David Frum | The Atlantic

Is Anybody Actually Winning Trump’s Iran War?

2026-04-15T13:10:00-04:00

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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the recent election in Hungary and the defeat of Viktor Orbán. David counters Orbán defenders who claim that this loss proves Orbán was never a threat. Antidemocratic leaders often face institutional constraints, and it was those institutional constraints that compelled Orbán to accept a defeat after years of abuse of power.

Then, David is joined by former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger to discuss the current state of President Trump’s war in Iran. David and Pottinger talk about the recent failed negotiations between the two sides in Pakistan, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and what could happen next. They also discuss how the Iran war is viewed in China and how it has been a financial gain for Russia.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser in the first Donald Trump term, and we will be discussing the very uncertain, unsettled, and dangerous situation in the Persian Gulf as the United States and Iran conduct this cold truce with double blockades, each of the other. And Matt will be explaining to me and to all of us the state of play as he sees it, from his point of view, as someone who is broadly sympathetic to the agenda of President Trump, even if he is no longer directly associated with the administration.

The book this week will be Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges, a masterpiece of strange and symbolic writing from the 1940s, translated into English in the 1960s.

But before either the dialogue or the book, I wanna talk about a different subject, and that is the dramatic election in Hungary that occurred this past weekend, with this convincing and crushing defeat of the government of Viktor Orbán. Many of those who are sympathetic to Orbán, or who were sympathetic to Orbán, and who wanna see some kind of Orbán-like politics come to the United States have chosen to interpret his crushing repudiation by the Hungarian people as a repudiation also of the idea that Orbán was ever any kind of threat to freedom and democracy. What kind of dictator, they ask, leaves office because he’s rejected at the polls? What kind of dictator has an election free enough that he could be rejected in the polls? And so, yes, goodbye, Orbán, say these apologists for him and for the Trump administration and the people in the United States who like Orbán, Goodbye to Orbán, but let’s also say goodbye to the idea that Orbán was ever a threat.

And that’s what I wanna talk about, is this argument is wrong and in bad faith. Not all dictatorships are the same. Not everything is the Third Reich. Not everything is Joseph Stalin. There are many intermediate forms of corrupted power, and Orbán represented a new one. I wrote about this a decade ago; I spent some time in Hungary in 2016, and I wrote a substantial article about Orbán, which I ended up not publishing, but instead cannibalizing to use in my first major article about the Trump administration in 2017, “How to Build an Autocracy.” And I told there a story that I had heard in Hungary in 2016 about the methods that the Orbán regime used.

There would be, let us say, two restaurants. And both would have violations of the health code. The restaurant that was owned by an Orbán supporter would get away with it, and the restaurant that was owned by a nonsupporter would have to face a fine. Now, the people who were fined were genuinely guilty; they had broken the health code. But they knew that if they had aligned their politics with Orbán, they would get away without a fine, as their next-door neighbor and competitor did, and they were being punished for their politics, even though the ostensible punishment was for the thing they had genuinely done: broken the health code. And I wrote then the most important power in a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to punish the innocent; it is the power to protect the guilty. Orbán created a system where there was some law. He didn’t abolish the law; he just applied the law unfairly, in order to consolidate political power and, by the way, to enrich himself.

Now, it is true the law was still there—and this is why the regime could, in the end, be dismantled. Hungary is a small and relatively poor country embedded within larger frameworks. Its economy is embedded within the European Union, and its armed forces are embedded within NATO. That NATO affiliation is one reason that Orbán could not reasonably imagine using the military to make a coup d’état and seize power. A NATO-trained military doesn’t do that kind of thing. If it does, it may find itself on its way out of NATO, and the military attaches great value to its membership in NATO. In the same way, Hungary’s role in the European Union, from which it derives many, many benefits, meant that Orbán couldn’t throw people in prison. He’s subject, after all, to European laws on human rights and, ultimately, the jurisdiction of the European courts that enforce [the] human rights division. So he can’t just murder people and arrest people and detain people the way he might’ve wanted to. But he could rig the system in many ways, in a kind of intermediate form of what Fareed Zakaria has called “illiberal democracy.” It’s not that it wasn’t a democracy; it just wasn’t fair, and the law was not applied equally, and he used that to consolidate power.

In the end, his membership in the European Union was what doomed him. The Orbán regime in Hungary received three major benefits from the European Union. The first was that trade and investment could flow freely. The second was that people could move freely, and so that meant that anyone who was unhappy in Hungary didn’t have to become a political dissident; they could just leave. If they had portable skills, if they spoke English or German, they could just get on a train and go somewhere where the going was better than it was in Hungary. And that exit was a great safety valve for a regime that otherwise would’ve faced much more dissent at home. The dissidents just moved—they went to Munich.

But the last benefit that Hungary got—this is the thing that really precipitated the crisis—the poorer countries of the European Union received direct transfers from the European Union treasury. At their peak, Hungary’s direct transfers from the European Union amounted to somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of its gross domestic product. That’s, in other words, as big as the defense budget is to the United States. It paid for roads, it paid for many benefits, and it balanced the Hungarian budget and provided a lot of economic activity. As Orbán became more and more authoritarian, the EU froze those payments, stopping Hungarian economic growth and precipitating an economic crisis in Hungary. And it was that economic crisis that brought him down. Now, he might’ve left the European Union, but then he would lose forever the money that he got. He would lose forever access to European investment; German car factories are a major employer in Hungary. And he would’ve lost the ability of Hungarians to move back and forth, which meant the people who were unhappy would’ve been trapped at home, where they were dangerous to him, rather than moving to Munich, where they were less dangerous.

So he was in this intermediate state, and that is what set in motion the events that ultimately brought him down. But especially in the United States, where there are so many people who imagine an Orbán-like future for the United States, it’s really important to understand democracy does not go out like a light switch; it’s like a dimmer. It’s not on or off. It’s at different settings. And you can have an authoritarian leader who dims the lights without reducing the lighting entirely to zero. And that gives us hope because it means there are tools that, even in an authoritarian, illiberal democracy like Hungary, like the one Donald Trump and J. D. Vance want for the United States, the opposition is never powerless. But it’s also a warning because it means that as the lights begin to dim, the movement and the danger can be gradual rather than sudden. It’s not always 1934 and the Third Reich Enabling Act. It’s not always Stalin and the assassination of [Sergei] Kirov. Sometimes it’s what was happening in Budapest since Orbán came to power. And it is important to understand that as a method of self-defense, and as a way of saying off these excuses and apologetics that are offered in bad faith by those who want an Orbán-like future for the United States.

And now my dialogue with Matt Pottinger.

[Music]

Frum: Matt Pottinger is a former journalist, Marine officer, and senior White House official. Pottinger covered China for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal for seven years. After the 9/11 terror attack on the United States, he made a dramatic career change: He joined the Marine Corps at age 32, and completed three combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pottinger served on the National Security Council in the first Trump term, ultimately as deputy national security adviser, one of the few senior officials to serve four years in that office. Pottinger resigned on January 6, 2021.

Since leaving the White House, he has remained a prominent voice on China policy. He joined the Hoover Institution as a visiting fellow, chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and serves as CEO of Garnaut Global, a strategic advisory firm. His book, The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, was published in July 2024.

I should mention we are recording this about midday on Monday, April 13, with a view to releasing on Wednesday. The stories we’re following are so dramatic and fast-changing, we are doing the best we can to keep up with them. So let me begin by asking: Matt, what’s happening?

Matt Pottinger: (Laughs.) David, it’s great to be with you.

Yeah, look, it’s Monday now. We just learned this weekend that the negotiations in Pakistan that were led on the U.S. side by Vice President J. D. Vance came to an impasse on President Trump’s red line, on the core issue of Iran’s nuclear program. And remember, that’s really the main impetus for this war, was President Trump’s determination to try to destroy Iran’s ability to build a bomb and also to try to get them to give up fissile material—it’s not yet technically fissile, but it’s very close to that; it’s 60 percent-enriched uranium, uranium that’s enriched far beyond what you would need for civilian uses. They’ve got probably around a thousand pounds of that stuff sitting around somewhere or in various places, and Iran has also not yet agreed to give up its enrichment capability.

So I don’t think that was a surprising outcome, that these talks in Islamabad did not achieve a lasting peace. The truth about negotiations is that war is an extension of politics, right? And I wouldn’t have expected the Iranians to give away in negotiation what President Trump was unable to take from them in war. And so what that means is that this cease-fire is not only tenuous, but I think that it’s technically gonna be hard to argue that we’re even in a cease-fire for much longer, if even at the current moment. And that’s because Iran is continuing with its blockade.

What you have now are dueling blockades, David. (Laughs.) Iran is basically blocking all shipping in the Strait of Hormuz unless those ships get permission from the Iranian IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and then pay a very steep toll to Iran, so what Iran is doing is basically turning an international waterway into a little Suez-like tollbooth. And so they are conducting a blockade. Now President Trump has announced a counterblockade, in which he’s going to stop ships that pay the toll to the Iranians, as well as ships carrying any Iranian oil—ships that are leaving or going to Iranian ports, those ships are now under U.S. blockade. The U.S. is gonna try to enforce that, at least in the early stages, well west of Hormuz, in the Gulf of Oman.

But blockades are acts of war under international law, under traditional conventions of the law of the sea, and so forth. So what you have are, really, an escalation in the war this weekend. But it’s not yet turning violent from the U.S. side, but it is coercive. So in that sense, we’re still at war, right? The cease-fire is there almost in name only.

Frum: All right, but one of the things that seems so baffling about this conflict is the United States and Israel appear to have achieved great operational success against Iranian defenses. They’ve killed much of the Iranian leadership. They’ve revealed that they have penetrated deeply into Iranian capabilities. But the obvious countermove in all of the how many war games [that] have occurred since 1979 is the United States, Israel strike Iran; Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. This administration seems never to have taken that countermove seriously, and as you and I speak, the price of oil is again back over $100 a barrel. And if you want immediate delivery of a physical barrel of oil in Europe today, that’s going to cost you more like $150, prices that will raise prices for everything all over the world and maybe push the developed world into a recession.

Pottinger: Yeah. Well, look, this pain is gonna deepen, okay, because what President Trump is trying to do is, in order to try to release more traffic from Hormuz, he’s going to stop more traffic, right, in order to basically try to take away the advantage of Iran’s tollbooth that they’ve set up. And so what you’re left with is, essentially, a state of war. I don’t know, but I suspect that the U.S. Navy is going to attempt to do escort operations. They haven’t been willing to do that to date, because it’s so darn dangerous. But given that we saw the news over the weekend that a couple of U.S. destroyers had moved into Hormuz, at least briefly—to my knowledge, for the first time since this war began in late February—tells me that you’re gonna have these dueling blockades and dueling attempts to break the blockades, with the U.S. trying to move traffic, potentially fairly soon, on the Oman side of the median line of this very, very narrow choke point in the water.

Frum: But that, again, suggests not having thought things through. The parallel here is back in the ’80s, during the Iraq-Iran War, missiles were flying between Iraq and Iran, endangering shipping in the Gulf. And the United States then said, Right, tankers can fly the American flag so if anybody hits you, it’s an attack on the United States, and that will deter both Iraq and Iran because they know, if you hit one of these tankers with an American flag, then we retaliate against you. But in this case, the United States got its retaliating in first. So the Iranians will just say, Can we hit an oil tanker at 20 paces with a drone? I bet they can. Can a destroyer stop a drone, or a swarm of drones, from hitting a target as big as an oil tanker? I bet they can’t. And the implicit threat—which is, If you try hitting the oil tankers, we’ll retaliate against you—well, the retaliation has been done.

Pottinger: Yeah, well, I’ve talked to U.S. sailors who—in fact, I talked to a French sailor the other day who had been on a frigate during the 1980s, during that whole operation to try to escort convoys and so forth. And that was in the ’80s, when Iranian technology was not nearly as sophisticated as it is right now. So, David, what you’re seeing right now is, in many ways, the democratization of warfare, the ability of middling states like Iran, and even nonstate actors like the Houthis, who are really sort of a proxy of Iran camped out in Yemen on the Red Sea, both of them have shown the ability to stop commercial traffic through major sea-lanes, and the United States has really struggled. And, again, the U.S. is really on its own. It’s got Israel helping. It doesn’t have any other allies yet coming to help. But nonetheless, we’re struggling. The United States Navy is struggling to keep international sea-lanes open, so we’re in a new phase right now. The nature of warfare never changes. But the character of warfare—how wars are fought—changes all the time, and we’re now having a reckoning, in many ways. People theorize, they speculate, they make assessments, but war is the great clarifier. It’s the accountant. It’s the auditor that says, No, no, here’s your real relative power, relative to the Houthi tribes in Yemen, relative to this badly wounded regime in Tehran.

But, yeah, we’re in a new phase. I’m not certain that the U.S. Navy is gonna be able to pull this off, and if the U.S. Navy has one of its warships crippled or sunk, I think you’re gonna see a very significant escalation by the White House. We’re gonna see larger, further-reaching, and temporally longer consequences of this war.

Frum: There’s a saying on Wall Street: When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked, and—

Pottinger: (Laughs.) Yeah, exactly. And look, there are positive lessons learned, as well as negative lessons, in this war from the perspective of U.S. power. And in fact, we should talk at some point a little bit about what this means for the Western Pacific, but I won’t jump ahead.

Frum: Well, no, that was going to be my very next question because, as your introduction suggested, you are known above all for your expertise on China. You speak the language. You worked there as a journalist in a more favorable time in U.S.-China relationships. And you are noted for being an early voice warning that China was not evolving into a good global citizen and the United States should take action with allies—that was your view: with allies—to contain Chinese power.

Now, many people observe, and it seems plausible, that one of the effects of this war is to hugely increase Chinese power because the United States suddenly looks like a very unreliable custodian of the security of the Persian Gulf. Twenty percent of the world’s navigable, or waterborne, oil comes from the Persian Gulf, and 80 percent of that oil goes to Asia, with China the single largest customer. The United States is imposing heavy burdens through this war not only on China, but on South Korea, Japan, and many other countries that might have been at odds with China, but now are thinking, Well, we and the Chinese are at the mercy of a United States that is launching a war it does not seem to have anticipated all the consequences of.

Pottinger: Yeah. Well, I would say that it’s still too early to say what the net strategic effect is. It’s possible that China is gonna benefit largely from this war, but it’s not clear yet. That’s not clear.

Beijing right now, you can see in its own statements, its own actions so far, that they’re sort of hedging. On the one hand, I think Beijing was uneasy with the war continuing. We’ve seen reports from the Pakistanis and others suggesting that China played a role in trying to hasten that cease-fire a week ago. On the other hand, we also learned over the weekend, probably from tactical leaks of U.S. intelligence—I only know what I read on CNN here—but that China is actually moving to supply Iran with MANPADS. MANPADs are man-portable air-defense systems, right? These are like the Chinese version of our Stinger missiles that are very effective at shooting down low-flying helicopters, low-flying aircraft. So this would be, potentially, a very serious threat to American air dominance that both the U.S. and Israel have enjoyed so far.

Frum: And the way that stacks up is: The Iranians send a drone. The countermove to the drone—because you don’t wanna hit a drone with a big, expensive missile—is you send up a helicopter with a machine gun, and the machine gun can kill the drone because the drone is moving relatively slowly and it doesn’t have any stealth. And the MANPAD then says to the helicopter, You better keep away, which means the drone can move on the tanker.

Pottinger: Yeah. They can set up ambushes, right? The F-15 that we lost and, thank goodness, recovered the two aircrew from that American F-15 that was shot down recently, I believe it was shot down by a shoulder-fired anti-air missile, just of the type that China is reportedly moving to try to sell to the Iranians. And, by the way, this is China taking a page from its playbook almost a half a century ago. You remember that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, it was only two weeks later that the paramount Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, invited the U.S. defense secretary at the time, Harold Brown, to start collaborating in finding ways to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan. And in fact, Deng Xiaoping said, We should cooperate in getting them stuck in a quagmire in Afghanistan. That was almost a direct quote from Deng Xiaoping.

And sure enough, the United States began buying Chinese shoulder-fired missiles and providing them to the mujahideen, guerrilla fighters, who were fighting the Soviets. And then several years after that, the U.S. started supplying Stinger missiles, an even more advanced anti-air shoulder-fired missile. And the Chinese provided the operation to get those missiles into Afghanistan. They raised thousands of mules in Western China and would put these Stinger missiles onto mules and move them over land, through Pakistan, into Afghanistan. The Russians retreated in 1988. They lost control of the air. And soon, they lost the war in Afghanistan. And a few years after that, in 1991, the Soviet Union was gone. It’s possible China is trying to extend a cease-fire while, at the same time, moving to bleed the United States and try to destroy U.S. air dominance and get us either defeated or stuck in a quagmire.

Frum: But the biggest effects may not be anything that anyone intends. So we mentioned that the Persian Gulf is a source of 20 percent of the world’s shipborne oil. Eighty percent of that goes to Asia. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. It’s not literally self-sufficient, because it exports some forms of oil and imports others. Gas is trapped in North America. Canada plus the United States produce a quarter of the planet’s oils, more than is exported from the Persian Gulf. So the United States is in a relatively benign situation, especially with regard to natural gas, where it’s floating on a sea of cheap gas. But if you are in Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines, Bangladesh, even Pakistan, India, you have to think, The Americans did not think about us at all when they started this war. We are really directly at risk. The South Koreans are having to impose all kinds of draconian energy-saving measures because they’re worried about their supplies of oil and gas. In poor countries, gas is used often as a direct heating fuel, and how will people cook? And many countries in the Western Pacific and the mainland of Asia are thinking, We look to the United States to be our security provider and to care about us, and it turns out they didn’t. And we now have to think, Maybe we have the wrong hegemon here.

Pottinger: Yeah, look, you’re right that the majority of that Gulf gas and oil moves eastward over to India and through the Strait of Malacca and into Southeast Asia and then East Asia. That’s exactly right. A big difference from 30 years ago, when we had to fight the first Gulf War, when we were heavily dependent on imports from that region. That said, no one escapes the effect of a chokehold on 20 percent of the global supply. I learned that this weekend when I was filling my car and—

Frum: There are many supplies, but there’s one price.

Pottinger: Right, right. There’s some regional effect, but not enough to overcome a 20 percent reduction in global supply. And so even though the U.S. is in a better position—we’re buffered, our oil and gas companies are in a position to benefit from higher prices, and so forth—but the strategic effects are pretty hard to contain, right? And this could affect China’s economy as well.

The Chinese economy right now is heavily, heavily dependent on exports. That’s been true for decades. It’s more true now, ironically, than it was. China has a larger trade surplus today than it had 10 years ago, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. They never built the consumer economy that people had advised and thought that they were going to move toward. The property market has collapsed in China, and it’s not really recovering, so that’s had a negative wealth effect; people don’t wanna buy things in China. So Beijing is basically saying, Okay, we’re the factory of the world. Let’s make ourselves the permanent factory and the only factory in the world. And in fact, their strategy now is to deindustrialize the Western democracies and regional democracies in Asia by making literally 100 percent of—that’s their aspiration. They don’t even have a sense of irony about it. They just wanna make everything that’s made. That’s a problem when you have a global energy shock like we’re experiencing right now, because it could lead to a significant global recession, or at least recessions in places like Europe that are major dumping grounds for Chinese excess capacity. So this could be a problem for China if Europe goes into a recession as a result of this shock.

So what you just said a minute ago, which is, it’s really hard to kind of grasp and play out all of the unintended consequences of this thing. It’s gonna take a while before we have sort of a net assessment of kind of what the effect was for China—and other countries.

Frum: You talk to leaders and businesspeople in the Pacific Rim. Do you hear from them any qualms about American leadership as compared to before the Iran war?

Pottinger: Yeah, look, I think a lot of countries are uneasy when they look at what’s happening between the U.S. and NATO—and frankly, I think both sides are at fault on this one. President Trump is exactly right that Europe needs to spend more, and of course, they’ve now made a pledge to spend as much as the United States is currently spending as a percentage of GDP on defense. That’s long overdue. That’s a credit to the Trump administration. But to then threaten the sovereignty of European states and territories, to bully NATO member Canada, to say that we’re gonna seize Greenland, these things are really, really damaging to trust. I’m just back from Asia, and talking to leaders in U.S. allied countries in the Western Pacific, yeah, they’re concerned about all of that. They view any unraveling of NATO as something that’s gonna unleash a major crisis in the form of coercion and war in their neighborhoods in ways that are gonna harm all democracies, all rule-of-law societies.

That said, I do think it’s worth noting that I see no deterioration in the, for example, U.S.-Japan relationship. I think that’s still strong. Prime Minister [Sanae] Takaichi, she doesn’t have other allies that she can really fall back on, so she’s working hard to maintain a strong working rapport with President Trump. I think that that was on display when she visited just a few weeks ago in Washington.

South Korea is still, even though you have a left-leaning government in place—usually that leads to poor or strained ties between South Korea and Japan. In fact, you’re still seeing pretty good ties between the leaders of South Korea and Japan right now. I think that that’s a stabilizing sort of dynamic. I think that’s a good dynamic. And I give credit to both President Trump’s team and President Biden’s team for all the work that they invested in keeping Japan and Korea on cooperative terms.

You see a lot more activity between sort of Australia and Japan now, right? It’s mainly concern about the People’s Republic of China and its axis friends, like North Korea and even Russia, which is active in the Western Pacific as well. But it’s also a sign that countries are nervous about American reliability. So anything that the Trump administration can do to put to rest these just insults to the sovereignty of our allies would go a really, really long way and it would pay off. And, look, now we need our allies again, right? We’re in this war. We’re trying to open the Strait of Hormuz. It would be certainly helpful and a powerful signal to Iran if they were facing a coalition of navies, not just the U.S. Navy, right there in the strait.

Frum: It goes under the heading of “another thing we should have thought about first,” but—

Pottinger: (Laughs.) Sure.

Frum: —if you say it’s too early to say whether China is a net winner from the war, it’s not too early to say that Russia is an enormous net winner from this war. They have billions of dollars—I think it’s almost a billion a day more revenue; you will know the figure better than me—but hundreds of millions more per day than they had before, at a time when the United States is expending munitions that could have been given to Ukraine, and when the relationship between the United States and European allies is so bad that President Trump is speculating about withdrawing from NATO formally. That’s probably what he had in mind with that strange truncated speech he did a couple of weeks ago where he had a big announcement and then he just sort of rambled for 20 minutes to no point.

Pottinger: No doubt, right now Russia’s benefiting from the higher oil prices. They’re benefiting from being able to sell more oil. They’re benefiting from strain in the NATO alliance. Still too early to say how all of that ultimately nets out, but if the U.S. commits an own goal by undermining or abandoning Ukraine, then we’re gonna be in a world of hurt. I haven’t seen that President Trump is turning his back on Ukraine. In fact, after the February 2025—that fateful meeting in the Oval Office when everyone thought that Trump was about to turn his back on Ukraine, in fact, the U.S. has continued its support, provided weapons. It’s required Europe to pay a much larger share of the money for those weapons, which I think is wholly appropriate.

Frum: Are you providing weapons when you’re simply selling them to the Europeans? There’s no element of gift or aid here. I think net U.S. aid to Ukraine is now almost zero. And Ukraine has a civilian economy to keep going, too, and the Europeans help support that.

Pottinger: Well, someone’s gotta pay for the weapons, and the U.S. was paying for them previously; now Europe’s paying a much larger share. The key thing is to keep that flow of weapons going, because you’ll remember, there are people who have been arguing that the U.S. shouldn’t even provide any weapons to Europe to help Ukraine. I think that that would be a huge mistake.

And take a pause for a second: The two most capable allies of the United States are not even technically defense-treaty allies of the United States. They are Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, not a defense-treaty ally of the United States, and Israel, also not a defense-treaty ally, just an informal ally of the United States. These two countries—one of them tiny, in the case of Israel; one of them just a midsized state that people thought was gonna get steamrolled by Russia—these are the two most capable countries that we have as friends right now. They’ve shown on the battlefield that they can take care of themselves. They don’t require the U.S. to join them in fighting, although it helps them, and they certainly don’t ask the U.S. to do their fighting for them. This is an amazing model. This is a model for Europe. It’s a model for Taiwan and for Japan and South Korea and Australia. It is the Ukraine model.

By the way, I would count Ukraine as the most capable military for dealing with post-2022 infantry warfare. The United States has zero. I fought in two wars not long ago, right, in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have zero experience in the current character of infantry warfare that began in 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that’s because we are now fighting semi-autonomized drone warfare, increasingly AI-driven drone warfare, and as of December, the last NATO figures I saw, Russia was losing 1,000 men per day on the battlefield in Europe—1,000 men a day were carted away in body bags or on stretchers, and almost 90 percent of those casualties were inflicted by drones.

