care about these issues can track and will begin to sound an alert if the government information is wrong. I would worry in the immediate term not about false information but about lacking information, absent information, broken information. That’s the direction the Trump administration, with Elon Musk’s help, seems to be heading.

And the last question from Colin—he quotes something I said on air in an episode or two back: “I had always thought of myself as a conservative because I believe in things like a strong and robust foreign policy to oppose authoritarians abroad in free markets and personal liberties and in constitutional values that underpin our democracy.” Colin asked, “Well, why do you call those things conservative?”

And I suppose I’m reflecting the world in which I came of age. But in the late 1970s, the question of market or not market, that was a lively debate. And the people who were skeptical of markets proudly identified themselves as being on the left. That was a time when there was a lot of post-Vietnam trauma over America’s role in the world. And the people who were more skeptical of that role, who doubted that the United States was a force for good or, anyway, thought that good intentions would likely go awry again, they mostly—not always, but they mostly—identified themselves proudly as being on the left. And so it seemed to me that the people who are opposite those things were the people on the right.

But many of these are deep American values that at normal times are more broadly shared. Unfortunately, we live right now in what is not a normal time. And a lot of the things that I thought of when I was a young Reagan enthusiast in 1980 as belonging to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, they’ve surrendered those commitments and those beliefs. And it’s shameful for them and sad for all the rest of us.

Thank you for listening today to The David Frum Show. We’ll be back next week with more. And again, the best way to support our work if you like what we’re doing is subscribe to The Atlantic. But otherwise, visit us here on YouTube or your favorite podcasting platform for more next week of The David Frum Show.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

Donald Trump is shaking up his Cabinet, while his immigration agenda faces mounting pushback from the courts. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss.

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas has called the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act “unlawful”—and was among other judges from across the country who have ruled against the president.

“The defining fact of the first three months of this second term of Trump is that so many of the institutions that so successfully opposed him in the first term have been absent or in retreat,” Michael Scherer, an Atlantic staff writer, said last night. “The one exception to that is the legal process.” Although judges “operate at a different tempo than politicians or executive orders,” he added, “you have seen in the last few weeks a really dramatic move by the judiciary to step in.”

Joining the guest moderator and White House correspondent at PBS News Hour, Laura Barrón-López, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Ali Vitali, the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC; Alexander Ward, a national-security reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses how misinformation, distrust in science, and extremist rhetoric are fueling a deadly resurgence of preventable diseases in the United States—and urges clear and responsible leadership to protect public health.

He’s then joined by Alan Bernstein, the director of global health at the University of Oxford, to examine the long-term consequences of the right’s war on science and vaccine research.

Finally, David answers listener questions on creating laws to counter Trump’s norm violations, on David’s confidence in the future of free and fair elections, and how to teach civics to high schoolers in the Trump era.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 4 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thank you for all who watched and listened to the first three episodes. All of us at The Atlantic and at The David Frum Show are so gratified by the extraordinary response to our first three episodes, and we hope to continue to meet your expectations in this and future episodes.

My guest today is Alan Bernstein, director of global health at Oxford University. Alan Bernstein coordinates all the health and medical research across the vast domain of Oxford University and tries to ensure that scientists talk to each other and talk to the public in ways that benefit the safety of the whole planet. Before that, Alan served as the founder and president of the Canadian Institutes [of] Health Research, a coordinating body for health research across all of Canada, much like the Centers for Disease Control in the United States. And before that, he rose to fame and eminence as one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and virology. So I’m very glad to be joined today by Alan Bernstein.

And first, some preliminary remarks on the subjects we’ll be talking about in today’s discussion.

[Music]

Frum: As I record this episode in late April 2025, the United States is gripped by an outbreak of measles. More than 800 cases have been diagnosed in 24 states. Three people are dead: two of them, unvaccinated school-aged children; one of them, an unvaccinated adult.

We are only about one-third of the way through the year 2025, and yet the United States has suffered nearly triple the number of cases of measles in 2025 as it did in all of 2024. Measles is caused, of course, by a pathogen, but it is enabled by human ignorance and human neglect. Rising numbers of children are going unvaccinated. About a third of American children fail to get the full suite of vaccines that the CDCs—Centers for Disease Control—recommends. And about 7 percent of American children go unvaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella.

These are invitations to human harm and human suffering, and they come about because of a rise in American attitudes of ignorance and unawareness about the causes of disease and how diseases are prevented. Let me read you a recent statement from the Kaiser Family Foundation, an important source of health and medical-research information.

Here’s Kaiser:

When it comes to false claims that the [MMR] vaccines have been proven to cause autism, that vitamin A can prevent the measles infections, or that getting the measles vaccine is more dangerous than becoming infected with measles, less than 5 percent of adults say they think these claims are “definitely true,” and much larger shares say they are “definitely false.”

That’s the good news. Returning to Kaiser:

However, at least half of adults are uncertain about whether these claims are true or false, falling in the “malleable middle” and saying each claim is either “probably true” or “probably false.” While at least half of adults express some level of uncertainty, partisans differ in the shares who say each of these false claims is definitely or probably true, with Republicans and independents at least twice as likely as Democrats to believe or lean towards believing each false claim about measles. One-third of Republicans and a quarter of independents say it is “definitely” or “probably true” that the MMR vaccines have been proven to cause autism, compared to one in 10 Democrats; three in 10 Republicans and independents say it is “definitely” or “probably true” that vitamin A can prevent measles compared to 14 percent of Democrats; and one in five Republicans and independents believe or lean toward believing that the measles vaccine is more dangerous than measles infections compared to about one in 10 Democrats.

Republicans are believing things that are putting their own children at risk. We see again here how the MAGA cult is becoming a death cult that consumes the lives of its believers. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died preventably from the COVID virus.

Your chance of dying from COVID was about the same whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. The disease did not discriminate by political affiliation. But after vaccines became available, the disease began to discriminate. Suddenly, people in blue towns and blue states began to survive the disease at much higher rates than people in red towns and red states. Those deaths were overwhelmingly concentrated in areas where people were loyal to Republican ideas and listened to Republican influencers. The price of believing your favorite right-of-center influencer could have been your own life.

What kind of political movement sacrifices its own people in that way—to make some point, to make money, or to score a political jab against an opponent? It’s a little hard to explain exactly what they thought they were doing—it’s not hard to explain it. It’s a little unpleasant to contemplate the explanation of what they thought they were doing. But we can measure the effect of what they were doing in lost lives. And now with the spread of measles and the shrinkage of measles vaccines according to political affiliation, we can see this same horrible process of death by political partisanship reoccurring in the middle 2020s as at the beginning of the 2020s.

Against this spread of weaponized ignorance, what is needed is the clearest possible messages from everyone in positions of authority—whether public or private—that it is your duty as a parent to see that your child is vaccinated against preventable disease, and if your children are unvaccinated, you have failed in your duty as a parent. And that is a message that needs to be spread by everyone who’s in a position to spread a message. And the authorities should also say that in the hard cases where it can be shown that a child died because of an intentional failure by the parent to vaccinate the child, that parent should be held to account—in much the same way as, in my opinion, if the child died because of an unsecured firearm in the child’s home left there by a parent, the parent should be held to account. Protecting your child is your most important duty as a parent. Put the gun in a safe, and make sure the child is vaccinated.

And yet, instead, we are seeing people put into positions of high authority who are not only hesitant to spread that message, but in fact are the leading hoaxsters and fraudsters against the vaccines. At the head of the Department of Health and Human Services is the most notorious proponent of letting people suffer measles death—of spreading false claims, outrageous claims, debunked claims, exploded claims against the vaccines—and by the way, demeaning and insulting people who struggle with autism. People with autism can live meaningful lives, yet according to our present secretary, they’re no better than wasted lives and useless people who need to be counted in some kind of registry so we can keep tab of their numbers—for what sinister purpose, who can barely begin to imagine? But clearly not for a purpose of respect and dignity.

And because of this outrageous and cruel lack of regard for people who are on the autism spectrum—many of which scans a lot of cases, both worst cases and less-bad cases—he is urging Americans, or he has, over his lifetime, urged Americans to leave their children unvaccinated. And his secretary of Health and Human Services is staffing his agency with people who are mealy mouthed or worse in the fight against this preventable, unnecessary cause of death.

The anti-vax ideology comes from some strange places. It comes, I think, in the first place from a myth of a benign nature. That’s, I think, one of the reasons why it tended to, maybe before the Trump era, be so prevalent on certain parts of, like, the vegetarian left. If you believe that nature is kind and good and benign and only human—and the only wickedness is human—and if you are unaware of how massively human lives were at risk from disease before the modern era, it may seem like, Why am I intruding into my beautiful child’s body this sharp needle then that makes them squawk for a moment, and introducing these foreign substances? Why would I do that when nature wants us all to live and rejoice?

Well, nature doesn’t want you to live and rejoice. Nature is utterly indifferent to your hopes and wishes. (Laughs.) And if it were up to nature, half your children would be dead. You’d be dead, too, by age 50, at the latest. Nature is not our friend. Nature is a resource that we must protect and steward, but it is not our friend. It does not wish us well. It doesn’t have wishes at all.

I think some of the anti-vax cult also comes from another myth: the myth of malign government—not just that government is inefficient, as it often is, and clumsy, as it often is, but that actually there’s some kind of secret conspiracy up there of people who, for some bizarre and nefarious purpose, want to prevent Americans from enjoying the beneficent benignity of nature, and instead want to inject them with all of these artificial products like seatbelts. I think this is the part of the myth that has gained the upper hand most recently, this myth of conspiracy and government and other high places.

But the truth: Nature’s not benign, and government is not malign. But there are a lot of fraudsters out there. That’s the truth. And they have more ways of reaching people than ever before. And the cost of these frauds is becoming ever more terrible in lost human lives.

So as you listen to my talk today about Alan Bernstein—we’re going to talk about many of these issues. I think we’re going to try to talk as dispassionately as possible, but as I talk about them, I’m really angry about this. I’m really angry about this. It should be one of those things that, just as there are no Republican and Democrat ways to sweep the streets or shovel the snow, there should be no Republican or Democrat way, disagreement about protecting our children from preventable diseases.

All of us should salute vaccination. It’s one of the most magnificent achievements of human civilization. One of the ways that marks us off from all the sad eras that went before us, when parents had to grieve half their children before their third birthday or before their 20th birthday. We have an opportunity to live better, healthier lives than ever before in history. How could we refuse such a thing? And how much should we condemn and revile those people who deceive their fellow citizens into refusing this magnificent gift of science and technology?

So we’re going to speak dispassionately with Alan Bernstein. I’m not dispassionate about this. I hope you won’t be dispassionate either.

But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: Alan Bernstein, welcome to The David Frum Show. Thank you for joining us.

You have spent your career as a practitioner of science, as a director of science, as an adviser to governments about science. It looks to those of us who are not scientists, like the government of the United States is engaged in a campaign against science of almost unprecedented historic proportions. As you and I speak, there is a measles outbreak in the United States—actually, there are 10 separate outbreaks, 800 cases, three dead as of the time we speak. There are dramatic firings and cuts to government agencies—the National Institutes [of] Health, the vaccine program. Progress toward cures for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is supposed to have been slowed or maybe halted altogether. And, of course, there are these extraordinary pressures on medical and scientific research at universities.

So if you would offer your assessment, how much has been done to science in the United States in these past weeks?

Alan Bernstein: So first, David, it’s a pleasure to be on the show with you. First of all, backing up a little bit and just saying how important science has been to America’s success. I think people don’t quite appreciate that. But it goes back to, actually, World War II. And Harry Truman, when he was president, realized that in one way, science kind of won the war. It wasn’t just the atomic bomb: It was penicillin. It was radar. It was sonar.

And so he asked a guy called Vannevar Bush—I don’t think it’s a relation to the other Bushes—to make some recommendations about what America should do. And [Bush] wrote what’s a famous book in scientific circles called Science, the Endless Frontier. And in that book, Bush recommended that America invest heavily in science—and particularly in American universities—because it would lead to economic well-being. It would lead to power in the world. It would lead to security for America.

And I don’t know that anybody at that time appreciated just how right he was. Because if you look at the growth of the American economy and the growth of American well-being and health outcomes—anything you want to measure—the numbers are anywhere between 20 to 40 to 50 percent of America’s well-being, if you will, and growth in GDP and all those things, was due to science and innovation.

Today, as we’re witnessing kind of the destruction of the institutions behind American science, it’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that any administration would do this.

Frum: All right, well, destruction is a dramatic word. How severe is the damage?

Bernstein: I think it’s very severe, and it’s not just my own personal view. I was talking to a close friend at Stanford, actually, and she was talking: Even though Stanford has not been hit by one of the sort of things that Columbia or NYU—the East Coast so-called elite universities—have been hit by, they no longer are guaranteeing salaries for Ph.D. students who enter into the graduate program at Stanford. Stanford is a wealthy university, so they’re kind of circling the wagons and harvesting—you know, harboring—their funds in case that the Trump administration goes after them. So I think it’s hard to overstate how serious this is.

I think the thing we should all keep in mind is: By going after the institutions of science—so I would say there’s several categories, the funders of science. So the NIH—the National Institutes of Health—is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. By cutting its budget, by severely cutting its staff, it’s crippling the world’s major funder of biomedical research, never mind America’s major funder of biomedical research. By going after the top research universities in the United States—the Columbias, the Johns Hopkins, the Harvards, the Yales—it’s also crippling the major institutions that are supporting researchers in the U.S. That’s, first of all, unprecedented, of course, but it’s also crippling for the institutions that support science in the U.S., not just the individuals. So it’s hard to overstate how serious this is.

Frum: From my lay understanding, there are four main categories of scientific institutions that have come under a different kind of pressure.

There are the direct practitioners of science within the United States government: organizations like NASA, the aeronautics agency; NOIA, the oceanographic and atmospheric agency. The direct practitioners of science inside the government are under pressure. There’s also the government-funding institutions—as you said, the National Institutes [of] Health. These don’t do the work themselves. They make grants to others. They’re under pressure. There’s the kind of sword and shield of technological application at the Department of Defense—agencies in the Department of Defense that do cyber warfare, cybersecurity, cyber innovation. They’ve come under pressure. And finally, fourth—so first, direct science inside the government; second, funding; third, swords and shields—and fourth and last, the universities that get government grants but where government doesn’t direct how the money will be spent.

Is that the lay of the land? Have I got that correct?

Bernstein: You do, actually. That’s the sort of the etymology of American funding institutions.

And there are some that cover at least two. So the NIH, for example, has a very large so-called intramural program that funds research within government, in Bethesda, Maryland. And then there’s also institutions that actually fund—the NIH also funds science at American universities. So it does both.

You also left off in that list a very important one: the Department of Energy. It funds about $1 billion worth of research, both in-house and in American universities. And as you’d imagine, the Department of Energy traditionally has been one of the leading research institutions for funding research on climate change and renewable energy.

Frum: So there are budget cuts. There are personnel cuts. There’s also this immigration squeeze because the United States has often worked by attracting talent from all over the world, setting them to work in American universities. Many of those people then stay for the rest of their lives. Or, science being so global, there are many people in the scientific world who have spouses or partners who come from other countries, and their spouses or partners are under pressure, causing those scientists to reconsider their own careers. Tell me a little bit about the way the immigration pressures affect science.

Bernstein: Well, again, historically, America has been a magnet for scientific talent for almost the entire 20th century. It started with a flood during World War II when many émigrés from Germany, Austria, France, came to the U.S. And they set an important precedent. The success in building the atomic bomb under Oppenheimer was in large part due to those émigrés. The one person that jumps out to me is Enrico Fermi, who had the Fermilabs at the University of Chicago. He was an émigré from Italy.

And there are many, many others. And that tradition has continued. Young people from around the world want to come to America to do science for lots of obvious reasons, I think. One is: The institutions are so strong. They have their resources. They have the energy, the culture of: We can do anything, and if it’s going to be done, it’s going to be done in America. That sort of bravado is so characteristically American, and it’s evaporating before our eyes.

Secondly, of course, having the immigration people descending on some of the immigrants who are here on visas in the United States and either taking them away and imprisoning them, or sending them home at the drop of a hat without any kind of hearing, is sending a clear signal—not an ambiguous one, a clear signal: You are not welcome in the United States anymore. So if I was a young person working in Europe, in Canada, Australia, you name it, I would not go to the United States at the moment to do my postgraduate degree or training. It just wouldn’t happen. And indeed, I think that that pipeline of talent from abroad has probably shut down completely.

Frum: Let’s talk about your special area of expertise, which is infectious diseases. There seems to be a special malice toward innovation and research in that area. Under Robert Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services has announced they’re going to do all these investigations into well-attested vaccines whose safety and efficacy has been proven for dozens of years. Kennedy has promised some kind of big review in September. I don’t know why he’s taking that long. He knows the answer he wants and is going to enforce. He could do it tomorrow. Why the pretense that there’s any real work here? And we are seeing this extraordinary outbreak—or outbreaks—of measles across the United States. How does that connect with government policy? How alarmed should people be about these outbreaks?

Bernstein: You know, what’s particularly frustrating for me—and I’m sure many of my colleagues in America, in science and biomedical research, in particular—is: We are in a golden age in biomedical research. It is such an exciting time to be in this field, including in the vaccine field, because vaccines have been traditionally used against infectious disease. And indeed, it’s hard to estimate the number of lives that have been saved, because you can’t count what hasn’t happened. It’s hard to count that. You can count how many people die, but you can’t count how many people you’ve saved. But it’s of the order of hundreds of millions of people around the world whose lives have been saved because of vaccines.

Smallpox, which was the world’s largest killer over centuries, has been eradicated. There is no smallpox in the world today. It has [been] eliminated completely, largely through American know-how and American perseverance with the WHO, in partnership with the WHO. Ditto with polio and measles. So a young physician today has never seen smallpox, has never seen polio, has never seen measles. And so when it appears, they’re seeing a new disease.

Frum: Hmm.

Bernstein: And these were diseases, certainly when I was growing up—and I suspect, David, when you were growing up—my mother wouldn’t let me go swimming in a common swimming pool, because of polio. We don’t worry about polio anymore today. We shouldn’t, because, you know, children should be vaccinated. And Kennedy’s point that they haven’t been proven to be safe is really a criticism of the FDA. It’s saying that the FDA has not done their job properly. Well, if you look at the FDA, it is the gold standard for approving new drugs and vaccines. It’s very stringent. It really does a superb job, and it always outweighs the risks and the benefits of any drug, including vaccines.

And so it’s hard to imagine a medicine that has not got some risk associated to it. And the thing about vaccines, which makes it hard to sort convince somebody that they really are good and they should be taken—and their children should certainly take them—is when you take a pill when you’re sick and you get better, you go, Oh, that pill made me better. When you take a preventative vaccine, you don’t get ill.

And so there’s no miraculous recovery. There’s the absence of disease, and you could always say, and people do say this, Well, I wouldn’t have got the disease anyways. So it wasn’t the vaccine.