So only the Ukrainians, on the good guy’s side, know how to do this kind of warfare. Only the Ukrainians know how to do counter-drone warfare at the level that they’re achieving. The United States has not learned how to do this. The United States does not scale. We make about 300,000 drones a year in the United States, all in. Ukraine’s gonna make 12 million drones this year. Are you kidding me? Trump has talked about the Stone Ages—the United States is the world’s best late-20th-century military; we are not a 2020s military yet, okay? And this is why I’m grateful that President Trump has not committed ground troops to the fight. I think we would learn lessons in blood very quickly about the realities of the character of warfare post-2022.

What I’m trying to tell you is, we need countries like Ukraine and Israel, okay? So does Europe. And Europe needs to be doing more, we need to be doing more just to learn from the Ukrainians. And this applies to Taiwan as well, right? We’re nervous about what China might do next with respect to Taiwan. Taiwan should learn from the Ukrainians. They should also learn—I’m gonna say it—from the Iranians, right? Look at what Iran was just able to do: keeping this strait closed, keeping the U.S. Navy at bay, at least for the last six weeks, by using cheap, relatively expendable, portable weapons like drones, sea drones, sea mines, coastal-defense cruise missiles. So the good news for countries like Japan, for countries like Taiwan is that they now have a template, provided by Ukraine in the Black Sea and provided by Iran in the Persian Gulf, for keeping superpower navies at bay. That should enhance deterrence and encourage Taiwan.

Frum: The flip side of that is the Chinese have had a very good lesson in how they can completely quarantine Taiwan without sending any ships. All they have to do is say, Okay, we’re not going to invade you, but nothing’s going in; nothing’s going out.

Pottinger: Even though you’re right that China would be able to close down a lot of traffic around there, we’ve also learned from this war that airpower alone—so if Taiwan and Japan are able to keep China’s navy at bay using the same cheap weapons that the Ukrainians and the Iranians use, and they have the confidence that airpower alone will not subjugate them, then they can hang in there; they can show that they’re willing and able and have the resolve to fight a long emergency. And that might be enough to deter China from trying to undertake something so complicated and dangerous and unpredictable as a quarantine or a blockade or a full-blown invasion.

Frum: Okay, the logic there has some sinister implications for how the U.S.-Iran war ends. Right now, the balance sheet as we speak is the United States and Israel have done devastating damage to many of Iran’s aggressive warfare capabilities, a lot of its internal repression apparatus. The regime is less able to project power and surely wobblier than it was. On the other hand, it now is the more or less recognized owner of the Persian Gulf, which it didn’t used to be. And although the United States disputes that ownership, there doesn’t seem to be a lot that the United States can do about it. And how does the United States extricate itself from this situation? How does this war end?

Pottinger: It’s going to be decided in Hormuz, right, through a mix of war, coercive gunship diplomacy, and then negotiations. Negotiations are downstream of all the rest of that that I just mentioned, right? (Laughs.) That’s why the Iranians said, Yeah, I’ll meet you in Islamabad, and I’m telling you now, I’m not gonna give up my nukes, or my nuke aspirations. It’s obvious that they’re trying to develop a nuclear arsenal. And I think President Trump and Israel are right to be targeting that capability. We’ve had multiple presidents who’ve said that we will not stand for them having nukes—well, they were getting pretty close. They were within weeks last summer. They have not yet given up the aspiration or the materials or the tools that they would need to enrich, so I actually think that is a noble, correct strategic goal for the United States.

But as you said, we’re now pregnant with this war. You don’t get half-pregnant with these things. And what President Trump is going to try to do is try to build leverage by taking away the tollbooth from Iran. And then it’s sort of a test of wills to see which side cries “uncle” sooner, and the world economy is gonna be choking; there’s no question about it. The world economy is the one that needs that oil—everybody needs that oil.

The short answer is, I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know.

Frum: I’m gonna say something, and because of your past relationships, you may not wanna comment on this. But if it’s a test of wills, say who’s gonna come out with the upper hand: the fanatical, murderous, apocalyptic regime that believes it’s going to get its reward in heaven for all its crime on Earth; or a president with the world’s shortest attention span, who’s seeing his poll numbers at home collapsing because of high gas prices from a war he has no congressional authorization for, no public approval for, he’s never explained a case to it, and he is someone who’s famous for his short-term-edness? I think the Iranian will, although they have way less in the way of material resources, looks like the more robust side in that contest of wills.

Pottinger: When you go to war, you go to war with your military and your nation, even when you’ve got a lot of people who don’t back it. I don’t yet know where President Trump’s gonna come out. I would say the following: It became clear to me in the first term working for him that he views Iran as a separate category of threat from other adversaries of the U.S. And it’s precisely because of his assessment—and I think his assessment is right—that Iran cannot be deterred, okay? This is a country—a regime, I should say, because this is really about the regime, not the Iranian people—this is a regime that attempted to assassinate President Trump while he was running for office at least twice in 2024, according to Justice Department indictments under President Biden’s Justice Department. They attempted to assassinate much of his Cabinet from the first term. In other words, the things that Israel and the U.S. have just done to Iran were a mirror image of what Iran was attempting to do in its own regime-change strategy towards the United States.

These guys are—they’re dangerous; they’re nuts. I think that, if they had a nuclear weapon, they would be willing to take even more extreme risks, knowing that they are protected by a nuclear shield, that no other country would be willing to actually inflict retaliation on them so long as they have a nuke. Now what you’re looking at is sort of Iran conducting something closer to all-out war to try to remake the Middle East as the hegemon. If that’s where we end up with this, we’re not in a good place, absolutely.

Frum: I don’t think it’s a hard sell that Iran is an aggressive regime that’s bad at calculating risk, driven by implacable ideology. I think if you took a vote in the U.S. Senate—Iran: good or bad—there might be two or three senators who’d abstain. And there’s a long blood debt, as you know from your time in Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s a long blood debt, that Iran inflicted a lot of loss and harm on the United States, and that’s never been quite requited, although President Trump did kill Qasem Soleimani, the architect of that harm.

But the question is: Who has more staying power here? If fuel prices stay high into the summer driving season, on top of the harm done to the American economy by the tariffs that were imposed in 2025, with a president who was not that popular to begin with, whose numbers are now deteriorating, and who’s famous for his short-term-edness, it’s hard to imagine that these talks can continue in this same way into the month of May and into the month of June.

Pottinger: Yeah, I don’t think the talks are gonna settle this thing. I think that we’re now seeing the negotiation on the battlefield. And it’s still apparently sort of, kind of a cease-fire, but I think the cease-fire exists in name only because, as I said at the top, blockades are acts of war. And now you’re seeing a contest of wills again, on the seas and in the Strait of Hormuz, dueling blockades, and if the U.S. kind of chickens out, we’re gonna be in a pretty rough spot afterwards.

Frum: What happens if Congress refuses to approve the supplementals that are going to be necessary to pay for this war? There are enough Republican dissenters from the war that the supplementals can’t get through the House with Republican votes only. In the Senate, there are many procedural obstacles. You need a consensus to get these supplementals through, and they’re going to be big. What happens if they don’t get funded?

Pottinger: Yeah, well, look, Congress controls the purse. The Constitution’s pretty clear about that. I don’t know what—yeah.

Frum: I think here’s something we can say pretty for sure. There’s a tiny Republican margin in the House. There are probably half a dozen Republican defectors from any Iran war supplemental, maybe more. Once you have one or two, then there may be a lot. There are going to need to be Democratic House members voting the supplemental. Who will they be? And for a war that’s never been authorized by vote of Congress and that the public doesn’t want.

And people are assuming as if this war gets funded, but there could be a real crisis. And then President Trump may try to say, Well, you stabbed us in the back. But given how unpopular the war is, the public may say, That wasn’t a stab in the back. That was a lasso to pull you away from the land war in Iran that we seem to be heading towards.

To have a big war that has already taken a dozen lives, it’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and to do that, Congress may have things to say. AndPresident Trump has refused to involve them at the beginning, like the allies, and you may get some protest at the end if they weren’t there at the beginning.

Pottinger: Yeah, I’ll take your word for it. I think we’re stronger as a nation when we have the support of the Congress and the support of the people when we undertake the most grave responsibilities of government, which are those having to do with war and peace.

Frum: One thing that no one seems ever to have said to Donald Trump is, one of the reasons you involve these people is not just because it’s a nice thing to do. When you have that photograph and there is the president flanked by leaders in House and Senate, flanked by allies, and anything goes wrong and the question is, Who thought this was a good idea?, the president could say, All of us. Look at all these guys. We all thought it was a good idea. (Laughs.) If he’s just there front, center, solo and the question is, Who thought this was a good idea?, it’s him. And when it looks like not a good idea, one man to blame.

Pottinger: Fair point. (Laughs.) That’s good. It’s a fair point.

Frum: All right, I need to let you go, but I wanna press you one more: How does this end? If you were to predict, how does this end?

Pottinger: Remember, I described war as kind of an auditor. That’s not an original idea. The guy who wrote the most eloquently on that is an Australian historian named Geoffrey Blainey, who wrote a book that I wish everyone who ever went into national-security jobs would read. It’s called The Causes of War, and he’s just published a new edition of it in Australia.

This accounting that settles for everyone to see kind of who has more bargaining power, that is done on the battlefield. And I think that what you’re seeing after this weekend is that President Trump is unwilling to accept the math at the current stage, which is with Iran saying, I’m not gonna meet any of the political objectives that you demanded of me: I’m not giving up my regime. I’m not giving up my nuclear weapons aspirations. And by the way, I’ve now taken the Strait of Hormuz as my own little tollbooth. We have the cease-fire, but I don’t think that President Trump is gonna settle for that accounting, and so there’s more accounting to do. And that means the dueling blockades on the high seas. Blockades are dangerous things. They’re coercive. They could easily escalate to use of force.

And I don’t know how this ends, except I can give you an indicator. If the United States is able to convene allies and partners, a coalition of the willing, to provide more of that coercive muscle to keep the strait open, which is in everyone’s interest; this isn’t just a contest anymore between the U.S. and Iran. Everyone who’s sitting on the sidelines—and I’ll tell you, the Gulf states know this, and we have some inkling in the press of what they’re asking President Trump to do. They do not want this war to end on the current terms of Iran controlling a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies. So now’s the time to do something that is not in the muscle memory of the current White House, but which I think is necessary, and that is to actually build a coalition. It’s gonna share the burden, but more than that, it’s going to create both optics and numbers that could be more persuasive to Iran to at least back off on the Gulf.

Frum: Matt Pottinger, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Pottinger: David, thanks for having me.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Matt Pottinger for joining me today on The David Frum Show. My book this week is Labyrinths, by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. We had Italo Calvino last week, so now we’re plunging deeper into symbolic territory with the man who really introduced symbolic writing into English.

If you haven’t read Borges or are unfamiliar with his work, I have to prepare you for a very strange world. Labyrinths is the book that made Borges famous in English. It was published in 1962, but it’s a translation and anthology of stories Borges wrote in the 1940s.

Maybe you need to begin with knowing something about the very unusual career of this man. Borges was born in 1899 in Argentina. He was from a well-to-do and very literate family, and he learned many languages at an early age. He spent his 20s in Europe during the First World War in Switzerland and then in Spain, in neutral countries, returned to Argentina, where he began as a poet. In the year 1938, he suffered a traumatic head injury that left him doubtful about his own sanity. And to test his wits, he abandoned poetry and tried instead short stories, and he wrote some very, very strange ones over the next years.

He found himself on the outs with the ruling authorities in Argentina when Juan Perón came to power. Borges was an Anglophile conservative, a traditionalist, and did not like at all the populist regime of Perón, and he lost a job, and he found himself making a living by lecturing on English literature. But the stories came to greater repute, and Borges himself was politically rehabilitated and ending up as director of the Argentine National Library, ironically at exactly the moment that he began to lose his eyesight to a hereditary condition, another predicament that you might find in a Borges short story.

Borges never won the international claim that really ought to have come his way. He was the sort of person who ought to have won a Nobel Prize, but because of his right-of-center politics—he accepted a medal from Augusto Pinochet in 1976—he flunked the political test that is always there in the Nobel considerations. But the stories are bigger than politics and stand the test of time.

Let me tell you about one of the most bizarre of those in the book Labyrinths—published, as I said, in 1962. This is the very first story, the story that he turned to after his crisis in 1938, and it’s called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” The story is a fictional obituary by a pompous, pedantic, and quite bigoted obituarist of a fictional French writer, Pierre Menard. Pierre Menard had a very obscure imaginary career, and in the later part of his career, in the 1930s, he sat down to write his masterwork, and what he resolved to do was to rewrite Don Quixote in exactly the same words and exactly the same lines as the original Don Quixote. Now, he was not copying Don Quixote, said Pierre Menard, the imaginary author. He was instead drawing on his experience as a 20th-century Frenchman to rewrite Don Quixote from the beginning, exactly the same way as [Miguel de] Cervantes wrote it in the 1600s. And he wrote two chapters and a little fragment of a third chapter—two noncontinuous chapters—each of them drawing on his own inspiration to produce exactly the same book as Cervantes did. And the imaginary obituarist says, When you compare them side by side, they seem identical, but actually, Menard’s version is a lot better because it’s more ironic and written by someone to whom 17th-century Spanish is a second language and not a first language, as it was for Cervantes. The story is humorous, but it raises some very profound questions about the relationship between authors and texts of a kind that have inspired a lot of thought.

Another of the stories in the book is a story called the “Three Versions of Judas,” meaning Judas Iscariot. This is, again, an imaginary essay about an imaginary essayist who wrote an imaginary theology of Judas Iscariot, arguing that Judas Iscariot was, in a way, the true founder of Christianity through a series of very heretical beliefs. And it’s a play on philosophy. It’s a play on meaning. It’s a play on this double game, or this removal game, of imaginary author of an imaginary text about an alien subject, all of which is designed to challenge us to think.

And the reason I draw this to your attention, if you’re not already a Borges fan, is I wanna return to a point I keep making about why I do these books and about what we are losing with the loss of literary culture. Video culture, and especially the kind of short, instant videos we are surrounded with today, encourage us to take the world literally, to be a passive consumer of created objects for us. Literary work, at its best, challenges us to be individuals, to think for ourselves, and understand that text is treacherous. The story of Pierre Menard, a 20th-century writer who rewrites Don Quixote but as a new book, as if it were new, and claims that his version is better, well, that’s a literary game. That is a philosophical problem. That is an invitation on you to think for yourself and be more fully human.

I’m not a Luddite. I enjoy an Instagram Reel as much as the next person—well, maybe not as much as the next person, but I enjoy them. I watch them. But we are losing something. And it’s something that not only changes the world in its loss, but changes ourselves. We need to grab on to it. And meeting Jorge Luis Borges in his Labyrinths is a great place to start.

Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will like and share the program as well. Thank you for watching and listening. See you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Only Losers Play the Madman

2026-04-08T16:43:00-04:00

The most important thing to understand about the “madman theory” of foreign policy is that it was designed by losers for losers.

The world first heard of the madman theory from a 1978 memoir by President Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. According to Haldeman, Nixon said: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” Faced with an otherwise hopeless war in Vietnam, Nixon would pretend to be crazy to intimidate the North Vietnamese into allowing him some face-saving escape.

Nobody executes a madman strategy when he feels that he’s winning. Strong and successful powers emphasize consistency and predictability. So do powers that hope to be seen as strong and successful. When China’s foreign minister speaks to the world, he uses language such as “China will be a reliable force for stability” and China “is providing the greatest certainty in this uncertain world.” He understands that true power does not need to boast or yell.

Those who feel their power ebbing, however, may bluster and bellow. Over the seven weeks of his Iran war so far, Donald Trump has discovered that no amount of the force at his disposal will calm world energy markets or boost his sagging poll numbers. He has tried a double strategy of promising imminent breakthroughs in negotiations while posting ever more violent threats on social media to ostensibly accelerate those negotiations. But if this was a madman strategy, it signally failed to gain the advantage that he sought. Everyone could see that Trump wanted a deal more than his Iranian counterparts did. A good rule of thumb is that the side that wants a deal more is the side that is losing.

The madman strategy is for not-crazy leaders caught in adverse predicaments. It’s a strategy of deception. The madman strategist pretends to be willing to do things that he’s not really willing to do. This approach relies on credibility: Rivals must be able to take the threat of extreme action seriously.

[Read: Trump made a deal that gives him nothing he wanted]

Trump’s problems with this strategy are ironic. Foreign leaders are surely willing to believe that Trump is “crazy” in the sense that he is detached from reality. They have seen him miscalculate risk and bungle all kinds of projects, such as his trade wars with China and his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. But they also know that when push really comes to shove, Trump will flinch. TACO has become, like NATO, an acronym so familiar that it no longer needs spelling out.

The Iranians just executed the most dramatic TACO event in history. Trump threatened to annihilate their entire civilization if they didn’t agree to his demands to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran defied the threat—and now Trump has apparently conceded control over the strait and the right to impose tolls on the ships that navigate it. On the point in which Trump tried hardest to terrorize, the Iranians aptly guessed that he was bluffing.

Trump has taught the world that he has every quality of the madman except indifference to pain. He likes his wars unilateral, quick, and cheap. He won’t seek consent from Congress; he cannot appeal to public opinion. He just gambles that the war will end before his poll numbers sink too deep. When this latest war of his turned difficult, he panicked. Everyone could see the panic, including the Iranians. His blood-curdling Truth Social posts—shocking as they were—proclaimed desperation, not resolve. That’s the Trump version of the madman strategy: yelling at people in the street while begging those same people for a bailout. What’s the opposite of the expression crazy like a fox?

What It Means to Be American

2026-04-08T13:00:00-04:00

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the nearly two decades of economic turmoil that have caused younger generations to lose faith in American institutions and led to the rise of populism in the United States. David argues that as the country stands on the precipice of a Donald Trump–manufactured economic crisis, perhaps we will learn to appreciate the basic ideas that led to prosperity in the 1980s and ’90s.

Then David is joined by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to reflect on the American ideals that captivated David and Fareed when they first immigrated to the U.S. and whether they still ring true today. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, David and Fareed discuss whether this country remains the same one they moved to many years ago and whether America has strayed from its foundational principles.

Finally, David concludes the episode with an examination of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible Cities, and a discussion about our postliterate society.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This week marks one year of The David Frum Show. I’m so grateful to everyone who has watched and listened along the way. To mark the occasion, I’ve invited my old friend Fareed Zakaria to discuss with me what it means to be an American. Both Fareed and I were born citizens of other countries—he of India, me of Canada—and we’re going to look back on our decision to join our fates to that of the United States and how we feel about it all these years later.

My book this week will be Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, a meditation on words and meanings that cast light on the decline of literacy in modern American society.

Before either the dialogue or the book, some opening thoughts on the economic troubles gathering for the United States. President Trump’s second term has been economically troubled from the beginning. 2025 was upended by his decision to impose high tariffs, and that crushed job creation in the United States—very little net new job creation in 2025. But things are even worse in 2026 with the president’s decision to open a major war with Iran without apparently thinking through the implications of this war for oil prices. Experts describe the largest supply shock to energy since the 1970s, maybe the largest of all time. And while this shock has only begun to be felt by Americans, more is coming. It’s like the president dropped a giant rock in a bowl of water, and it takes a little bit of time for the impact of the rock to slosh the water out of the bowl. But everyone, I think, is aware that a shock is coming, and they’re bracing for it.

I wanna put this shock in some kind of context. Over the 25 years 1982 to 2007, a quarter century—so I graduated from college in 1982, so for the 25 years of my opening adult life—the American economy lived through a time of extraordinary economic stability. In those 25 years, from 1982 to 2007, there was consistently low inflation, and only two short and mild recessions: one from the summer of 1990 to the spring of 1991 and another in the spring to the fall of 2001. Twenty-five years, moderate inflation, two mild, short recessions—otherwise sustained, continuous growth. And that was the experience that I think has formed the attitudes of many of the people of my generation.

Now, since 2008, there’s been one economic shock after another. The period opens with the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, an 18-month-long great recession—the longest since World War II—8 million jobs lost, and the economy did not fully recover for about half a decade. Then in 2020 comes another recession: the COVID recession, the steepest collapse of economic activity ever recorded. Plus, immediately after the COVID recession is the worst inflation since the 1970s. Now in 2026, we’re looking at the possibility of another bout of inflation and possibly another recession, caused by the shock of the energy crisis President Trump didn’t anticipate and didn’t plan for.

When people look at the reasons that American society seems to have gone so off the rails since 2007, they often point the fingers at smartphones. I’m sure the smartphones didn’t help. You can blame them for all kinds of things. I’m gonna talk after the dialogue in the book segment about one of the ills that they have caused: the decline of literacy. But when you’re trying to understand why so many younger people around the world and younger Americans have lost faith in the operation of the system, basic economic management explains a part of it.

My cohort, the late Baby Boomers, Generation X, we lived in a time of great stability. It was a time of rising inequality and other economic challenges, for sure, but mostly, you could plan a life in the confidence that, at the end of 25 years, things would be clearly better than they had been at the beginning of the 25 years, and the punctuations along the way would be mild, and the inflation that so disturbs your ability to make long-term decisions, that that would be held under control. People who have come of age since 2007 have not had that confidence—two severe recessions, one bout of inflation, and now a third recession apparently imminent and another second bout of inflation apparently imminent.

The shock since 2007 ushered in this age of populism. Expertise was discredited. The people who told us back in the ’90s that they knew what they were doing, after 2007, no one believed that anymore. So we got Brexit, and we got the rise of the far right, and we got the return of socialism and communism, and we got Trump, and we got all these sort of magicians promising some kind of new magic that will liberate us all from the basic rules of how a society and an economy works, and bring back rent controls and government-owned grocery stores. All of that got its start because of the understandable disappointment that followed from the failure of economic management after 2007 and 2008.

So those people have been in charge for a while, and they have made things much worse. And so one question I have, and maybe it’s even a kind of hope, is that the experiences of 2026, maybe they’ll cure us of the idea that there is some alternative way of organizing an economy than the way that worked between 1982 and 2007, that we need to get back to some basic ideas like balancing budgets, controlling inflation, making sure that there’s free trade and free economic activity. And all the things that people thought were out of date in 2007, they look pretty good compared to the manias that have hit us from 2008 onwards and especially from what is about to happen now in the wake of this unconsidered war with poorly anticipated economic consequences by President Trump.

And now my dialogue with Fareed Zakaria.

[Music]

Frum: Fareed Zakaria is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, a weekly international-affairs program that airs around the world, and he writes a column for The Washington Post. He’s the author of five New York Times best sellers: The Future of Freedom: [Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad] in 2003; The Post-American World in 2008; In Defense of a Liberal Education, 2015, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World in 2020; and most recently, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present. Fareed is a graduate of Yale, a doctorate from Harvard University, a contributor to American letters in journalism and history and international knowledge through his long and distinguished career. I’ve had the honor of knowing him, well, more years than I think either of us would care to remember, but quite a few. And it is such a pleasure to welcome Fareed to be the guest of honor here on the one-year anniversary of this podcast.

Fareed Zakaria: Thank you so much, David. It is a huge pleasure, and I actually remember, I think, pretty close to exactly when we met. I was in graduate school and you were in law school at the same university, and somebody told me, You have to meet David Frum. You guys are gonna get on wonderfully. And as it happened, you and I were unusual in that we were both living in Boston while going to school in Cambridge, and so we were kind of neighbors for a year. And I went to your apartment, and thus began a conversation that has gone on for, I guess it’s now 35 years.

Frum: Yes. Okay. You put a number to it. (Laughs.)

Zakaria: (Laughs.)

Frum: So here’s what I wanted to ask you about. And I wanna assure listeners that I’ve precleared this because it’s going to be kind of a sensitive question, but Fareed and I are both naturalized Americans—Fareed first in 2001, me later in 2007. And I think, like all people who make that conscious decision, we began with a very particular idea of America. And in this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I wanted to ask: Fareed, what do you think? Is the country we live in now the country you moved to, that you became a citizen of, that you’ve supported through all of your distinguished intellectual work all this time?

Zakaria: I’d say, very simply, the answer is yes. It sounds corny and cliché, but I still believe in America; I still have hope in America. But it has changed, not so much that it makes me lose faith in the country itself. But I wanna back up for a second and remind people of something that’s particularly true for somebody like me, who came from very far away and from a completely different culture. We often talk about immigration as an entirely kind of joyful process: You’re coming to America, celebration, etc., which is all true, but there is an extraordinary loss and a choice the immigrant is making. You’re choosing to leave your country, your culture, your family, your friends, and you’re making this big leap. And the reason I made it was because America seemed so attractive and it seemed so compelling. And so that piece of it has to be strong. That is one of America’s secret sauces. It may be the last one we have left, right? The rest of the world is doing capitalism pretty well. The Chinese are doing big investments pretty well. What are we left with that’s distinctive? What we have more than any country in the world is this power to bring people in, attract them, and then assimilate them.

So when I came here, I was dazzled by America. I was fascinated by every aspect of it. I thought it was extraordinary, wide, open, free—and free in every sense of the world; you were really able to be yourself in America in a way that you are in almost no country in the world. And I think some of those broad cultural characteristics, societal characteristics, I still find true. Americans are very warm, very generous, very open, very welcoming. The country is still, by and large, free and wide open, though we should get to that. In many ways, there is more of a kind of regulated nanny state than I remember. I used to go to Hertz and rent cars on my student visa and my international license, with no insurance, and they would just say, Look, if you’re willing to pay the money, take the car. Go. Enjoy yourself. That America has gone for some reasons.

There is a kind of nastiness to the populism that we’re seeing now, a kind of mean-spiritedness and an anger that I didn’t see in the America I came in. I came to America in 1980, ’81, ’82. [Ronald] Reagan’s America might have been very conservative on policy terms, which some people liked or didn’t like; I rather liked it at the time. But it was wide open in terms of hope and optimism and generosity of spirit. It’s not an accident that Reagan did an amnesty for lots of immigrants. People make it out like he was snookered into it. No, it very much came out of his basic openness and warmth and generosity of character.

The nastiness has really surprised me, stunned me, and the democratic decay. That I did not expect—the degree to which the United States has really gone down the path of illiberal democracy, the degree to which you have the president, many of his most powerful associates, many leaders in Congress actively participating in the eroding of the rule of law, the separations of power, the norms that have kept American democracy strong. All of that has really surprised me. I come to my basic positive conclusion with some caveats and a lot of sadness, but I do think that the essence of America remains.

Frum: Well, I don’t think we should be afraid of being corny at all because corny is simply a way of saying things that deeply move us or maybe sometimes we’re a little bit embarrassed of the emotion, maybe it brings the emotion a little too close to the surface for the sophistication of daily life, but it’s something real.

But let me put it to you a slightly different way. So the country marked its first centennial in 1876 with a big exhibition of arts and sciences and technology in Philadelphia. And a lot of the physical remains of that exhibition are still on display here in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian [Institution]. It marked the second bicentennial in 1976 with many events, but probably the most iconic, certainly the most photogenic, was a big regatta in New York Harbor of 18th-century and 19th-century sailing ships supplied jointly from the United States and Great Britain. Now, it was a big visual, but it was also a way of saying that, [in] 1976, the United States and Britain that had fought the Revolutionary War against one another were commemorating their deep partnership forged in two world wars and the Cold War.

As I understand it, the highlight of the 250th is going to be a mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn. (Laughs.)

Zakaria: (Laughs.)

Frum: And it’s hard not to feel that from the arts and sciences to the big ship regatta to the MMA fight on the White House lawn that something has gone off the bend here.

Zakaria: That speaks to a broader shift that Trump is ushering in, which is a real kind of populous revolt against elites: elite judgment, elite technocracy, and elite choices with regard to art, culture, everything. I think for Trump, it’s intuitive because that is what he likes; he likes gold-plated Corinthian columns, and he likes MMA fights. But he does represent something real in America, which is a lot of people who look at the way in which these events are commemorated, buildings are built in America, and they think, This doesn’t reflect what I think a fancy, beautiful building should look like. And Trump, in a way, is an expression of that. And while I share with you the sense of dismay about it, I think it’s also true that, look, there is another America out there, and who’s to say that they don’t get to be represented with some of their stuff as well?

What I point to, by the way, your markers are very interesting ones, aren’t they, because 1876 is, of course, a pretty bad time in America. It’s a period of when you have this extraordinarily corrupt compromise after the Civil War, not quite a rigged election but an election that is arranged, in which the Republicans essentially agreed to give up on any Reconstruction of the South, essentially allowing formal slavery to be replaced by informal slavery, by Jim Crow, in return for which they get their president. And then 1976 is, of course, Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the stagflation of the ’70s, and everything that that conjures up—not a great time in American history. So it’s always worthwhile to look back historically because there never was a golden age; things have always been complicated.

Frum: Well, I’m old enough that I do remember the 1976 bicentennial firsthand; I was a teenager. And I was a big consumer of American media and living in Toronto; you were nearby. And I remember exactly what you described, but that’s where the contrast is. So 1976, I don’t think people would’ve described that as a good time in America: Watergate, Vietnam just behind, economic trouble of all kinds. If you watch the cinema of that period, it’s very, very dark and bleak. The official mood was, despite the very hard things the country had been through in the past three or four years, We are going to make this right, and we’re going to make it proper, and we’re going to make it kind of uplifting.

That seems to be the mood that is very much not there. In many objective ways, the conditions in 2026 are not as hard as they were in 1976, although that may be about to change as the economy moves into a slowdown. But the aspirational element, that’s the thing I’m noticing about the mixed martial arts—it’s not that America in 2026 is a more vulgar country than it was in 1976; it’s that it’s a less aspirational country than it was in 1976.

Zakaria: Yeah, and it relates, I think, to the loss of faith in elites. Because, after all, what created that aspirational sense? It was things that we aspired to, that were setting the tone for America. We tried to say, We, too, can produce great music, great art. I remember a little bit of the ’76 celebrations. I remember there was this one musical performance where they did Aaron Copland and “Rhapsody in Blue,” and the whole idea was to showcase the greatest things that American music had produced, which were high art. And that whole sense of two things, a kind of elite-driven culture and also a kind of centralized culture, have been lost. There are things you needed to know. You and I remember E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy: [What Every American Needs to Know]. There was this whole idea that, Look, there’s a bunch of things that you need to know if you want to consider yourself an educated person. That world has kind of gone away. I think it’s part of the Trump phenomenon, but it’s not intrinsically related. But it is a broader suspicion of elites and a sense that the elites have betrayed us.

I tell you—I’m free-associating here—but one of the things I have been puzzled by about the world we are living in right now, the America we’re living in, is why are Trump supporters so unconcerned with the obvious, naked, extravagant corruption of this administration? How could a working-class person in Appalachia look at these hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, being siphoned off in various ways, most of which seem deeply unethical, some of which make you wonder whether they’re even legal, and be okay with it. And I think the answer is, they were so disgusted by the rule by elites and the system that was in place before—let’s call it the kind of meritocratic, technocratic America—that they thought, You guys set up a system for yourselves where it seemed all rule-based, but it was all self-dealing, and somehow, you guys all did very well, and we got screwed. Well, our guys are now in power, and maybe they’re doing this more nakedly and they’re being more crass about it, but it’s our turn. And I think that there is a very powerful feeling out there about this.

Obviously, I don’t agree with it. I think that, [in] the one case, it was trying to create a rule-based meritocracy, even though it was flawed and not honored as often as it should have been, but the other is naked corruption. But I think part of it is this deep disenchantment with the system that was in place for the last 40, 50 years, a kind of administrative, technocratic state ruled by Ivy League, credentialed elites.

Frum: Let me ask you a question that draws some of these debates into your academic and intellectual work. Now, one of the main themes of your writing through your whole career has been—and in this, you are in a tradition of many internationally grounded scholars, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who have all worried too much about the American tendency to make a morality play out of foreign policy. And that’s probably one of the things that you and I have most disagreed about over the years; I’m a little bit more attracted to that than you are. And this maybe reflects something personal.

I grew up in Toronto at a time of great prosperity and security in Canadian life. But as I look back on it, I realize everybody I knew was either themselves or the child of or married to an exile and a refugee, everybody. And from all kinds of places: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, fascism, communism, and not just from Europe, that we knew people who had been expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda because they were South Asian; we knew people from apartheid South Africa; we knew people who were draft resistors; we knew people who had been expelled because of personal life choices. Everybody. And that tended to create, in my parents’ sort of liberal-minded circle, a certain anti-Americanism. And the thing that pushed me to the right as a young person was I had this—I don’t know where it came from—this awareness that all of this all existed, and I liked it, but all of it existed under the umbrella of American power, and that Toronto wasn’t protecting itself from the dangers of the world, and these exiles and refugees who showed up in my parents’ garden were not safe because of anything they did; they were safe because of things the Americans did. And it was that moral grounding of American power.

Now, you have written eloquently and well about the dangers of overdoing this. But I wonder, as you confront a United States that seems, at least for the moment, to utterly jettison that idea—that American power owes any duty at all to ideas of ethics and morality and something bigger than American interest at its crassest—how you assess all of that.

Zakaria: Yeah, I’m disappointed, distressed. And I think it sort of highlights the limits of the way in which a pure kind of realpolitik analysis kind of doesn’t capture what the United States has done to the world. And so let me explain for me where the realism comes in.

My view has always been that the United States has acted in a completely exceptional way in the world. When it had great power at the end of World War II, it did something no other superpower would’ve ever done, which was to try to create a new international system based on rules, laws, openness, liberty. And it did that because it thought it was a better way to organize the world. No realist power would’ve ever done that. That came out of a kind of liberal internationalist spirit. Maybe it came out of a high-Protestant belief in the universal rights of man and the ability to proselytize around the world. But it came out of a very distinct view. And my thought has always been that the United States did this extraordinary thing in creating this system, which is sort of tilted towards liberty and openness and human rights. It needs to maintain that system. What it has been able to do is create almost a machine that helps societies move in that direction. But when it overdoes it, when it goes in and tries to get rid of a dictator and say, Thou shalt be a democracy, it almost never works, because slow, organic processes of state formation and societal transformation are much more effective.

So in this sense, I’m sort of a Burkean about it, and I think if the United States created at the end of World War II this world, which slowly allowed countries from the Spains and the Portugals of the world, which people forget were fascist dictatorships until the 1970s, to the East Asian countries of the world, Taiwan, South Korea—also, by the way, very tough right-wing dictatorships—to evolve into democracies, if it then pressured the Soviet Union so much that it cracked and crumbled 45 years later and liberated Eastern Europe, this is achievement enough. You don’t need to go and invade every country where you think there’s a dictator and install a democracy. It won’t hold. It risks rupturing the whole system. And for that reason, I’m very strongly in favor of helping Ukraine because it was a fledgling democracy that wanted to be democratic itself, that is struggling and fighting mightily and losing enormous numbers of people in order to do that. All it’s asking us to do is help it with arms and money. But I look at the Iran thing, and I think to myself, The way you’re going to get democracy in Iran is not likely to be on the back of American tanks and troops. These are much more complicated processes. You might be reinforcing nationalism.

Look, every now and then, it works. I don’t dispute that. There are cases you can look at where things have worked out. But in general, I think it’s much more important that the United States devote its power to that general system-building approach rather than somewhat idiosyncratically going to countries that it happens to feel at that moment are kind of bad countries and reform them. And the track record on that is not particularly good, whether you look at Vietnam, whether you look at Afghanistan. Ironically, and you might get to this, Iraq doesn’t look so bad in that sense, where Iraq is now a democracy; it’s had something like nine changes of government. It is, without any question, a better regime than Saddam Hussein’s, both internally and externally. But the cost was catastrophically high.

And so I come out feeling like I am being a kind of idealist, but a kind of Franklin Roosevelt idealist, not a George W. Bush idealist. ’Cause Roosevelt set this whole system up, but he was realistic about the fact that he couldn’t do much about Eastern Europe; [Joseph] Stalin had his army there. And he acquiesced in that destruction of liberty. That’s life.

Frum: But I now watch the United States become, in international affairs, a kind of gangster, predatory country, where it overthrows dictator No. 1 in Venezuela to install dictator No. 2. Well, we’ve seen that before. But then it pillages the country, takes oil. We are told—this may or may not be true—that it’s taken physical gold from Venezuela. I find that a little hard to believe, but the Trump people say it. Not everything they say is untrue.

That seems to be Trump’s plan for Iran: again, to not just break the country’s military power, but to bring dictator No. 1—or, at this point, maybe No. 42—in line to replace dictator number one and pillage the country. And watching this kind of gangsterism, that is a shock to my system because I did have a very different idea of what America was supposed to be in the world. And this has now been going on for a decade, and when a country does something for a decade, under two presidencies separated by an interval of not very strong correction, you think, Well, maybe that’s at least as much a part of who America is as the America that I used to see.

Zakaria: Yeah, this is probably one of the greatest disappointments for me because you put it exactly right: The United States is acting like a 19th-century European imperialist power, which is shocking because the United States, of course, came into being, in a sense, in rebellion against an 18th-century imperialist power. And to be watching the United States behave like a rogue superpower, breaking the rules-based system that it had put into place, not even bothering to try to claim that there was some kind of broader justification, broader rule of law violation that is why we’ve gone after Iran—which, by the way, you could construct, and you could have brought some countries on board, and you could have taken all this to the UN. But it almost seems that part of the point of the way Trump is doing this is to say, I reject all that. I have absolutely no desire to appear to be behaving in a lawful, legitimate, rule-based way. I want to make the point that this is arbitrary, this is unilateral, this is self-interested, this is rapacious. And for the leading power in the world and for the power that built this system to be behaving like this is absolutely shocking.

It is also frittering away 80 years of ordered liberty that we have helped create in the world, of trust that we built among so many countries. We have 59 treaty allies in the world; China has one: North Korea. We’re giving up all of this. For what? For nothing. To my mind, Trump 2.0 has been the worst foreign policy in my lifetime, without any question, because it is system-wrecking, and it is destroying trust that took eight decades to build and I don’t think can be regained.

Frum: I find myself thinking a lot in the second Trump term about a poem written in the 1890s by Rudyard Kipling called “Recessional.” And Kipling, of course, was the great poet of British imperialism, but 1897 was the year of Queen Victoria’s 60th anniversary on the throne. There was a lot of boastfulness in the air, and somehow, in his artistic sensibility, this hit him amiss; he didn’t like it. And he wrote a poem against the kind of heavy boasting that he was hearing everywhere about the greatness and power of Britain, and wrote a poem in which he had this vision of British power melting away despite the boastfulness of the day. And I think of this poem a lot, in which he sort of begs God’s pardon for the boasting that he’s hearing. And it makes me think very much of Pete Hegseth.

When you talk about the realism versus liberalism in foreign policy, I think one of the things that we’re discovering in these Trump years is American generosity was not just a good-to-do thing; it was actually a necessary thing. It was smart politics too. When America emerged from the Second World War and for most of the time after, America was the strongest country in the world, and probably, it still is. But the world has seen strongest countries in the world before, at least in the Western worlds: Habsburg Spain, Bourbon France. But what always happened in the past was the strongest country in the world was never stronger than all the other countries put together. And one country would emerge as the strongest; the others would combine against it and rip it down. And the United States, as strong as it is, is not stronger than everybody else put together. But cunningly, in the years since 1945—and responsibly and rightly, too—the United States put together a system where most of the other strong countries were also friends. And so it was not just the strongest single country, but the head of the strongest possible coalition; no one could rip it down.

And when you jettison all of that, I’m beginning to hear—and I think the comments recently from the president about letting the Strait of Hormuz police itself—I think, like Kipling hearing the melting away of power, I’m hearing the gathering of the anti-American coalition of the second half of the 21st century, and it just fills me with foreboding, that as America becomes less attractive, it also becomes more vulnerable.

Zakaria: Yeah, no, I think you’ve put it exactly right. And maybe we have gotten to that point in our power that we were ripe for somebody to abuse it the way that Trump is. But you’re absolutely right. This was Franklin Roosevelt’s genius. This was Harry Truman’s genius. It was Roosevelt, Truman, and [Dwight D.] Eisenhower, really, collectively put in place this system you’re describing. And you’re absolutely right; it defies the logic of balance of power throughout at least modern history, since the fall of the Roman empire. The basic story has been the one you described: The rise of the great power and then what we always call the balance of power, the balancing against that power, whether it was the Habsburgs, the French, whomever—the British.

In the U.S. case, not only did it not happen, but the richest countries in the world said something extraordinary. So if you looked at the world in 1970, you’d say, Who is the richest country in the world? The United States. Who’s the second richest country in the world? Germany. Who is the third-richest country in the world? Japan. The second- and third-richest countries in the world, for most of the postwar period, had subcontracted their foreign and defense policy to the richest country in the world, the United States. This has never happened in history before. If you read Paul Kennedy’s [The] Rise and Fall of [the] Great Powers, when a country becomes rich economically, as the night follows the day, it becomes powerful militarily. It builds a huge army. It struts around. It wants to spread its influence around the world. The Germans and the Japanese say, No, the U.S. can take care of that. Now, some of that was war guilt, but a lot of it was that the United States treated them well. It said to them, We will take care of your security concerns. We promise you that if there is an attack on you, we will respond as if it were an attack on New York. And that sense of solidarity created this extraordinary Western alliance, which even today, if you add in countries like Japan and Australia, you’re talking about 60 percent of global GDP; you’re talking about 80 percent, maybe, of global military spending. And the idea that that’s all anchored together and not divided because countries are suspicious of America is entirely because of what you say: because America acted with this kind of enlightened self-interest and broad generosity.

So at some level, I am proud as an American that we’re the richest country in the world and, for most of the last eight decades, until this February, we were the most generous country in the world. We were the country that really invented foreign aid. We’ve given that up. And as you know, it costs a pittance; it’s 1 percent of the federal budget. And we’ve given that up, and that was all part of this soft power that covered our hard power, that made us seem much less threatening and much more attractive to a country like Canada, to a country like Singapore, to a country like Australia, and of course, to the countries of Europe. And Trump is actively shedding that. He’s forcing these countries maybe not to ally against the United States—they won’t do that—but to hedge. Look at what [Prime Minister] Mark Carney is doing in Canada. He’s saying, I have to reduce my dependence on the U.S. Look at what [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi is doing in India. He’s saying, I have to reduce my dependence on the U.S. We were thinking we were going to be this close alliance, but no, I’m now gonna buy more European defense equipment. I’m gonna keep some of the Russian kit I have. Look at the Europeans. The German chancellor is saying, It is absolutely clear I cannot rely on America’s nuclear guarantee. And he’s gone to the British and French, and asked them to guarantee it.

This is all terrible for America. This is the diminution of American power, the erosion of American power, and Trump is doing it willfully, with no strategic idea in his head.

Frum: I wanna double back to where we began the conversation, with the immigrant experience. And you and I shared an unusually, I think, easy and gentle path. We both spoke English, and we both came from some comfort in our native countries, and we both were able to go back and forth pretty easily. And so we were spared the worst. And both of us—I think me more than you—have written critically about some aspects of American immigration policy. And at another time, I used to make the joke that thinking critically about immigration is one of those jobs that Americans won’t do, so they have to import immigrants to do it. And George Borjas, the great Cuban-born skeptical economist of immigration, so many others of the people who have been most skeptical of unrestricted immigration have been foreign-born, and that’s not a contradiction; that actually means you think more about this problem if you are foreign-born than those who are native-born.

But I have to say, I do have this feeling, speaking of quoting poetry, that as I watch what has happened in the second Trump term, I feel like that line in T. S. Eliot, That’s not what I meant, That’s not what I meant, at all. Saying you can’t let every car that wants to go on the Hollywood freeway all enter the Hollywood freeway at the same time does not mean you should be having death squads massacring motorists. (Laughs.) I wanted those little blinking lights: Slow down the entry of cars onto the Hollywood freeway. (Laughs.) And now what we’re doing, instead of restricting immigration in an orderly way, we have these mass roundups, these mass detentions, putting people in shackles. As eyewitnesses, I feel like something horribly shameful is happening right in front of our eyes, and it’s something that, if there weren’t so many other shameful things, we’d think about it every day, but it’s not something we can forget either.

Zakaria: Yeah, look, I, too, have been fairly clear in being in favor of legal immigration—obviously not being in favor of illegal immigration—but beyond that, being in favor of reducing the family-based immigration, increasing skills-based immigration, making it more a system that helps America in more direct ways.

But even beyond that, David—and I know you’ve written about this and agree as well—look, one of my mentors in my intellectual life was Sam Huntington, who was my dissertation adviser at Harvard. And Sam’s last book, Who Are We? [The Challenges to America’s National Identity], is an argument for a kind of cultural assimilation that needs to take place in the United States, not just around political ideas, where we all believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. No, he argues that, at base, American culture has a kind of high-Protestant English DNA and that should not be eroded, that should not be kind of turned into some multicultural soup. And I sort of agree with him. I think that it’s a challenging question of: How you do it as people come in from more and more different parts of the world, and will naturally contribute something to that experience? You just think of the rise of Jewish Americans, and that means that Christmas is not the only holiday celebrated. That whole process of living the reality of a multicultural nation and yet maintaining some core, mainstream culture that defines your essence is a challenge. But I agree that, for those people who want to come here and create a perfect replica of Mexico or India, I say to them, Go back. Why did you come here? The whole point is you’re entering a different world.

And so I even agree with a very soft version of some of the things, but what the Trump administration seems to be doing, and you put it exactly right, is taking these ideas to an extreme, making them so coercive, nasty, aggressive, intolerant that it kind of violates the American spirit about this. It’s not only not solving the problem it’s trying to solve; it’s creating a country that is more disunified, more fragmented than the reality. The truth is, the United States has always been doing pretty well on this cultural assimilation. You know this and I know this ’cause we have children. The truth about being an immigrant parent is, the hard thing is to make sure your children retain some modicum of the old country’s culture. The assimilation machine works so well in this country. I look at my kids, three of them; they’re half Indian, right, in the sense of ethnic origin. I don’t know—my son’s 25, 26; he’s been to India 27, 28 times. He doesn’t for a second think of himself in any sense as Indian. He thinks of himself as a regular American kid who’s been to India a lot and likes it because his dad came from there. That’s it. I would’ve loved for them to know some of the language and the poetry and the music I grew up with—impossible. The machine here is so, so powerful. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur wrote about this in the 18th century, when he talked about this new American, who has been transformed from a Frenchman, a German, a Dutchman to something new called an American, and it’s still happening 250 years later.

Frum: And you remind me of a reminiscence. Shortly after I left the [George W.] Bush administration, 2003, 2004, I gave a lecture somewhere at a university, and I was met at the train station by a much fancier car than the university would normally send for a university talker—a big, gleaming car. And I discovered that the reason I had such a fancy car was they placed a call to the local limousine company, and for the usual kind of beaten-up academic vehicle, and the owner of the company, who was Egyptian-born, who had vaguely heard of me, had come out with his best car because he had a question he wanted to ask me. And he was an Egyptian. He’d migrated to the United States. He’d done very well for himself, built this successful limousine company, and he had two sons, and he wanted my advice of how they could best contribute to the defense of the United States against global terrorism. And I said, Well, there are a lot of options here. Let me ask you: Your sons, do they speak Arabic? And he replied, full of pride, Not one word.

Zakaria: (Laughs.) Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Speaking of the tried-and-true journalistic habit of talking to cab drivers and thinking of it as data, I was in Oslo, in Norway, taking a cab, and I remember this vividly because, you see, the cab driver was of Moroccan origin, and we were chatting, and he said, Where do you live? I said, Oh, I live in New York. And he said, Oh, I have a brother in New York. I came to Norway; he went to New York. Oh, I’m thinking to myself as a social scientist, here we have a good experiment. I said—

Frum: (Laughs.) A controlled experiment.

Zakaria: Exactly, a controlled experiment. I said, So tell me a little bit about your experience compared to his. He said, Oh, there’s nothing to tell you. It’s very simple. No matter how long I stay in this country, I’ll always be Moroccan. He’s already a New Yorker. His kids don’t even think of being anything else. And that is the difference still.

Frum: But when we think about this and this Huntington point—and it’s important, and I agree with you about it, and I’ve written a lot about it over the time, as have you—but I find now the thing I am really struck by is, we are building for millions of people, maybe tens of million [of] people, who live on American soil, most not causing any problems for anyone, a kind of fear-based society, where every time they encounter a representative of the law, who may be masked and unidentified, which is pretty shocking, they have to feel something terrible could happen to them, something so disproportionate to anything they’ve done. They may have broken a rule, but they’re not a danger to anybody, and they could end up in a cage, in shackles, in a torture dungeon somewhere else, and that it changes the nature of the relationship that residents of the territory have with the authorities of the territory. And one of the things that makes a free country a free country, I think, is that you can be a little negligent in the presence of the police. You don’t have to have a shudder of apprehension every time you meet a uniform. And yet millions and maybe tens of millions of people who live on this soil do have to have that feeling.

Zakaria: This is a very important point, and this is what I was trying to get at when I talked initially about that sense of freedom when I came to America. To me, coming from India, probably the most striking difference about America was the relationship people had to the state. There was a sense in which, when you came to America, that nobody cared what the government was, what it was doing. Businessmen couldn’t give a damn who was in power. They were going about building their businesses. Whereas in India, you were constantly aware of the government. If you wanted a phone line, you had to have a connection to the government. If you were a businessman, you had to be careful to be on the right side of the government. Everything was determined, shaped; the government was the central actor in shaping civil society. In the America I came to, it was almost the opposite: The government was sort of irrelevant, and you could just go about your business.