Frum: And sometimes your arm is a little sore, and sometimes you have a reaction to the introduction of the agent in the vaccine. And sometimes—if you are phobic—the vaccination is followed by all kinds of psychosomatic symptoms. And psychosomatic symptoms appear to the receiver of those symptoms just as real as, actually, symptoms caused by organic illnesses in the body. So people have a lot of reasons for attributing the problems in their lives to this disruption, especially if—and I’m surprised to discover how many people have this feeling—they are phobic about having a needle inserted into their body.

But one of the things that bothers me a lot: There’s an intellectual movement right now in the United States very properly to look back at the COVID experience and to learn lessons from it—as, of course, exactly should happen—and there’s a lot of criticism of measures that were taken that maybe overshot, and in particular, the decision to keep schools closed past the fall of 2020. States where schools opened pretty rapidly have done much better by children than states where schools were kept closed for long periods of time.

But this is essentially a politically right-coded movement, or when it’s done by more liberal people, there are people who are speaking to right-coded audiences. And I just read an important book published by a university press, by two liberal-leaning academics, and went through all the things that were done wrong, and many of which I agree with—keeping the schools closed too long. The book was called [In COVID’s Wake:] How [Our] Politics Failed Us. And they have one paragraph about vaccine resistance because they say, Well, that’s inherent in the population. Politics didn’t cause that.

Of course, politics killed those people. There’s a lot of research. They’re not randomly distributed. They are concentrated in red states and red counties. If you lived in a red state or red county, your leaders—political and cultural—the people you looked up to, risked your life and got many of your co-adherents killed in order to score political points. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s shocking. It’s a crime. And we’ve accepted it as a normal part of politics.

Bernstein: So there’s a couple of interesting facts about all this. I think if we were talking about this 500 years from now or 300 years from now, and we look back and say, It’s remarkable that whether you wore a mask or not or took a vaccine or not at the height of this pandemic depended on your political party that you belong to, no one would believe you. You know, it’s like, In America? And yeah, it happened, and it happened five years ago. So that’s perplexing.

Now, I think, you know—I think there’s a mea culpa here. I think the scientific community everywhere did not do things perfectly. And I think what the mistake we made—and we need to make sure we don’t do it again—was to, as we talked to the public, say, Here are the facts. Here’s what we know you should do or not do, as opposed to saying, Here’s the facts as we know them today. This might change, and we’ve never encountered this virus before. We don’t know whether lockdowns are good, bad, or indifferent. Here’s the consequences of locking down, not locking down, etcetera. We needed some hubris here, some modesty, some admission that we don’t know everything. Science is based on evidence and facts. How can you have evidence before the fact?

So I think there was a bit of too much black-and-white “this is the way it is” on the part of the scientific community. And so when we first said, You should wear a mask—sorry, sorry—you should wash your hands and wash surfaces, and then weeks later, changed our mind and said, No, no, no. Actually, you should wear a mask because this virus is an aerosol; it’s not on surfaces, I think that caused a lot of lack of confidence amongst the general public about the scientific community.

Frum: I want to take that load of guilt off this. I think when scientists talk to the general public, they assume some basic grade-eight familiarity with science. So it is the most natural thing in the world for scientists to say something, square bracket, [state of knowledge today]. I mean, as you say, I have heard from many people, Well, they said one thing in March. They said a different thing in May. They said a different thing in September. How can we trust them?

I think, This is not religion. That’s how you know you should trust them. If they’d said the same thing all the way through, they’d be priests, not scientists. And the scientists assumed some basic literacy from the public, and they also assumed some good faith in the political system, where it’s not the job of scientists to communicate the science; it’s the job of political leaders. And those political leaders are unused to an atmosphere of such malice and distortion as existed in 2020 and even more in 2021.

I think a lot of what happened during COVID was: There had been a Republican president during 2020—he had mishandled the disease in many important ways. Then there was a Democratic president in 2021—things began to be handled somewhat better. And there was a political imperative to make 2021 a failure.

Bernstein: So, you know, I’m a scientist, so I’ll speak about the science. You know, the great—and you alluded to it, David—the great strength of science is that it’s not ideological. It’s based on the currently available data or evidence. And so when scientists change their mind, the public still—despite the grade-eight education that you refer to—the public still says, You’re changing your mind. That’s not good.

Whereas to the scientific community, that’s what it’s all about. That’s the strength of science, not the weakness of science. It’s not religion. It’s not an ideology, political ideology. And so I think it goes back to how we teach science in schools. We teach it as a series of facts, as opposed to the way to look at the world and to change our minds as the evidence changes.

Frum: Can I ask you about how powerful the stop-start button is for the scientific endeavor? So right now the government is pressing stop on Parkinson’s, stop on Alzheimer’s, stop on many vaccines. Five years from now, if you press start—four years from now, if you press start—how quickly does the start ignition sequence resume after the stop button that has been pressed today?

Bernstein: That’s a great question. And, you know, I think the right answer is: It depends. You know, we don’t know what the Trump administration is going to do tomorrow, never mind five years from now, so I think we all wake up in the morning wondering what the news will bear about what the Trump administration is doing now.

So I think a lot depends on how long these cuts—I’ll just use cuts or attack on universities and size—how long that goes on and how deeply those cuts actually are in the end of the day. And I don’t know the answers to either of those questions, and I don’t think anybody does. I don’t think President Trump does. So I think how quickly things recover will depend on those variables, and we don’t know the answer.

I do think that institutions take longer to recover than individuals. You know, the thing we all need to remember is: Talent can move. You know, I have a publication from Europe that has listed in its latest edition all the things that European countries are now doing to attract American scientists, especially young people who are finding that their careers are cut off or ended because of what’s going on. So talent can move to Europe easily.

And we’ll be watching to see what happens in the United States four years from now. If it doesn’t change, they’ll stay in Europe, just like the émigrés who moved to the United States when the atmosphere changed radically in Nazi Germany, for example, or Fascist Italy.

So what happens will depend on a lot of things, that I don’t pretend to know the future, but I do know that science is going to continue elsewhere, and particularly in the EU; Canada’s going to reinvest, and the new prime minister said he will reinvest in science; and in China. China is investing huge, huge amounts and increasing it by 10, 20 percent a year, over the next few years.

And so if one thinks about the standoffs between these two great superpowers—the United States and China—we have the United States attacking one of its most powerful weapons in the current 21st-century war between countries, and the Chinese investing. Now, which one do you think is right? Well, I go back to what Harry Truman said after World War II: Science played a major role in winning World War II.

The drones that were used—are being used—by Ukraine and in the war on Russia, those drones are largely powered by artificial intelligence. AI didn’t just happen. AI came out of universities. You know, the Nobel Prize in Physics this year went to Geoffrey Hinton, who works at the University of Toronto. So the new weapons of warfare are largely going to come out of universities. I think that’s not a prediction—that’s a safe prediction. And yet Americans are attacking those universities where all this is happening.

Frum: If you were to talk to people in the Trump administration about what they were doing, and if they were to answer you, which they tend not to do, but if they did, I think they would say, Look—we’re not waging a war on science. We’re waging a war on DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’re waging a war—we’re trying to stop all these crazy climate scientists who are bringing us news that either we don’t think is true or that we don’t want to hear. We are cracking down on the people who warn us about Russian disinformation, because we think that harms many of our friends and allies who are spreading Russian disinformation, often for pay. And I think they also have a sense of—there may be some sense of ideology that this research anyway should be done to the private sector, not the public sector. So: We’re not waging a war on science, as such. We have a very specific list of targets.

Do you see any merit to any of that? Is there anything that one could concede to the case that they’re prosecuting? Or is it just dumbassery all the way down?

Bernstein: Look—I don’t think universities are perfect. I think there is a lot of wokeism that probably has gone a bit too far. But having said that, I would quickly add the great strength of universities, and the role of universities and the role of acquiring new knowledge, is to challenge the status quo. You know, if you’re just going to reaffirm the status quo, you don’t need a university to do that.

And that goes back to Galileo, you know, 500 years ago. Galileo challenged the church. Does the Earth go around the sun or vice versa? So political leaders have to allow for this freedom and this openness and small-L liberalism that goes on in universities if they’re going to get the kind of value out of universities that have been going on for a thousand years now, since Oxford was created.

So I think there needs to be an understanding on the base of our political leaders that dissent, looking at different ways of doing things, can be uncomfortable, and that is the role of the universities. No other institution in society does that as well as a university. In fact, no other institution in society, as far as I can think, does that at all.

So I think we need to acknowledge that, and the politicians need to acknowledge that and tolerate it.

Frum: As we end, remind us of what the stakes are here. How close are we to breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases that seem to be yielding to scientific investigation as we speak?

Bernstein: I don’t like predicting the future. And I don’t like—talking as a biomedical scientist, cancer has been my own area—I don’t like saying it’s around the corner, because then people lose interest after a while. But I do think, if I look in the immediate past, how remarkable the progress has been, not just in scientific advances, but in clinical advances. I think back to when my wife had breast cancer—now, as she reminded me, 15 years ago. She would not be alive today if she had had that cancer 25 years ago.

And certainly, when I started in cancer research—I won’t say how many years ago—we knew nothing about the cancer cell. And so the tools that clinicians had at their disposal were crude at best. Crude at best. Today we know the most intimate molecular changes that make a cancer cell behave differently than a normal cell. We know the mutations in the DNA that are causing these changes, and we know the effects on the proteins that those genes code for.

And so now we can design drugs that exploit those changes. And so if you’re a woman with breast cancer, you’re going to be treated if your cells are HER2-positive—I’m sure every woman knows that phrase—you’ll be treated with Herceptin because we know that molecular difference. If you have chronic myelogenous leukemia, you’ll be treated with Gleevec. Or if you have GI stromal cancer, you’ll be treated with Gleevec.

These are all based on information that’s come out over the last dozen years or so. Of course, now the big excitement—and not just in cancer, but in other diseases—is using vaccines to treat disease and to prevent disease. So again, these are advances that have happened recently and are on the horizon to continue to happen.

So I’ll take—in contrast to where cancer research is, which I view as the beachhead disease, if you will—if you think about mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, we have only very crude tools to treat those very serious diseases. And the reason is: We don’t understand those diseases. But I think every scientist who’s working in the field of biomedical science is optimistic that it is just a matter of time before we will understand really serious diseases like bipolar, depression, Alzheimer’s, dementia.

And from that will come a whole new class of drugs. And when that will happen, I don’t know. But what we have been seeing is an acceleration of new drugs coming on the market because of the advances that have been made at universities and exploited correctly by the pharmaceutical industry. So this is a very exciting time. And so to cut that off would be just a shame. Just a shame.

Frum: Thank you so much for your time today.

Bernstein: My pleasure, David.

[Music]

Frum: Thank you so much to Alan Bernstein. Now some questions from viewers and listeners.

The first comes from Nathan: “In Donald Trump’s first term, there were innumerable norm violations. The administration’s M.O. seemed to be, If there isn’t a law explicitly prohibiting an action, we can take that action. After Trump won, why were there no efforts to codify any of the gray areas or the ones that everyone had previously thought, No president would ever do that? Is it because people wanted to keep the possibility of using those same tactics open to themselves in the future? If so, what do you think that says about the direction of the country and the culture within the government?”

Now, first, I want to stress that there was one very important reform after the Trump administration, and that was the reform of the Electoral Count Act. The law now makes clear—as it mostly made clear before, but now it unmistakably makes clear—that the vice president of the United States does not have the authority to substitute his or her own judgment for the judgment of the people of the states in the electoral-count process. So one of the very worst things that Donald Trump tried to do—use violence to intimidate his vice president into overthrowing the 2020 election—that can’t be done anymore. And so that’s a change.

But for the most part, I think that’s right. I think we have been reluctant to. And part of it, I think, is just: It’s hard for Americans to take on board the magnitude of the criminality in the first Trump term. We, maybe, have made a serious mistake about that, as we see the even greater magnitude of criminality in the second Trump term.

But I would also caution there is a problem with trying to write things into law. The American culture and the American mentality are very legalistic. Americans tend to assume that the law is the divide, and they will often say, If something’s not illegal, that means it’s okay for me to do. But in life, there are lots of things that are not literally illegal but that you still shouldn’t do. And in a free society, we don’t write down everything that could be an offense and try to turn it into law. We have to rely to some degree on the public spirit and decency of people, and that needs to be especially true with people in the highest reaches of the land.

We talked about this last week with Peter Keisler, the former [acting] attorney general under George W. Bush. To some degree, democracy is going to have to be the answer here. We cannot write laws for everything. We can’t anticipate every contingency. What we can say, instead, is with the famous prayer of John Adams that is carved into the lintel, or into the mantelpiece, of the East Room, “Let none but honest and wise men”—update that to men and women. “Let none but honest and wise men and women rule under this roof.” We have seen what happens when there is an abuser, and we may have outrun the limits of law.

From K.C.: “It seems to me that there is an argument that Trump and Republican legislators are acting as if there will never be another Democratic majority or administration that might hold investigations or hearings into their behavior. This leads me to believe that the ’26 and ’28 elections won’t be rigged. Rather, I’m beginning to believe that Trump will look for ways—a national emergency, perhaps—not to hold them at all. Your thoughts? Am I worrying needlessly?”

No one is worrying needlessly when they worry about the integrity of the 2026 and 2028 elections. I worry about it all the time. But we need to focus what it is exactly we’re worried about. For Donald Trump to try to turn off the elections altogether by declaring a national emergency and calling out the Army and using powers leftover from the Cold War and World War II, that’s a constitutional crisis. In the end, that is the kind of scenario that is met by people in the streets and is met by officers of the Army refusing to obey illegal orders from the president.

I think that case is so intense that we can’t plan for it. What we can plan for are the things that we can see that are already underway, and those are attempts to sabotage vote counts, to make it difficult for the Democrats to fundraise—or any opponent of Donald Trump to fundraise—and to concentrate sabotaging efforts in the states that are most likely to swing one way or another; the Wisconsins, the North Carolinas, the Georgias. It’s a state-level problem.

So where I think your energy needs to go is in focusing attention on your state governors, state legislators, and state courts to make sure that they will uphold honest, free, and fair elections in the respective states. We have seen the enormous pressure in the state of North Carolina to prepare a false outcome in 2026. Citizen vigilance has been mobilized, and citizen vigilance needs to stay mobilized. Again, it’s a democratic problem, and your attention is the best answer. So if there’s something you want to do between now and 2026, make sure that the vote will be honest in the states where the vote is most in doubt.

Last, from Josh: “I’m a high-school government teacher, so much of my teaching is centered on hope and optimism about our civic system and our citizenry. Hope and optimism felt like a lie in the Trump era. Is there a hopeful and optimistic message that properly addresses the current climate that I can give to my students?”

Now, as I’m sure Josh well understands, it’s not the place of a teacher to tell students, particularly near voters like those in high school, what they should think or who they should support. Many students will have many different views, and that’s as it should be. And all of the points of view should, of course, be treated with attention and respect in the classroom. But I think a message that a teacher can communicate is to say to the students, This is a moment where their country really needs them. And it’s an honor and a privilege to be alive at a time when your country needs you, and without telling them the exact nature of that need, and without, in any way, presuming to direct their actions, to make them feel like their vote matters and their actions matter.

You know, as we’ve discussed today, a lot of the secret weapon of Trumpism is cynicism and despair, and a feeling like, Oh well. Things are unfolding without me. LOL nothing matters. But everything matters. Your students matter. Teach them that, and watch them be better citizens.

Thank you so much for the questions. Please send next week’s to producer@thedavidfrumshow.com. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Remember, please: It matters a lot to the algorithm gods that you rate and review and like and subscribe, whether you listen on an audible podcast or whether you view us on YouTube. Thanks for your comments on YouTube. Those also really matter, and I try to read as many of them as I can. I don’t always respond, but I see so many of them, and I’m so grateful for them and so often touched by their warmth.

Thank you for watching this episode. See you again next week. I’m David Frum.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has overhauled core institutions and norms. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the first 100 days of the president’s second term—and what may come next for the country.

On the subject of Trump’s impact as president since his inauguration, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, posed a question to the panelists: “What is the most consequential action he’s taken, or what’s the biggest change we’ve seen in American governance?”

“The difference between Trump now and Trump previously is one thing I’ve been struck by, which is just how confident, bold, aggressive, creative he has been at sort of wielding the levers of powers at his disposal to bend, you know, the city, the country, and the world to his will,” Atlantic staff writer Ashley Parker said last night.

“Trump traditionally is someone who is trying to get through the minute, the hour, the day,” Parker continued. “He is trying to win over the person directly in front of him.” But the president also now appears to be tolerating more criticism than he might have in his first term: On tariffs, Parker explained, “he had the stomach, at least initially, for more pain as the markets plummeted and as he was getting, you know, lobbied behind the scenes, and some pretty public criticism.” Trump, she added, “stood by that much longer than I would have expected for someone who is traditionally pinballing between whatever is politically expedient in that moment.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Kaitlan Collins, the chief White House correspondent at CNN; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent for NPR; and Ashley Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

In this episode of The David Frum Show, David examines the dangerous path the Trump administration is charting by deporting and detaining individuals without hearings—an assault on due process that threatens the foundation of American justice.

He’s then joined by former Acting Attorney General Peter Keisler to explore what America’s institutions can realistically do to counter Trump’s executive overreach—and the serious risks facing the courts, the Federal Reserve, and the American public if Trump continues unchecked.

Finally, David answers listener questions on Republican contempt for blue states, the importance of reclaiming the term globalist, and how citizens can effectively fight back.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello. Welcome to the third episode of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This week, my guest will be Peter Keisler, former acting attorney general of the United States under President George W. Bush, former head of the civil division at the Department of Justice, a veteran of the conservative legal community. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice [Anthony] Kennedy and for Judge Robert Bork.

I have known Peter, also, as a friend for nearly half a century. He’s someone in whom I have enormous confidence in and for whom I have great respect. And I think as you listen to him today, you will see why, because of his extraordinary breadth of interest and depth of knowledge. I’m so grateful that he joined us.

Our theme will be issues of law and due process of law. And before I begin my conversation with Peter Keisler, let me offer some introductory thoughts on the subject.

As we’ve seen, the Supreme Court of the United States has rebuked the Trump administration for its contemptuous attitude toward courts and toward the dozens of people it has sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without a hearing, without even allowing them to challenge that the government has got the right person.

Those detained people have now been in—supposedly the custody of El Salvador—in fact, in the custody of the United States government, because the United States government is paying millions of dollars to the government of El Salvador to hold these prisoners. They’ve been there now for five weeks, as I speak, without a hearing, without any show that the government has got the right person, incommunicado, and apparently for life. Now, it does look like there have been at least some instances of mistaken arrest, that some of these people may be outright innocent. Others may be genuinely bad actors. Who can know? Because there’s been no show of proof, no hearing of any kind.