What the Trump administration is doing, through immigration but not just through immigration, through this very activist policy in the economic sphere, where it’s punishing certain companies, it’s rewarding others, based on, honestly, how much Trump likes the CEO or maybe the industry they’re in. It’s investing in certain companies. It’s relaxing the rules so if Dave Ellison wants to buy Warner Bros., well, that’s okay, but if Netflix wants to buy it, we’re gonna make that impossible. All of this is changing the nature of the individual’s relationship to the state in America. Businessmen have to care now who is in power. They have to curry favor. You can see it in a company like Nvidia, [which] pointed out that until a year ago, they didn’t have a lobbyist in Washington. They now have an army of lobbyists in Washington. It’s almost—I hate to say that there is some essence of America, but America was, in its DNA, a country that was founded against a powerful state, that was the rebellion. It is, in its DNA, a limited state. It is, in its DNA, has a kind of libertarian feel to it. And the fact that we’ve lost that is, I think, tragic, and once the government takes these powers, it’s very hard to imagine them shedding them.

You and I have a mutual friend, or a kind of mentor, Bill Buckley, and Buckley used to often say that his favorite country in the world was Switzerland. And I asked him why, and he said, Because if you go to somebody in Switzerland and you ask them, “Who is the president of your country?,” there’s a 95 percent chance, maybe a 99 percent chance, they will have no idea. ’Cause Switzerland has this very strange rotating presidency. And it’s a very business-friendly state. And I think that’s true. The idea that you wouldn’t even know who the president of your country is, it does speak to something. It would, of course, be Donald Trump’s nightmare. Trump has such a different view, and, in that sense, is so fundamentally not a conservative and not somebody who believes in that conception of limited government. He wants to dominate everything. He wants to choose everything. He wants to build every building, cut every ribbon, be involved in every economic decision. This is terrible for liberty and for individual freedom.

Frum: Let me finish with a personal question about this 250th anniversary. Have you given any thought to how you’ll mark the Fourth of July?

Zakaria: The only thing I’ve thought about is that I’d want to do it with my kids. I will probably spend it with my brother. For me, family is very important, as it is for you, so I’m not gonna go to some public thing. I’ll just do something quietly, privately. I remember a few times in the past, I’ve done a barbecue where we’ve had somebody read the Declaration of Independence. The problem is, it’s very long, and as you know, the back half is a lot of kind of details about, King George [III]’s malfeasances, which is not very interesting. But maybe something simple like that. But maybe it is worth doing something like that to say in the end what I began with: I still have faith.

Look, I can tell you, whenever we’ve had these conversations about Trump winning or not winning and you’ve had these people talk about how they might leave America if Trump wins or go to Canada, go to Europe, I’ve never entertained that thought for a nanosecond. That’s what I mean. I still believe, I still feel very strongly about this country, and I guess I feel like, if the ship goes down, I’ll be on the ship.

Frum: Yeah, I share that feeling. When people make that point about [relocating], I always say, The fight is here. If the fight is lost here, it’s lost everywhere. If the fight is won here, it can be won everywhere, given enough time. But it’s still true that I’ll spend this Fourth of July as I spend most Fourths: on the north shore of Lake Ontario, on roads and in towns named for the losers of the American Revolution, populated by descendants of refugees from the American Revolution—

Zakaria: (Laughs.)

Frum: —where the flag they fly is the British flag as it was in 1776, which is slightly different from the British flag of today, and the American Revolution remains alive because there are people for whom it’s a live issue. And I think, in the end, it was rightly decided, and the country that was built was good and great. But there’s a shadow over it now, and that shadow does chill me.

Zakaria: It’s a bad time to be somebody who believes in the ideals of the American Revolution—individual rights, individual liberty, limited government—and that sense that they always had of being a city on a hill. I was reading the other day Perry Miller, the great Harvard historian’s book Errand Into [the] Wilderness. And the “errand into [the] wilderness” phrase comes from one of the sermons of one of the great preachers of the time—I can’t remember—and the whole idea was the Pilgrims are making this errand into the wilderness to show the world. There was always that sense that the American Revolution was about more than just this one place, this plot of land; it meant something to the world.

Frum: Fareed Zakaria, thank you so much for joining me today.

Zakaria: Such a pleasure, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Fareed Zakaria for joining me today. My book this week is Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino.

Now, Invisible Cities is an extremely strange book. It’s published in 1972, translated into English from Italian in 1974. And it purports to be a kind of travelogue, a description of 55 cities as told by the Venetian explorer Marco Polo to the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan. But that’s just pretend. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are living in a world that has nothing to do with the actual world of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. They reference dirigibles, roller coasters, and petroleum refineries, things that did not exist in the 1200s, when the two men lived. In the evening, they smoked pipes together; China would not receive tobacco for another 300 years after the death of Kublai Khan. It’s an act of imagination. And it’s a book without really a story or a plot. We are in no different place at the end of the book than we are at the beginning. We have toured 55 cities, but what we’ve really had is a series of word poems about those cities.

So why do I bring it to your attention today? One of the things that I think about a lot, and that actually sparked the show and sparked this segment of the show, is the decline of literacy in our society. It’s just pretty obvious and it’s apparent everywhere—it’s measured in all kinds of ways—that people read less than they used to, and that literacy and text matters less to the culture of our time than it did a generation ago, never mind half a century ago. This book, Invisible Cities, helps us to understand what has been lost as we lose literacy. As I said, it’s weak on story. What it is strong at is thinking about what things mean. Again and again, the theme of the book is the connection between symbols and content, between contents and meaning. At one point, Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan a description of an arch, and he describes stone by stone the arch, beginning with the central stone and then moving to the stones on either side. And the emperor Kublai Khan protests, Why are you telling me about those stones? I wanna know about the arch. And Marco Polo answers, Without the stones, there is no arch.

A culture that is based on literacy is a culture that teaches certain things that we’re not even conscious of teaching. It teaches us to be skeptical, to understand that everything we hear is told by someone and for a reason, and to question what we are hearing. Through Invisible Cities, we meet city after city where signs and meaning are in unstable relationships. There is Tamara, a city where signs symbolize unobtainable meanings. There is Fedora, a city that preserves in glass globes models of the city that might have been, making enduring art of futures that were possible once but are possible no longer.

When Marco Polo first meets the emperor Kublai Khan, they don’t share a language and they have to communicate, says Calvino, through making gestures or displaying objects. But the objects, what do they mean? Marco Polo shows Kublai Khan a quiverful of arrows. Does that mean that war is nearing? Does that mean there’s an abundance of game nearby? Or is that just an indication that he visited an armorer’s shop and bought the quiverful of arrows there? We are invited to question again and again how we know what we know.

And although this is a pretty radical confrontation in Invisible Cities, it’s true in every novel that anybody has ever read. You always have to wonder: Who’s telling the story? Why? Can I trust them? And in the 19th century, when novels were often stacked as letters within letters—we would have one narrator, who would tell us about another narrator, who would tell us about a third narrator. I think there are three layers in Frankenstein; I believe there are three layers of narrator. We’re always forced to question: What are we hearing? What do we know? What do we think we know?

By contrast, film and especially short-form video are much more literal mediums. The camera always lies, but the camera doesn’t alert us to the fact that it may be lying in a way that text often alerts us. And the short-form video invites us just to be naive, to consume very passively what we’re seeing, to believe whatever we are shown, however it is created. And that may account for the rising susceptibility of modern people to conspiracy theories: because they are immersed in media that are designed to dull their critical faculties and they have left behind the older medium of text that invites them to exercise their critical faculties. And you will never exercise your critical faculties harder than when reading or listening to—I read it the first time and more recently listened to it—Invisible Cities.

I had seen it on bookshelves for many years. I didn’t read it until quite late in life. It was the favorite book of a very dear friend of mine who died at a prematurely early age, and his children read excerpts from the book at his funeral. And that sent me, out of love for my friend, to read the book that he had loved so well. And I was thinking about him the other day, and I returned to the book and listened to some of its sections. And I was struck again and again by its beautiful word poetry, the way that Calvino would juxtapose things. He described the city of Isidora as a city “where perfect telescopes and violins are made.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it sounds very strange. Or he describes the city of Dorothea: “Four green canals span the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with 300 houses and 700 chimneys, where the inhabitants sell bergamot, sturgeon roe, amethysts, and astrolabes.” That just falls on the ear in a way that invites us to think magically about the world around us.

I do love this book as much as my late friend loved it, but I also am inspired by this book to remember that symbols do not yield their meaning without a struggle. And in a world in which we are invited to trust more and believe more, we are deceived by symbols much more readily than when we lived in a world that invited us to test symbols, question their meaning. That’s something we all ought to be doing more. That’s why we all ought to be reading more. And this beautiful, short book is a great place to recommit.

That’s it for this week’s David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for watching and for listening. As ever, if you’re minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic, where you will see my work and that of all of my colleagues. See you next week back here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Trump Looks Frantic

2026-04-07T14:19:00-04:00

President Trump’s threat on Truth Social this morning to destroy 25 centuries of Persian civilization in a single night echoes a joke by the comedian Eddie Izzard about Darth Vader ordering food in the canteen of the Death Star.

Darth Vader: I will have the penne all’arrabiata.
Canteen worker: You’ll need a tray.
…
Darth Vader: I am Vader, Darth Vader, Lord Vader. I can kill you with a single thought.
Canteen worker: Well, you’ll still need a tray.

Trump, in six lines, similarly moves from the grimness of mass annihilation to a cheery invitation to stay tuned for the next episode of his newest reality show. “God bless the Great people of Iran,” he concludes, after vowing to blast the entire country to pre-civilizational smithereens.

Trump’s Iran war has entered its seventh week, with no resolution in sight. The United States and Israel have gained control over Iran’s skies, striking wherever and whatever they wish. But Trump seems never to have seriously considered Iran’s obvious countermoves—despite the decades the intelligence community has spent war-gaming such scenarios. He’s now contending with an Iran-imposed global energy crisis to which he can offer no solution except blood-curdling threats.

On March 6, soon after launching the war, Trump demanded an “unconditional surrender” from Iran. But as the economic pain from the energy crisis has worsened, Trump has signaled an openness to conditions and a desire for a negotiated settlement.

[Read: Trump threatens to destroy an entire nation]

Other flip-flops promptly followed. On March 21, the president demanded that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours or face the destruction of its electric power plants. Then, 48 hours later, he offered yet more threats but also more time. Then, still more threats—and another postponement, this time to April 6.

On March 28, Trump reassured Truth Social readers, “No, Trump is not losing his nerve on Iran”—the kind of thing a president says only when it very much looks as if he is losing his nerve.

On March 30, Trump threatened Iran’s desalination plants unless the strait was reopened, but he changed the April 6 deadline to a vague “immediately.”

On April 1, Trump claimed that Iran had asked for a cease-fire, and he also threatened to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.

On April 5, Easter Sunday, Trump called the Iranian leadership “crazy bastards”—and bumped back the deadline to the night of April 7.

On Monday, April 6, Trump threatened that all of Iran could be taken out in one night.

Now, on Tuesday, April 7, Trump has amped up the rhetoric yet again.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

[Barbara A. Perry: This is not how presidents typically communicate]

The language is ferocious, reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II when he called for German troops to act like King Attila’s merciless Huns in avenging the 1900 assassination of a German ambassador to China: “Should you encounter the enemy, he will be defeated! No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken!” That speech did not gain Germany the respect craved by its psychologically fragile ruler. It alarmed the whole world—and earned German soldiers the derogatory nickname of “Huns” in the two world wars that followed.

There is little question that American power can inflict hideous pain on the people of Iran, the very people whom Trump in January promised, “Help is on the way.” Like Wilhelm, Trump may also inflict generational discredit on the good name of the armed forces he commands.

But the thing Trump most wants to do—extract a face-saving deal from Iran before he wrecks the world economy and Republican electoral chances along with it—remains beyond his reach. The more brutally Trump speaks, the more frantic he looks.

Watching War From the Strait of Hormuz

2026-04-01T13:00:00-04:00

Updated at 11:54 a.m. ET on April 3, 2026

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the strange lack of information about the current war in Iran. He wonders why, despite the publicized tactical success of the United States’ campaign in Iran, the war seems to be progressing in an unfavorable way for the U.S.

Then David is joined by his colleague at The Atlantic Graeme Wood to discuss Graeme’s recent reporting from the Persian Gulf. David and Graeme talk about Graeme’s experiences being bombed in Dubai and snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz. They also discuss what happens next in Iran, Trump’s failure in political messaging on the war, and the state of the global energy market.

David concludes with a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which was published 250 years ago this year.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Graeme Wood, my Atlantic colleague and author of two important recent articles in The Atlantic, one about Iran’s ability to continue to inflict economic damage on Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states, and the other, well, a really delightful piece called “Snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz” about Graeme’s adventures going swimming in that body of water that is the center of the world’s attention. Graeme is a courageous, inventive, ingenious, and perceptive writer, and it’s a delight to be able to talk to him on The David Frum Show.

My book this week will be Common Sense, by Thomas Paine, published 250 years ago this year and worthy of urgent rereading on this anniversary occasion.

But before my discussion with either Graeme Wood or my reading of Common Sense, some preliminary thoughts about the war that continues to rage between the United States and Iran, now finishing its first month, entering month two.

We’re in a strange information blackout about the war. There is so much that we hear, so little that we see, and so little that we can know for sure. We don’t see the evidence of it, but from everything we read, the United States and Israel have inflicted devastating damage on Iranian military and economic targets. How fateful this damage is, how consequential, remains [unclear], but it must be very extreme.

At the same time, the war seems to be progressing in ways that are not so favorable to the United States. The price of oil is up, and American confidence of the war is down, and there seems to be no plan in the Trump administration to bring the war to an end on any of the terms that you might’ve thought America would’ve wanted, including permanent denuclearization of Iran and the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

I think, as I try to understand what, if anything, is going wrong, the Trump administration seems to have taught Iran how to defeat the Trump administration through the Trump administration’s own words. One of the things that [President] Trump has made very clear to the Iranians is how low his threshold for economic pain is. Every time he tries to jawbone the energy markets by making some statement just before the energy markets open that he hopes will lead to lower trades as soon as they do open—jawboning that worked at first and that now seems to be ceasing to be working—he is teaching the Iranians that if bad things happen in the energy market, Trump can’t take it. It may be their steel factories that are blowing up, it may be their leaders who are being killed, but it is Trump who seems to be showing more signs of panic and fear as he loses control of the situation and as he responds by making threats to escalate more, in ways that maybe create for him the alternative of either backing away from threats made—maybe he doesn’t take Kharg Island after all—or escalating into a ground war with Iran for which he has no permission from Congress, no mandate from the American people, probably not the resources to do, and certainly no political permission to suffer the pain of. Iran can read Western media as well as any of us can, and they can see the panic and terror of economic dislocation that is being broadcast by the Trump administration to the world.

If Trump wanted to fight a war in the Persian Gulf, one of the things you would think he would need to do would be to explain to the American people why the economic pain that must follow is worth it. He’s never done that. He promised them no economic pain. And every Sunday night, before markets open on Monday mornings in Asia and the rest of the world, he tries to incant some formula to keep things at bay for at least a few minutes. And as I said, at first, that worked; he bought a few minutes’ peace. Recently, it seems to have stopped working; he’s no longer buying a few minutes’ peace. But the economic realities are the economic realities. And incredibly, the much weaker party to the war, Iran, seems to be able to inflict pain that the stronger party to the war, the United States and its ally Israel—and especially the United States—can’t seem to bear.

Trump seems to think of wars as exercises in destruction; he doesn’t accept that they’re exercises in politics. And many of the people around him take pride in saying, We’re not doing any nation building. We’re not thinking about what comes after. We’re not worrying about permanent regimes. We’re just here to kill bad guys. But killing bad guys is very seldom an end in itself. At some point, the killing has to stop, and at some point, you have to deal with whatever is left. And that point will come earlier rather than later and maybe earlier than the United States can afford for that point to come if the United States has not given Americans any inkling of the pain that was likely to be headed their way, any reason for it, any reason to hope that things will be better after it.

So the Iranians are discovering that if they just inflict economic pain, which they can easily do, they can bring pressure to bear on Trump that is much greater on him than the pressure he is bearing to them by blowing up things and killing bad guys.

We don’t know how much margin of survival the Iranian regime has. It is, in many ways, a fragile country; it depends on oil exports, and the United States could interdict those oil exports if it wanted to. But because the United States doesn’t have a capacity for planning, it’s not interdicting Iranian oil exports. At the end of a month of war, Iran is exporting not only as much oil as it ever did, as much oil as it did last year, but it’s exporting that oil at a higher price, maybe billions and billions of dollars more a higher price than it was making before the war started. And that means that even if the United States were to succeed in reducing Iranian oil exports somewhat, it would not be putting budgetary pressure on the Iranian regime. It’s a plan for war without politics, and that’s a plan for war without success.

And now my dialogue with Graeme Wood.

[Music]

Frum: If Graeme Wood’s business card does not read “International Man of Mystery,” it should. His recent report from the Persian Gulf, “Snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz,” is Graeme at his most characteristic: in the center of the action, seeing things the way no one else sees them, and preserving calm where most of us would see only danger and terror.

A Harvard graduate who now teaches at Yale, an Arabic speaker, Graeme began his journalism career as a reporter for The Cambodia Daily. On the outbreak of the Iraq War, he relocated to Iraq and was hired by The Atlantic, where he continues as a colleague to this day.

Graeme’s deep investigations of the ISIS terror organization generated a viral Atlantic article and were published in book form in 2016, The Way of the Strangers: [Encounters With the Islamic State], which won acclaim and awards all over the world, including the Governor [General’s] Award of Canada, of which Graeme and I are both citizens.

For the past two years, Graeme has closely studied the Iranian regime. As Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, Graeme has traveled to the region and reported intensely from both sides of the war zone, and it’s such a pleasure to welcome Graeme to The David Frum Show today. Graeme, thank you for joining me.

Graeme Wood: David, it’s good to be with you.

Frum: So let’s talk about your snorkeling adventure. (Laughs.) For those who have not read this amazing piece of reportage or seen the sprightly video that emerged from it, tell us, what was that day like?

Wood: So I had been in Dubai, and missiles were coming in, drones were coming in, and the Strait of Hormuz was more and more in the news because it was being closed, and that’s the choke point for about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil. And my instinct was just to go see what it looked like. This is an area that I’d crossed before as a ferry passenger, but actually just laying eyes on it when it is the center of the world’s attention seemed important. So I just got in a car, drove there, and then chartered a dhow—d-h-o-w—which is one of these old wooden boats that, in normal times, it’s there for pleasure cruising; it’s there for smuggling. And guess what? Right now, it’s really cheap if you wanna hire a dhow for a pleasure cruise. And although you made me sound very intrepid by going out there, it was a quiet, beautiful day. There were dolphins, there were damselfish, and there was no sign at all of a war going on just over the cliffs.

Frum: Yeah. Because you think of it as, even from the energy trade and all the traffic, an area of environmental devastation even at the best of times, and now it’s the middle of a war zone, and it looked like holiday pics from the video you took.

Wood: It was. That’s exactly what it was. When you’re there, of course, because it’s closed, the ships are not going back and forth, so it’s quiet. In fact, in the strait, I saw lots of these dhows just idling there because it was not a time when you could safely go back and forth to Iran, and usually, they’d be going back and forth, mostly speedboats smuggling, but at this point, again, as calm as could be. So I spent about five hours in the fjords next to the strait and just a few miles into the strait itself, and saw, I would guess, fewer than half a dozen boats that were actually going back and forth across the strait. And of course, I didn’t see any evidence that anyone was going through the strait.

Frum: Well, this is one of the ways that this war shocked so many of our ideas about what modern war is like. We are so used to seeing everything, or at least being presented with images that purport to show us everything, and the idea that both combatants—the United States–Israel side on one hand and Iran on the other—would agree to a complete shutdown of imagery. And then on what is the central economic battlefield, the Persian Gulf, nothing is happening; that’s the news. So there are scenes, presumably, somewhere of extraordinary violence being unleashed, and yet we don’t see them; we just see this peaceful blue water.

Wood: Yeah, exactly. Right across the strait, if you went inland, you’d get to Minab, where there was the school famously destroyed by the United States, which killed possibly hundreds of children, so devastation is not that far away. But if you’re not right there, then what you see is calm waters. And also, by the way, you still see some traffic going back and forth. I mentioned six boats or so that I saw going back and forth. Those are smugglers who just decide that, you know, they live outside the law in the best of times, and so right now, they’re going back and forth. They’re bringing electronics to Iran, and in the past, they would usually bring goats back, apparently. So there’s still that going on. But mostly, you just see these calm waters and then dozens upon dozens of boats just waiting for it to be safe to go back in their usual route.

Frum: Are Iranian tankers able to move?

Wood: At that point, no, there was nothing going back and forth, so—

Frum: Or Chinese tankers serving the Iran trade, I should say.

Wood: There’s this extraordinary phenomenon going on right now where, while there’s a lockdown on Persian Gulf oil, Iran has been able to sell, actually, more than before, mostly going to China. So, yeah, at the moment, because of expensive oil and because of the need of everyone, including the United States, to loosen up the energy markets, Iran has been able to sell oil. But going back and forth through the Strait of Hormuz right now means you’re going under the eyes of Iranian missile launchers, as well as the United States, so it would take a pretty brave crew to wanna do that.

Frum: Now, you referenced lightly your departure from Dubai, but you were under fire there more than in the Gulf.

Wood: Yeah, that’s right. Dubai, at that point—I think it’s still the case today—the United Arab Emirates was getting more incoming Iranian drones and missile strikes than anywhere else. So I was there almost from the very beginning of the war, and, yeah, you’d hear the interceptions. I witnessed a couple of the hits and got to see what Dubai looked like, which I think you referenced earlier the information war here, too, which is a pretty extraordinary thing to watch on social media when you’re in the place that’s the subject of the social-media speculation. So there’s a lot of discussion of how Dubai was, quote, unquote, “over,” that the model was finished and that people were fleeing; there were refugees at the border. And that was a mismatch from what I saw while there. There was certainly fewer people who were going there as holiday-makers, but the place was mostly functioning as it used to, but with some booms in the background.

Frum: Now, Dubai doesn’t have the network of bomb shelters that Israel, which is receiving, also, a lot of Iranian attack, has. So what do people do for safety when the booms begin?

Wood: Well, at that point—and the numbers aren’t that much higher so far; the number of reported dead in the entire country is still in the single digits, so in general, it wasn’t as if there were explosions happening that were causing mass casualties. But, yeah, there’s nothing you can do. If a place is not built as a security state, the way Israel has had to be, then you just go on with life. And so I went to shopping malls, supermarkets, restaurants, and all of it was just still going on. There weren’t even, like, missile alerts that would cause people to go scrambling. In Ukraine, there were these apps that would tell you when a missile was incoming, and before too long, people would just ignore those in a lot of cities because they happened so frequently. And Dubai seemed to have skipped right ahead to that stage, so even two days after the war had begun, it seemed like nobody was heeding any of those alerts whatsoever and life was proceeding.

Frum: Now, your most recent article for The Atlantic, “Mutually Assured Energy Destruction,” suggests that what’s going on here is a kind of deterrence, actually, between the United States and Iran, where neither is hitting quite as hard as it potentially could. Dubai is a high-rise city full of, as you say, shopping malls. There are a lot of dense human targets. If you were seeking to maximize the infliction of loss of life, I assume the Iranians, even in their depleted state, could do more than they’re doing. Do you have a sense that this is inability on their part, or are they still fighting this war, in some ways, with one hand tied behind their back?

Wood: I think the latter. An enormous skyscraper, it’s not built as a military target. If you wanna take down the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, it would be very difficult to stop Iran from doing that if it wanted to concertedly send a fleet of drones to do so.

One thing that I think has been saving Dubai in particular, though, is that its cosmopolitanism is part of its shield. There are hundreds of thousands of Iranians who are in the Emirates. There are Russians. There are Chinese. So if they were to destroy one of those malls that I said was operating at lower capacity but still operating, [there] would definitely be a bunch of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian body parts strewn about.

So the Iranians, if they really wanted to destroy Dubai, they could do so, but they haven’t. And that, as you mentioned, goes for infrastructure as well; if they really wanted to hit oil infrastructure in the Gulf hard, I think they could do much more damage than they already had. But there would be consequences for their doing that.

Frum: They also presumably have a lot of their money in Dubai banks.

Wood: Oh, yeah. Even—

Frum: They being the Iranians, I should say.

Wood: Yeah, the Iranians have their money and their people—and I don’t just mean Iranian people who have gone there for work, but Muscat, Oman, which Oman has also been hit, and Dubai have a lot of Iranians who have just fled there because they considered it a safer place to be than Iran, possibly not aware that Iran would soon be attacking them. So it’s been a place of refuge for money and for people for some time, even high-level people. So, yeah, it’s complicated for Iran to strike a place that’s also a place of refuge for its own people and its allies.

Frum: Now, a decade ago, you wrote this remarkable article that became an acclaimed book getting inside the mind of ISIS. You’ve been doing some of that similar work with the Iranian regime, trying to get inside their brains. Anything that has happened in the past month of conflict to change any of your perspectives or enrich your thinking, as compared to where you were a month ago?