United States law allows for a quite expedited process to remove people from the country, to deport them. You don’t get a big trial. You don’t get a jury trial. You are moved rapidly because the theory of the case is: First, you don’t have a right to immigrate to the United States, so you have not been deprived of your rights. And secondly, once you’re removed from the United States, you remain a free person. You are sent back to the place you came from or some other place to which you have some connection, and then you’re free to go about your business. You’re not sent to a prison—not sent to a prison for life.

But as I talk about this, the thing that has most gripped my mind with worry and anxiety is not only the effect on the individuals themselves, some of whom may be genuinely innocent, but the effect on those who are sending human beings to a prison without a hearing.

You know, the United States government is now building an apparatus of lawyers, of officials of all kinds, who plan and think every day, How can we apprehend people on American soil and bundle them to a prison without giving them any show of a hearing? They’re building skills and competencies at non-due-process forms of arrest and incarceration that are going to be very hard to limit.

There are many kinds of immigration status that people present in the United States have. There are citizens, of course. There are permanent residents. There are people here on many different kinds of visas. Now, you can lose your visa rapidly for many reasons. I remember when I was a Canadian citizen in the United States on a student visa, we were warned if you got into a bar fight, you could theoretically lose your student visa. Now, in those days, that meant that you’d have to go back to Canada and go to school in Canada, which is not the end of the world. In today’s America, that could mean you could lose your student visa and be accused of terrorism, and a bag put over your head and be put into a car and sent to a prison in El Salvador for the rest of your life.

Now, maybe that doesn’t happen in every case. Maybe that doesn’t happen in many cases. But there are people in the employ of the United States government, paid by taxpayers to think about how can we daily broaden the category of people who can be arrested and detained and imprisoned without any showing to any authority at all, without any opportunity to make themselves heard, without any evaluation by an independent fact finder—by any of the things we call due process.

Due process is not just one thing. American law—the American Constitution—specify different kinds of process for different kinds of crime. The crime of treason, for example, is defined in the Constitution as waging war upon the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. And the Constitution then lists some very strict rules that have to be met to prosecute somebody for treason.

The rules for armed robbery and other things—even as strict as they are—are not as strict as that. Then there are rules for criminal prosecution. Then there are rules for immigration hearings, and there are other kinds of rules. We’ve all encountered traffic courts. You get a hearing if you want one. If you don’t, you can choose to pay the ticket, or you can contest the ticket. And then you don’t get a jury of your peers. You don’t get any of the other apparatus of criminal law, but you still get some kind of process. Always, the law says, the word of authority is not to be taken for its own sake. And we have that practice, not just to constrain authority, but to allow all of us to live lives of dignity.

A thing it means to live in a free society is that you can encounter the look of a police officer without fear. You do not feel like you must cringe and defer. You do not feel you are in the hands of someone who can do anything to you at any whim. You know that so long as you are following the clear and specific rules of the land, which are available to all to know, you can go about your business and meet the eyes of power without fear.

The Trump administration is changing all of that. Lots of people who have lots of different statuses—who are here for limited periods of time, who are here under conditions, who are not full citizens, but who are not illegal either—are now living lives of fear. Ordinary tourists are being apprehended, detained for days, sometimes for longer than that, treated in inhumane and indecent ways, and then deported from the country without showing that they had done anything wrong, other than maybe not having a hotel room booked at the time that they arrived.

We are building a society that is governed by fear, led by people who want to rule by fear. That’s not right. It’s not humane. It’s not American. It’s not democratic. It’s not decent. It needs to stop. And that’s what I’ll be discussing with Peter Keisler today.

[Music]

Frum: But first, a quick break.

[Break]

Frum: Peter Keisler, welcome to The David Frum Show, and thank you for joining.

Peter Keisler: It’s a pleasure to be here, David.

Frum: So we’re going to be talking some about transparency in the next few minutes, and in the interest of transparency, let me disclose: You and I have known each other for—I don’t know that either of us would be comfortable in using the exact number—but suffice it to say, we were both typing papers on typewriters at the time when we got to know each other.

Keisler: Right. And that was a great time. I still think about it very fondly, and one of the things I think about fondly is our long conversations over lunches and dinners and dining halls.

Frum: Well, you’re very kind to remember all of that. We both started on the political right. You were active in the conservative legal movement. I think it’s fair to say that your legal views are probably quite continuous with where they were all those years ago, but you found yourself—because of those legal views—in a different political situation from where you were all those years ago.

Keisler: I think that’s true. Look—I mean, I voted for Hillary Clinton, for Joe Biden, and for Kamala Harris. You know, I was actually walking the streets in Pennsylvania this last year, knocking on doors for Kamala Harris. I never thought I would be doing that, frankly, for anyone. It’s not what I used to be doing to contribute to campaigns, and I certainly didn’t think I would be doing that in that setting for the Democratic candidate.

But look—I had always thought myself a conservative, because I believed in things like a strong and robust foreign policy to oppose authoritarianism abroad, in free markets, and personal liberties, and in constitutional values that underpin our democracy. I still believe in all of those things. I don’t think the current administration believes in any of them. And if that’s what conservative has come to mean, then I just decided quite a while ago that I didn’t want any part of it.

Frum: And yet on issues of the role of the judiciary, how statutes should be interpreted, have you changed your mind about those things? Or do you find yourself there saying, Yeah, that is still what I thought—you know, what I thought then I think now?

Keisler: Largely so. I mean, look—we all, over time as things happen, our ideas adjust in different ways to take into account new facts and new information. But on the whole, I still believe in the same thing about the courts that I always have.

Frum: Speaking of the courts, let’s start with the Supreme Court’s recent rebuke to the administration about due process rights of people it has detained and sent to foreign prisons. How big a story is this? I mean, you have represented the United States so long and so well. How big a story is this?

Keisler: What’s happening now is unprecedented and really serious. I mean, in some of the most high-profile cases out there, the administration’s been acting with what could only be described as contempt towards court orders. And that’s playing out most vividly in the cases involving their efforts to remove and keep people in the United States in that prison in El Salvador. And that those cases are really, at one level, very, very simple. And that’s unusual for a legal matter. Most of them are complex to some degrees, but this one is simple.

And just to back up: The administration had what it thought was a good two-part legal strategy for how to get certain people out of the country in ways that would not require them to ever go to any court and present evidence or justify the legal basis for what they were doing.

Part 1 of that strategy was an internal decision that, under a statute known as the Alien Enemies Act, they could bundle people into planes without giving them any notice about what was about to happen, spirit them out of the country, and do that so quickly that, as a practical matter, they wouldn’t be able to get into court to stop that from happening.

And then Part 2 of the strategy is—once they are out of the country and in that prison in El Salvador, if they try to file cases—to say, Well, it’s a fait accompli now. They’re no longer in our custody. They’re in the custody of a foreign government. So there’s nothing a court can do.

So, you know, even though there is a precept, which is deeply wired into the DNA of the country—and certainly in the Constitution—that everybody gets their day in court, under this approach, it would always be either too early or too late for them to get into court.

And what happened is the Supreme Court dealt what could only be described as a death blow to both aspects of that legal strategy. The Court held with no reported dissent that, no, you can’t hustle people out of the country in this way without giving them sufficient notice to enable them to go to court and challenge that if they wish to. And they also held, on the other part, that a court can direct the administration to do what it is able to do to get somebody returned who’s been erroneously removed.

Frum: Now, defenders of the administration will say, Wait a minute. Are you saying there has to be a jury trial for every person who’s in the United States illegally? It’s probably worth clarifying here that for a deportation where the deported person gets off the bus or the plane and is then at liberty, the process can be very, very expedited. The United States deports a quarter of a million people a year, and it removes many more than that without even the formality of a deportation. But the key to the streamlined, simplified process that leads to so many deportations is: Once you’re off the bus, you’re a free person. I think that’s a point that we need to underscore here.

Keisler: Absolutely. We are not talking about weeks-long jury trials. We are talking about there’s no jury at all. This is before either an immigration judge, or it can ultimately be before, you know, a federal judge. But the key, the minimum baseline is you have an opportunity both to present evidence—factual evidence—and to make legal arguments that the administration doesn’t have the authority to do this, and some independent decision maker will make a judgment as to whether or not they have a right to deport you.

So it is a very minimal level of due process, and it is not itself an extraordinarily time-consuming fact, but it does require the administration to submit to some neutral testing of its legal theory and its evidence.

Frum: At a minimum, the person gets to say, You’ve got the wrong person. I may have the same name as this other person, but actually, I’m here on this visa or this status. You’ve got the wrong guy. You should be able to say that.

Keisler: Right. And to translate this to our current context, it would mean saying, They’re saying I’m a member of Tren de Aragua, this Venezuelan gang, because I have a tattoo that looks like what they say is a logo of the gang. But in fact, that tattoo is something I put on 20 years ago because it’s my favorite soccer team, or something like that. And a judge would scrutinize the evidence.

And so the administration really, once it lost on these basic legal principles in the court, it had a very straightforward way to respond, which would be just to say, We acknowledge that these people in El Salvador are there only because we are paying millions of dollars to El Salvador to house them for us. So they are in our custody, effectively, both legally and practically. And their lawyers can file habeas petitions and present whatever evidence they can that what was done was unlawful. We can respond, and whatever a court decides, we’ll do.

And as to the guy in Maryland, who they’ve already conceded was erroneously deported, they could bring him back and then give him whatever process, and maybe he can be removed to another country. All of that would be for a judge to decide. All that’s being asked of the administration is that they go through that process. But whether because—well, I think it’s a mix of political reasons, ideological reasons, psychological, even pathological reasons—they are incapable of doing that. They want this fight, and it’s turned into a big power struggle. And that’s where it ceases being so simple.

Frum: Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is the federal courts have gone very, very far out of the way to avoid conflict with the first and then the second Trump administrations. And in between, they went even further because they seem to have greatly welcomed delay on all the criminal matters, hoping that somehow all this problem would go away—it would be resolved by some other decision maker, some other branch of government or public opinion or something—and they could be left well out of it.

And it culminated with the decision about the president’s exposure to criminal liability, which is like this complete castle-in-the-air legal structure that seems just to be based on, We’re going to lick our finger, put it up in the wind, and do a three-part balancing test based on no kind of ever previous authority. But mostly, what we’re trying to do here is just keep this off our docket. And if I’m right in saying that, then that makes this recent decision even more remarkable because for once, the Supreme Court is going all in to say something to the administration it doesn’t want to hear.

Keisler: I think that’s absolutely right. And if you want a really extraordinary example of that, you would look at the order that the Court issued at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning this last weekend, because even though they had held that everybody has to be given meaningful notice before they could be removed in this way, there was credible evidence that the administration was loading people onto buses without giving them anything like the notice that was required. And the ACLU went to the Supreme Court and said, you know, Please, as you listen to the rest of this case and get briefing, stop this from happening.

And if the administration were a normal administration and had compiled a record so far of being a normal administration, the Court would’ve said, Well, I can be confident they’re not going to do this while we are hearing your petition, so let’s give the government a chance to respond. Let’s see what they say, and then we’ll decide what to do. Because, of course, the government wouldn’t spirit these people away while we are actually in the process of deciding whether it can do so on this emergency application you filed. But they knew that the government had done exactly that with the first 200 or so people they had sent away.

The case was before a district judge, and they rushed to secretly get the people out before he could issue an order. And they didn’t quite succeed on that, which is why you have these issues of contempt floating around now. But at 1 a.m., the Court by a 7–2 vote said, Don’t remove anybody in the class represented by these lawyers until you hear otherwise from us.

And that shows that there is a cost to the administration of acting the way it’s acting towards the courts, because if you squander the reputation that governments of both parties have had for credibility and fair dealing and honest brokering with the Court, then they’re going to treat you different because they know they can’t quite trust you.

Frum: Well, but as we play this game out, who wins? Because in the end, the Court counts on the government to comply. And if the government doesn’t comply, and again doesn’t comply—if it shows contempt, and the Department of Justice refuses to do anything about the contempt—at the end of this chain of escalation, doesn’t the executive win?

Keisler: Well, that’s a really good question, because look—if you and I were disobeying a court order in a private case, there’s a very available tool kit that courts have to deal with that. We would face punishing fines, perhaps daily fines, until we comply, and we could even be incarcerated. It’s much harder, much trickier to apply that tool kit when the executive branch as a whole—not simply some rogue actor in it, but the executive branch as a whole—is the one that’s in defiance.

And in particular—and I think this is embedded in your question—a particular order that essentially directs the executive branch to conduct diplomacy is especially hard to enforce. If the Court had ordered, you know, that the government pay somebody money, that’s an easier matter. Or even turn the planes around, as was the case in one of these cases—that’s a binary thing. You either comply or you don’t. The planes turn around or they don’t. But the Court can’t deal directly with the president of El Salvador, so they’ve essentially directed the president to do what he can to get them out.

Now, you know, this is an easy matter because, as I said, they’re only there because we’re paying to house them. El Salvador has no independent—and so the administration just needs to ask. And I would just say this about that, which is that right now they’ve made it easy to see their contempt, because they’re not even asking. The attorney general has said, “He’s not coming [home] … End of [the] story.” Those are her words.

But let’s say they were just a little bit more smarmy about it, right? Let’s say they sent a letter: Dear President Bukele, an unelected federal judge without, in our view, any legal basis has directed us to try to get Mr. Abrego Garcia home. So we are conveying that request. Your friend, Marco.

Frum: (Laughs.)

Keisler: And President Bukele looks at that letter, and he can read the subtext as well as the rest of us, and says no. And then the administration goes back to court, with a kind of a cartoon halo above its head, and said, Well, Your Honor, we tried, but he said no. Now, the Court can find them in contempt because she can read the subtext just as well as President Bukele and the rest of us. But that still doesn’t get the man home, and it’s very hard for a court to work its will directly on a process that’s so necessarily entrusted to the actual carrying out and implementation by the executive branch.

Frum: On this larger question of defiance, a thing I find myself thinking about a lot is the president’s threats to Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve. Now, the rule we all thought we knew is that the president of the United States cannot fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve for policy reasons. And Jerome Powell has, as recently as last week in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, stated, That’s the conventional view. You cannot fire me for policy reasons.

But we also used to have a strong tradition that was preserved by every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama that the president couldn’t fire the head of the FBI for policy reasons. And some presidents, like Ronald Reagan and Obama, cohabited with an FBI director appointed by the opposite party for six or seven years before the term expired. And the one case where an FBI director was removed was by President Clinton. And that was a case where he’d inherited an FBI director from the Bush administration and also a big dossier from the Bush administration saying, Please fire this guy for fiddling his expense accounts, which may or may not have been fair—let’s bracket that.

But H. W. Bush’s attorney general, [Bill] Barr, the same as Trump’s second attorney general, had said, Look—we’ve compiled this dossier here. We think you should get rid of him. And the Clinton people squirmed and stalled and tried to entice the director to leave voluntarily, and fired him only at the end, but not for a political reason, but for cause: the alleged fiddling with the expense accounts.

Trump fired two FBI directors, both for political reasons, in his first term and his second, and then appointed a creature of his as FBI director and got him confirmed by the Senate and a deputy who’s an even more embarrassing creature, if possible, than the director. And that tradition is over. The FBI director is no longer independent of the president. The FBI director is a complete tool of the president. Why couldn’t that happen at the Federal Reserve?

Keisler: Well, it potentially could. But let’s talk about that, because it’s important to distinguish between the president’s power to fire Jerome Powell and the president’s power to demote him, because those actually stand on somewhat different footings.

And let’s start with the firing. But let me just step back and give a little of the background here, because the important thing to know is that the Federal Reserve Board has been the ghastly specter that has haunted the debate about the extent of the president’s removal power over officers for many, many years. And I’ll explain what I mean by that.

But just some additional background for your listeners: The default rule has always been that, with a few exceptions, if the president appointed you, the president can fire you. He could call up Marco Rubio tomorrow and say, Marco, you’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve been a great secretary of state, but I want Steve Witkoff, and so I am firing you right now. And at the end of that phone call, Marco Rubio would be a private citizen. The president doesn’t have to have a reason, doesn’t have to get anyone else’s approval. He’s gone.

And actually, that’s true of the FBI director too. The FBI director has a 10-year term by statute, and that was designed to give him some measure of independence. And there’s been a norm that presidents have mostly not removed their FBI directors, except for cause before Trump. But in fact, the statute doesn’t say he can’t be removed earlier than that. And because there is this default rule that says if the president appointed you, the president can fire you, that actually is generally accepted that, as bad as it is, it applies to the FBI director too.

But there is a small subset, mostly and most prominently, the regulatory commissioners at some of the key regulatory agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Congress has written into those statutes not only a specified term, usually four years, but has specifically said, The president cannot remove you except for—there’s language like malfeasance or neglect of duty or inefficiency.

And back during the New Deal, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power to restrict the president’s ability to fire under certain circumstances. But there has been a long-standing debate—and one that predates Donald Trump—among scholars over whether or not that decision was right and whether or not Congress really should have that power. And the trend of Court decisions over the last several years has been to be increasingly skeptical of Congress’s power to limit that. But they’ve never quite gone so far as to overrule that key New Deal precedent. And part of it has been the haunting specter of the Federal Reserve Board, because the board of governors are one of those agencies where Congress has written in, You can only fire for cause.

And so if you are on the side of the people who want the Court to permit Congress to do that, and some cases come up—as they’re coming up now involving the president’s firing of FTC commissioners or National Labor Relation Board members—if you are on that side, the first thing you are saying is, My God, Court, don’t do this. Because if the logic and reasoning of their position supports that, it also supports being able to fire J. Powell, and everybody understands what a disaster it would be if our monetary policy were subject to that kind of direct political control.

And if you’re on the other side—if you are arguing in favor of the president’s power to remove—there are a few exceptions, but most people and anyone litigating the case before the court is saying, No, no, that’s different. The Fed is unique. Monetary policy is unique. I can come up with some reasons to distinguish it.

So that’s been kind of a long background. But what will the Court do? Right now, there are cases bubbling up and before the Court involving other agencies. The president hasn’t fired J. Powell, as you know, in part because he doesn’t want to contaminate those cases by making that vivid how much might be at stake. In those cases, the Court is perfectly capable of saying, Arguments about the Federal Reserve Board are not before us. We’re not going to decide that here. Even if they uphold the president’s right to fire FTC commissioners and NLRB members and so on, they can say, There are arguments out there that the Fed is different, and we will wait to address them for another day.

And that day may never come, because, you know, last week the president said—I mean, it was almost a joke—he said, “Powell’s termination can’t come fast enough [for me]!” Well, he’s the president. He hasn’t been shy about pushing the legal envelope. If he really wants to fire J. Powell, he would try to.

Frum: But when Trump says things like that, there’s a whole school of thought, which was, Well, Trump may say these things, but he would never actually do them. And that school of thought looks pretty battered. After January 6, you have to assume that anything Trump is talking about doing is something he might actually do.

Keisler: I think you have to assume the possibility. I don’t think he loved the experience when the stock market dived because of the tariffs, and he may not want to provoke a similar one, but he could wake up one morning and just be motivated to do it. And that’s why I mentioned at the outset this distinction between firing and demoting, because if he was going to do it, I think he would.

And by demoting, what I mean is this: So J. Powell is chair of the seven-member board of governors. The decision to designate one of the governors as chair, the provisions in the statute about that don’t have the same tenure protections that being a governor does. So if the president, instead of saying to J. Powell, You’re fired. You’re now a private citizen, like that Marco Rubio guy I was referring to earlier—if he instead said, You’re still a governor, but you’re no longer the chair, there would be, I think, a stronger basis for him to argue: Look—Congress has never limited that particular designation decision.

Frum: So interesting. Yeah.

Keisler: And there’s a default rule that says, I can change it. Now, there’d be limits there, right? He couldn’t just pick anybody to succeed Powell; he’d have to pick an existing governor because if there’s no vacancy, he can’t create one by firing a governor. He can only remove the chair, make the chair a governor, and elevate somebody. But eventually, there would be a vacancy. Or, you know, he could say to one of the governors that he wants to remove, How would you like to be secretary of the Treasury? Then fire his secretary of the treasury, move the governor to the Treasury Department, nominate somebody new, and say that person would be chair.

So there are ways to do this without putting himself in the weakest possible legal position. Because I think the Court would be as reluctant as the rest of us to usher in a situation where monetary policy is subject to presidential control on a day-to-day basis. And I think they would avoid a decision doing so if they if at all could.

Frum: But he’s going to need a scapegoat because the tariff policy is an immediate disaster. There’s no public backing for it. And the Federal Reserve has always been—and when he got into trouble in 2018, the Federal Reserve was his favorite villain then. And Trump thinks like a lifelong debtor. He always thinks, There’s nothing wrong with this business that cheaper credit couldn’t fix.

Keisler: Right. Look— at some point, he can’t keep on blaming Biden for everything that happens. So yes, he’s going to have to find other scapegoats. And maybe he will try to do this, and if he does, it will be yet another line being crossed that we may never be able to get back from.

Frum: One of the things I think we’ve all discovered—I mean, we must have known it, but we never thought about it—there’s a background law to a lot of powers of the president, which is: The president of the United States would never do that. So we don’t have to write that down, because the president of the United States would never do that. So is there a law that the president of the United States can’t run a profit-making business while president? Or sell scam meme coins? Well, we don’t have to put that in writing, because the president would never do that. So the president did it. So now we have this strange spectacle, where there’s this powerful agency created—or it’s not even an agency. What do you call DOGE? What is its status?

Keisler: It’s an entity.

Frum: It’s an entity that’s firing people, cutting budgets, impounding funds. And all of this is overseen nominally by somebody who has never, I think, even been photographed, but in practice by a hugely powerful and wealthy businessman who has never divested himself from any of his other businesses. Now, are there legalities here, or are we in a post-legality world where legalities don’t matter anymore?

Keisler: Well, there is a criminal conflict-of-interest statute, and it prohibits employees from participating in matters over which they have a financial or other interest that’s at all substantial. And that applies to Elon Musk because Elon Musk is what’s called a “special government employee,” meaning a temporary employee. But the conflict-of-interest laws apply to that.

And look—in thinking about this, I mean, there’s obviously a host of really complex government regulations. But basically, the potential for conflict with anybody coming to the government is a function of the answer to two different questions. One is, what is their set of financial and other interests? And the other is, what are their responsibilities going to be?

So you have those two circles. And think of it like a simplified two-circle Venn diagram. Where those circles—his interests and his responsibilities—intersect, that’s the area where there is a potential conflict. And if you have very few assets, you can be secretary of the Treasury, but there’s not going to be much intersection. You can recuse yourself from a couple of things. If you have lots of assets, but you’re a data-input operator at the Social Security Administration, there’s not going to be a big intersection point.

But with Musk, what you’ve got is two really big circles because you have an enormous amount of financial holdings, and you have, government-wide, vague but very significant government-wide authority. So there’s a huge intersection point there. Now, you know, that doesn’t mean he can’t serve. There are lots of people who go into government with lots of financial interests, but there’s a process for that usually. You disclose all your financial interests to—you know, you were in the White House; you know this process. You disclose your financial interests to various lawyers and officials who go over it and then give you guidance as to what you can and can’t do. With Musk, what he said is, Oh, if I see anything that’s a conflict, I just won’t do that. So it’s completely self-policing. That’s not how it works. It’s at least not how it’s ever worked, and it’s not how it should work.

Frum: But the president can dispense with a lot of, for example, the classification rules. Can the president say, Look—I know you’ve got a lot of SEC matters pending, but if you want to go ahead and fire everybody at the SEC so these matters won’t be resolved for the next hundred years, go ahead, be my guest. You have the power. Is that one of those, “But the president would never do that?” Or is there some law that would restrain the president’s ability to say, Yeah, you can gut the SEC so it will never get around to enforcing any of these matters against you?

Keisler: Well, I have two answers to that. One is a technical one, and one is a philosophical one. The technical answer is: There is in the conflict-of-interest laws and regulations procedures for someone to get waivers from various agency officials, and usually the waiver requires you to show that your interest is just not so substantial that would affect the integrity of the procedure.

Now, that almost certainly could not be sensibly granted here. But nonetheless, there could be a piece of paper where some agency official says, I grant you a waiver. I suspect they haven’t even bothered to do that. But I don’t know, because that’s where we get to the philosophical question here. And not to take this too high into the stratosphere, but the question is: What is law?

Like, to me, law is a set of binding requirements that you find in statutes and court decisions and regulations in the Constitution. And they exist, and they bind whomever they bind by their own terms. But you know, there was a school of thought in the early 20th century—the legal realists, very influential thinkers who said, No, no, no, that’s silly. Law is not an abstraction. Law is a prediction about what courts and people who enforce the law are actually going to do, because that’s the only place where law has meaning.

So who enforces the conflict-of-interest requirement? It’s agency general counsels. It’s inspectors general. For high-level appointees like Musk, it’s the White House counsel’s office. And in extreme cases where there’s a criminal violation, it’s the Department of Justice. If all of those institutions have been sufficiently compromised, that there’s nobody who’s going to say, This is a conflict, is it really law? Well, we could debate that philosophically. As a practical matter, I don’t think anyone’s going to be applying the conflict-of-interest requirements to Elon Musk any more than Elon Musk wants them to.

Frum: So it’s all gone?

Keisler: I think like so much, you know, ultimately, look—we’re a democracy, and we give the president a lot of power. We particularly give the president a lot of power when he’s joined with Congress. The reality is that so much of what we rely on, as you say, have been norms and lines that presidents don’t cross, not because they couldn’t but because they don’t wish to. If they wish to, we’re in a different world.

Frum: Well, this is where I want to invite you to look ahead to something that worries me a lot. And I don’t have any kind of answer to this, or I don’t even know how to begin to think about it.

But the United States has a strong tradition of turning the page on past chapters of political history. The outgoing president departs, and even if the successor thinks that outgoing president may have done some things that were wrong—there’s a very real-world example that during Watergate, it was uncovered that Lyndon Johnson had done many of the same financial things that Richard Nixon was accused of doing, and more so that would, in the post-Watergate world, look like violations of practice or even of law.

Strong impulse: Turn the page. Don’t look back. Once Nixon left office, pardon and don’t look back. And so on, it has always been. And it becomes—it’s not just a technical matter of: Do we look at the acts of past presidents? But there’s also been a kind of acceptance of them. So enough time passes, and however much you didn’t like Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter, that 20 years after they’re out of office, everyone agrees to pretend they’re to be chiseled out of marble and regarded as stalwarts and paragons.

One of the things that Trump people complain about is, when Trump left office in 2021, he didn’t get that treatment, right? There were investigations that because his acts had been so egregious, that he was prosecuted in all kinds of ways, or at least investigated. He was able to stop most of the prosecutions. But he was treated in a different way from any other ex-president, to which the answer is: Well, he behaved in a different way.

And as he’s now returned to the presidency, he’s doing even more egregious things. And the cycle—if and when there is a post-Trump presidency, if and when people who have different views ever reclaim any executive power, they’re going to confront either: These acts are so extreme; you can’t turn the practice of oblivion on them. But then we’re into a new kind of world that looks a lot more like French history than American history, where we’re digging up the bodies of dead kings and throwing them to the jackals.

Keisler: Yeah, I mean, look—I would just say this, which is that I think that will be a tough question, but at the same time, at the end of this administration—let’s assume it’s just a four-year administration—the to-do list is going to be huge. It’s going to include things like: How do we rebuild NATO? And how do we rebuild our alliances around the world, and how do we rebuild our economy from the different shocks and disasters, and how do we rebuild a functioning civil service after so many people are fired?

And I’m not saying that questions about accountability should be completely ignored, but I will just say that my priority is going to be less—and I think the new government’s priority is going to be less—How do we ensure accountability for past misdeeds? and more, like, How do we just repair the damage?

Frum: But if some staffer at DOGE has unloaded vast amounts of proprietary government data into a computer where they shouldn’t be, and is maybe hoarding them or even trying to sell them, that person is going to have some kinds of legal liabilities in his own right. And the defense will be, Someone told me to do it.

Keisler: No, that’s right. And look—you mentioned the Supreme Court’s decision about presidential immunity, with which I really disagree. The decision—I disagree with the decision. But at the end of the day, that only applies to the president. It doesn’t protect his subordinates. So there will be potential liability and exposure.

And I don’t mean to dismiss that. I just feel like there’s going to be so much repair work to be done. I feel like we’re going to have other priorities as well.

Frum: How does that rebuilding go? I mean, there is a practice where lawyers—no disrespect—tend to respond to breaches of norms by writing laws. And so after every scandal, you have this kind of museum of the scandal, which is the law written after the fact of: Outlaw the scandal, because it wasn’t maybe even illegal before, until you get ever greater accretions of law. And the bad practices, or the bad consequences of all this law, is you encourage the very American way of thinking, which is: If it’s not outright prohibited, then I’m free to do it.

Keisler: Look—democracy got into this mess, and democracy is going to have to get us out. And that’s going to mean, kind of, fostering a public understanding of why these principles and norms are important, so that we could get back to a place where, regardless of whether it violates the precise terms of a law, people who want to be successful in politics and want to be remembered well won’t do that. And that’s a broader education and persuasion campaign more than it is a question of writing new laws and regulations.

Frum: In Trump 1, just generally, the conservative legal establishment we knew, all the federal society people we were friends with—in so many cases still are—that was turned out to be quite a bulwark against the worst things the president wanted to do in Trump 1. During the interregnum between the two Trumps, it began to crumble. You found a lot of people who, one would’ve thought, knew better, making arguments to protect Trump that were obviously opportunistic for Trump, you know, one time only.

And now in Trump 2, it’s not just legal weirdos from strange places in American life, but it is: A lot of very distinguished people are ready to do the work to enable Donald Trump to break what everybody used to think were laws. How do we think about this? What do we do about it? Does any of this cast a backward glance on the conservative legal project? Or is there a new conservative legal project that we’re going to need to do to incorporate kind of concepts of morality along with concepts of law?

Keisler: Well, on the backwards-looking question, I mean, I certainly do look back and think, Well, you know, I thought there were people who shared certain principles that I hold dear, and that I thought we all said we held dear, that I guess turned out not to or changed their minds. So it does certainly make me look back with a bunch of question marks in my mind.

But look—looking forward in some ways, I think the answer is the same. Yes, there are a lot of people who have done things and joined things and advocated for things that I’m very surprised and disappointed about, and it certainly changed my view of them. But I think we need to work, person by person, throughout the country, just trying to persuade people that this is the wrong path, and moving to the right path anyone we can.

Frum: Is there a general rule, or is it so particular in each case, where you could say to a young person who intended to do good and who’s thinking of serving the second Trump administration, Look—here are the rules where you might be able to do good, and here are the rules where you might not be? Or would your advice to them just be, Stay away. This is all going to end in ruin and disaster?

Keisler: So my advice on that—it changed between the first Trump term and the second Trump term. In the first Trump term, I had a lot of conversations with people about that very subject. They would say, you know, I don’t like Donald Trump very much, but I have these particular political values which coincide with some aspects of his program, and my only chance to serve in the government would be in a Republican administration. What do you think I should do? And my general view there was that, look—the only alternative to good people being in government was more bad people being in government, and so that we all had an interest in having good people be in government.

But I would say, Look—that’s what the country’s interest is. For you, I would just look for roles that don’t have you directly, you know, with the Eye of Sauron gazing upon you in the White House. Find something that’s a little distant from that where most of the government is functioning normally, and you can engage in public service in a wonderful way.

In the second term, I just don’t think there is a part of the government where you can say that anymore. I think at this point, that baleful eye is kind of much more pervasive and trying to turn everything in its direction. I mean, one thing that is just striking about this administration, whether you talk about law firms or universities or the media: They are systematically trying to use every available lever of government power that exists in order to punish their enemies and discourage people from speaking out against them. And I think it’s very hard to find a corner of the government today where you can feel good. So I think on that my advice has changed.

Frum: My very last question: You have had a distinguished career in private practice. You mentioned law firms just now. Why are the law firms buckling in the way that they are?

Keisler: Well, I think it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma, which is that some individual—I mean, the way the president’s attack on law firms works, again, this is about using all the levers of government power. They’re trying to ruin the law firms by threatening the clients—by saying, you know, You’ll lose your government contracts if you’re a client of this law firm, in the hope that the clients will flee, the lawyers representing those clients will flee, and the law firms will crumble. And so some law-firm leaders have, I think, mistakenly concluded that the way to do this is to cut a deal and just get themselves out of the president’s gaze, and then they can move on.

I think they’re mistaken if they think they can move on. I think we’re already starting to see the demands escalate. Everybody knows that when you pay protection money, it’s not one and done—that they come back to you for more and more and more once they know you’re willing to pay. And so that’s why we see, even after these deals were inked, the president saying things like, Well, now I think I’d like to use these law firms to help coal companies with their leasing or help me with my trade deals. And there’s even reporting that they want these law firms to potentially work for DOGE and the Justice Department. Now, I don’t know whether any of those requests have been made. Maybe the president’s gaze will in fact turn elsewhere. But these law firms have indicated that they are willing to pay protection money, and I don’t know why they think it’s going to stop here.

Frum: I think the message from the federal courts through Trump 1 and through the interval between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is, Don’t look to us. This isn’t our job. It’s your job. And maybe we all need to heed that message and say, You know what? They’re not—the courts aren’t going to save us. They can do some things, but this is our job. And we have to do it.

Keisler: I think that is absolutely right. Look—courts are going to play a very critical function. They’re already playing that function. There’s a subset of issues where they are absolutely critical, and they’re often doing great work.

But that’s a subset of issues. Some things the president is doing are going to be terrible but lawful. Some things are going to be unlawful, but there’s going to be a long lag time between the act and a court remedy. And some things, the court remedy is just not going to be fully effective. So it’s ultimately up to the rest of us.

Frum: Peter Keisler, thank you so much.

Keisler: Thank you, David. It’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Peter Keisler for joining The David Frum Show. I always learn so much from him. I have learned so much from him for so many years. I’m so grateful he joined us today.

Now some questions from viewers and listeners. Let me thank everyone who’s been sending in these questions. We really are impressed by the volume and flow and the thoughtfulness of the questions. This week I was only able to select three. Please continue to send them. We’ll be selecting more in the future.

But let me begin with a question from John in Richmond, Virginia: “Why is it much more politically acceptable to attack Democratic constituencies, cities, and blue states, but not Republican constituencies, rural areas, and red states. Republicans compete to see who has more contempt for the former. And everyone seems to accept that Democratic voters should not expect to be treated as equal citizens under a Republican administration, but not the other way around.”

Well, John, is it acceptable? I notice you don’t accept it. You know, a long time ago, President [Franklin] Roosevelt reprimanded one of his Cabinet members, the postmaster general, who was also the functional head of the Democratic Party. He had said something dismissive—the postmaster general—about Republicans in rural areas. And Roosevelt said to him, This is never wise. You don’t denigrate anybody. We need every vote and everywhere. And indeed, that year, President Roosevelt won the vote in Kansas and other midwestern states because he had practiced a politics of respect.

Republicans do this not because it’s acceptable, but because they’ve given up on competing in great parts of the country. And Democrats refrain from doing it because they continue to compete in great parts of the country. We have two political coalitions in the United States right now. One is the tightly bounded Republican coalition, with its strict upper limits and its lack of interest in competing in the areas of the country where probably more than half the population lives, and a much baggier, looser Democratic coalition.

It’s never good practice to insult anybody. You’ll always be surprised by votes that might be potentially available, and it’s just undisciplined and misbehavior for Republicans to do the opposite. It’s part of the self-indulgence, I think, that is intended to impel Republican politics in the Trump era. It’s not good for them. It’s not wise. And the lesson is not, Why can’t we be as obnoxious as them? but, When will they learn to stop being so obnoxious themselves?

A second question comes from a reader who identifies himself as an immigrant from Africa. He said, “Sometime ago, you said in one of your interactions with other podcasts that you want to reclaim the term globalist, which the MAGA folks use as pejorative. How important do you think reclaiming such terms as globalist and globalization is in accepting the inevitable interconnectedness and interdependence economically, financially, commercially, of the global community in the 21st century and beyond?”

You know, when a word gets contaminated, there’s usually a strong reason why the people who contaminate the word want to contaminate it. And then those on the other side have to think very hard about whether it’s worthwhile to try to rescue the word or not.

So the word globalist is used to connect together a series of ideas, some very popular, some less so, and some quite crazy. So globalism is sometimes used to refer to advocacy for free trade, free movement of capital, investment goods—which, as we’re now discovering, most Americans support, and especially support when someone tries to take those things away. It can also mean a reference to the apparatus of global governance that makes this trade and makes these flows possible. These things don’t just happen by themselves. The United States and other advanced countries are bound together in a series of arrangements. The World Health Organization, conventions on postage and moving parcels, rules on intellectual property, all kinds of institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Now, these institutions are harder to understand. They have many different missions; some are more popular, and others are not. And I think people who use the term global and globalist as pejoratives are trying to link something that is generally approved of—which is international trade—to things that people find more mysterious and maybe threatening, which are the institutions that make international trade possible.

It is also, I suppose, linked to feelings about immigration, which are more complicated than feelings about trade and goods and services and capital. And finally, I think it is intended to suggest at the back of all of these arrangements lies some shadowy conspiracy—maybe Jewish, maybe some other kind of conspiracy—that is manipulating the lives of people and controlling our thoughts, through 5G telephones or whatever paranoid conspiracy has the upper hand that week.