Wood: There’s one thing that’s happened, which was the death of Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran for the last 30-plus years. His death, the rhetoric of it was martyrdom. But also, the fact that he almost presented himself as a target, in the sense that he was living, apparently, aboveground in his own compound and doing so at a time when it was pretty clear the Israelis or Americans were going to try to assassinate him, that brought back a lot of the rhetoric of martyrdom that one had heard throughout the history of the Islamic Republic, and it brought it back after a period of, I would say, not quite abeyance, but de-emphasis.

I would say that, unlike ISIS, if you look at the actions and the policies of the Islamic Republic over the last few decades, Iran has been much more rational, much more strategic, and much less motivated by some of the ideological aspects that they were so fervent in embracing in the beginning of the Islamic Republic, and ISIS was fervent up until the end. So when you see someone sort of offering himself up for martyrdom, then you go back to thinking about all the rhetorical emphasis on the martyrdom of the early imams in Shia Islam, so the martyrdom of Husayn [ibn Ali], for example, which, again, I wouldn’t have thought of that as an operational concept, but there’s a bit of that that I see in this war and with the death of the supreme leader.

Frum: I think, going into this war, a lot of people in the United States and in the United States government assumed that the Iranian state had become a very rickety state, that the ideology didn’t move anybody anymore, the extraordinary sacrifices of the regime that occurred during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, that those days were over, and one hard blow, the whole structure would collapse. That’s turned out to be, obviously, not true. Do you have any opinion on the prevalence of this kind of ideology of martyrdom or other aspects of regime ideology?

Wood: Before the war, and I think still, actually, I would’ve said that that ideology had largely run out of gas. In Iran at the very beginning, it was almost impossible to overstate in the early days of the revolution in the 1980s how much it was part of what people were thinking and, to some degree, that there are people who even have kind of memory-holed some of the things they were saying about, say, the Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini possibly being this kind of quasi-messianic figure, the hidden imam himself, which nobody believes anymore and people pretend they never believed. But there’s been a long period of kind of strategic bureaucratization that has washed away a lot of the ideological stuff, and fewer and fewer people who believe it.

But the last time I was in Tehran was in 2009, and I went to regime rallies, and I met lots of people who were still very enthusiastic about this belief. Now, granted, many of them seem to have been bused in from the countryside, so they were not the cosmopolitan Tehrani types, but they do exist in the country, and I would say that there’s possibly a double-digit percentage of Iranians who still feel that way. So it’s not exhausted, but I don’t think it would be wrong to say that the country as a whole has lost that faith and has moved on to another phase in its development.

Frum: So there are people in your estimation—and, again, it’s a very dark box, and it’s been a while since you had access to the country—but it does seem there are people [who] would bear arms to defend the regime if Americans landed on Iranian soil.

Wood: Yes, yes, no doubt. And in addition to the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], which is the main regime-loyalist military element, there are millions of Iranians who are part of the families of the IRGC, millions of people whose livelihoods depend on the regime, as the regime, remaining intact. Every Iranian I speak to, no matter what their view of things, says that a lot of these people are going to fight until the last drop of blood.

Frum: The United States has been studying the Iran problem very intensely for a long time. Even before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, people worried, or Americans worried, about the aggressive intentions that the shah of Iran might have. I think some of the war-gaming to defend Kuwait began with the idea that the shah might be the aggressor, not the Iraqis and not yet the Iranian regime. Since the hostage crisis of 1979, ’80, again, the United States has intensely war-gamed it. You assume there was a lot of deep knowledge of the Iranian system inside the United States government; yet the past month has not been very reassuring that the taxpayer is getting the Iran knowledge the taxpayer may have thought the taxpayer was paying for.

Wood: There are few wars that have been more intensely planned—as you say, war-gamed out—than a war against Iran. And I think the fact that that’s the case should make us maybe a little bit analytically humble about what’s gone on so far. Because any war that’s been planned out is planned out in phases: That is, there’s a stage one, a stage two, and a stage three. I would say whatever stage one is, it hasn’t gone that well, but we have to be cautious about judging stage one against what may be objectives that were reserved for stage two or three.

Now, what do I mean by that? It seems like we have, so far, almost no plan for leadership change, for regime change. And that may be because that’s a stage that, possibly, we’ll never get to but, possibly, that was planned for a later point in this war. So I’m a little bit cautious about just saying that the war looks like incompetence because some of the overall objectives have not been met. But there’s plenty to criticize in what’s already happened that’s apparent right before our eyes.

Frum: Yeah, I didn’t use the word incompetence; I talked about lack of understanding of Iranian society. Let me test a hypothesis on you, which is: Phase one, let’s suppose the military track of this war is going well, that the United States and Israel are destroying the things they wanted to destroy. They obviously are having great success finding the people they wanna find and eliminating them from the chessboard. Maybe the mistake was a lack of study of the American side of the equation.

Whenever the serious study of the Iran War began, in 1979, ’80, the assumption, I would guess, would be that Iran would’ve done something really bad: capture American hostages and detain them for a year and under horrible conditions or something else really bad. And the president would go on TV and explain to the American people why the United States was going to war with Iran. He’d go to Congress and get a vote from Congress. Congress would give it because Iran had done something bad. And then there would be a monthlong air campaign, followed by whatever phase two was, and everyone would understand you’re fighting in the Persian Gulf; there’s going to be economic hardship. And we would all bear it because Iran had done something so very, very bad.

The mistake here was, what if there was no reason to go to war that week? And the American people’s pain threshold was literally zero. So none of the obvious moves that Iran would do—closing the straits, interfering with the shipping of oil—none of them was there any appetite for in the United States, and the United States then had to conduct whatever phases of this war there are without any ability to take not only casualties, but even any economic hardship. That may be the missing piece. And that’s not the fault of the war gamers, because they all assumed, right, The reason the president gave us the “go” order was something bad had happened that we had to respond to, not, The president had a mood, and we’re going to war with no permission from the society, no vote from Congress, and no ability to accept any degree of economic pain.

Wood: There is a total failure so far in political messaging, very little explanation of what’s going on, why it has to happen now. And that’s messaging both to Americans and to Iranians, by the way. The Iranian people, especially in Tehran, where they’ve suffered by far the worst of the bombing, they’re not really sure if the United States and Israel really cares about them and really cares about some other objectives, such as just destroying the capability of whatever Iranian state exists, whether it’s a friendly one or an unfriendly one.

So all of that messaging takes preplanning, and it takes the development of some faith in what the administration and the military is saying, and that’s made us, as Americans, pretty vulnerable to Iranian propaganda. I know Americans who I think of as pretty sophisticated consumers of information who are repeating to me falsehoods that are stated by Iranian propaganda. Why are they doing that? Why are they susceptible? It’s because there’s no one on the American side who they can credibly turn to and then say, Ah, okay, well, this person explained why that’s not the case.

So there’s a horrible vulnerability that could have been averted if there was just some faith and rapport developed between the administration and the American people, the administration and the press. And as we know, that rapport has been completely destroyed, and in the information war, that’s a big problem.

Frum: And it’s not just a matter of communications. Politicians like to blame communications advisers as if communications were magic, but communications can’t be better than the thing communicated. So if the United States is embarking on a major war with Iran, there’d better be a reason. And you can’t just message the reason; you actually have to have the reason—and not just a reason for going to war with Iran in general, but going to war with Iran in the last week of February of 2026. Why was that the time? What was different? And if there was a belief, for example, that Iran was making a lot of progress in its missile program at that point or had reenergized the nuclear program that seemed to have been so damaged last summer, that’s something you have to say, and say it not just on TV, but to Congress. And none of that was done, raising the suspicion of the reason it’s not done is maybe it wasn’t true.

Wood: Yeah, this has been a long-term problem with not just this administration, but any previous administration’s plans or policies about war in Iran, which is that the Iranian progress is incremental and war is not incremental. War is a great big thing, and if Iran is slowly developing ballistic-missile capabilities, if it’s slowly developing drone capabilities, then at what point is the exact moment when the United States should do something about it? And every president before Trump has decided that that exact moment was postponable—and they may have been right. They all, in that sense, get an A grade because there was no war, there was no nuclear weapon in Iran, and so they can hand it off to their [successor]. But anytime the war was gonna happen, it was gonna have to happen as a kind of judgment call about an accumulation of things, rather than one thing that could be pointed to.

Frum: When I think about what Trump may be trying to do, giving him the highest level of credit—and this is not credit in the sense of moral credit, just intellectual credit—he may have been convinced or he may believe that lots and lots of people in the upper reaches of the Iranian regime are crooks rather than fanatics. And if you can identify the fanatics and kill enough of them, eventually, your shovel will clink on the treasure chest—that is, the level of crooks—you will open the treasure chest, find your crooks, and then you can do business with them, not in a way that will bring satisfaction to the people of Iran, whom we’re ostensibly trying to help, although Trump has never been very empathic on that subject. But you bring together a degree of crooked leaders, as has happened in Venezuela, as I think is the plan in Cuba. You empower the crooks. You can do business with them; they’ll do what they’re told in order to keep their money. And then they become less of a nuisance from a strategic point of view. Does that make any sense, and based on your interactions with upper-elite Iranians, does any of that plan make any sense?

Wood: I think there are a couple things that he might have been surprised by, if that was the plan. One is how deep you have to dig before you get to the clink, that almost anybody who was in the inner circle of Iranian politics was gonna be very difficult to work with because they had not just blood on their hands, but they had been at the intersection of many different types of immoral activity that’s kind of irredeemable in some way. So that’s the first thing.

I have also spoken to Iranian exiles who have asked why that wasn’t the policy, why wasn’t he constantly digging deep enough to find someone he could work with? ’Cause they say, actually, it seems like he’s not looking for that at all; he’s just digging and digging and digging, and trying to discard as much of the regime as possible. And that is why everybody’s fighting to the death, is because it appears that the only resolution that the United States would be happy with would be some kind of complete scalping of the regime, to a very deep level, and its replacement with the shah or something like that. And they say if the United States had just announced pretty early on, or found a way pretty early on, to get someone in the regime to defect, then they actually would’ve, possibly, been able to do that with a lot less loss of life.

So it’s possible that they’re looking for someone who can be compromised like that. But they’re digging pretty deep and killing a lot of people before they’re coming to someone they’re satisfied with.

Frum: Their message to the Iranian regime seems to be completely incoherent, which is, We want unconditional surrender. We want you to negotiate a deal. Yes, you can keep control of the Strait of Hormuz, which we’ve just annexed. No, you can’t. Do you think the messaging direct to the Iranians, through whatever channel it’s going, is any more clear than the message to the world that we’re all hearing a contradictory version of every single day?

Wood: I think part of this is just a kind of controlled chaos of negotiation, which is the mode that Trump seems to prefer. So understandably, we listen to what the president of the United States says when he says what he’d be satisfied with, but then, of course, we have to remember that this president doesn’t seem to know himself what he would be satisfied with, and so we can’t quite take that as a direct negotiating position. Like today, Trump said that the current leaders of the regime are people you can work with. And do we take that at face value, which sounds a lot like the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people matter not one bit to him? Or—

Frum: Yeah. Today is Monday, March 30, the day you and I are recording.

Wood: Right. As oil markets open up, he says there’s people at the top we can deal with, which would cause the hearts of Iranian democrats—who’ve, of course, lost 30,000 people very recently—to sink. But then again, it may also be that if you’re opening a negotiation, which he is, with someone, then you don’t wanna say at the beginning of negotiation, There’s no negotiation that can happen, because then the negotiation stops. So, again, there’s weird and conflicting messaging that we’re getting, and it might just reflect the weird and conflicting thoughts of our commander in chief.

Frum: Yeah. Well, or it may reflect a desire to manipulate energy markets.

Wood: Yes, that’s what the Iranians have said. [Mohammad-Bagher] Ghalibaf, who’s thought to be kind of the day-to-day operator of the Iranian state, said, Yeah, Trump cares a lot about energy markets, and so you should disregard a lot of what he says, which sounds wise to me, actually.

Frum: Yeah. And the energy markets last week seemed to often buy it, and they seemed to respond positively when Trump said something. And one of the things that seemed significant today, Monday, March 30, is Trump said something reassuring and the energy markets ceased to buy it; they don’t believe it anymore.

Wood: Yeah, a lot of what’s happening right now is there’s an accumulation of problems. There’s realities that become more real as time goes by. The Strait of Hormuz, of course, it could be opened up, and it would flow just like it always did, if there was some agreement that could be reached. But now, of course, the markets are starting to have to price in exactly how much damage was done to Qatar’s gas infrastructure, exactly how much damage is likely to be done if there’s an escalation of the war to Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait, and so forth. So these become more real as the war fails to find a resolution.

Frum: Because, as you reported in mid-March, it’s amazing how much damage to oil production, to energy production on the southern side of the Gulf has not yet happened—to Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait, to the other Gulf states—that Iran has not yet hit them as hard as it, imaginably, could.

Wood: Yeah, I’ve been reporting for the last week or so about exactly what a hard hit to that energy infrastructure of Saudi Arabia and Qatar would look like, and there are particular nodes where, if you hit them, it takes years to recover. And taking that much oil and gas offline, it’s almost impossible to overstate how serious a blow that is to the world’s economy.

So Iran has demonstrated very clearly that if it wants to hit an area that is, you know, 10 meters by 10 meters on an American air base in Saudi Arabia, it can do that. So if they wanna do the same thing on an oil field, which cannot fly away, cannot have a hardened shelter built over it, then why couldn’t they do that too? This is, I think, totally within their capability.

Frum: This is the destruction of those surveillance planes that were parked out in the open air in a very arrogant way, it seemed.

Wood: Yeah, that’s right. And probably the most clear illustration so far of the failure of the United States to prepare for a very predictable threat, which is a drone attack of the sort that Ukraine and Russia has been perfecting for years now. So if they can do that to one of the most valuable air assets that the United States has, then they can do it to a piece of refinery equipment that’s been sitting out under open skies for years. And those things, again, can take years to replace.

Frum: Did you hear anyone talk, when you were in the Gulf, about, Look, obviously, these small, rich states need a protector, but maybe China would be a more predictable and reliable protector than Trump’s United States, which seems so erratic and confusing and prone to blundering into wars it doesn’t know how to finish?

Wood: Yeah, in some way, China already is a protector, and let me explain that. A huge percentage of that oil that exits Saudi Arabia is going to China. So if Iran were to destroy that hydrocarbon infrastructure of the Arab states, then China would be hurt. So if China wants to say, and I would say if I were China, Don’t do that—don’t do anything irreversible to that oil infrastructure, then Iran would probably have to listen because China is one of the few remaining friends that it has. So there’s that.

Also, though, if you talk to the Saudis, for example—I brought this up when I had an interview with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and I asked at what point, if you feel disrespected by the United States, you turn to the Chinese. And he very openly said, Look, there’s people in the east who would be very happy for us to be disrespected by the United States, and we’re ready to turn toward them.

Now, there’s many other Saudis who, maybe in a moment of less impulse and pique [who] would say, Okay, well, that would be complicated to do. Io turn away from the United States after the long, productive relationship we’ve had with them would be like turning from 110 volts to 220 for the entire country, where we’ve set up ourselves completely to work with the Americans, and to change that to the Chinese would not be a minor step; it would not be an overnight step. So it wouldn’t be that easy to do, but all of those countries have developed strong relationships with China that I think are, in a way, protecting them already, and of course, they’ll probably see ways that it would be useful for them to hedge by developing those connections too.

Frum: Yeah. As I understand the math of the Persian Gulf, it’s 20 percent of the world’s oil—or as you correct me—shipborne oil, because a lot of oil moves by land. Eighty percent of that oil moves to East Asia, not just China, but Japan, South Korea, others, but China being the single largest consumer. But there’s only one world price, so it’s not like the United States can shrug it off. And that, whatever happens, Americans pay at the pump because even if you buy 100 percent American-made fuel, that 100 percent American-made fuel is priced according to whatever the world price is, according to the marginal buyer. Because the Chinese could also buy from—so long as we have any kind of free market in energy, if the Persian Gulf is closed, then there are more bidders for American oil or for oil from Norway or from other suppliers, so there’s one price, even though 80 percent of the Persian Gulf’s oil flows to East Asia.

Wood: Yeah, that’s correct. There’s one other important fact about Persian Gulf oil and Saudi oil in particular, which is, the Saudis have this magical ability to produce more or less oil whenever they wish. This is something that other countries basically don’t have. So in that sense, they kind of operate as a sort of Fed in the hydrocarbon business. And so to take them offline, to remove that capability, means that there’s a very important economic lever that no longer is in American hands, Saudi hands, anyone’s hands. And having those levers at hand can be awfully important for world markets.

Frum: Well, there are two other sort of more radical thoughts on the energy market that I come away with watching this, and clearly, these are things that can’t be done today or tomorrow, or they’re a [decade’s] work, but if you look just at the map, the distance from the Persian Gulf to Haifa in Israel, all the way through Saudi territory, is not greater than the pipeline that Saudi Arabia built from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. They went to the trouble of building a diversionary pipeline that allows them to export via the Red Sea that is past the Houthis in Yemen. But you could also build a pipeline to Israel and go through the Mediterranean and be surrounded by friendly people the whole way. They didn’t do that—for political reasons, I assume. And meanwhile, in the past decade, the United States under two Trump administrations, with a not-very-effective Biden administration between, has made very little progress moving itself and moving the world away from petroleum, when we’ve had a decade of opportunity and technology that enabled us to do that if we were minded to do it.

Wood: Yeah, the idea of taking a pipeline all the way to Israel is, of course, several political steps off, but the integration with Israel, it’s pretty obvious that that was one of the end points of Saudi development. That whole city in the desert, which so far [has] gotten not very far, Neom, it’s in the upper left corner of Saudi Arabia. It only makes sense to build it there if you believe that that particular region is ripe for development, so I think of it as predicated, in the long term, over some kind of friendly relationship with Israel, maybe including a pipeline. It just hasn’t happened yet, and the money doesn’t seem to be quite there for it.

The planning for a post-oil economy, of course, this is still considered fantasy in that region, and it’s far enough away that I don’t blame them for expecting that oil is still gonna matter quite a bit in the future.

Frum: Mm-hmm. But the United States has been talking about this for a long time, and there are brief intervals, but Trump 1, Trump 2 have rejected it, and the Biden administration talked about it a lot but didn’t do much.

Wood: You mean talking about oil dependence in the Middle East?

Frum: Shifting to fleets of electric vehicles powered by nonpetroleum sources of fuel. In the United States, of course, natural gas has huge potential for electrical production, and so does nuclear power, if we could ever return to that. It’s pretty hard to imagine how you power aviation with anything other than petroleum, but the days when you need petroleum to power your motor fleet, those could be behind us.

Wood: That would be wonderful, and that would lower the stakes of the current conflict substantially. So I’m all in favor of that, but as you point out, it just hasn’t happened.

Frum: That was a 10-years-ago discussion, not a 10-years-from-now discussion, and we just drove past that exit kind of heedlessly.

Wood: The 10-years-ago discussion and 20-years-ago discussion also involved developing American independence in oil, which did happen and which has eased the stakes of this war for the United States substantially, so it’s not as if no planning happened in that direction. But the one that we would, of course, want the most, which is not relying on oil at all, no, that’s still in, let’s say, early phases.

Frum: You’ve been traveling in this region for a long time—in the Middle East region. Do you notice any abating of intense anti-Western ideology? It seems like the days of al-Qaeda and ISIS are over, but that may be just a misreading from a distance. Do you have any sense that there’s actually less purchase in the area for these kinds of anti-Western ideology? And if so, what’s replacing it?

Wood: Yeah. The Gaza war, of course, matters a lot in this discussion. There is a whole new wave of—I don’t wanna call it radicalization, but hatred of the United States and Israel that has come up in the wake of the Gaza war. But I think the larger secular trend is definitely away from jihadism. And ISIS represented the high point of a kind of, call it jihadi, Salafi, or Wahabi, version of jihadism, where ISIS was so successful in the period of its greatest prosperity and flourishing that it attracted anyone who had that in mind. They were able to travel there; they were able to die there. And a success that’s that acute is followed by a long period of Hard to top that. Time to move on to a different thing. And I find that, yeah, there’s a lot of people in countries that I previously would’ve associated with a lot of very harsh anti-Americanism where that seems to be treated as a previous generation’s way of being political. So it’s definitely waned in that regard.

The other component here is Iran, where, again, it’s been since 2014 when I was last in Iran and 2009 when I was last in Tehran, but there, the positive views toward the United States are impossible to ignore, as of then. And I think that’s still the case, where—just as I think you’ve probably heard many times—you would meet people all the time who don’t just say, I would move to the United States if I could, but who say, I have positive feelings toward the United States and would like to live in a society like that, no matter where I am. So I think that’s real, and I don’t know whether it survives this war.

Frum: A last personal question: Do you intend to return to the region anytime soon? Do you think there’ll be things for you to see that you can usefully report?

Wood: Yes, I would love to go back as soon as possible. It’s a question of where to go. I would like to go to Iran itself. Some journalists are getting in, including from Western outlets. I don’t expect that that’s gonna be—would be easy to do. But this is a regional war, and so I’m thinking pretty hard about where in the region one should go to see the sort of invisible aspects of what’s going on, that there’s places where Iranians have flowed across the border out of fear of war and I’d love to talk to them. Iran has had its hooks deep in Iraq for a while now, and there’s war happening there, too, so finding out what the dynamics there are. It’s just a matter of where to go, but I certainly wanna go somewhere as soon as possible.

Frum: Graeme, thanks so much for talking to me today. Everyone should follow your work in The Atlantic and your two most recent articles on “Mutually Assured Energy Destruction” and “Snorkeling in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Wood: Thank you, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Graeme Wood for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned earlier, my book this week is Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is one of the remarkable trio of books that were published 250 years ago this year. I’ve already discussed the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s [The History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; that was published in February of 1776. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, was published in March of 1776. Now we’re going to reach all the way back to January of 1776, when Common Sense was published as a pamphlet in the United States.

At the time, the United States had a population of about 3 million people, not all of them free, not all of them literate. But in that population of some 3 million people, almost half a million copies of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet were sold over the coming years. It is maybe the greatest best seller in the country’s history, apart from the Bible, and maybe even in terms of speed of penetration bigger than the Bible in any given year. It’s a book that is worth rereading because it remains, to this day, accessible and powerful.

Now, Thomas Paine was an unusual person to make an impact in the United States. He was actually English-born, British-born, came to the United States, and he was someone who was, in many ways, a man of the future. He was not a religious man; he was a deist at most, maybe an outright atheist. He certainly rejected all forms of organized religion at a time when the United States was one of the most religious societies in the world. And he was, in many ways, a visionary of the future. His later books would outline some kind of image of a welfare state, when he was writing in the 1790s. But in 1776, he addressed himself directly at the feelings and beliefs of his adopted country, and he made an impact on them unlike anything seen before or maybe since.

Common Sense breaks down into a series of sections. It begins with some thoughts on government and society. In this respect, it’s one of the first libertarian manifestos. He draws a distinction between government and society, and regards society as a positive good, government as a necessary evil. And then, for a book that is going to be about declaring American independence from Britain, he begins not with the American-British relationship, but with a general attack on the concept of monarchy. He begins with a case for revolution that would be as binding and applicable in England and the United Kingdom as in the United States. And only after he makes his case against monarchy does he make a case for American independence. So this is a book that is a revolutionary manifesto not just for Americans, but for people anywhere that the English language is spoken.

It also was a book that went maybe farther than many Americans would later wish. Thomas Paine would end up re-emigrating from the United States and find himself in a jail in revolutionary France because his thoughts were so at variance with his own society when his own society, after the Revolutionary War ended, tried to put the Revolution back in a box.

Thomas Paine was not a man to be put in a box. His attack on any unjustifiable form of inequality is one that had enduring implications for a society that found itself, after it gained independence, still in many ways a society bound by many forms of inequality: racial the most obvious—free versus slave—but others too. It would take the United States a very long time to become the country that Thomas Paine imagined and urged in January of 1776, and that, I suppose, is why we go on reading this book.

We quote it too. But we quote it, as so often is the case, often without understanding. It’s only a few dozen pages long, I think 48 pages. It’s worth rediscovering for yourself and reminding yourself of what a radical proposition it was in 1776 to imagine not just the United States free of English rule—many distant countries had broken away from their founding countries—but a society that would become a new kind of society altogether: a society based on both liberty and equality, ideas always in tension, ideas that maybe Thomas Paine did not think through entirely—he was a writer and a polemicist much more than he was a philosopher. But he put these concepts in motion in ways that speak to us still and that are worth rediscovering on this 250th anniversary of the publication of Common Sense, by Thomas Paine.

Thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. Thanks to all who watch and listen to this program. As always, if you are minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do it is by supporting and subscribing to The Atlantic, where both Graeme Wood and I work, and where we are both grateful for your readership. I look forward to speaking to you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Correction: Due to an editing error, this transcript original misidentified Husayn ibn Ali as Saddam Hussein.

Why Trump Didn’t Predict the Gas-Price Spike

2026-04-01T10:32:00-04:00

On March 16, two weeks into his Iran war, President Trump assured reporters that he had the Strait of Hormuz problem well in hand. “And we’re hammering their capacity to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, with more than 30 mine-laying ships destroyed,” he said. “We hit, to the best of our knowledge, all of their mine-laying ships.”