I think the terms global and globalist are worth fighting for, because, as we’ve discovered, you can’t surrender part of this project and hope to keep the other parts alive. Once you accept the idea that there’s some kind of shadowy conspiracy that is making institutions work, you weaken the ability to defend international trade and other international benefits. The Trump administration has singled out for attack the World Health Organization. Now, it is only thanks to the World Health Organization, with its admittedly many, many problems, that we have any eyes into what is going on inside China at all. And China is a place where epidemics do tend to originate, for reasons that it’s fascinating to speculate about but ultimately don’t matter.

They just, again and again—epidemics going back into the middle years of the 20th century have tended to originate in China. So you want eyes and ears. The World Health Organization is a way to do it. If you denigrate that because you have succumbed to some crazy conspiracy theory, you do yourself no good. And if globalist and globalism are used as synonyms for anti-Jewish prejudice, then I think you need to take it head on.

Last question comes from Jamie, California: “As someone deeply disturbed by what’s happening, I’m at a loss for what meaningful, immediate action I can take. Like many, I feel shocked by our country’s descent into autocracy and kleptocracy, but also paralyzed by it. What can individuals like me actually do right now that might truly move the needle instead of just waiting helplessly for the midterms?”

You know, there was a saying during the first Trump term: “LOL nothing matters.” And I always answered that by saying, actually, everything matters. It’s just that there’s a lot of everything. The needle is enormous, and its movements are often imperceptible to the individual eye. But that doesn’t mean that when you apply whatever force you have to moving that needle, however little you see the needle moving, that doesn’t mean it’s not moving. It is moving just so, so slowly and with such weight. And all our individual strengths are one by one, so limited, but together, so powerful.

I am a great believer in elections over movements. There is a time and place when people need to come into the streets, and that is when the possibility of free and fair elections has been taken away. You see that happening in places like Serbia and soon, perhaps, in Hungary, where people come into the streets because the electoral process doesn’t work. And that day may come in the United States. I worry a lot about the integrity and fairness of the elections of 2026 and 2028. But for now, we have to assume and work on the assumption that those elections will be more or less free and fair, that the efforts that individuals put into organizing and voting will matter, and that is the place to go.

You shouldn’t be waiting helplessly for the elections; you should be preparing now. All those elections have begun. The 2028 election has begun. The 2026 elections have well begun. Money needs to be raised. Candidates need to be recruited. An organization needs to be done. If you live, as I infer Jamie does, in a state that is overwhelmingly blue, like California, you can still play a part by, for example, volunteering your time to phone bank into nearby states. California may be blue, but Nevada is contested. You can take time to help candidates in Nevada. And even in California, there are districts that can swing one way or another.

Another thing that a good citizen like Jamie can do is to try to make the Democratic Party more effective in government. You know, one of the things we all have to face is: A reason that Donald Trump came back to power in 2024 was because so many Americans were dissatisfied with the record of the Biden administration before it—both about things that maybe they couldn’t help, like the surge of global inflation, but the Biden administration also decided it wasn’t going to make a big deal out of issues like immigration enforcement, anti-crime enforcement, civic order. And that’s an important reason why Kamala Harris lost in 2024 and Trump was able to return.

So there has to be a Democratic Party that can not only win but govern if you’re going to keep the forces of Trumpism at bay, so being involved in those sectarian or factional disputes within the Democratic Party to say effective governance is going to be indispensable to keeping the lower-D democratic institutions in power, making them work, making them succeed.

There’s a lot to do. And you shouldn’t measure the success, the efficacy of your efforts by: Is there some immediate, big result? Everything moves so gradually. Everything moves so slowly, but everything does move.

I think it’s the faith that individual effort can matter that brings me back here week after week. I hope it will bring you all back here week after week. Thank you all for watching. If you are watching on YouTube, please like and subscribe. If you’re listening on an audio platform, please rate and review. We’ll be back next week with more of The David Frum Show. Send questions to producer@thedavidfrumshow.com, and please keep watching.

Thank you for joining. I so appreciate it. And I am so strengthened, cheered by the comfort and company of you all. Thank you. See you next week.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

As Donald Trump nears the end of his first 100 days in office, his administration continues to take aim at many American institutions. Panelists joined Washington Week With The Atlantic last night to discuss the administration’s stance on the courts, universities, government agencies, and more.

Meanwhile, this week Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told voters that “we are all afraid,” adding that she’s anxious about using her voice, “because retaliation is real.”

“It is so pervasive, what she is talking about,” Mark Leibovich said last night. She’s not talking about “political intimidation like Elon Musk throwing a bunch of money at an opponent or someone being primaried.” He continued, “She’s talking about physical fear.”

Murkowski’s sentiments are also not isolated, Leibovich added. “It’s been a real hallmark of this era,” he said. “Governing is supposed to take place by politics, by persuasion, by debate. Authoritarianism is by intimidation, by threat, by violence in some cases.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Laura Barrón-López, a White House Correspondent for PBS News Hour; Eugene Daniels, a senior Washington correspondent and incoming co-host of The Weekend at MSNBC; and Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of The David Frum Show, David discusses how the Trump administration is in for a stark reality check due to its trade policies. David also debunks the claims of a painless economic transition promised by President Donald Trump and makes the point that the administration is not only bluffing and mismanaging fiscal and trade policies, but also misleading the public with promises of easy success.

Then David is joined by the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, to discuss Canadians’ reactions to the sudden economic and rhetorical attacks from their once-trusted American neighbors.

After the interview, David answers listener questions about the Trump base, the media techniques of fascists, and the hidden gift of Trumpism.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and I’m grateful that you would join us again this second week of the program.

This week, my guest will be Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Now, I should make clear, if anyone doesn’t know it: I, too, am a Canadian and an Ontarian by birth, and I still spend a lot of time there.

I’m going to be speaking to the premier about the sense of shock and dismay that Canadians have felt about Donald Trump’s threats, not only to the trade arrangement between Canada and the United States, but his demands that Canada be annexed to the United States.

You know, the Trump people, when they’re trying to justify the economic policy that sent world financial markets into such chaos over the past weeks, they try to present this as some kind of confrontation with China alone, because they don’t like to admit to Americans that they are waging a trade war against the entire planet. This is not an anti-China campaign; this is an anti-everybody campaign. And it’s a campaign in which America has almost literally no allies, except maybe El Salvador.

The trade war began with attacks on Canada, supposedly and historically America’s closest neighbor and ally. You would think if you were trying to build an anti-China coalition, you would start by consolidating the North American heartland, especially the U.S.-Canada relationship. That’s exactly the opposite of what has happened.

I’ll be talking to the premier about that, how Canadians feel about it—not so much the facts and figures of the relationship, enormous as it is, but what it has been like for Canadians to be on the receiving end of threats of annexation, threats of violence, and this unrelenting campaign of tariffs and harassment, which has not been paused. The tariffs against China paused and unpaused. But those against Canada have remained consistently in place from the very beginning of the Trump administration. It’s bizarre. It’s shocking. It’s upsetting. And that’s what we’re going to talk about this week on The David Frum Show.

After the interview, I will be discussing and answering some reader questions. But first, some opening thoughts on the events of the past week.

[Music]

Frum: When Donald Trump and those around him want to demean or dismiss some opponent, some critic, they sometimes use the phrase, He doesn’t have the cards. They’ve said that about Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people’s resistance to Russian aggression. They’ve said it about Canada and other trading partners.

The implication is that the other person is too weak, too insignificant to be bothered to be worthy of respect. But there’s another implication, too, which is that the United States and the Trump administration does have the cards, is so mighty and fearsome that others must give way.

Now, the United States is obviously a very powerful nation with a lot of sources of command and control. But it is important to understand that, in fact, Donald Trump doesn’t have the cards that he thinks he does, and that’s one of the reasons that this campaign of economic aggression he’s launched—not against China but against the whole planet, every country just about, almost every trading nation—is coming amiss and will likely end in failure, and even disaster.

Let’s just take Donald Trump seriously for a moment. He doesn’t deserve it, but let’s just, for our own sakes, do it: supposing a president of the United States came to office and said, You know what? My top priority is going to be reshoring manufacturing in the United States. I personally don’t agree that this should be anybody’s top priority, but let’s suppose it were a president’s top priority: reshoring manufacturing. That’s what Donald Trump says he wants to do. How would you go about it?

Well, first you admit to yourself, if to no one else, that you are proposing a very ambitious and expensive task, one that will involve a lot of dislocation. So you’d face up to that. You would try to build some kind of political consensus in favor of the bumpy, difficult path you were proposing for the nation. You would maximize your friends at home. You would reach out to other parties. You would not behave in an arrogant way that had a lot of people hoping for your failure, and you would not start committing all kinds of other offenses—and even crimes—that put you in all kinds of precarious positions, where anything went wrong, and your whole program would come a cropper.

You would understand you were doing something that was not easy, was not going to be fast, was going to be costly, was going to impose significant hardship on many people. You’d work with allies. You’d build a large coalition because even if as you’re shrinking your supply chains to move things away from China, you’re still going to need various kinds of inputs from other countries—raw materials, if nothing else. And you’d want to make sure that as many countries as possible were sympathetic to what you were doing, rather than wishing that you would fail and fearing your aggression. You certainly wouldn’t open campaigns of territorial aggression against neighbors and allies. You wouldn’t say, We’re going to annex Greenland from Denmark, and we’re going to try to conquer Canada and make it a 51st state. You wouldn’t do any of those things.

You would also understand the relationship between your financial program and your economic program. Now, this is a little technical, but it’s really important to grasp. The reason the United States has such a big trade deficit is exactly and precisely because the United States imports so much capital from other countries. The current account and the capital account—to give them their technical names—have to move together.

So one reason the United States has had such an expansion of its trade deficit in recent years is, first, that the United States is importing so much capital in the form of private investment. People are buying into American companies, which is a good thing. But it’s also because the United States has run huge budget deficits. So foreigners buy a lot of American debt because there’s a lot of American debt to buy.

A first step—and an indispensable step—towards shrinking your trade deficit is to shrink your budget deficit. So you would have a fiscal plan that worked in parallel to your trade plan, your economic plan, whereas instead of, as Donald Trump has done, exactly the opposite. His plan is to make the deficit bigger on a fantasy that with enough tariffs, he can make the trade deficit smaller. And that’s not going to work.

You would level with people. You would not promise people quick and easy success. The hardships that have come, and are to come, are going to arrive and are arriving as a total surprise to Americans. They were promised that this was going to be quick and easy. People in the Trump administration are still promising that the stock market will go up any day soon, not understanding: You know what? Reshoring all this manufacturing, it’s going to dislocate a lot of arrangements. A lot of businesses are going to close. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs.

Maybe they’ll find new ones. Conceivably—I don’t believe it, but conceivably—the new ones will be better paid. Probably not. But if you think it’s sort of more manly for Americans to work with their hands in factories than to work in offices or in service jobs, if you think that that is going to fortify the character of the country and the economic sacrifice is worth it, don’t go promising people that they’re going to be better off, because it’s not true. And they will notice, and they will be mad, and they will notice soon.

Don’t also say that your goal here is the strengthening of the American family. One of the things we know about families is they tend to come apart in times of economic distress, especially the non-college educated. During a recession, rates of divorce go up; rates of childbirth go down. If those are your top priorities, understand that they conflict with the other top priority of reorganizing the entire American economy.

Don’t also make a lot of appeals to freedom, because a top-down reorganization of the American economy is many things, but a free-market project it is not. It’s an act of state control, of state assertion, of central planning. Someone has grimly joked of central planning without a plan. But there’s a notion, there’s a concept that the people at the top—the people with authority—think that a certain way of organizing the economy would be better than other ways, and they’re going to use the power of the state to enforce their vision.

So you have to drop all this talk about economic freedom, because that’s not what we’re doing. Economic freedom belongs to those who are free traders. With the reorientation of the economy toward manufacturing, you’re committing to the tariff regime, which is highly intrusive. You’re committing to probably various kinds of retraining programs. You’re committing to state subsidies to, at a minimum, to buy off the farmers, but state subsidies in other industries too.

And ultimately, if you’re not going to have a shrunken budget deficit and you’re going to do the tariffs and you’re going to try to reshore manufacturing, sooner or later, you’re going to discover yourself needing some kind of capital or exchange control to control the flow of money in and out of your country.

So this is a big, old-fashioned, wartime-economy project, not at all a free-market one. And you’d better acknowledge that to yourself. Instead, what has happened is that Trump has presented this in a way that is so false, so deceptive, that the story is going to unravel faster than he can deliver any conceivable benefit. Never mind net benefit—any benefit at all.

So what he’s going to discover is he’s doing this all with bluff. He doesn’t have the cards. His promise of easy, cheap success, well, it comes naturally to him because he’s kind of a flimflam artist, and all his life, he has bilked people who have trusted him. In this case, he’s trying to bilk a whole nation.

I don’t worry about this, because, as I say, I don’t wish any of this project well. I think the whole project is ill-conceived, even if it were an honest project. And it’s not honest. But I think he has begun this project by lying even to himself about how easy it’s going to be, how fast it’s going to be, how remunerative it’s going to be. And I think what we all smell coming from this administration in the light of the unraveling of self-deception is the smell of panic.

And this is the whole thing. This is the thing. I think that the whole world—and especially the Chinese, who are supposedly the targets of the Trump program—are smelling panic. They are smelling fear. They’re smelling imminent defeat.

You know, the United States was sold this project as a way of reaffirming American power and greatness. In fact, what we are witnessing is not just a crisis of the American economy but a crisis of American power. All kinds of other resources of the American state—the good name, the credibility, the alliance system—all these things are also in danger right now. And we are going to find ourselves, at the end of this Trump program, which may be coming faster than anyone believes—this whole thing may collapse quite quickly—but when it does collapse, it’s going to be hard to put together a second plan. It’s going to be hard to persuade countries that have been targeted by the tariffs, the countries that have been threatened with aggression, the countries that have been abandoned that the United States has repented and will do better.

And I’m not thinking here just about close American friends but about a country like Vietnam, which is a historic enemy of China—which welcomed the opening of an economic tie to the United States as a way to both enrich themselves and also to give them some leverage against their powerful neighbor. They are now thinking, As nasty as the Chinese are, they may be more reliable. And we are seeing a revival of high-level visits between Vietnam and China in a way that is going to be very hard to undo.

Authoritarian states like Vietnam have a lot of policy continuity. Once they settle on something—it comes out of a big bureaucratic process of decision, but once they settle on it—that becomes the plan. And if they’ve become convinced that the United States under Donald Trump—that the United States, generally—is not a reliable partner, that’s not something they’re going to change their mind about when the United States says, Oops. Sorry it didn’t work out. We didn’t hit the Dow 50,000 target that Peter Navarro promised. We’re rethinking this. We’re going to try something else. We’ve got to pause. We’ve got an unpause, then we’re pausing again and unpausing again. Through all of this, the United States is going to find itself in worse and worse shape.

And now my interview with Ontario Premier Doug Ford. After that, I’ll be answering questions from viewers and listeners. Please remember to like and subscribe to The David Frum Show.

But first a quick break.

[Break]

Frum: Premier Ford, welcome.

Doug Ford: Well, thanks for having me on, David.

Frum: I should mention I was born in Ontario. I have a house in Ontario. I pay property taxes in Ontario, but I don’t vote in Ontario, so you get the best of all possible worlds from me.

Ford: (Laughs.) Well, that’s great. I can’t stand taxes. Never raised a tax ever.

Frum: This is where I want to start. So you’ve been working very hard on American television—

Ford: Yes.

Frum: —talking about the relationship between Canada and the United States, between Ontario and the neighboring states, the facts, the figures, the enormous size of this relationship. I want to move away from that meat-and-potatoes, facts-and-figures approach to ask a sort of question I think Americans may not understand and would appreciate your insight into.

A lot of Americans, even the people who are not sympathetic to what President Trump is doing, treat his comments about Canada as kind of a joke: Annexing the 51st state—it’s a troll. It’s a joke. I don’t think they understand the impact that this is having, that this kind of talk has on Canadians. So could you just [say], as someone who comes from a right-of-center background—not a tax raiser, not a big-government guy—as someone who comes from the same part of the world, basically, as the Trump voters come from, how all of this lands when Canadians and Ontarians hear it?

Ford: Well, what it is, David, we’ve always thought ourselves part of the family, and it’s been that way for, oh, generations. And I think people were shocked. They were disappointed—if I could say the word hurt—because Canadians love Americans. They absolutely love them. They spend a lot of time in the U.S. And Americans love Canadians. I’ve talked to so many hardcore Trump supporters who are saying, Yeah, I would do anything for Trump, but I don’t like the way he’s treating our—one guy said—little brother. And that’s the way we look upon it too.

I spent 20 years of my life in the U.S., and I love the U.S. I love the American people. I traveled pretty well to almost every state numerous times, and I just believe we’re stronger together. I believe in the “Am-Can fortress,” the American-Canadian fortress. Put a ring around it. No one can touch us.

We have all the natural resources, the energy, everything that the U.S. needs, and we need the U.S. We’re the No. 1 customer, as I call it. We’re their No. 1 customer, so vice versa. And we just need to work together. The threat is not Canada; it’s China. You have to keep an eye on China. I’ve been saying it for years now, and it’s coming to fruition.

Frum: I think one of the things that baffles a lot of people in the Canadian business community especially is: It’s a complex relationship. There are always chafing points. Everybody understands that lumber, dairy—there have been issues that go back a long time. What I hear from people in the business world is that Trump people aren’t saying anything you can even say yes to. The grievances seem so imaginary. Everyone knows the drugs don’t flow from Canada to the United States. They flow from the United States to Canada. The guns flow from the United States to Canada. Flows of manufacturers go from the United States to Canada. Canada sends energy, and there’s a trade back-and-forth in services. So they don’t hear it. Like, even if they wanted to say yes, they can’t, because the grievances don’t seem real.

Ford: Well, that’s because they aren’t real. It’s very, very simple. And, you know, it’s the uncertainty that President Trump has put not just on Canada, on the entire world. You know, I always say you have to take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s book back in 1988, on the free-trade deal. And, you know, protectionism does not work. It doesn’t work anywhere in the world. It won’t work between Canada and the U.S. The supply chain is so integrated.

Everyone’s heard about the auto parts going back and forth six, seven, eight times before they get assembled in a plant in Ontario or a plant in the U.S., be it Michigan or any other auto plant. I always say—you know, the Auto Pact’s been around since 1965—and you can’t unscramble an egg. You have to make the omelet larger. And that’s the auto sector. But there are so many other sectors that the supply chain is so integrated. You just can’t flip on a switch and turn it off.

Frum: Well, you mentioned the Auto Pact. I think a lot of Americans don’t understand when they hear President Trump say and his surrogates say, We want Canada to sign some great new trade deal, that Canadian-U.S. trade has been wrapped in deals. They go back to the 1950s for defense, to the 1960s for autos, the first Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement to the ’80s, NAFTA update in the ’90s, the Trump version of NAFTA in the 2010s.

And what Trump has been doing is saying, All those signatures don’t mean anything. We want another set of signatures. And one of the questions I think you must have and Canadians must have is, well, if the last set of signatures don’t mean anything, why do you want new signatures?

Ford: And that’s what people have been saying, David. You know, President Trump made the last deal. I was part of that deal with Secretary [Robert] Lighthizer. And President Trump said it was the greatest deal ever. I guess it’s not the greatest deal ever anymore. So I’m not too sure what he wants to do or where he wants to go, but we’re just stronger together. With all the threats around the world, we need to stick together.

When China’s cutting the U.S. off of critical minerals for their military use, we have all the critical minerals. Ontario has more critical minerals than anywhere in the world. We want to ship them down to our closest friend and ally to support them. For instance, nickel: 50 percent of the high-grade nickel the U.S. uses comes from Sudbury. And I emphasize high-grade nickel. There’s a difference. They use it in their military, use it in their aerospace, in their manufacturing. Not to mention the aluminum and the steel and other critical minerals that I could list. And who better to give it to than our closest friends?

Frum: I understand you often talk to Secretary of Commerce [Howard] Lutnick. What are those conversations like, without asking you to say anything you shouldn’t say? Does he place the call? Do you place the call? How do you greet each other? Is it cordial? What happens on those calls?

Ford: Well, it’s always cordial. He’s a very, very bright individual. He understands the markets, and that’s why it’s mind-boggling to so many people, elected officials, private-sector folks. He’s a smart guy, and the market’s speaking. And when you see the market tumbling, it’s not about Wall Street losing money; it’s about Main Street losing money.

The mom and pops that are out there that have money in pension funds—and we have a lot of pension funds in Toronto, probably one of the largest group of pension funds—they invest everywhere in the world, and they invest heavily into the U.S. So when their pension fund drops $2 billion or $3 billion over a three-day period, that’s concerning.

It’s concerning to people that want to invest around the world. They put that on hold. We’re going to see inflation when you’re targeting tariffs—which, by the way, I support all the tariffs against China, but there’s a way of handling it.

Frum: Do you ever tell Secretary Lutnick that he could make everybody billions and billions of dollars if he could just keep his yap shut for 48 hours?

Ford: (Laughs.) Well, I never get personal with the president, never get personal with the secretary. But I’m not too sure if they realize the impact on the entire world when one man speaks; it can shift everything. So they have to be cognitive of every word that comes out of their mouth. It’s just so, so important for the U.S., for the citizens, to make sure that we continue thriving and prospering. And that’s what would happen if we made this Am-Can fortress.

Frum: Can you talk a little bit about the 51st-state troll?

Ford: Yes.

Frum: Because Canada and the United States have a relationship that is so integrated, everything from migratory birds and the Great Lakes. And trucks break down on the bridges, and if they break down on this part of the bridge, it’s an American traffic problem. If they break down on this part of the bridge, it’s a Canadian traffic problem. Police coordination. Your relationship with your counterparts in Lansing and Albany; you probably work with them every single day. And yet they are two countries with different cultures and histories. Talk a little bit about how it feels to Canadians when Americans say, Your country doesn’t matter, even though we have this great cooperative relationship.

Ford: Well, what I did say to Secretary Lutnick, and I’ll say it publicly: The difference between Americans right now—and I have a tremendous amount of friends and contacts in the U.S.—they’re just kind of going on their way. They’ve woken up a little bit over the last few weeks. But 40 million Canadians are at a fever pitch right now. They’re willing to sacrifice. They’re patriotic, like patriotism I’ve never seen. We always say how Canadians are so polite. Well, they’re at a fever pitch right now and willing to do anything and sacrifice anything to protect their sovereignty. And they’re passionate. Again, I’ve never seen the patriotism like I’ve seen over the last few months.

Frum: You just won an election on these issues.

Ford: Yes.

Frum: And there’s now another election at the federal level being fought, where the Trump issue is central.

Ford: Yes.

Frum: Do you think that the Trump people understand that they’re remaking Canadian politics in ways that may surprise them, in ways potentially they may not like, because of their blundering interventions into Canadian life?

Ford: I think they’re playing a huge impact on Canadian politics. They played a huge impact on my election as running for a third mandate, and I talked about the tariffs. That was the most important issue on all our polling. Tariffs were No. 1 because that affects their lives. You know, I always say, the foundation of our health-care system, education, our infrastructure, our business—the foundation is your economy. That’s what keeps everything going. And when there’s an attack on your economy, that affects every other sector here in Canada, but it also affects every sector in the U.S. as well.

Frum: Let me end by asking you about the way forward, the way back to normality. Prime Minister [Mark] Carney, who may or may not be prime minister next month, he faces an election at the end of April. Prime Minister Carney is sort of an interim prime minister. He said nothing will ever be the same, and right now it is very hard to see a way back to normal. Do you see a way back? What would that look like, starting from where we are, with the intense feeling in Canada against what has been said about Canada?

Ford: Well, I always look at the glass being half full. I think there’s an opportunity to drop these tariffs, build on our strengths. We can be the two strongest, wealthiest, most prosperous countries in the world. If we get the [Keystone] XL pipeline, start heading south. We need to build pipelines east, west, and north as well. We need to make sure that we get the critical minerals out of the ground and sell them to our friends south of the border. And if they’re at capacity, then we ship them around the world to our allies, not our foes. We want to send them to our friends and make Canada stronger and make the U.S. stronger and more secure. That’s what we need to do. And we’re consumer gluttons in Canada. We hit way above our weight for 40 million people.

Frum: Let me focus that question about the way back a little bit more. In our earlier lives, I think we can both remember a time when Canada was a much more state-dominated economy, much more protectionist. There was a government-owned oil company, government-owned other services in places the government had no business being. There was a lot of mistrust of American investment. There was foreign investment-review acts. We remember the first Trudeau government’s national-energy policy, where they tried to create a kind of isolated Canadian energy market.

You know, from the ’60s to the ’80s, Canada was an inward-looking, isolationist, protectionist, state-dominated economy, in a way that changed in the 1980s with the free-trade agreement, the Mulroney government, and governments like yours, Ralph Klein in Alberta. Prime Minister Carney sometimes sounds like he’s talking about returning to that old way, where there would be a made-in-Canada car, and that the price of Trump to Canada is not just what he’s doing to Canada but the way he’s changing Canada to make Canada more inward.

Do you worry about that? Do you think that’s a resistible trend? Do you think that’s a fight that can be won in the face of the kind of pressure on Canada today?

Ford: Well, David, I totally disagree with that, anything to do with protectionism. Do I believe in onshoring? I’ll give you a couple examples.

Aluminum cans: 65 percent of the aluminum the U.S. needs comes from Quebec. So we ship down the aluminum. The two big breweries and the two big beverage companies, they print it, convert it, and ship it back up. They get hit 25 percent on the way down, 25 percent on the way back. It drives up the cost to the consumer. And I have to ask, there’s a billion-dollar industry. Why are we not making cans here in Ontario? That’s one area.

I found out the other day, we have three big steel plants—Stelco, Dofasco, and Algoma—and we don’t make steel beams here. And we have more cranes in the sky in Toronto than New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, L.A., and they even threw in Honolulu combined. So we need to build steel beams.

The last one, I’ll give you an example. We ship wheat down to the U.S., and they make cereal. I found out that we don’t even have a cereal manufacturer here. We used to have Kellogg. But these are simple areas that I believe in onshoring to make sure that we have a supply of cans at a lower—

Frum: American spaghetti is all made from Canadian wheat, or almost all.

Ford: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And then some of the packaging and spaghetti comes up to Canada, which I have no problem with.

It was like [during] the pandemic, when President Trump cut us off from the N95 masks, well, we stood up an industry in two months. And we’ll never rely on anyone in that area again. We’re making our own N95 masks, our gowns, everything else here. We can manufacture anything in Canada, absolutely anything.

Frum: You have your hand on the on-off electricity switch flowing south to the United States?

Ford: Yeah, I want to ship them more electricity. You know, we are sharing the technology of the small modular reactors. We’re leaders in the G7 on the SMRs.

And I just had Governor [Spencer] Cox here from Utah, a Republican governor. What a gentleman. The first thing we did, we brought them up to Darlington, where we’re making the small modular reactors. We’re working with U.S. companies—General Electric, Tennessee Valley Authority, and Hitachi’s in there as well—but we’re saying, Here. We’re going to share this technology.

They need energy, the U.S. We have the energy, we have the technology, and we’re sharing it with them. We have orders for over $100 billion from Europe for the small modular reactors. And anyone who doesn’t understand SMR—it can be any size, but let’s just use it as approximately the size of a Walmart. It can power a town of 400,000 people. And it’s convenient. It’s clean, green, reliable, affordable energy. That’s the way of the future.

Frum: Thank you so much for making time for us today.

Ford: Thanks, David. And I just want to tell the Americans, we love you. I love the Americans, and may God bless the U.S., and may God bless Canada. And let’s get through this and get this deal done.

Frum: Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

[Break]

Frum: Thank you to Premier Doug Ford for that candid, powerful interview.

As mentioned, I also live in Ontario. I have a house there, and I’ve witnessed myself what the premier has described. This surge of hurt and dismay and, above all, surprise among Canadians at the reaction to Canada in the Trump administration. What did Canada do to bring all of this hatred and desire for annexation on? It’s very puzzling and very upsetting, and Premier Ford has been someone who’s given powerful voice to those feelings.

As mentioned, we’re going to try to experiment with viewer and listener interaction on this program. It’s something that has been lost on the internet—the collapse of comment sections from the early internet, the demise of Twitter as any kind of useful platform of exchange. I’m going to try to restore some interactivity here. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks to everyone who sent a question. We’ve selected three. I hope listeners and viewers will send more questions to producer@thedavidfrumshow.com. And here are the three for this week.

The first comes from Paul in the Bay Area, and he asks, “Do you think Trump supporters are having buyer’s remorse?”

Now, the Trump base is famously solid, powerful, even kind of threatening. Many in Congress on the Republican side hesitate to vote their consciences on things like free trade, because they’re so terrified of what Trump supporters inside the party might do. But elections aren’t lost from the base. Elections are lost at the fringe. Remember: 1932, the Great Depression. Americans are going hungry. Transient camps on the edge of every American city. Herbert Hoover still won 38 percent of the vote in 1932. You don’t lose your base; that’s why it’s called the base. What you lose is the fringe and the edge. And there are a lot of signs that President Trump is in deep trouble.

During his first term, his personal approval was never that great. Americans saw him for what he was, a bully—or maybe not wholly for what he was, but they saw a lot of what he was—a bully, loudmouth, kind of a thug. They didn’t like it, but they did enjoy the economy of 2017, 2018, and 2019. They didn’t care whether he’d done it himself or whether he’d inherited it from Barack Obama. Those were good times, and people appreciated it until the COVID crash, for which they largely didn’t blame Trump. They saw that as some external event that maybe he didn’t manage as well as he could have, but it wasn’t his fault.

Now there’s a lot of data that shows Trump’s economic numbers are heading south, and that’s before significant layoffs have begun. Thus far, the crisis that Trump started entirely on his own has been a financial-market event. And it’s like the gathering of a storm, not the storm itself. The storm is coming, and if it expresses itself in layoffs, in home foreclosures, I think you’ll see a big reaction to that.

You already hear nervousness from Republican members of Congress about the 2026 elections. If those elections are allowed to proceed in a free and fair way—which is, unfortunately, not the certainty that it ought to be—I think there’s going to be a price to pay for the mistakes of the past months and the further mistakes that seem to be coming.

So I don’t know that you’ll ever get, Paul, the kind of reaction from the pro-Trump talkers on many platforms to say, We lied to you. We knew we were lying. The whole thing was a disaster. We’re so sorry. We want to make some kind of repentance. I don’t think those folks are ever going to apologize in the way that perhaps you’d wish. But will there be enough cracks in the Trump coalition to weaken the position of the Trump presidency leading to the midterms? And will there be some kind of correction in the midterms if they’re allowed to happen? I think the answer to that is pretty strongly yes.

A question from Hans. In last week’s program, I made a reference to the way in which the far right of today has become a very adept user of new social media. And Hans asked, “I’ve been thinking for years that there was a comparison to be made between fascist authoritarian use of radio and film in the 1920s and 1930s, and the right’s use of social media today.” And he wanted me to develop this thought some more.

It’s a big mistake to assume that just because people have reactionary social views, that they will necessarily be backward in their use of technology. In fact, quite the contrary, often because they’re so alienated from the society of the present, they’re hunting in all kinds of unlooked-for places in ways that people who are more satisfied with society don’t.

For example, cable TV has, obviously, audience problems, and that’s a much-discussed fact. One of the things that the new media have discovered is there is a huge, untapped audience for conspiratorial anti-Semitism, and people who speak to this can build huge online followings. Many of the most successful podcasters of today have discovered conspiratorial anti-Semitism as a great resource, and they’re building audiences larger than CNN, MSNBC, even Fox.

Why? Cable news is a little more old-fashioned that way, thank goodness, and is saying, You know, even though there’s a big profit to be made, we’re not going there. But new media has said, We are looking for every kind of new opportunity, and if conspiratorial anti-Semitism is the wave of the future, that’s for us.

And so you see this flourishing of the worst kind of ideas in the most advanced places on the newest platforms. I think if we’re going to hold society onto a better path, if we’re going to hold media and public discussion onto a better path, we’re going to have to follow the worst people in society onto the newest platforms and to communicate in the newest ways. And that’s one of the things I’m trying to do here on this platform, to say, You know what? We can use the new media and still say conspiratorial anti-Semitism is for crackpots, cranks, and vicious people of all other kinds.

Question from Michael: “In your book Trumpocracy, you highlighted some of the hidden gifts of the Trump presidency. Eight years later, are we any close to unwrapping and enjoying the fruits of those gifts, or are we at risk of squandering them forever?”

So this is a reference to an observation I made in a long-ago book about there being potential benefits. One of the things that is a gift of Trump, and maybe not a gift any of us want, is: Trump’s second term brings to Americans the gift of humility. I think a lot of Americans have an assumption that things that happen in other places at other periods in history could never happen here. A famous book about American fascism bears the title It Can’t Happen Here.

I think Donald Trump is showing that Americans belong to the same human race as the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese. We are not special creatures of God. We are not immune to the vices of humanity. America has had, on the whole, a more fortunate history than other countries—not in every way a perfect history, but a more fortunate history. And so political extremism has tended not to get the purchase in the United States than it has in less fortunate countries.

But there is no innate American immunity to extremism. And there is no guarantee that America must stay a democracy forever. It is really up to all of us, and Donald Trump has taught us that lesson—is teaching us that lesson. If we want to keep what has been great and good about America, we’re going to have to work over the next years the way Americans have seldom worked before in their political history.

Thank you so much for listening to the program. We’ll be back next week with more. I hope you’ll like and subscribe. I’m not a very good salesman. I never remember to say that, but it turns out it’s really important that you like and subscribe, because we need to work together to bring this kind of message to as many people as need to hear it.

We had great success with the first show. I’m looking forward to more success with you in the future. So please keep watching. Please like and subscribe. And thank you for joining The David Frum Show.

[Music]

Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.

Donald Trump’s trade war has unleashed global uncertainty. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the fallout from the president’s policies—and his insistence that tariffs are the key to strengthening the American economy.

Trump is “not particularly ideological,” Ashley Parker said last night, but there are a few areas in which he’s remained consistent: immigration and tariffs. “He hates the idea that anyone is taking advantage of him or taking advantage, now, of his country, of the United States,” she said.

With the president’s continued insistence on imposing high, global tariffs, “he does not want America, in his eyes, to be getting a ‘bad deal,’” Parker continued. “Despite not having a particularly clear ideology on a number of things, he fundamentally believes that trade imbalances mean that America is getting ripped off.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News; Ashley Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Tarini Parti, a White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

In the premiere episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum lays out his case for a new kind of political conversation—one that rejects the radicalized rhetoric dominating major podcasts.

He then details why Donald Trump’s tariffs wrecked world financial markets. David takes apart the excuses offered by tariff defenders, and tries to explain the shock and betrayal felt by America’s allies.

Then, David is joined by the former ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel shares the lessons he learned as White House chief of staff during the 2008–09 financial crises—and his assessment of how Democrats went wrong in 2024 and where they can advance from here.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello. And welcome to the first episode of The David Frum Show. I’m David, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Why another podcast? It’s a natural question. The answer begins with the chart I recently glimpsed from a media-studies organization. It showed that audio-visual content online tended to bunch up at the far extremes of American political dialogue: the far left and the far right—the far right having a big advantage. The center ground lay abandoned and seemingly barren.

Now, that’s not the way things are in real life. In real life, most of us are pretty levelheaded people, and we approach the world in a spirit of curiosity, not anger, looking for insights, not insults. Yet, when the sound comes on and the video comes up, things are suddenly different, and the worst voices get the biggest audiences. I don’t think it has to be that way. In the text edition of The Atlantic, we prove every day that Americans want something better. I’m going to try to give them that something better, also, here in audio and visual content on The David Frum Show.

We shouldn’t assume that just because people have deeply reactionary politics, they’re necessarily backwards in their technology. A century ago, in another dark time, fascists outpaced Democrats and liberals in their mastery of the then-new technology of the radio. Something similar to that seems to be happening today. We need to meet the worst forces in our society on the battleground of ideas, using the latest tools. And that’s what we’re going to try to do here.

You know, when people produce honest information about vaccines, about trade, about anything else that’s important that has unfortunately become controversial, of course, the production of that information costs resources, and those resources have to be paid for. The unfortunate result is that the truth is often paywalled, although lies are always free. Well, here on The David Frum Show, we’re going to try to be free in every sense of that term and to make content available to all who want it in as honest way as it’s possible to do.

My first guest this week will be Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, who served the United States in many capacities. I’m going to be talking to him at the beginning about one of those capacities: his service as White House chief of staff during the financial crisis of 2009, another steep collapse in financial markets. What similarities does he see between now and then? What differences? And what lessons does he have to offer us?

Before my conversation with Rahm Emanuel, a few opening thoughts. Last week, the United States suffered one of the severest shocks in the nation’s financial history. It’s a little difficult to wrap your mind around how big an event this Trump tariff disaster was. As of Friday afternoon, U.S. stock markets had suffered a loss of about $6 trillion. And to put this in context, the severest natural disaster in American history—Hurricane Katrina—cost the United States about $200 billion. So what Trump did was about 30 times as expensive as Hurricane Katrina. It’s more on the order of what it cost the nation to wage and win the Second World War.

Now, stock market valuations come and go, and perhaps some of this money will be recovered. But other forms of damage that Trump did never will be. Trump permanently—or at least for a generation—stained the good name of the United States with dozens of allies around the world, countries that had done things the United States asked, countries that had signed agreements with the United States. He demonstrated that America’s word was not good, that American credit could not be trusted. Many corporations have very intricate systems of supply with providers all over the planet. And those things were interrupted, and those business relationships were disrupted in ways, again, very hard to undo.