On March 31, the national average price of gasoline at the pump surpassed $4, the highest level since the post-pandemic shocks of 2022. One-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas usually flows through the strait, but hasn’t since Iran began impeding the waterway in early March. Yet Trump continues to insist that Iran’s partial closure of the strait isn’t a problem. Markets don’t agree with Trump, and neither do his poll numbers.

How did Trump get Hormuz so wrong? The answer reveals one of Trump’s most characteristic and most fateful mistakes: his steadfast refusal to acknowledge that Americans live in a world economy.

Here he is on March 16 again: “You know, we get less than 1 percent of our oil from the strait. And, uh, some countries get much more. Japan gets 95 percent. China gets 90 percent. Many of the Europeans get quite a—quite a bit.” These specific numbers are, as you might suspect, wrong. China gets about 40 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Still, the general point is correct. Gulf oil flows mostly to Asia, and vanishingly little goes to North America. But what Trump fails to understand is that these geographic details matter little to world energy markets.

[Graeme Wood: Mutual assured energy destruction]

Trump wishes for a United States economy walled off from the rest of the world. That’s why he loves tariffs so much—and why he refuses to think about what they mean to American producers, who now must pay more for inputs such as aluminum.

But with energy, there is no walling off. Most of America’s oil and gas is produced in the United States. American imports come overwhelmingly from Canada and Mexico. But American oil can be put on a tanker and sent to Japan or the European Union if the price across the ocean rises. The global process of buying and selling equalizes prices worldwide. Walling off the U.S. would mean America would have to stop exporting and importing oil. Trump does not want to do that. In fact, he endlessly urges other countries to buy more American oil and gas. As he said in his March 31 comments: “Buy from the U.S.; we have plenty.”

Trump’s inability to comprehend the relevance of Persian Gulf supplies to American motorists may explain how he stumbled into his Iran war in the first place. A threat to the Strait of Hormuz may be the most war-gamed problem in the whole U.S. military inventory. It’s thorny enough to have deterred American presidents from attacking Iran for nearly 50 years, no matter how provocatively Iran behaved.

“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” Trump announced as the first bombs dropped on February 28. But why did Trump go where every other leader had declined to tread? Maybe he was the first president to see this war as an answer because he was the first who did not understand the question.

The Far-Right Algorithm: Anti-Churchill, Anti-West

2026-03-25T13:00:00-04:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on President Trump’s recent comments that appear to show a desire to back away from his war in Iran. David argues that Trump is comfortable as a “wartime” president as long as the enemy is American Democrats, and compares the president’s rhetoric about Iran with his rhetoric about his fellow Americans.

Then, David is joined by the historian and journalist Andrew Roberts to discuss why right-wing podcasters seem so fixated on insisting that Winston Churchill was the villain of the Second World War. Frum and Roberts discuss the origins of pseudo-historians and why they appeal so much to the American right.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the novel Burr, by Gore Vidal, and the relationship between art and morality.

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. My guest this week will be Lord Andrew Roberts, the great British historian, a man of letters, and we’ll be talking about many subjects, but above all about the great duel between [Winston] Churchill and [Adolf] Hitler, and why, in our day, so many people in positions of public prominence seem to have difficulty figuring out who was on the right side of the Hitler-Churchill duel and of the Second World War.

My book this week will be a novel, Burr by Gore Vidal, which raises some questions about the relationship between art and morality.

But before my discussion of the novel Burr, and before my dialogue with Lord Andrew Roberts, some thoughts on recent dramatic developments.

On the morning of Monday, March 23, the world woke up to this startling announcement by President Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social:

I am pleased to report that the United States of America, and the country of Iran, have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East. Based on the tenor and tone of these in depth, detailed, and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week, I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five day period, subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President Donald J. Trump.

This statement at 7:23 a.m. was promptly contradicted by the Iranians a half an hour later, who said there were no negotiations and no dialogue. Now, neither the Iranians nor President Trump are reliable narrators, so who knows what is true. But it does seem to be genuinely true that President Trump wants to back away from his confrontation with Iran. Interviewed on live television a few minutes after this Truth Social post, he said he was thinking about some kind of joint-owned management of the Strait of Hormuz between the United States and the ayatollah of Iran. So we’ve gone from calling for regime change, for calling [for] unconditional surrender, to a kind of shared management of the waterway between the United States and Iran.

Trump obviously wants out. And he wants out in a way that is going to leave almost all the important questions of the war he initiated unresolved: the Iranian nuclear program, the Iranian uranium stockpiles, Iran’s missile program, Iran’s threat to world oil supplies by its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. All of these seem to be unresolved as Trump seems to be heading out.

This story will have many twists and turns. And Trump, of course, is not—despite his pretenses otherwise—the sole decider here. The Iranians get a vote. As Tom Nichols said in one of our discussions a couple of weeks ago, wars end when the loser decides they’re over. In tactical military terms, the Iranians are the loser of this conflict; they’ve taken much more damage. But there isn’t peace until the Iranians say, We’re ready to stop fighting. And they seem to have concluded—whoever they is, because the leadership keeps being changed by Israeli air strikes against the leadership—but whoever the leadership is, they seem to have decided they’ve taken the measure of Donald Trump and they can outlast him. And if they remain standing and continuing to be firing missiles at the Gulf states, at Israel, and at shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, they sort of determine the shape of the outcome much more than the United States, the tactical winner.

Why is Trump backing away in this way? I think there’s a clue in something he said the day before, on March 22. Now, everyone who’s traveled this weekend or read about travel knows what chaos the airports are in. The airports are in chaos because of the cutoff of funding to the Department of Homeland Security, which is the envelope in which TSA and other airport security agencies are located. There have been negotiations between Republicans and Democrats in Congress over the DHS funding. Some kind of deal seemed to have been within reach that would’ve severed ICE, the immigration agency, and said, Okay, we’ll keep talking about ICE and the restrictions on ICE, but the rest of DHS can be funded so the airports get open. And President Trump vetoed that and said, No, I like this issue. I wanna keep fighting over the whole of DHS. I wanna keep the airport snarled because I don’t wanna negotiate about just immigration alone, because the Democrats will ask me things like the end of face-masking, cameras on ICE agents that I, Trump, find unacceptable. And I don’t wanna fight that fight alone, because I’ll probably lose; I wanna fight it in conjunction with a bigger fight over airport funding.

And here’s what he wrote on March 22 at 8:31 p.m. to explain his reasoning. “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass “THE SAVE [AMERICA] ACT.” It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate, and that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems (who are to blame for this mess!)—” And so it goes.

Notice the contrast in tone between “the country of Iran” and “the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats.” Trump is most comfortable as a war president in a war against half of the United States, or somewhat more than half the United States. Ron Brownstein, a colleague of mine at The Atlantic, has observed very well that Donald Trump is a wartime president, yes, but his war is a war of occupation by red America against blue America. Having to be a leader of the whole country in a war against Iran, that’s just not in his nature. And when his polls begin to sag and the price of gasoline goes up, he fears not that something is happening to the American national interest that may or may not be outweighed by the strategic goal of ending the Iranian nuclear program, changing the Iranian regime, whatever his goals are in that conflict. His most important war is the war at home. And if the war abroad asks of him too much, asks him to act like president of all of America, he just doesn’t wanna do that. Where he is at home and where he is comfortable is as a war leader of part of America against the majority of America. He can’t be a national leader. He doesn’t want to be a national leader. He doesn’t know what it looks like, and he’s only comfortable when he’s the leader of a faction of the country against the rest of the country.

That may be the fundamental reason—even more than the lack of strategy, the lack of stated goals, the lack of explanation, the lack of congressional authorization—why this war in the Middle East has gone so weirdly and strangely and inconclusively, despite all the tactical successes of the American and Israeli bombing of Iranian war-making capacity. Because he can’t lead the nation, and doesn’t want to and doesn’t know how and doesn’t like it, he can’t speak to the nation about anything to do with a national interest. The only interest he knows is his own personal interest and that of similarly aggrieved people in a struggle against the majority of the country that just wants to get through the airline in an expeditious and efficient way. And so, given the choice between winning the war against Iran and waging the war against “the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats,” it’s that second war, the war against “the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats,” that Trump gives priority to.

Now, those are the people whose votes he needs in order to fund the war he wants less to fight. And so it looks like he’s going to give up the war in Iran to save the war against “the Crazy Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats” and the majority of Americans who oppose him and want a president who can speak for an America in the way that this president never has, never will, never could, doesn’t want to.

And now my dialogue with Lord Andrew Roberts.

[Music]

Frum: Lord Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, is one of Britain’s foremost historians and men of letters. He is known internationally for his 2009 book, The Storm of War, which received the British Army Military Book of the Year award for 2010. Also among his roughly two dozen books are Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare [From 1945 to Ukraine], co-authored with General David Petraeus, and The Aachen Memorandum, a political thriller. Roberts chaired the 7 October Parliamentary Commission, whose report draws on forensic evidence, survivor testimonies, and open-source footage to document the crimes committed by Hamas and its allies during the sneak attack on Israel of October 7, 2023. In November ’22, Roberts was elevated to the House of Lords. My own personal favorite among his many books is his biography of the great high Victorian statesman Lord Salisbury, underrated among Britain’s wittiest prime ministers. Attributed to him is the remark—when a supporter suggested that maybe he considered changing a few things in Britain, Salisbury is supposed to have replied, “Change? Change? Aren’t things bad enough already?”

But we are here today because of Andrew’s work on Churchill, of whom he wrote an outstanding one-volume life in 2018. At a time of online attempted rehabilitation of the Third Reich Nazism and Adolph Hitler, Lord Roberts is the man we need most urgently to hear from. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today.

Andrew Roberts: Thank you very much indeed for having me on, David. And thanks very much also for those very kind words.

Frum: Let’s start with something you have both observed and participated in, which is this crazed online rehabilitation in the American and English social-media world of the—or the attempt to do an online rehabilitation—of the legacy of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. What is going on with these crazy talkers and podcasters?

Roberts: Well, they’re attempting to attack Winston Churchill because he was epicentral in defeating Adolf Hitler, of course. Anti-Semitism plays an absolutely central role to this as well. And they essentially argue—and it’s not a new thing; Second World War revisionism goes back to the 1960s, earlier—that, really, the world was on the wrong side when it tried to stop Hitler from destroying communism after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, and Churchill made a strategic error in not supporting Hitler and opposing [Joseph] Stalin. That’s, I think, where it stems from, but of course, it’s got massive modern connotations with regard to the United States and where the United States is in the world today.

Frum: How is it that somebody decides, You know what? I’m trying to differentiate myself from a sea of online voices. I could talk about a lot of things. I could have a lot of opinions. I could go into sports podcasting, for goodness’ sakes, but no, my distinctive, value-added proposition is going to be the defense of Hitler, anti-Semitism, and the Third Reich. And by the way, it seems to work—when you look at America’s top podcasters, in the political sphere at least, it is amazing how many of them find the rehabilitation of Nazi ideology their ticket to success.

Roberts: I think it’s the very shock value, isn’t it? We always used to call radio “shock jocks” because they try to say the most outrageous thing possible, therefore drawing attention to oneself. And that is the nature of the internet, is that the more shocking you are, the more likely you are to appeal to the lowest form of human nature, I suppose. So it’s built into the algorithm of the internet, in a sense. But also, I think that, as well as wanting to shock and be perverse and so on, there’s also a very—even darker side to all of this, which, as I say, is anti-Semitism, and I think it has contributed enormously to the present rise of anti-Semitism in the world.

Frum: Which do you think is cause, and which is effect? Do you start as an anti-Semite and then wanna rehabilitate the Third Reich, or do you start by wanting to rehabilitate the Third Reich because you look at a lot of old picture postcards and imaginary scenes and Leni Riefenstahl movies and think, Well, that’s an accurate depiction of reality. They must have had a point about the Jews? Which goes first, this cultish attraction to the Third Reich or the anti-Semitism driving the cultish attraction to the Third Reich?

Roberts: I think they go absolutely hand in hand. I think they’re in lockstep, both of them. And of course, they then do lead you on to a whole load of other views about the world that are essentially antidemocratic, anti-Western, anticivilization, anti-Christianity, anti-culture, as well as this primary motivating force of anti-Semitism—and a desire to shock.

Frum: So you’re led from Third Reichism to pro-Assadism to apologies for Hezbollah and Hamas to defense of Iran—one crazy thing after another.

Roberts: And [Vladimir] Putin, of course, as well because you admire Putin enormously because he invades countries and is a strongman, and I’m afraid there could be overlaps. We’ve seen that there are overlaps in all this manosphere, incel thing as well, that you think it’s macho to invade countries and blow up buildings and send tanks over borders and so on. So that also is something that Hitler did and Putin is doing, and you want to try and make an apology for that too.

Frum: All right, so let me draw on your historian’s hat, or your historian’s expertise, for a moment because there may be some basic facts about this that people don’t know. So let’s start with this: Who won and who lost the Second World War?

Roberts: The Germans, Italians, and Japanese most definitely lost. The Russians, Americans, British, and British Commonwealth won. (Laughs.)

Frum: So if you have an impression that the Nazis had the most formidable war machine in the history of the world and the most effective society organized for war, you do bump into this problem: They did lose.

Roberts: And they were also defeated by the other people that you think of as slavish “Untermensch.” The Russians are people who you despise. You don’t despise the British, because they’re Aryans and so on. So it bumps into your racial theories at every stage—not least, of course, because ultimately, the Japanese are not Aryan peoples, but they’re your allies against various countries, like, I don’t know, Denmark, who are Aryan people. So it just doesn’t make any kind of sense, even according to its own really weird and screwed-up ideology.

Frum: One of the reasons that Hitler and Nazism are so discredited is because the Germans have led the way in saying, You know what? This was not good for us, either. If we had stayed on the path of democracy and peace, all the prosperity we had in the 1950s, we could have had in the 1940s.

Roberts: Well, that’s right, and also, of course, the führer did declare war on Germany at the end, in the very last days in 1945. He wanted to destroy the reservoirs and the railways and basically make Germany completely ungovernable, regardless of how many Germans starved in the process. So, as well as declaring war in all of those Untermensch countries—and Britain, as you say, as a result of Britain having continued to fight—he also finally declared war on his own country.

Frum: Right. Just as he left orders to blow up Paris and destroy that, orders that were mercifully ignored by the German commander in chief in the Paris vicinity, he left [orders to] blow up every waterworks, blow up every power plant, make sure that if Germany does lose the war, the German people then die of starvation. And that was Hitler’s idea, not something that the United States and Britain did to them; the Americans and British fed the Germans after the war.

Roberts: That’s right, yes. [Dietrich] von Choltitz is who you’re talking about, who didn’t let Paris burn. And of course, it was also the junior commanders that refused to carry out the führer’s final wishes with regard to basically turning Germany back into an agrarian, starting economy.

Frum: Right. Let’s talk a little bit about the attempt to overturn the reputation of Winston Churchill. As you and I speak, Winston Churchill is still on the British £5 note, but there’s a project of the British government to take him off—some kind of bird, I think, they wanna replace him with.

Roberts: Yeah, it’s not just Churchill. They’re taking off all of the famous people, all of the writers and the people we’re proud of, and they’re going to be swapped for various fauna, birds and dogs and things like that. I think there’s gonna be a public consultation. The British people, typically, are taking it as a huge joke, and they’re putting forward completely absurd animals that are going to do—if it’s done on a vote, then all hell’s gonna break loose, frankly. (Laughs.)

Frum: But this is symbolic of a larger trend, which is, even within Britain and certainly outside Britain, an attempt to make Churchill a villain of world history rather than the great hero of the 20th century.

Roberts: That’s right. As I like to always point out, this has been going on a long time. David Irving tried it back in the ’70s and ’80s, in a sense. Obviously, [Joseph] Goebbels himself demonized Churchill. There have been lots of books attacking Churchill. Quite recently, we’ve had three or four in a row. So—

Frum: Lemme put a pause there because not everyone will recognize the name David Irving, who’s a huge hero to many of the other people on the internet far right. So tell us about the career of David Irving and why he’s so central in fabricating these myths of Third Reich rehabilitation and Winston Churchill defamation.

Roberts: Well, David Irving is a neo-Nazi historian. He, because of his extreme right-wing views, was able to contact a lot of the widows of leading Nazis back in the ’70s and ’80s, and therefore was able to get quite a lot of information, including new information. So he posed as an historian, but unfortunately, he was somebody who didn’t believe in the Holocaust, for example. And there was a huge libel action against him that was taken out by a very brave writer called Deborah Lipstadt, who won against him.

David Frum: There are so many things to say here, and just for the record, because neo-Nazis will often say he was sued for his views, it was David Irving who initiated the libel action against Deborah Lipstadt, not the other way around.

Andrew Roberts: Sorry, you’re quite right—for calling him a Holocaust denier, wasn’t it?

Frum: He sued her—it was he who tried to suppress her speech, not she who tried to suppress his speech. I think that’s a very important thing to ram home. And in Britain, where it is so easy to win a libel action, he lost.

Roberts: And yes, I attended the court, actually. I watched it. It was better than any West End show; it was absolutely fascinating. Historian after historian getting up and talking about the evidence that proved that there was a Holocaust, and also, of course, that David Irving had denied it.

But therefore, this does make him into a hero of the extreme right.

Frum: Well, I wanna say one more thing about him: He’s also crucial in elaborating the myth of the Dresden bombing.

Dresden is a very beautiful city in eastern Germany, now, thankfully, substantially rebuilt. It was also an important railway node. It was the last unbombed city in the Reich, and it was hit by the Western Allies in the last days of World War II, and 20,000 people were killed. And this is obviously a major disaster, but not as big as the Hamburg bombing or the terrible bombings of Tokyo.

For reasons that are kind of obscure to me, the Nazis in their last days decided to make a propaganda issue of this, and Irving became the person who took the 20,000 to 30,000 authentic casualties and created a much bigger magnification of the number through falsification of archives and other things.

Roberts: Yes, he claimed that 200,000 people, or more than 200,000 people, had died, which, actually, was next to impossible demographically. There were perfectly good reasons to bomb Dresden, good strategic reasons. Plus, we were asked to by the Soviets. But it was the fact that the gauleiter there had basically pocketed the money he was given to build massive air-raid shelters that led to larger-than-expected deaths. But Irving was the man behind the modern creation of the myth; Goebbels started the myth originally, but Irving backed it up. It’s therefore sort of understandable why he should become the godfather of the modern revisionists. He’s their hero. The modern revisionists, on the other hand, they’ve gone far further than even David Irving—primarily, of course, because of the internet; Irving was working before the internet. Whereas when Tucker Carlson interviewed Darryl Cooper, for example, who said that Winston Churchill was the greatest villain of the Second World War, 33 million people downloaded that show. The modern revisionists are able to reach a far wider audience than ever David Irving was.

Frum: Tell us who Darryl Cooper is.

Roberts: Well, I tried to find out, when I heard about these moronic remarks of his. (Laughs.) And the answer is that he’s somebody who Tucker Carlson calls the most consequential American historian writing today, but he’s never written a history book, this fellow. He goes on podcasts a lot and makes sort of long-form podcasts, which don’t have any intellectual respectability whatsoever, which no academic of any serious note has taken seriously. I can offhand tell you a few dozen American historians who’ve got a genuine right to be considered more seriously than Mr. Cooper.

Frum: One of the things that makes you a historian rather than just a journalist, like me, is the historian gets the quotes from the place they came from. So if the quote comes from a state paper, they consult the state paper. If it comes from a memoir, they consult the memoir. They go to the original thing. The journalist says, If this thing from the state paper is reproduced in the work of Andrew Roberts, I trust Andrew Roberts, and so I get my quote from the Andrew Roberts book. But there’s always the possibility, even with an Andrew Roberts book, of a mistake.

Roberts: Oh, yes.

Frum: And so the difference between an historian [and a journalist] is the historian goes to the source; the journalist goes to the secondary source. And my impression from listening to Cooper is he—partly because he doesn’t have the languages, which historians are supposed to do—he goes to the secondary source, and it’s often a neo-Nazi secondary source. And there are various kinds of verbal clues that this Churchill quote, he discovered not from reading the Churchill speech, not from reading Hansard, but via some much more sinister secondary detour.

Roberts: And actually, the laziness of it is also pretty reprehensible because, nowadays, if you go onto the International Churchill Society website or if you consult the Churchill documents at Churchill Archives Center, a lot of which are online, it doesn’t actually take that much; it’s not that difficult to get the correct quote. I’ve got upstairs the 20 volumes of Churchill’s documents. Now, not everybody’s gonna have those, but they are available online. So it’s not that hard to do, but you-re right—he doesn’t bother to do that.

Frum: But there’s also something about internet culture that makes us vulnerable to this. So when David Irving—his primary means of communicating with the world was through books, and because he wanted to be taken seriously as an historian, he complied with the formal architecture of an historical work, which is footnotes and quotes. You make your argument that Hitler was completely innocent of the Holocaust, that he didn’t know about it. You cite a bunch of sources. The people who are encountering your work, they read it, they have the book open, they see the footnote, and they can then wander down the hall, if they’re in a library, to the shelf and pull the thing you cite off the shelf and see, Did you quote it correctly?, and, as John Lukacs did in The Hitler of History, point out, Oh, you introduced a series of very malicious mistakes into your reading.

But the preferred form of modern neo-Nazism is verbal, or verbal and visual. That is, there’s no text; they speak. And their favorite form is not to say, Let’s not have a historical controversy in writing, but let’s debate in form so if I tell a lie and the person I’m talking to is not as nimble or not as well informed, the lie sails past, in a way that it can’t do in true historical debate, which is done in writing, with footnotes.

Roberts: Precisely right. And it’s all part of their modus operandi. And they have to do it that way because, of course, if they did it the other way, we’d be able to catch them out all the time. So it’s much, much easier to lie verbally than on the page—if you want that lie to survive longer than the amount of time it takes for somebody to check you.

Frum: Can you take us through what you think are one or two of the most common lies about Churchill and Churchill in relationship to the Second World War?

Roberts: Oh golly. (Laughs.) Well, there are dozens of them. I dunno. I wonder whether it’s best to do it chronologically or just—he’s supposed to have been involved in secret peace negotiations with [Benito] Mussolini, and apparently, the proof of that is wrapped up in a box at the bottom of Lake Como. (Laughs.) He is, of course, supposed to have deliberately made the Bengal famine worse than it actually was already, for which there’s no proof whatsoever. He’s supposed to have let Coventry be destroyed, even though he knew that Coventry was going to be attacked in order to preserve the secrecy of the Ultra decrypts. Oh gosh. There are so many—aall the way through his life, by the way. He’s supposed to have sunk the Lusitania as well, is another one. (Laughs.)

Frum: Isn’t the central lie that he was supposed to be in the thrall of Jewish bankers? That’s the big thing: that the Jews invented Churchill in order to make war on white Western civilization. And Churchill, because he was, for a man of his time, strikingly not anti-Semitic—although not purely so, but strikingly non-anti-Semitic for a man of his time and class—that therefore he’s some kind of tool of the Jews in their war on the white West.

Roberts: Yes. This, again, has been around for a very long time. Oscar Wilde’s lover “Bosie,” Lord [Alfred] Douglas, was a believer in this theory, and Churchill actually sued him [because] he said that Churchill had underplayed the Battle of Jutland for some financial reason that the Jews were behind.

The Jews are blamed for, as you say, creating Churchill—or if not creating him, then at least buying him in the 1930s. Now, he did have rich Jewish friends who occasionally did bail him out. So that’s the way that they tie in this sort of [The] Protocols of the Elders of Zion kind of conspiracy theory. But there’s no example—

Frum: He also had rich non-Jewish friends who bailed him out, because one of the requirements of being a Churchill friend … (Laughs.)

Roberts: Yeah. No, Churchill was broke his entire life, basically. No, he didn’t get into the black until he was in his 70s, once he—

Frum: You introduced me to a wonderful book about Churchill’s finances. What was it called—No More Champagne: [Churchill and His Money]?

Roberts: That’s right, yeah. David Lough. Very good book. Yeah.

Frum: He would periodically write letters to his wife instructing her on domestic economy: And the first thing is: We’re going to eliminate champagne at lunch. That’s how we’re really going to … (Laughs.)

Roberts: That’s right. And actually, I asked Mary, Winston and Clementine Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames, and she said that that lasted about three days. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) The expensive Cuban cigars were only to be served at the discretion of Churchill; the box wasn’t to be open for guests to help themselves. (Laughs.)

Roberts: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. I don’t suppose that lasted terribly long, either.

Frum: (Laughs.)

Roberts: But the thing was that he was always broke, but quite rightly, I think, his attitude was not really to try and save spending money, ’cause that never worked, but to just work harder and to—and that’s the reason that we have 800 articles and 37 books, comprising 51 volumes, and he wrote more than [William] Shakespeare and [Charles] Dickens combined. It’s because he had to because he was broke.