The economic mechanism is a sophisticated and delicate apparatus. And when somebody comes blundering around and smashes up arrangements, that has enduring effects. Now, some of Trump’s defenders will give you an explanation of what happened. They will tell you that woke financial markets guided by people who hate Trump went on a kind of petulant rampage against Trump’s “America First” agenda.

Can we pause to understand and absorb how childish a way of thinking this is? Financial markets are made up of millions of people making billions of decisions involving trillions of dollars. They’re as impersonal as the tides. The financial markets crashed because all of those decision makers across so many countries, across so many time zones, collectively assessed that Donald Trump had sliced a huge amount of value out of every company traded in the United States, and although we couldn’t see it, also out of every company not traded in the United States. There are some 30-plus million companies in the United States. Almost all of them must be poorer this week than they were last.

To understand why these financial markets reacted as they did, we need to begin by understanding what a tariff is. In the simplest terms, a tariff is a tax on any good imported into a country. But most of us experience those tariffs as taxes on things we consume: fruits and vegetables, electronic equipment, maybe an automobile. But from the point of view of the whole economy, it’s just as important to understand a tariff as a tax on things we produce as a tax on things we consume. Every industrial product—every product—is an assembly of components from other countries and other places. When you raise a tariff, you don’t just raise the tax to the consumer; you raise a tax to everybody at every step along the way of the value chain.

Trump defenders will say, for example, Well, if you build your car inside the United States, the car won’t be tariffed. Fine, as far as it goes. But what about the steel that goes into the car? Well, that’ll be tariffed. What about the aluminum that goes into the car? Tariffed. What about the glass out of which the windscreen is made? Tariffed. What about the fabric from which the upholstery of the seats has spun? Tariffed. What about electronic gear? What about the windshield wipers? All of those components that are assembled into the car: All of them are tariffed. And the whole car, as a result, is more expensive to everybody. And a car is by no means the most sophisticated item out there.

Think about iPhones. Think about airplanes. They are just giant assemblies of components and subcomponents that come from all over the planet. And every one of them is more expensive, and therefore, the final product is not only more expensive but more disrupted. Because, of course, manufacturers these days expect things to arrive just in time. They don’t keep warehouses full of parts. They bring the parts in constantly in container ships from all over the planet. And when Trump acts in the irrational and unexpected way that he did, he disrupts all of those systems of delivery.

Tariffs do one other thing that is very important to understand, which is: They invite corruption. They invite corruption at the highest level of society because every business in America—every business in the world—will now be on its way to Mar-a-Lago seeking a special exemption or a special favor for itself, some countervailing subsidy. And, of course, Trump will exact a price for those favors: Buy his memecoin to direct wealth to members of his family. Make a documentary and pay his wife or his child for the right to make the documentary. Do that and your tariff might be lifted.

It also invites corruption that touches each of us more personally. There’s going to be, in a few days, a 60 percent difference in the cost of an iPhone in Toronto or Vancouver from the cost of an iPhone in the United States market. Smugglers will arbitrage that extraordinary difference. And there will soon be goods moving on foot, by car, by truck, by boat, by plane, by container ship from all the rest of the world into the uniquely high-priced terrain in the United States.

It’s hard enough to police fentanyl. Fentanyl is something that everybody agrees is wrong. When smugglers are moving things like pepper and cinnamon and coffee and toilet paper and flat-screen TVs, no one’s going to think that’s wrong. They’re going to think those people are bringing them a better bargain. The idea that we’re going to all pay more for tube socks, as Peter Navarro, the Trump economic adviser said—well, some will. But many people will be looking for bargains from off the back of a truck from a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy.

You’ll hear excuses for what Donald Trump did. It’ll be said, for example, that what he’s trying to do—what he’s really trying to do—is raise revenues to fund the United States and make possible a cut in the tax rate, or maybe abolish the income tax altogether. You can’t know a lot of math if you’re going to believe that, because the numbers just don’t work. And that’s even before the tariffs cause a recession and invite all this smuggling.

Tariffs are not going to be a substitute for any kind of tax revenue. They don’t begin to pay the cost of a modern government, the government that Trump wants, including the defense establishment he wants. One of the reasons the United States moved away from tariffs more than a century ago was precisely that modern government costs more than a tariff can possibly sustain without terribly damaging effects.

It’ll be said, Well, okay, what he’s really doing is trying to force countries to make deals with the United States, and the phones will be burning up as nation after nation calls Trump to make a deal. We’ll be signing all of these free-trade agreements. Now, notice the claim that these are invitations to negotiate completely contradicts the claim that they’re here to raise revenue. If they’re here to raise revenue, the tariffs are supposed to be taxes that stay in place forever. If they’re to be negotiated away, they’re not going to raise much revenue. If they raise much revenue, they can’t be negotiated away.

Well, it’ll be said, No, no, no, the whole point of this thing is in order to counter China. China is such a predator. China is such a threat. China is such a difficult neighbor. We’re going to bring jobs back from China. But if the goal here is to counter China, why alienate every other nation in the Pacific? The United States, to balance a country as big as China, is going to need friends. And it has alienated those friends, from Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia. Every one of them is looking at the United States and saying, Little as we like the Chinese, they’re at least predictable. You guys are erratic. Maybe we’re safer with them than with you. And we’re certainly not falling in line with any counter-Chinese scheme you have, because you might smack us in the face for no reason, with no notice.

The last thing that is sometimes said—and the president himself has said this in his social media—is that what you are seeing is the working out of a master plan to lower interest rates. Well, you can lower your property taxes by burning down your house too. That doesn’t make that a good plan. Yeah, if we go into a major economic recession, as it looks like we’re going to do, yeah, interest rates will probably come down. They were very low during the Great Depression. They were very low during the financial crisis. The goal is not to have low interest rates; it’s to have lower interest rates consistent with high levels of economic activity. Causing recession to bring down interest rates is no kind of solution to any kind of rational problem. It’s an excuse after the fact.

Anyway, none of this is true. Trump’s actual idea is: The United States should be running a trade surplus with the whole world—and not just the whole world together, but each country in the world, and anytime there’s any country with which the United States runs a trade deficit, that country is ripping the United States off. So if, for example, impoverished Madagascar is selling the United States more vanilla beans than it buys software and airplanes and insurance from the United States, then Madagascar is ripping us off by letting us have real vanilla.

Is that crazy or what? The whole world is an interlocking system of trade. The United States is not the center of the universe, with everyone having a one-on-one relationship with the United States. Countries sell to the United States to buy from other countries. Countries buy from other countries to sell to the United States. Everything is interlocked. And the United States will have different kinds of relationships with different kinds of countries at different stages in development.

And through it all, the United States has remained the wealthiest country in the world with the most sophisticated markets. Donald Trump keeps trying to tell Americans they failed. The country isn’t great. The country is some kind of economic disaster, when in fact, its economy, on Inauguration Day 2025, was the envy of the world. Only today is that economy an object of pity.

Let’s think about it for a minute, about all of this, from the perspective of other countries and other peoples. There’s a story told about the great British general the Duke of Wellington, winner of the Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon. After the battle, many years, a friend was riding in the countryside with the Duke of Wellington, and they observed a rise in the landscape. As they approached the rise, the friend said to the Duke of Wellington, This is so pretty. I wonder what the other side looks like.

And the Duke of Wellington imagined a landscape. He said, Oh, I suspect that there’ll be a stream running from this point to that point. There’ll be a copse of woods. There’ll be some hills. I think there may be some grazing animals. They passed over the top, and indeed everything was as the duke said. The friend said, Have you been here before? How did you know? The Duke of Wellington replied, Well, I’m a general. All my life I have devoted my life to the problem of what lies on the other side of the hill.

Donald Trump won’t think about the world from the perspective of anybody else, but that’s something, if you’re trying to do these so-called great deals, you ought to do. If you’re trying to impose your will on the planet, you ought to think about how the rest of the planet will respond. Everybody around the world looks at the United States and thinks, What are you people doing? We can’t trust you. We can’t look to you for leadership. You are unpredictable. We’re seeing action after action that can’t be explained: Your betrayal of Ukrainian troops in the field. Your abandonment of the island of Taiwan. Your outrageous and deliberate act of unprovoked economic aggression. And the miserable, mean-spirited treatment with which you attack visiting tourists and people who may have had a mistake on their visa. You throw them in prison forever. What kind of country are you?

We look different in the eyes of the world than we did just a few weeks and months ago. And the rest of the world will respond by saying, Even if you change your mind about all of this, even if Donald Trump rolls back the tariffs, we still need to keep our distance from you. We need to think about buying fewer weapon systems from you, because you can’t be trusted. We need to think about developing military systems that are independent of yours, because you can’t be trusted. We need to think about strategic autonomy from you, because you can’t be trusted. We need to think about finding new kinds of trading relationships and new kinds of partners, because you can’t be trusted.

Trump will end. Someday, this will all be history, but the consequences will not fade so fast.

Let me say a personal word. I come from Canada. I still spend a lot of time there. I have friends and relatives there. And my generation of Canadians undertook a long argument about the kind of relationship that Canada should have with the United States. And people like me said, Canadians should stand closer to the United States. You can trust the Americans. They’re good neighbors. They’re good allies. And their world design is a benign one. And Canada can find a prosperous and secure part by following American leadership. People like me, we feel very betrayed right now, and I think that memory, that’s not going to fade so fast.

Now my conversation with Rahm Emanuel, but first: a quick break.

[Break]

Frum: Rahm Emanuel, thank you so much for joining the podcast. It’s such an honor to have you.

Rahm Emanuel: Sure. Thank you, David. Thank you very much.

Frum: Let me recapitulate for anyone who does not know your brilliant career: Senior adviser in the Clinton White House, member of Congress and member of the Democratic House leadership, chief of staff to President Obama, mayor of Chicago, ambassador to Japan. That is quite a perspective on history.

I wanted to ask you about one particular moment in your perspective on history, which is: You were there in 2009 for one of the severest economic shocks in American history. As you and I speak, the United States is suffering another one. Have you got some perspective for us about what is going on? Lessons we should learn? Hope to offer?

Emanuel: Here’s my take on this moment, in particular, and it’s kind of a pull back, which is: China—in my view, you can’t raise tariffs high enough on them—China was becoming the center of focus of energy in the world economy. They’ve shuttered the Chilean steel plant, about to do that to South Africa. There’s more than 500 countries that have taken different types of legal actions against China because of unfair trade practices. And the president of the United States just declared “Liberation Day” in Beijing, not in America, because he’s giving them an out-of-jail card to get out, and now made America the focal of everybody’s energy and anger and frustration.

I think, obviously, this is an own goal. It’s the largest tax increase in American history on the American consumer. And I kind of say this both fictitiously but also seriously: If this is supposed to be a renaissance in America’s manufacturing—Elon Musk, the president’s friend, has a facility in Shanghai; 20,000 people work there. He has another one in Berlin: 12,000. Shutter them, and bring all the jobs back in manufacturing. Now, the over-under on that, not very good. But this is why it’s really one of the worst policies and decisions.

And you not only have a collapse in the market, but five months ago, the United States was outpacing everybody’s economy. We had low unemployment. We had growth at levels everybody else was envious of. And in five months, we’re already talking about a 60 percent chance of a recession, all because one man has decided a new economic theory that was totally reputed. So in 80 days, he’s undone 80 years’ worth of work.

Frum: Let me ask you very specifically about the crisis part of it. In 2009, there were two salient features to the response to the crisis. The first is: You had this legendarily smooth transition from W. Bush to Obama. There’s a book about it by a political scientist as the smoothest transition maybe in American history.

Emanuel: Yeah.

Frum: And then you had this extraordinary level of collaboration with central banks all over the planet and treasury departments all over the planet. So domestic consensus, international cooperation—those seem to be entirely missing now.

Emanuel: Yeah. There was a period. Look—there was not only cooperation between President Bush and incoming President Obama’s administration. Just one anecdote of that cooperation: All the resources expended to help the banks. We were notified in the transition. I met with President Bush and Josh Bolton; Josh Bolton and I had a meal. We went in to see President Bush, and I said, Look. We’ve gotten a heads up that both GM and Chrysler—not potentially Ford, but definitely GM and Chrysler—have six weeks left. That is it. We not only have this massive financial engulf to collapse that is going to lead, not just worldwide, but to the United States going from a recession into maybe something far worse. And to give us some help here so we have breathing room, could you take the politics of tapping the resources to save the auto industry so we have enough time to deal with one and set up the process to deal with the second?

There were going to be politics about tapping those resources outside of the financial sector for the auto industry and all the auto jobs and all the communities. And President Bush said, I’ll do it. We negotiated. Do we get eight weeks, six weeks? They took the six weeks, etcetera. I think there was—I’m doing it by memory—I think they supported with $24 billion for General Motors and Chrysler.

And he took both the politics as well as giving us some breathing room to work. That’s an anecdote of trust—not just of an action, but of trust. Also worldwide coordination, as you said.

And I remember, if you go back, now this is where President Bush is president. This is pre the transition. Ben Bernanke; Mr. Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Hank Paulson came up to speak to the bipartisan leadership. We were all meeting in Nancy Pelosi’s office. And he says the economy has 48 hours, 72 hours, before it totally collapses—not just the market collapses.

And we thought—from Democratic leader to Republican leader, House member to Senate member—we all leaned forward around the conference table and said, What did you just say? He said, We have 72 hours. The economy will collapse. And we spent all night and also the next 72 hours working through what became the hated, for good reason and bad reason—I’ll walk through it if you want—financial assistance to stabilize this financial system. And that was bipartisan, and it was across Pennsylvania Avenue. What did you have in that room? Patriotism and trust.

Now, there were a lot of faults, and we could talk about it later on. Things that I wanted to get done, we didn’t get done, etcetera. But those two examples of working together to stave off not just a financial crisis, but also, we were that close from the great recession bordering into a small-D depression, which we hadn’t seen since ’29.

Frum: Let’s talk a little bit about the international aspect, because one of the things, it’s a little dark to say this, but if you’re the European Central Bank or the Japanese Central Bank—

Emanuel: I think it’s a pretty dark day, so go ahead for it. (Laughs.)

Frum: If you’re the Europeans, Japanese, British, major central banks, you have to be hoping that this shock is as painful as possible and this recession is as nasty as possible to teach the Trump administration a lesson about waging economic warfare, economic aggression against allies in this way that is like an economic Pearl Harbor of bad faith and aggression. They don’t want to help. It’s not in their interest to help. And in 2009, it was in everybody’s interest to help each other.

So reminisce a little bit about that, and how do we get back into a place where America’s friends want to help, instead of saying, You know, you screwed us. Now we’re going to screw you?

Emanuel: David, I mean, you’ve got to treat friends like they are: friends. You can’t treat them worse than you treat your adversaries. I mean, now, you say they don’t want to help, and I agree with that. There’s also a part of them that the more you try to hurt, it may boomerang. So it’s not exactly a clean shot on goal here. But there is a lot of animosity, and I can’t get back not only trust in America [but also] the devastation to America as a safe harbor that’s built up. And so much of our hard power, economic power is built on what people view of America: rule of law, somebody you can depend on in a storm. That power—these other manifestations of it—are dependent on one piece.

And the president is not only destroying America’s hard power, its soft power, but the credibility of the American brand that—people, maybe short term, will try to figure out retaliation versus negotiation, because the Trump administration is sending both signals, which is most also confusing. That’s short term. On the other hand, long term? Everybody will start to design economic pieces around America and away from America that will hurt America.

An example, two things illustrating this point: We spent the lion’s share of my time in Japan building a coherent alliance between the United States, Japan, and Korea, isolating China. China, seeing the opening, just created an economic and discussion of partnership between Japan, Korea, and China, isolating America. Very bad for America. Two: Forget the countries. Samsung, which was critical to America’s export controls against China on semiconductors, just cut a deal with a Chinese company. So we already have a company crack in the united front against China.

You don’t trust America? You think America’s going to treat you worse than they treat its own worst adversary? Then you make your own deals, and now it’s going to come, which is what I said. They just gave Beijing a get-out-of-jail card.

Frum: It’s like the Chinese have their national slogan, We may be nasty, but at least we’re predictable.

Emanuel: Well, they’re going to show that they’re the adult. If you were sitting in Beijing’s corridors of power, why would you not take advantage of that? Look—after the “wolf warrior” and after the economic coercion, we organized the Indo-Pacific against China. They knew they were isolated. They kept complaining about it because they had made a massive mistake treating Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines as the enemy.

We organized it. Own goal by China? We took advantage of it, and China was complaining that we were isolating them in their own backyard. Yeah, we were. Exactly. We isolated the isolator. Now China sees an opening, and it’s basically isolating the United States and taking advantage of it. We just hurt ourselves.

Frum: Let me ask you very specifically about the view from Tokyo of what is happening right now. Bank of Japan, Japanese Finance Ministry—what are they thinking? What are they doing? Can you give us any insight into that?

Emanuel: Well, I think it’s so—they can’t make heads or tails. They’re having, for lack of a better analogy, vertigo. The world they knew is upside down.

Now, think of it. If you’re the Japanese, for four consecutive years and starting on the fifth, you’re the No. 1 foreign direct investor in the United States. One million Americans work for Japanese companies. Forty-eight percent of them are in manufacturing and industrial. Those are years of investment, mainly in the auto industry but not limited, where you trust America and you invest in America. And they just had the wind spit back in their face, and they’ve now realized that those were bad investments.

That’s one. Given the defense piece, they’re going to try to figure out, Can we work this out amicably? And while we’re talking to you, we’re going to start these conversations with Korea, Australia, Taiwan, Philippines, the EU, Canada, and develop other economic ties. Now, remember, when America pulls out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Japan steps in, takes leadership, and creates that for their own good. They are now going to look at other markets and other ways of becoming less integrated with the U.S. economy and less supportive of a million Americans working in companies owned and run by the Japanese. So there’s a short term, medium term, and long term.

Frum: Can we talk about the economic theory or the economic excuses that are offered for what’s just happened?

Emanuel: Oh, I’m going to stop you there. There is no economic theory. Don’t dress it up and put lipstick on a pig. This is all about vindictiveness, anger. There’s no economic theory behind this, and this is an own goal of the worst order.

Frum: Okay. I was just being polite. (Laughs.)

Emanuel: Why? I’m here. We can take polite out of the conversation as a necessity.

Frum: All right. Candidly, I was recently in Austria, and I was in Vienna, and there’s a short street there called Dumbastraße, which, as an English reader, you read as “Dumbass Street.” And I’ve been thinking that the whole world has been living on Dumbass Street for too long.

Let’s talk about how we live on a smarter street. So the excuse offered is, look—these have been difficult times for Americans with less education, fewer credentials, and we need to have all these tariffs in order to protect Americans with less education and fewer credentials. And the answer is: A tariff wall is the solution to the problem of the parts of America that have not shared as much as other parts in the extraordinary economic progress of modern times.

I know you have a lot of thoughts about that. Tell us, how do we think more intelligently about how to respond to the problems of people, or the situation of people who have not done as well as others?

Emanuel: So first and foremost, the analysis of the problem is correct. Over the last 30 years, neither the risk or the opportunities were equally shared. And as I like to say, the American dream is unaffordable now and inaccessible to many Americans, and that should be unacceptable to us. Rather than having a shot at the American dream, the American public’s been given the shaft. And globalization does have winners, but it has losers, and we left the losers alone, isolated, and on their own, just to figure out their own way. That’s wrong. That’s un-American actually.

So the problem with the tariffs is it treats everything as a nail to its hammer. China and Columbia are not the same. One’s a potential ally; the other one’s an adversary. One’s a potential market, and the other one isn’t. Columbia doesn’t involve itself in economic espionage. It doesn’t involve itself in intellectual property theft. China does. That’s one.

Second, how do you make sure that Peoria, Youngstown, Battle Creek, La Crosse, Wisconsin, Ames, Iowa, are not left on their own to negotiate against China, Mexico, or, for that matter, Vietnam? And the best way to do that, in my view, is to invest in Americans and America. And we didn’t do that. So while globalization was happening—huge opportunities. Also, huge risk. Your kids, my kids are going to succeed. Other people’s kids are going to get the shaft unless we give them the tools to succeed, like our families gave our own children to succeed.

Which means—and I’m not saying I have the exact ticket, but we know it’s true in human history: Education is essential for progress, both for society and for the individual. One of the things I try to do in Chicago: We were the first city to make [it so that] if you got a B average in high school, community college was free. So everybody had a shot, without going into the poorhouse or a second mortgage, to get an education past high school, which is where three-quarters of all jobs are.

Second—equally valuable—to get your high-school diploma, you had to show us a letter of acceptance from a college, a community college, a branch of the armed forces, or vocational-education institution. We gave you support; career counseling kept you on course. So if you wanted to go to the Navy, you knew what math courses, what history classes, what to take, so you were ready. We made post-high-school education expectations and requirements universal, not just the Frum and Emanuel children.

And third, just shy of 50 percent—49.2 percent of our kids—were taking either Advanced Placement, international, baccalaureate, or dual-credit, dual-enrollment college classes in high school. They were graduating already with college credit and not having to pay for it.

So to me that’s No. 1, because your education is your passport to a better future. I don’t care whether it’s going into health care at Malcolm X Community College in Chicago, transportation distribution logistics at another school in our community college center, advanced manufacturing at Richard J. Daley Community College. But everybody’s going to have the skills so they can navigate the future the best they can.

Education is essential. Then investing in science, technology, the critical kind of infrastructure writ large, which means investing in America. And if you invest in Americans in America, I don’t care if you’re from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou—we’re going to kick your butt. I’d always bet on America and Americans, but we’ve got to be honest: The last 30 years, they didn’t get that equal investment. They didn’t get the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. And we paid a price for it. And they paid a price, and they have every right to be furious.

Frum: We had three two-term presidencies back-to-back under two parties—Clinton, W. Bush, Obama—that made reform and improvement in the standards of educational performance central to their domestic agenda.

And yet we look back on, as you say, the 30 years. I don’t think there’s a lot of happiness or satisfaction with the results of all the effort that those three two-term presidents invested in improving education. What went wrong? Why are we not getting more for the effort we’ve made? What lessons do we learn from the disappointment?

Emanuel: There’s actually an interesting article today. One is, look: I wasn’t in an office anymore, but I was against what we were doing during COVID, because it became clear within six months, kids’ mortality rates, etcetera, and they’re locking kids out of schools for two years and the impact of what COVID did—especially if you’re a former mayor, like me in Chicago, where 84 percent of your kids are from poverty—absolutely stupidest thing you could do. I’m not going to clean it up. It was stupid.

Now, there’s a story today in the Times, on the day you’re asking me, it’s pretty clear that both [No Child Left Behind] by President Bush; President Clinton’s 100,000 specialized teachers, plus school choice, plus other types of things on both reform and accountability; President Obama’s basic race to the top—those were actually quite successful academically. They were slow but steady progress on reading, math scores to getting not just the high-income kids—meaning, children of high-income families—but low-income children succeeding.

Now, the truth of the matter is, we were replacing teaching with just testing, and there was a reaction both to the left, to the right to it. And then once that accountability was basically erased, you had a deterioration in standards and in educational attainment, and parents—also educators—rebelled against the accountability.

Now, testing is only a means of information to improve. What happened was because of the strictures, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. The testing became, we were teaching towards the test rather than using the test to improve teaching. And it kind of flipped. And what should have happened was more of a reform. But the idea that there wasn’t an improvement, it’s not true. In fact, there was improvement. It begins to stall out around 2010, just at the period of time where people start to break from accountability. The impacts on that were most dramatically felt by first-time English learners and also the poor. And then it starts to, in COVID, float up to, kind of, all income levels.

Frum: Let’s talk a little bit about the COVID experience in education. So if you were, in COVID, in a red state or especially red county, you had a much higher chance of dying from the disease, especially after vaccines became available, than in the blue states and blue counties. So that’s, you know, checkmark for the blue team that they did a better job of vaccinating people or maybe a less bad job of dissuading people from being vaccinated.

If you were in a red state or a red county, it was more likely that your schools would reopen early. And we see some indications that kids in Florida did better than kids in California, as a result of decisions made at the state level. So how should we think about this gap in educational performance that was very much concentrated in blue states and blue cities?

Emanuel: Look—there’s two things. One is: The way I look at it, and there’s lessons to be learned from Alabama’s improvement on math, Mississippi’s improvements on reading. So you can’t undo the stupidity of two years of locking kids out of school. Can’t undo it. But you can start to ameliorate it and make up for lost ground.

A couple things are very clear. You need more time on topic, so you’ve got to add time in the day to reading, math, and writing. Two: Testing so you can find early data on intervention and then apply one-on-one, whether that’s in person or by using technology—one of the things that comes out of COVID, that was the one thing that was valuable—and you can start to do one-on-one [teaching] through technology and tutoring kids so they get more time. And once they get that time, you could see dramatic improvements in both reading and writing, as an example of academic areas.

Third: A horrible habit has been, basically, kids and parents have accepted almost a four-day school week. And I think you should make, because absentee rates now are double digits, [it so that] any child absent more than 7 percent, it absolute that you won’t be able to matriculate to the next grade. We have to reimpose a minimum of a five-day [week]. If it was up to me, I’d reorganize the school year-round so you don’t have the summer slide that everybody in educational fields talk about, but that’s a different subject.

As for dealing with absenteeism, it’s now become chronic, and it’s now in the high teens. And it’s across the board, anything north of—pick your number—7 percent, 8 percent, whatever it is, you can’t matriculate. And start to reimpose more time, not just in the school—more time on one-on-one instruction. I will also say, though, one of the costs here that’s crazy: 20 percent of a child’s life, David, is in the classroom. And if you want a child to succeed, you gotta invest in the other 80 percent.

So we, as a city, a state, invest in the 80 percent to back up and support the 20 percent. No teacher by themselves can handle the effects of poverty rushing through the front door of the classroom. It’s not possible.

Frum: Do you have a view on phones in the schools?

Emanuel: Yeah, get rid of them. Not in the classroom. Not allowed. All the time should be on the teacher and the blackboard, not on your phones. Get rid of them.

I’ve been long—in fact, I don’t want to say. The campaign knows this: I tried to get Kamala Harris’s campaign in the summer to adopt a national standard of no phones in classrooms. I’m a big, big supporter. Because again, you’re not allowing the teacher to teach. You’re having the teacher become a policeman. That’s not the job of the teacher.

Frum: You mentioned the Kamala Harris campaign. Can I ask you—

Emanuel: Do I have to? (Laughs.)

Frum: Let’s not make it personal, but just at the highest level of generality you want, lessons learned? I mean, you were the candidate recruiter in 2006 for the big Democratic wins that year. You won in a lot of places that Democrats historically didn’t win of the House. You get a lot of credit for that from all political observers. That was very much your project. And then 2008, okay, there’s an economic crisis. Maybe the challenging candidate had the chance, had a certain advantage, but it was a pretty decisive victory, especially compared to the victories and defeats that came later. So lessons for 2024.

Emanuel: Two other things. In one other thing in 2008, we won 30 seats in 2006 and then won another 20-plus seats in 2008. So you have back-to-back, which you’ve not seen in a long time. Okay, so not to count that, but I didn’t want the history to be forgotten by your listeners.

Frum: He who does not toot his own horn, his horn shall not be tooted.

Emanuel: I was general with—Chris Van Hollen deserves credit for that. My colleague who was my vice when I was chair, he deserves it a hundred percent. But it’s an important point about how big a repudiation there was in ’08.

Here’s my take. There’s three lessons of 2024 that are informative to 2026, 2028, and beyond. One level, you had 70 percent of the country that said the economy was heading in the wrong direction. So architecturally, structurally, it was an anti-incumbent. Now, the reason I think that got so high goes back to the Afghanistan pullout and constantly telling the American people the economy was great when they were telling you something else. And it intensified because there was a sense that there was nobody listening in Washington. So telling people what they weren’t experiencing was wrong. But it was still 70 percent.

Two: Below that, there was two Kamala Harris campaigns. She inherits the nomination. Joe Biden and her are eight points down, and by the debate, they are three points up. That’s a big swing. And principally, she’s running not only on energy; she says it’s a new beginning, and she talks about the economy, runs ads basically about, I understand the struggles you’re under, the pressure—a totally different economic message from the economy’s great to you’re under stress.

And then, I don’t know what happens the morning after her debate with Donald Trump, but they switch and go to democracy, which was what Joe Biden was running on. I mean, I don’t know what happened, and I still don’t know this. And I’m like, I don’t have an answer for you. But it was like, you go 11 points up, and then you switch. Like, what was wrong with the 11-point swing? You thought you deserved 12? I don’t understand it to this day. And all of a sudden, they go into democracy. If you care about democracy, we had you on hello. You didn’t need persuasion. It was on economics.

And then the third level, David, which is not the election in 2024 but this moment in time in history. Three seminal moments in my view. First, the war in Iraq. You have a trillion dollars, thousands of men and women lose their lives, and their lives are maimed, and it’s built on deception, and nobody who was there is held accountable. And it devastates America and Americans and American communities.

Six years later, five years later, you have the financial meltdown that we were talking about, and people lose their homes, and the bankers are demanding their bonuses, having destroyed Americans’ livelihoods and their savings. And this gets back to an argument we had in the Obama White House because I wanted to do Old Testament justice before we did health care. I thought we should do financial reform—lost that debate, legitimate discussion about the equities of going health care before financial reform. But I was the principal advocate for [what] I thought the system needed: Put bankers on the other side, and beat the living hell out of them for what they did. And I did. I talked about Old Testament justice, and I said that the public needed to see us wrestling with people, that they were not only at the top of the economic ladder but were literally pissing down on everybody else and telling them it was raining.

And third, after all that anger at the establishment comes COVID. And we, as Democrats, don the code of the establishment. And I think those moments broke trust, confidence in the establishment in America. And we’re still living with that, as we can see by the reelection of Donald Trump. And you can see it in the rest of the developed world. As I’ve said before, COVID was not only bad for your body; it wasn’t great for the body politic either.

And so when you put that all together, both 2020—what happened in 2024 is informative about understanding not just the anger [but] legitimate parts of why people are angry. They have a right to be angry. Rather than being given a shot, they were given the shaft, and Washington and the people that make it up let them down. The question is on all of us. What did we learn under President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, and other periods? Both the good, the bad, things that we have to correct, things that we have to—that’s what we should be doing. What we’re doing now is just rage. And we’re turning allies into adversaries, and we’re giving adversaries a get-of-jail card, and that is going to come back to haunt America.

Frum: Let me ask you a last question before I release you from your generous time.

Emanuel: Well, this is not exactly like jail time or parole or probation. (Laughs.)

Frum: Last question. How confident are you that the United States will have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028?

Emanuel: I’m on the 75 percentile that they’ll be free and fair, and the 25 percent that sits there is because of the unilateral disarmament by Donald Trump against Iran, China, and Russia, who clearly have shown they will mess in America’s democracy—because again, it destroys the trust the public has in America and its institutions.

What he’s doing on our cybersecurity with our men and women who man the front lines, the thin blue line in protecting America—our adversaries want to screw us. They want to screw us. And I would say something else, but that is what they’re trying to do. And he just unilaterally disarmed. So I still believe there will be fair elections, because I trust at the state level, regardless if it’s blue or red state, the secretaries of state, the county commissioners who are responsible for elections will do the best job they can. They are good patriots.

What makes me nervous and is bleeping yellow, could be bleeping red—and I’m not sure; I don’t know—is the fact that, you know that old line, paranoid people still have enemies? China, Russia, and Iran and North Korea are trying to screw the United States, and the president of the United States just gave them a way in to do it.

Frum: You see the threat to free and fair elections as coming from outside the house, not inside the house.

Emanuel: Look—we have challenges inside the United States, but if you ask me what makes up the lion’s share of my 25 percent of fair [elections], it is our adversaries.

Here’s the thing that I don’t understand, and this gets to larger than just the elections. China and Russia have explicitly stated that they are on a course to undermine America’s leadership—hard power, soft power, economic power, etcetera. And the President of the United States with a Cabinet whose entire grasp of the English language is limited to four words of, “Yes, sir, Mr. President” have decided to align America with our enemies. And there’s no other way to look at it.

Frum: Thank you so much for your candor and your time. Candor’s legendary. The time is scarce. I’m grateful for both.

Emanuel: I just wanted the record to note that I cleaned up my language that I usually say at the dining room table.

Frum: Yeah. I think people are going to be a little disappointed with that. I think there’s a certain expectation of what’s coming, and then they don’t get it.

Emanuel: But think about the positive. There’s a moment of maturity by Rahm. Who knew it was possible? Who knew?

Frum: Who knew? Thank you so much. All right. Bye-bye.

Emanuel: Thanks, David.

[Music]

Frum: Thank you again to Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. We’ll be back next week, and next week we’ll be answering questions from viewers and listeners. I hope you’ll consider submitting a question to producer@thedavidfrumshow.com as either an email or an audio file, and we’ll sift through them and begin answering them in the weeks to come.

Thank you so much for viewing. I hope you’ll join us again next week for more of The David Frum Show.

Donald Trump’s tariff announcement has baffled global leaders and forced markets to reckon with the fallout from America’s dramatic shift in international trade policy. Panelists joined on Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss what tanking financial markets could mean for the president’s administration.

“Trade has not delivered the benefits that economists and politicians of both parties have been promising for decades,” David Leonhardt explained last night. While the United States economy has tended to work in favor of educated professionals, blue-collar workers have not benefited in the same ways. Adjustments to trade policy could be one way to address this, but Trump’s tariffs are “shambolic, they’re extremely high,” and “no one knows whether he’s going to take them back the next day,” Leonhardt continued.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Stephen Hayes, editor of The Dispatch; David Leonhardt, an editorial director for The New York Times editorial board; Kayla Tausche, a senior White House correspondent at CNN; Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

A recent infographic published by Media Matters depicted America’s political-podcast space as dominated by extremist voices, mostly far-right, a few far-left.

Yet most of us are levelheaded people. Most of us want insights, not insults. We want to invest our time to feel smarter, not angrier. We want to renew our ideals and remember together that America’s democracy has always proved stronger than its enemies and doubters.

On April 9, The Atlantic and I will launch a new video podcast called The David Frum Show. It will post every Wednesday, on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts, with eminent guests from the worlds not only of politics, but of economics, medicine, and history. I hope every viewer and listener will find that the show offers the most informed and entertaining conversations of the day—sparkled with enough humor to brighten these dark times.

In today’s media, truth is often hard to find. Lies are everywhere—and too often for free. I hope all who seek something better will feel the warmth of welcome at The David Frum Show.

Watch the teaser here:

(Video photo credits: ​​Robert Alexander / Getty; Tami Chappell / AFP / Getty; Leonardo Munoz / AFP / Getty; Jeremy Hogan / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Bob Grannis / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Drew Angerer / AFP / Getty; J. Countess / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; Samuel Corum / Getty)

This week, The Atlantic reported that Trump officials shared military-attack plans in a Signal group chat and inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined him to discuss.

In the Trump administration’s insistence that the information in the “Houthi PC small group”—including the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—was not classified, “what these officials would have you believe is that all of this could be made public and there would be no consequence,” the Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris said. In reality, he continued, the breach was “replete with security and policy risks.”

“Had that information fallen into the hands of a U.S. adversary that had been in the group, or had [Goldberg] been a less scrupulous journalist and tweeted it, that information would then be known to the Houthis, who would be able to prepare defenses and a counterattack that absolutely would jeopardize the lives of U.S. forces,” Harris continued.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent at PBS News Hour; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; and Shane Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

Fears of a possible constitutional crisis are on the rise following an apparent standoff between Donald Trump and a federal judge after the president was ordered to stop deportation flights traveling to El Salvador. Meanwhile, Trump also moved to dismantle the Department of Education this week—and it is still unclear how much of the agency will remain intact. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss.

Since taking office, Trump has gone after executive agencies, congressionally authorized programs, the military, and now he’s going after the judiciary, David Ignatius said last night. “I do think that ahead of us is a confrontation in which the Supreme Court is going to decide what executive authority the president has.” But until that moment is reached, he continued, “I wouldn’t say we’re at the constitutional crisis.”

“It’s not unheard of that a litigant before a court would defy a judge, what would be unheard of is if it went to the end of the road” to the Supreme Court, Michael Scherer added to the discussion. “If he defies this court, that would be a remarkable moment.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Eugene Daniels, a senior Washington correspondent and co-host of The Weekend on MSNBC; David Ignatius, a columnist at The Washington Post; Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

In the less than two months since Donald Trump took office, he has upended decades of foreign policy by targeting the country’s allies. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the effects of his policies in the U.S. and across the globe.

Meanwhile, Congress averted a government shutdown on Friday evening, passing a bill that will fund the government through September. Although Chuck Schumer of New York rallied enough votes for the bill, some Democrats now say that the minority leader capitulated to Trump. Especially among House Democrats from districts that the president carried in the election, “they feel as though he kind of left them out to dry,” Laura Barrón-López said last night.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

Donald Trump’s unpredictable economic policies have rattled the markets and prompted warnings of a possible recession. Panelists joined on Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss new warning signs that indicate a negative impact on U.S. and global economics.

This week, the president announced yet another reversal for tariffs on Mexico and Canada, now saying that he would be pulling back the policies. “The reasons for why he’s imposing these tariffs keep shifting,” Michelle Price said last night. “At some point, the confusion for businesses is going to be worse than the tariffs themselves.”

Joining the guest moderator and staff writer at The Atlantic, Franklin Foer, to discuss this and more: Dan Balz, a chief correspondent at The Washington Post; Eugene Daniels, the chief Playbook and White House correspondent at Politico; Michelle Price, a White House reporter for the Associated Press; Kayla Tausche, a senior White House correspondent at CNN.

Watch the full episode here.