And as you say, non-Jewish friends bailed him out as well. But there’s no example of any Jew ever asking him for anything at all as a result of bailing him out. And some people, like Sir Abe Bailey and I think Sir Henry Strakosch gave him money in their wills. So there’s clearly nothing that they were after as a result, ’cause the money didn’t actually get given to Churchill until they died.

Frum: Well, because the impression one has of him is he was not just a deeply admirable man, but also a highly personally lovable man. And so people who were his friends and who were good with money and knew that he was horrible at it would say, This is something I can do in testimony to not only my admiration for him, but my love for him.

Roberts: That’s right. And Bernie Baruch being another great example of that—the New York banker who basically allowed, if Churchill’s stocks and shares went up, then Churchill kept the money, and if they went down, then Bernie Baruch would cover the difference. But again, there was no quid pro quo for this apart from friendship, admiration, and love for the man.

And so, of course, the anti-Semites immediately pounce on this aspect of Churchill’s character to try to insinuate that he was in the pocket of the Jews and so on. And therefore, according to this theory, he took the British empire into war in order to destroy the man who was attempting to destroy the Jews, i.e., Adolf Hitler.

This completely ignores the fact, of course, that he was out of office throughout the 1930s. One of the things that Darryl Cooper accuses Churchill of having done was to have made the Second World War worse after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but he wasn’t actually in the government until Hitler had invaded Poland; he didn’t get into the government until after the invasion. And then he doesn’t become prime minister, of course, until the Nazis had already invaded Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg. So, just on chronological grounds, none of these accusations really add up logically, just in terms solely of rational argument.

Frum: There are many differences between real history and this kind of internet history, but real historians are always very attuned to which event happened first. And one of the basic rules of history is: An event that happened after an earlier event cannot have caused the earlier event, because it came second in time and time flows only one way.

Roberts: Yes, exactly. And you get this, of course, with everything to do with Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. It comes a year and a bit after Hitler’s invasion of France, and one leads on to the other. And to try to therefore accuse Churchill of trying to save communism in 1941 as a result of anything that happens—it’s very, very clear that the reason that he made an alliance with Soviet Russia, even though he hated communism, was because the Russians were fighting Hitler and he recognized that Hitler had to be defeated.

Frum: That’s a very important point just to stress here. The most famous of Churchill speeches—Though we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall never surrender—at the time those were given, Britain’s allies were Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Greece. That’s about it. And the Soviet Union was Hitler’s most important ally. And at the time of the fall of France, Hitler drove into France with Soviet-provided fuel. And then the German tanks were made out of materials, many of which came from the Soviet Union. And so this is both a Soviet lie and now a Russian lie and a neo-Nazi lie to forget this key fact: When Churchill came to power and fought the Battle of France and lost, Hitler and the Soviet Union were allies, not enemies.

Roberts: Yeah, and the Communist Party in Britain opposed the war until the 22nd of June, 1941. So you have Communist trade unionists in British factories causing trouble even during the Battle of Britain.

Frum: Yeah. Communists in the United States too.

Let me take you into the present day because you are a rare historian who is not only active in contemporary discussions, but was called upon by your own Parliament to write the definitive report on the Hamas atrocities after October 7.

I won’t take you into that field right now, because of respect for time, but drawing on the expertise you acquired through there, I want you to help us understand a debate that is going on, which is: Many of the people who advocate these crackpot theories of history were, until a minute ago, big supporters of President Trump. Not to accuse Donald Trump, who seems pretty hazy on most of history—I don’t know that he would have a side on any of these disputes; maybe New York nightclubs in the 1970s, he’s kind of an expert on that. But there seems to be this split in the MAGA world between the voting bloc and the members of Congress, who are mostly aligned with President Trump in supporting his actions against Iran, and then the MAGA influencers online, who are increasingly radically opposed to it. Can you explain to us how this conflict is working and what it means?

Roberts: I suppose in a sense, of course, the MAGA opponents of Iran do have the point that they were sold a pup by Trump, who did promise no “forever wars,” no interventions, and so on, especially not in the Middle East after what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. So one can understand how some of them feel lied to and let down.

But the isolationist wing, who are the people who feel that, again, have a very long history. The phrase “America First” was first used by Charles Lindbergh and the anti-interventionists who wanted America not to go to war against Nazi Germany. So here, again, you have very strong historical echoes, and so people who consider themselves to be on the sort of ultra-right of the MAGA movement in a sense do sort of feel betrayed and let down.

Frum: Well, I don’t know that we wanna call them “isolationists” because the ultra-right wing of the MAGA movement was very keen for a war against Denmark to seize Greenland. They were interested in fighting Panama to take back the Panama Canal. And they raised no objections to Donald Trump’s repeated talk of annexing Canada as some kind of 51st state, although he never intended to give Canada any senator, so it wouldn’t be a state; it would be kind of an occupied territory. So the MAGA [movement] was very comfortable with violent action in the Western Hemisphere, of a highly imperialist kind, against people who are traditional American friends, like Denmark. Americans have been present—and you’ll know better than me—but there’s been an American military presence in Greenland, with the consent of the Danish government, since before the United States entered the Second World War, all during the Second World War, and all during the Cold War. And the Danes would’ve gladly welcomed a larger American presence today if the Americans would’ve been willing to send it, so there was no objection. And MAGA had not a problem with that imperialist agenda. It is conflict with anti-Western forces, whether it’s Putin or the Iranians; that’s what makes them upset.

Roberts: Yes, that’s right. In a sense also, historically, of course, with regard to Southern America—to Venezuela and Panama, etc.—that does tie in with the Monroe Doctrine that goes back to 1823. So that isn’t a radical change from what, oh, I don’t know, Teddy Roosevelt would’ve been comfortable with.

However, as you say, the time that the ultra-MAGA people get very upset is when the West goes to war against people who scream “Death to America” and tries to get the nuclear bomb. It is an interesting aspect. We have the same thing here in England, of course.

Frum: Let’s wrap this up here with going back to the historical matter. Would you give us a refresher of what the world would’ve looked like if, in those crucial days when the British had to make the decision whether to follow Churchill’s lead—whether to refuse the peace that Hitler offered after the fall of France—if we had taken the advice of the Pat Buchanans and the Tucker Carlsons, and Britain had surrendered in the summer of 1940, what would the world look like today?

Roberts: Hitler wasn’t asking for all-out surrender of Britain; he was asking for Britain to stay neutral in the future of the war. So we wouldn’t have had the Blitz, of course. We’d have probably been able to have hung on to the bits of the empire that he wasn’t interested in. And he would’ve been able to have attacked Russia with all of his armed forces, including 100 percent of the Luftwaffe, rather than just 70 percent of it, because he needed to keep 30 percent of it back to protect German cities against British bombing—and also to protect France, of course, from an invasion.

So there would’ve been a very different attitude, I think, in the United States; I can’t see the United States getting involved and also terribly difficult for them to have worked out how they could have engaged with the Germans anyway—North Africa perhaps, but that’s hardly any sort of quick route through to Berlin.

It was touch and go in Russia. Of course, in the October of 1941, Stalin had his own personal train made ready to take him back beyond the Urals. The Battle of Stalingrad could have gone either way as well. And of course, the Germans did subject Leningrad to a grueling thousand-day siege.

So had the Germans won in Russia and pushed the Soviets back beyond the Urals, Hitler would’ve been master of Europe from the Urals all the way through to Brest. And it would have been a catastrophe—of course, as it was, 50 percent of Europe’s Jews died in the Holocaust; 100 percent undoubtedly would’ve died under those circumstances, while Hitler was also working to try and create a bomb, which it would’ve been very difficult, I think, for the United States to have made entirely on its own and funded if they weren’t even involved in the war at all, because nothing would’ve brought them in to fight against Germany, especially if they’d been attacked at Pearl Harbor and Britain wasn’t in the war. So there’s a world in which Hitler could have certainly survived the mid-1940s, maybe created a nuclear bomb, and totally dominated the whole of Europe, which would’ve left America, ultimately, very isolated. So I think—

Frum: Yeah. And remember, the Germans were ahead in rocket technology, so the Americans might have gotten the nuclear weapon first, but the delivery system, the Germans would probably have got first.

Roberts: Certainly, yes, absolutely. You didn’t have an American version of Wernher von Braun in the first part of the 1940s.

So, yeah, Churchill’s decision to fight on in 1940 is absolutely central to the survival of Western civilization, which is why he’s so unpopular with the revisionists, because they would much prefer to see a world in which Hitler was dominating the world, did have the bomb, did wipe out the Jews, and had his own form of sort of Weltmacht, which is very, very different from the kind of Western civilization that we see today.

Frum: The person who saw this all most clearly at the time was President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt, who gave speeches about it, which we don’t read anymore, because they seemed so irrelevant until recently—or seemed so much a part of history. But Roosevelt warned in the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, that if we go down this path—if the Tucker Carlsons of this world had got their retrospective wish, and the British government had made a kind of peace with Hitler and let him invade the Soviet Union and annihilate all the Jews of Europe—that the United States would never have been a free country again. It would’ve lived on half a planet. It would’ve sheltered in the smaller of the two hemispheres. And it would’ve had to live forever on a war footing, not a Cold War footing, but on a full war footing, against this technologically advanced nuclear power with rockets on the Eurasian continent. That’s what this was all about in 1940.

And the development and peace that the world enjoyed after 1945 was a product of American power and British endurance, and had the British made the choice that is being recommended to them by all these fool, loudmouth bloggers, their own childhoods would’ve been overhung by terror and fascism and tragedy. And they would not have enjoyed the security that we have so taken for granted that we can entertain of all these foolish, nonsensical, childish, ignorant opinions on the internet that was created because of the peace and security and wealth that the Western world enjoyed because of Churchill’s endurance and courage in that summer.

Roberts: I think you’ve put the full level of irony right up there. (Laughs.) Yes, that’s exactly right, David.

Frum: Andrew, can I ask you one last personal question? I understand you’ve just finished working on something. Can you share a little bit about what it is?

Roberts: Yes, Napoleon and His Marshals. It’s a book about the relationship between the emperor and his 26 marshals. It’s gonna be coming out in America in November.

Frum: And you have written the great rehabilitation of Napoleon in another biography. The Hitler-Napoleon comparison breaks down because Napoleon was—although he was a warlord, he did do a lot of good things too.

Roberts: Yeah, there’s no comparison. One of them is the Enlightenment on horseback, and the other is the absolute opposition to the Enlightenment. No, that’s going well, and then after that, I’m going to write a biography of Benjamin Disraeli. So I’ve got until the year 2030 nicely cut out for me. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) You are a marvel. Andrew, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Roberts: Thank you, David. I’ve much enjoyed it.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Andrew Roberts for joining me today on The David Frum Show. My book this week is Burr, a novel by Gore Vidal, published in 1973. I first read this book as a teenager. I returned to it this past week because of some thoughts left behind by my discussion last week of the novel The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann.

That novel ponders the problem of a great artist, or someone we’re invited to believe is a great artist, tangled in the moral compromises of making art under the conditions of the Third Reich. And we’re asked to consider whether there is anything that can justify that kind of moral compromise, and The Director comes to its own very ironic and understated conclusion about whether or not moral compromise justifies great art in the end, whether great art can be produced under conditions of moral compromise.

I turned to Burr and Gore Vidal because it was a book I enjoyed very much as a teenager, and I enjoyed it because it was a pretty nasty piece of work, actually, written by a pretty nasty man, Gore Vidal. Burr tells the story of the American Revolution’s founding generation through the eyes of Aaron Burr, who even today remains kind of a villain of American history and in 1973, building up to the bicentennial, at a time when America’s heroes were taken much more at face value than they are today, Burr was the great outsider—a man hated both by Thomas Jefferson and by Alexander Hamilton, so he had to be bad.

Gore Vidal took on Burr and used him to write a debunking novel about all the founding generation. The novel is set at the end of Burr’s life in the 1830s, but we are constantly called back to the period of the Revolution and the Constitution. We’re shown, through Burr’s eyes, a George Washington who is stupid, vain, militarily incompetent, sexually dysfunctional, and mercenary in his marriage. By the way, because Vidal can spare no form of mockery, we are introduced to George Washington as a man who walks with an ungainly waddle. Thomas Jefferson, the great hero of the Declaration of Independence, is shown as hypocritical, cowardly, manipulative, a schemer of every kind. And Alexander Hamilton gets slightly better press than the other two, but he is shown as someone who is brilliant, but self-seeking, arrogant, snobbish, contemptuous of others, and profoundly two-faced. Burr himself is a man, certainly, with faults; we see that he, in late life, marries for money and then steals from his wife. But we’re invited to see him as, despite these foibles, amusing and retaining, and his cynicism about everything and his lack of moral scruple is—actually, we’re invited to see this as a kind of higher wisdom.

There is no irony about this. Gore Vidal does not introduce us to Burr as an unreliable narrator. In fact, there’s another narrator of the book, a younger man who sees Burr with some distance, but we’re invited to take Burr’s view as the novelist’s view and therefore as our view.

Now, Gore Vidal, I think his reputation is fading somewhat these days, but I knew him a little bit in his lifetime, He was a thoroughly unpleasant person. You can see it in his interviews. He was spiteful and envious in his own right. I think he’s best remembered now for a saying of his—he later tried to explain this away as a joke, but it reflected the authentic man. He is said to have said, or he takes credit for the line, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” And that’s the man. And it is his own nastiness that fills the novel with its amusingness. The novel is amusing because Burr is nasty, his story is told by a nasty person, and we’re given a point of view that very much appealed to the adolescent smart aleck who wants to see history as it really was and not through some gauze of legend.

So what we have here is, I think, not a great work of art, but a successful work of art that owes its success entirely to the unpleasantness and spitefulness of the novelist’s character. Bad character produced pretty good art. So is our problem solved? I’m not so sure, because as I reread this book now as a much older man, I thought, What would a truly great artist have done with this material? He would’ve allowed us to see through and past Burr in a way that, say, Shakespeare allows us to see through and past Richard III, or the way that John Milton allows us to see through and past his Lucifer, who gets all the best lines in Paradise Lost. And to understand that, while we can enjoy the spiteful cynicism of an Aaron Burr as a narrator, that the great work of art would’ve allowed us to see that Burr was fundamentally wrong, and that the people whom he’s traducing, mocking, maligning, they are, in fact, despite of their undoubted human foibles, which Burr can see and which history has kind of elided, that they were great people in their own way because great people are not perfect people, and the presence of imperfection—an ungainly waddle in the walk of the founder of the country—does not make him any less the founder of the country and does not make his heroic and self-abnegating acts any less heroic and self-abnegating. That the spiteful man sees only as far as the spiteful man can, and that can produce a work of art that is successful, but maybe not ultimately great.

I don’t know that that is a final answer to the question of the relationship between art and morality. I think we can think more hardily, more accurately, and more powerfully about this through the prism of a novel like The Director, which I think is a more successful novel than Burr—a more powerful and maybe more enduring novel than Burr. But Burr [is] entertaining; if you haven’t read it, it’s worth a read. If you wanna have a kind of mean view of the founding generation, it’s a lot of fun. Just understand always that this is a limited work by a limited narrator in the hands of a limited artist. And so maybe the answer is: Actually, the two, art and morality, may have more to do with one another than Gore Vidal ever imagined as he wrestled with his own limits, both as a man and as an artist.

That’s it for The David Frum Show this week. Thank you so much for listening and for watching. As ever, if you’re minded to support the work of this podcast, the best way to do it is by subscribing to The Atlantic and supporting the work of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic. Thanks for watching and listening. See you next week. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Trump Owes Mueller

2026-03-25T12:24:00-04:00

President Trump rejoiced in the death of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

It is sadly part of a pattern for Trump. The film director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle; former Representative John Dingell; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Senator John McCain—Trump had something wildly inappropriate to say after the passing of each of them, and others too.

“Good, I’m glad he’s dead,” Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after Mueller’s death was announced on Saturday. This comment was not just indecent. It was also ungrateful. Trump owes Mueller a huge debt of gratitude. Mueller’s straight-arrow approach to law enforcement rescued Trump from a danger of his own making.

Trump hates Mueller for the investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which was certainly embarrassing for Trump. But Mueller interpreted his mandate in ways that protected the president, and he delivered the best possible conclusion for Trump, stating in his report: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Mueller confirmed that Russian spy agencies engaged in a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to help Trump at the expense of Hillary Clinton. He confirmed that Trump’s inner circle welcomed this help—most vividly in a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower, in which a Russian representative offered dirt on the Clinton campaign to Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Donald Trump Jr. But although Mueller mapped the dots, he could not connect them.

[Jonathan Lemire: Donald Trump is nothing like Robert Mueller]

The questions Mueller was assigned to answer remained questions at the end: Why did Russia help Trump? What did Trump’s inner circle know about this help? How was this help connected to Trump’s pro-Russian attitudes as a candidate and a president? Mueller’s report insisted that the absence of answers did not amount to an exoneration of Trump. But without a clear indictment, Trump could effectively dismiss the whole matter as a “hoax.”

Mueller enabled this distortion of the facts. He not only accepted the Department of Justice guidance that a serving president could not be indicted for a federal crime, but also inferred that this meant a president could not be tried. Because a president could not be tried, he could not be acquitted; because he could not be acquitted, it would be unfair for Mueller’s report to include any allegation that the president could not legally refute.

Contrast Mueller’s approach with that of the next special counsel to investigate a president, Robert Hur. Hur was assigned to investigate allegations that President Biden had improperly removed documents to his private residence after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. In February 2024, Hur found no basis to proceed with a case. He added an explanation: If a case went to trial, a jury would likely find Biden to be a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur added that Biden appeared to suffer from “diminished faculties and faulty memory.”

These words were intensely politically damaging to Biden, yet Hur did not worry that Biden lacked a legal forum to contest Hur’s assessment. He just said what he thought was true and in the public interest. Mueller refrained from such candor. It’s striking, on rereading the Mueller report, how absent Trump is from its pages. Mueller believed that he could not charge the president, so he refrained from even describing him.

Mueller was a man who believed in the rule of law and the value of precedent, and he abided by an unspoken code of honor. He did not understand and so could not anticipate the moves of those who did not share his values or his code. He delivered his report on March 22, 2019, to Attorney General Bill Barr, who promptly released a letter proclaiming the total vindication of President Trump, then took 27 days before letting the public read a redacted version. (By contrast, the lapse between the delivery and public release of Hur’s report was only three days.)

Mueller did not see it as his job to speak out—not then, nor in his notoriously faltering testimony to Congress months later. Mueller repeatedly referred questioners back to the text of his report, apparently unwilling—or unable—to add any words of his own. If his report was mischaracterized by Barr and Trump, Mueller did nothing to correct the record.

[David Frum: What the Mueller report actually said]

Despite the place Mueller once held in the public imagination, he did not see himself as an antagonist to Trump. At any rate, he was surely the least aggressive antagonist Trump has ever faced. So what can explain the posthumous malice Trump feels toward Mueller seven years after his investigation fizzled out? Perhaps it’s just the principle of the thing: For Trump, an enemy is an enemy and must be attacked by fair means or foul, even in the grave.

But perhaps Trump’s grievance is more specific. The questions Mueller could not answer he also could not dispel. To this day, it remains clear that something is amiss in the relationship Trump has with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump in his second term has made it a priority to cut U.S. assistance to Ukraine and to coerce that struggling democracy to submit to Moscow’s terms. Might Trump’s pro-Russia policy in 2025 have anything to do with Russia’s pro-Trump policy in 2016?

Mueller’s inability to get to the bottom of the murk did not make the murk any less murky. Trump seems to feel the suspicion to this day, and he’s right to feel it. But Robert Mueller is not to blame for this stain on Trump’s reputation. Trump did that himself.

Why Britain Is Saying No to Trump’s Iran War

2026-03-18T13:30:00-04:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on President Trump’s dangerous disregarding of Congress’s powers of war-making and peacemaking. David argues that though Republicans have enabled the president’s dark impulses, Democrats in Congress also seem happy to turn a blind eye to the Trump administration’s actions in Iran. This, David argues, jeopardizes the restraints put on the President in a constitutional government.

Then, David is joined by Alastair Campbell, a writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics, to discuss how President Trump has poisoned the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. Frum and Campbell analyze how Trump’s impulsive war in Iran has put further strain on the alliance and how Trump’s relationship with Prime Minister Starmer differs from President Bush’s relationship with Tony Blair at the outset of the war in Iraq.

Finally, David ends the show with a discussion of the German novel The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann. David explores how the novel offers a poignant portrayal of moral compromise in Nazi Germany.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Alastair Campbell, co-host of the extraordinarily successful British podcast The Rest Is Politics. Previously, he served as the most intimate aide of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and he worked especially in that capacity on the U.S.-U.K. relationship. And in this time of war in the Middle East, I thought Campbell, who was such a central figure in the U.S.-U.K. partnership in the Iraq War of 2003, could cast light on what is right and what is wrong in the U.S.-U.K. relationship in this war in the Persian Gulf.

My book this week will be a novel, The Director, by the German writer Daniel Kehlmann, published in 2023 and translated in 2025. It’s a fascinating study of moral compromise in the production of art and also relevant to many of the questions Americans are wrestling with today.

Before I turn to any of that, let me begin with some opening thoughts about the raging and intensifying and escalating and prolonging conflict that the United States is waging in the Persian Gulf against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I record this podcast on the morning of Monday; you will probably watch or listen to it somewhat later, and so you may know more about current events than I do. I will not try to keep up with the military situation in the Gulf. I wanna talk instead about an increasing constitutional crisis that this war poses at home.

This war, at the time I record and probably still at the time you watch or listen to it, has not in any way been authorized by Congress. And it needs to be emphasized how unusual this is. I composed a short list of the major conflicts the United States has fought since 1945: Korea, Vietnam, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the Panama invasion in 1989, the Gulf War in 1990, Somalia, the Kosovo War, the war in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libya war, the ISIS war that started in 2014 as sort of an aftershock of the Iraq War. Now, it is impressive how many of these wars had explicit congressional authorization. The Gulf War was authorized by Congress. The Afghanistan War was authorized by Congress. The Iraq War was authorized by Congress.

Now, other wars were not, but they still had a legal basis. The Korean War, for example, was not authorized by Congress, because in 1950, Americans believed very intensely in the integrity of the United Nations. They had yet to be disillusioned by that. And in the United Nations Charter, it said that acts of aggression would be met by the combined action of United Nations Security Council members. When North Korea invaded South Korea in the summer of 1950, the Soviet Union was boycotting the United Nations at the time. And so [they were] able to pass a Security Council resolution calling on member nations to support South Korea against North Korea. And so President [Harry] Truman argued, Not only do I not need authorization by Congress, but Congress has already authorized the war by authorizing us to join the United Nations Charter, which calls on member nations to do what didn’t happen in the League of Nations and enforce the orders of the United Nations by military power. Now, lawyers will argue about all of this, and of course, the United Nations didn’t go the way Americans hoped it would in 1950. But Truman thought, and Americans agreed, he had a strong legal basis for fighting the Korean War in the authorizing act of the United Nations.

In the same way, George H. W. Bush’s actions in Panama to overthrow the dictator [Manuel] Noriega, which were not authorized by Congress, were presented by him as actions in support of the Panama Canal Treaty between Panama and the United States, which he argued the dictator Noriega was violating by his drug dealing and other crimes—so if not an authorizing act by Congress, then an authorizing act by some kind of treaty of the United States.

Most of the other wars that were fought without authorization were quite limited in scope: Grenada, Kosovo, Libya. Kosovo was costly in money but not in American human life. The Libyan intervention was not an expensive war in either terms, of money or human life, and neither was Grenada. So the presidents of the day would argue, These are policing actions. They don’t require supplemental appropriation by Congress. We can do them based on executive authority. But big wars require either a preexisting treaty or an authorization. Both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were authorized by a vote of Congress. And the war against ISIS was a continuation of the Iraq War, and the Obama administration argued that the Iraq authorizing resolution still held. It was not a dead letter. In 2013, President [Barack] Obama considered getting involved in the Syrian civil war, and he asked for an authorizing resolution from Congress, and when Congress voted no, he chose not to act. That had many other consequences, but it preserved the theory that congressional authorization is necessary for the United States to fight a big, costly, and dangerous war.

So Iran really is a departure here. It’s a war. There’s no treaty. It’s obviously a major war. And there’s no pretense, no pretext, no initiative, no beginning of an act of a request for authorization by Congress. It is not authorized in any way.

Now, some have argued on the basis of this that because of that, the war is illegal and should be stopped as quickly as possible. But that’s kind of a fantasy. The war is on. It is halfway through—or midway through, or substantially through—its stated objectives of reducing Iranian military capacity. We don’t know what the casualties are on the Iranian side. They’re very big. America has also taken losses. American allies in the region are under missile fire. This is like parking an airplane in midair; you cannot stop this war right now and say, Oh, well. Let’s pretend that never happened. This war will have to be fought to some kind of resolution, either successful or unsuccessful. But there’s no stopping it midway through. And that makes the absence of congressional authorization even more glaring.

And the unhappy truth that must be told is many in Congress prefer it this way. See, the secret of the Iran war is it’s not actually as unpopular in Congress as it seems to be in the country. And there are many in Congress, especially on the Democratic side but not only, who support the goals of this war, broadly support the way in which it’s being conducted, but don’t trust Donald Trump, don’t wanna tangle with the progressive wing of their party that wants to stop the war altogether, and prefer not to cast a vote one way or another. And so they are becoming increasingly compliant and even complicit with President Trump’s preference to just do everything on his own, without asking Congress. But Congress needs to make itself heard. And this pattern in Iran is a reminder of how much of the usurpation of the Trump administration is enabled by the willing compliance of Congress, and not only Republicans in Congress, with assertions of presidential authority that they don’t disagree with but don’t wanna be on record one way or the other about.

And this is not a constitutional outcome. And this is an outcome that, anyway, can’t last, because sooner or later, the Trump administration will come to Congress with a request for money. Because the war is costing $1 billion a day; some say $2 billion a day. By the administration’s own account, it had cost more than $11 billion as of the end of last week. Those figures will surely rise. They’re probably understated in all kinds of ways. There will have to be some kind of supplemental resolution that will pass House and Senate to pay for the war that Trump started. And Congress’s dereliction of duty, not being present during the conduct of the war, will meet its judgment at some point when the war is over, or well on its way to being over or much more advanced, anyway, than it is now, Congress is asked, Will you pay for it or not? And Congress will presumably vote to pay for it. So since they’re going to do that, if they’re going to be present at the funding stage, they need to be present at the war-fighting stage.

And this is especially important with an administration as untrustworthy as the Trump administration because the administration is up to things that Congress needs to stop. Secretary of Defense—“Secretary of War,” as he styles himself—Pete Hegseth has given press conferences in which he has invoked the possibility of American atrocities. He has said there will be “no quarter” given, meaning no one will be allowed to surrender. If true, that’s a war crime. But Congress needs to be overseeing: Is this war fought in accordance with American values and the laws of war? Are you taking prisoners when prisoners surrender? Are the prisoners treated properly? Are you doing other things to avoid the taint of atrocity that seems to so fascinate and delight Pete Hegseth?

Congress also needs to be overseeing the question of how is this war not only being paid, but how is it giving off revenue? President Trump has taken lavish gifts from many of the countries that the United States is protecting in this war. He took a plane from Qatar that the United States is protecting. He and his family took a major investment in their corporation from state-sponsored business in the United Arab Emirates. At the end of the Gulf War in 1990, ’91, President George H. W. Bush gained for the United States major payments from U.S. allies in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They contributed to the costs of the 1990 war, and those contributions went into the U.S. Treasury, where they offset the cost of the war, according to provisions established by Congress.

We wanna make sure that President Trump, if he repeats this program, repeats it in an equally legal way and that none of the contributions from allies, if there are any, go into his pocket, those of his family, those of his Cabinet; that he doesn’t turn contributions by allies to American costs into bribes by allies to the Trump family. We wanna make sure of that. That’s Congress’s job: no emoluments, no atrocities. They have to be present. And that means they need some kind of oversight structure, and that means they need to be present in some way in the approval and authorization of this war. They can’t just wash their hands of it and say, Well, if it leads to results we like, we’ll accept them, and if it leads to results we don’t like, we’ll condemn them. But in the meantime, we won’t do anything, because we know that the progressive demand—stop the war—is meaningless and irresponsible and impossible and just words that don’t mean anything. We don’t wanna be with them, but we don’t wanna be with the administration, so we’ll abstain and not be responsible at all.

The ideal of constitutional government is not only a restraint on the power of the president and the powers of other branches of government; it’s an affirmative duty imposed on everyone in government and enforced, in the first place, by Congress. This war purports to be a war of liberation for the oppressed people of Iran. I hope that war aim is true and is met. It purports to be a war of self-defense for the American people, and I hope that claim is true and will be justified by the event. But whatever its motives, however its conduct, whatever fine goals we assert for the war, the war needs to be fought as a constitutional war, as previous American wars always were. And the job of making it a constitutional war is not going to be done, is not of interest to the administration. The job of making this a constitutional war will fall on Congress—mostly Democrats, but also Republicans. It’s a duty that Congress has, and they should stop refraining from it and assert themselves as the first branch of government, defined by the first article of the Constitution and entrusted with the war-making powers and the peacemaking powers of the United States.

And now my dialogue with Alastair Campbell.

[Music]

Frum: Alastair Campbell co-hosts the leading British political podcast The Rest is Politics, but that is only the most recent accomplishment in a career glittering with them. Press secretary and chief speechwriter to Tony Blair in the great Labour victory of 1997, he led the strategy that won two more majorities for the United Kingdom Labour Party in the elections of 2001 and 2005. In government, among many other portfolios, he was crucial to building and sustaining the U.S.-U.K. partnership after the 9/11 attacks, a partnership that came under fire in Britain during the long and difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’s an author, too, of some 18 books, if I have the tally right, notably of selections from his voluminous diaries. Expelled from the Labour Party in 2017 for his all-out opposition to British exit from the European Union at a time when the then-leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was slyly temporizing with Brexit, Campbell now looms above the party system like the monarchy or the common law. I’ve had the privilege of appearing as a guest on The Rest Is Politics. I’m honored to host a return visit by Alastair Campbell to The David Frum Show. Alastair, thank you so much.

Alastair Campbell: My pleasure, David. That’s very kind. I’ve actually written 21 books, but anyway, 18 is—

Frum: Twenty-one? So my—

Campbell: Twenty-one, yeah, yeah.

Frum: Okay, I tried to count them all, but I failed.

Campbell: I’ve not written a book since I started doing the podcast, and that’s beginning to get at me.

Frum: So I first met you in the context of the Brexit debate, which was a decade ago, and when you were kind enough to agree to come on the show, that was our headline topic. But since then, a war has broken out, and with it, there is a new rift in [the] U.S.-U.K. relationship, which you have done so much to build and sustain. So I’d like to start with that and then work our way back to the point of origin of where we are, which was Trump and Brexit in 2016. But let’s start with what has happened in the U.S.-U.K. relationship since the beginning of the war in Iran. How do you see where we are, what has happened, and where we’re going?

Campbell: Well, there’s a lot in that, and of course, it’s happening right now. The thing about Trump’s presidency is that he moves and breaks things so often that you kind of forget what the last one was; then you’re on to the next one. So we’re literally still in the same week as when he launched, with the Israelis, this massive attack on Iran. And what’s happened is that [British Prime Minister] Keir Starmer, who is a lawyer by training—and an international lawyer, at that—he decided that he could see no U.K. legal base for taking part in the attack on Iran and therefore did not allow the Americans to use some of our bases.

Twenty-four hours later, because in the Iranian response, there was the sense of U.K. targets being approached by the Iranians, not least in Cyprus, which is currently the president of the European Union in this weird rotating system they have of the EU presidency, and so he decided that, for limited defense operations, two bases could be used—none of which has been good enough for Donald Trump, who has launched not quite [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky–style, but a series of low blows, sitting alongside Chancellor [Friedrich] Merz of Germany in the Oval Office, where [Vice President J. D.] Vance and Trump earlier did beat up Zelensky, and essentially saying that Britain was unreliable, Keir Starmer’s no Winston Churchill, and then going on, for this nth time, this MAGA ridiculous attack on London. You go to London regularly. You know that London’s still one of the most amazing cities in the world. And because we happen to have a brown-skinned Muslim mayor, MAGA has decided that London is one of their great enemies. So I’d say it’s tense and difficult.

Frum: Let me do a little recapitulation of what you’ve just said and some things that are even farther in time behind it. Since Donald Trump returned to power in January ’25, the relationship has been stressed, first and above all, by Donald Trump’s economic aggression against Great Britain and the European continent: a series of tariffs, talks of a U.S.-U.K. free trade agreement that, of course, never materialized. Both the president and the vice president made disgustingly disparaging comments about the valor and sacrifice of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had the honor of visiting British troops in both those countries; I’m sure you did on many more occasions. The sacrifices and the contributions were enormous and real and never to be spoken of disrespectfully, but they did that.

But then there has been this problem, which is, one of the most important of the British bases that the United States uses is the base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. That’s British territory that the British government is negotiating to surrender to the island nation of Mauritius, a thousand miles away. Keir Starmer has made that a big project of his government. And tangled in this network of international law, I think Diego Garcia was one of the bases that Starmer said the Americans could not use, and American use of the big airstrips and the big naval bases at Diego Garcia does depend on British permission. It’s always been assumed that permission would be available; it wasn’t, and that did interfere with the ability to use the big American bombers in the early part of the Iran war.

Campbell: Mm-hmm. One big point you missed when you were telling the backstory was Greenland as well. I think Greenland and the continuing threat to Greenland, where the Europeans have, I think, to some extent, successfully thus far pushed back, although I saw the Danish prime minister at the Munich Security Conference—they still think that it’s very much in Trump’s mind and on the table.

So the Chagos Islands issue, and this is really interesting: Jonathan Powell, who you know and is my colleague with Tony Blair—he’s now Keir Starmer’s national security adviser—he was very centrally involved in this negotiation over the Chagos Islands. And I said at the start, Keir Starmer’s background is the law, and I think, at a time when you have an American president like Trump and a Russian president like [Vladimir] Putin and some of the other guys who think that they are answerable to nobody but themselves and their interests at any given time, he’s responding to a legal decision that governments have to deal with. And by the way, as part of that, he British government was very careful to make sure that the Americans were on their side for that, and they said they were. And publicly—this is what’s so difficult about dealing with Donald Trump: One day, he says he’s fine with something, and the next day, he says he’s completely unfine with it, and governments just have to kind of dance around that.

I think we’re in the week of the 80th anniversary of the term special relationship first being used. And it’s gone up and down; our power has gone relatively down relative to the United States. But I think there is something still quite special about it, but we shouldn’t overstate it, nor should we get too hung up on the fact that there have always been differences—the question, then, is how you manage them. Famously, [British Prime Minister] Harold Wilson refused to send in British troops alongside the Americans of Vietnam. That could have “destroyed the special relationship,” but it didn’t. And I think what we’re seeing at the moment is a politics that is so defined around the personality of one human being, namely, Donald Trump, and what he thinks he is entitled to as president of the United States.

And what’s so strange about this, our politics—so you take the right wing in Britain. The right-wing newspapers today are totally on Donald Trump’s side against Keir Starmer. Why? Because they hate the Labour government and they hate the Labour Party. But these are the same people who talk the whole time about patriotism. And these are the same people who wanted us to come out of the European Union because we shouldn’t have foreign powers telling us what we should do. And yet they want to bow down before, surely, one of the most unhinged, dangerous American presidents there has ever been. So it’s a very, very weird and difficult world that Keir Starmer is trying to navigate.

Frum: I wanna double back to your point about Greenland, and you’re right; I made a terrible mistake in omitting that from the list of decisive incidents, because we were at a point, in the month of January, when European powers were considering whether they would have to use military force to defend a fellow European power, Denmark’s territory, against an invasion by the United States. And I believe there were officers sent, principally French, but I think some British, too, as part of a military planning mission to defend Greenland against the risk of an American invasion. So that obviously stresses the relationship.

But didn’t the special relationship begin—wasn’t it founded on British power, that Britain was not only the most militarily capable of the non-American partners in NATO, but the most globally present? If we’re talking about the year 1970, the Germans had a lot of military power, too, but it couldn’t be projected anywhere much beyond the borders of Germany, whereas British military power in the year 1970 could go all over the world, or many places in the world. And in a sense that the special relationship is America’s relationship with whoever is the second-most-militarily-capable power in the Western alliance, and if that ceases to be Britain because of budgetary reasons and becomes Israel, the special relationship is bound to shift.

Campbell: Look, I think there’s a lot in that, and I think there’s two things that I would add together in this equation. The first is that there was a peace dividend. There was a period during which we felt more secure than we do right now. Not just Donald Trump, but previous American presidents, I think, have had this worry that Europe is just assuming that the Americans will always be there for Europe in any difficult situation that we find ourselves in. So they’re not wrong in saying, look, when you—I know he’s got a particular thing about Spain at the moment, as well as the U.K.—Spain doesn’t spend that much on defense and probably does think, well, it can be part of the European defense infrastructure involved in NATO and the Americans will always be there. And what Trump is basically saying is, No, you guys have got to look after your own backyard. In a more polite, diplomatic way, previous American presidents have said the same. Most European countries now are upping the spending on defense. I don’t know that it’s just about military power. I actually have a sense that the Americans—Trump, Vance, Hegseth, all these guys—I think they want Europe weak. And so, on the one hand, even as the Europeans are saying, Yeah, okay, we get the point; we’re gonna spend more on defense, but then once they try to assert themselves in any way, that provokes the kind of reactions that we’ve been seeing.

Look, if the Americans just decided, We’re gonna roll in on Greenland, okay, I don’t know what the Europeans would do. And the reason why I think the Danes feel so offended and hurt by what’s going on is that there’s never been a problem with the United States having far more bases than they’ve got. They’ve had far more bases than they’ve now got; they pulled back. And so I think that, as ever with Trump, it’s trying to work out what’s a real motivation and what’s not a real motivation. So I think the Europeans—I’m glad that they stood by Denmark. That being said, if Trump did say, I don’t give a damn about that; in we go, that is the end of NATO. And that’s quite a big thing for the world. That’s quite a big thing for the world.

Frum: As you’ve reminded us, there are a long list of Trump infractions, aggressions, and abuses against Europe and other allies too: Japan and South Korea have their complaints, Canada. And as you are right to remind us, international law is important. That’s what protects Greenland from being annexed by the United States. You can’t just have great powers annexing bits of territory—or you can, but none of us, I think, want to live in a world in which that becomes the norm.

But without going down the rabbit hole of the Chagos Island treaty—I wrote a big article about it for The Atlantic, which I recommend to readers who wanna go down this rabbit hole. But it does seem that Britain, at least under this government, has got itself committed to a vision of international law that is so tangled and so one-sided that it constrains democracies; it doesn’t constrain non-democracies. It constrains Western powers; it doesn’t constrain non-Western powers. And anytime you get a ruling from any tribunal anywhere, including literally the International Tribunal [for] the Law of the Sea, everyone else will say, Oh, I guess this big base, Diego Garcia, which the United States and Britain have been fortifying since the 1960s, on which American power in the Indian Ocean depends, I guess that has to go to Mauritius, then.

Campbell: Well, only if that is the judgment that is handed down. Look, I think this has been weaponized. Because we live in this weaponized, polarized political world. Chagos Island is a very good example, where the right wing here have decided, regardless of what the legalities are, that Keir Starmer has done the wrong thing, okay, in agreeing to this deal with Mauritius. Donald Trump, who thought he was doing the right thing, has now moved to a position of saying he’s done the wrong thing, and of course, that then adds fuel to the fire of the people on the right here, who are saying he’s done the wrong thing.

And also, the other thing I would say about international law is that international law is always open to political interpretation. It’s like with the United Nations—the United Nations is a collection of all the governments of the world and all the differences that go with that. What I’m finding strange about what’s happening at the moment is that the Americans don’t even seem to be making the legalistic case for some of the actions that they’re taking. It’s all about the politics.

And so I just feel, with the Chagos Islands, that it wasn’t about surrendering power or further decline [of] post-empire Britain. I think it was trying to tie up a loose end of our security architecture, which we inherited from the last government, who had started that process, and just sort of get it off the table, since when it’s become a far bigger issue than I ever thought that it would.

Frum: Keir Starmer has invoked international law as a reason that Britain didn’t join the American action in Iran, and there are a lot of good reasons to be extremely hesitant about following Donald Trump’s lead on anything. [In] a previous program that I did with Tom Nichols, we worried about what Trump’s war in Iran means for civil liberties inside the United States because war is a grant of power to the president, always, inevitably, and has to be and should be, and if you have a president who can’t be trusted with that grant of power, that means that even necessary wars need to be avoided because the president will get power that he will abuse. He’s proven that he will abuse it.

With that caveat, I’m not telling on a policy judgment, but isn’t there something strange about someone like Keir Starmer, who’s based his career, pre-politics, on international humanitarian concerns, looking at a situation like that in Iran and saying, Hands tied, nothing we can do about it?

Campbell: I don’t think he’s saying hands tied, nothing he would do about it, but he’s saying that the case, as presented to him on a particular time, on a particular day, out of a reasonably clear blue sky—we knew something was coming, but he suddenly gets a demand to take part in the action that the Americans are proposing, alongside the Israelis. And he is making an assessment with our attorney general on the U.K. legal case for us taking part in that.

And bearing in mind, I was part of Tony Blair’s team in the buildup to the Iraq War, post-9/11—you mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan—and I can see why he would be cautious. I would see why he would think that, I’m not going to go into this without being absolutely clear that, further down the track, when maybe it doesn’t go quite as well, when maybe it does lead to all sorts of unintended consequences, as Iraq did in 2003, that there will be a reckoning and an accountability that will look, in very, very heavy, critical historical detail, at every step of this process. And so I think what you’ve seen is Keir Starmer, who, yes, has worked very, very hard at trying to form a good personal relationship with Donald Trump—and people have been surprised that he actually managed to do that at all, let alone what seemed to be quite successfully—but now saying, No, that does not mean that he has a blank check to do stuff that in our assessment, from the British perspective, has no legal base and no clear plan.

So I think you’ve got to at least respect the fact that I think he is actually saying what he genuinely thinks about this, even knowing there will be a political cost to that in the relationship with Donald Trump.

Frum: You and I were both in the building during the run-up to Iraq and Afghanistan. You were obviously in a much more important chair than I was. (Laughs.) And you were a central figure in all of that. And I know you’ve given hundreds of interviews and have spoken about it hundreds of times, and we don’t need to repeat things that have been said before. But drawing from this vantage point—and perhaps this has already happened—if a prime minister of Great Britain would ask you to advise him, based on your experience in 2001, ’02, and ’03, what are the things that a British prime minister should be thinking about and asking about and asking for from an American president in the face of this request for action?

Campbell: I think if there’s something that we didn’t ask enough, it was about what happens after. I think that Tony Blair didn’t need any persuading that the Taliban were a very, very bad, dangerous group of people who were sheltering people who’d been responsible for 9/11. I don’t think he needed any persuading that Saddam Hussein was a real threat. But I think where we didn’t push hard enough—we made assumptions about the post-Saddam for planning. Because we were the junior partner, no doubt about that. Most of the military hardware was American; most of the leadership was American. It’s always stunned me the extent to which Tony Blair probably suffered way more political grief than George W. Bush ever did for these decisions, but we were very much the junior partner.

When you went through that litany from the start of the interview, all the things where Donald Trump has shown his unreliability, shown his lack of respect for us and for the people who fought in those wars in particular and who died in those wars, saying that they kept back from the front line—it was hugely insulting—I think it’s not unreasonable for the prime minister, without going out of his way to offend Trump or the United States, just to be very, very cautious. And what you’re seeing now—just before we started the interview, I was just watching some of the interviews with the congresspeople and the senators who are clear to see all this classified stuff and to have the briefings that they’ve been having, and the line that they keep coming out with is: There was no threat, and there is no plan. Well, if that’s a bunch of American politicians saying that, I think for a British prime minister just to be cautious is not a bad thing.

Frum: I don’t agree with them at all, and I don’t believe they mean it when they say there’s no threat. But the lack of plan really is alarming. And one of the things, if I look back on the Iraq time, the glimpse of it that I had was that many of the people who were most eager to overthrow Saddam, especially Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld, were also eager to demonstrate that the United States had these military capabilities. It could do things in the computer age with a much lighter force. It was a point of principle, almost, to refuse to think about what happened next; that was not their department. The kind of things that Secretary of Defense—or, as he styles himself, “Secretary of War”—Hegseth is now saying belligerently and stupidly were said intelligently and politely in 2003, which is: We don’t wanna do nation building. We don’t wanna do democracy building. That’s not our job. We wanna step back and let the Iraqis run the process. But of course, the Iraqis were inheriting a shattered state, riven by vendettas and anger, with all the most talented people driven into exile, the infrastructure broken. The whole idea that they could stand up something in six months or three was crazy. And of course, the allied powers, the coalition partners, if they were not prepared to sign up for an extended period of state building in Iraq, then getting rid of Saddam was not going to work.

And the Trump people seemed to have looked at the Iraq experience and said, You know what went wrong in Iraq? Too much thinking about the future. We’re not gonna do any of that. And not only are we not gonna do any of it; we’re gonna have special press conferences where we say we refuse to do it, that it’s fake and weak to think about the future. We are not going to think about it. Whatever happens, happens. And you think, Well, if you bring down the mullahocracy, you can’t stand up a government for Iran, a great and ancient civilization. It’s not as riven a society as Iraq was. But still, it’s only 60 percent Persian. It’s got ethnic fringes. And it’s got a lot of vendettas, I assume. You can’t just wash your hands of it after you break the regime’s capacity to hold on to power.

Campbell: I think one of the things that will be weighing in Trump’s mind all the time—because I don’t think it’s too offensive to say he’s got really deeply, seriously narcissistic tendencies; he thinks that he’s very, very special, better than everybody else, understands the world better than anybody else—and he will be thinking, Right, well, I was told that when we move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, that that’s gonna cause absolute mayhem and total chaos and it’s a stupid thing to do. He does it; nothing much happens. He takes out [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro in Venezuela, and everybody says, This is gonna cause complete chaos in the region. And he does it, and it’s not really caused that terrible chaos that was predicted, in part because he’s done a deal with Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s No. 2.

And I think he’s gone in with the same sort of mindset with this. Iran bad—put to one side whether it’s related to kind of [getting] the Epstein files out of the news; I don’t know whether that’s the way he thinks or not, but a lot of people suggest it might be. But he takes out the ayatollah, and then they’re just into this sort of day by day. So today, it’s Hegseth talking about, We’re gonna find and fix, and we’ve sunk this with a torpedo, and proudly saying it’s the first sinking of a sub by a submarine torpedo since the Second World War, at a time when most of the world is thinking, Please don’t create a third world war, and he’s kind of bringing that messaging into the mix. And so what I have a sense of with him is, it is the reality TV show, I’m afraid, and he’s got his characters, and he gives them all a personality, and he gives them names. And in his head, I think this is sort of good v. evil, and he sees himself as good.

Now, I think it’s good to get rid of the Iranian regime. But one of the points I thought Keir Starmer made very powerfully when he was explaining why we weren’t getting involved on day one was he said that there’s never been a successful regime change from the air. There has to be a follow-through plan. There has to be something. You can’t just leave the whole place in complete chaos and then move on to the next adventure. And that’s the feeling you get that is likely to happen, and the next adventure likely to be provoked and inspired by the way that others are responding, rather than as part of some strategic plan that the Americans had from the word go.

You look at the way the Iranians have responded to this—they’re whacking missiles at something like a dozen countries, okay? Now, part of their thinking will be, Let’s get the oil price going, shooting up so that maybe the Saudis and the rest of them start to put pressure on Trump and say, Hold on a minute, this is really, really bad for everybody, not just for Iran. And they might also be trying to get into his mindset of thinking, This is not gonna help you in the midterms, either. So I get the feeling this is something that’s been done through instinct, without really thinking through a lot of the consequences.

Frum: The single consequence that I worry about most is, I have no idea whether the Iranians have any capacity to do terrorism inside the United States, but you have to prudently assume they have some. Right now, as you and I speak, there’s a blockade by Democrats in Congress against funding the Department of Homeland Security for its many, many abuses, for the lies it’s told, and for the strong whiff of self-dealing and corruption that hangs over the agency. So Democrats are saying, We’re not gonna fund their next request for money. But that—as Americans rightly worry that the Iranians may strike back on the American homeland, it’s not going to be sustainable to refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security. And Trump is going to reacquire the powers that he so terribly misused in his first year over domestic security at a time when people around him—we haven’t heard this exactly from him yet, but people around him are whispering, Maybe you can use the military to control or even suppress the 2026 elections. There’s a domestic-freedom price that may be at risk from this war or from the fears that are reasonably stirred by this war.

Campbell: Yeah, for sure. I was in Ukraine last week, and I kept hearing this thing about Donald Trump thinks Zelensky should have an election. And I had a meeting with the electoral commission, who just explained to me what that would mean in practice right now, with 5 million Ukrainians living inside the European Union, several more Ukrainians displaced from their own homes, hundreds of thousands who are fighting. They were basically just saying, well, one, it’s unconstitutional ’cause you can’t have elections under the Ukrainian constitution and martial law. But secondly, practically, it’s virtually impossible. And I do have a slight fear that one of the things that Trump and his team are trying to work towards is maybe that you don’t necessarily have elections at the time that they’re expected, because there’s so much mayhem going on in the world. But if you’re the creator of the mayhem, which right now, he is, and Hegseth started his statement the other day by saying, “We didn’t start this war.” Well, we can have a historical discussion about the various stages, but this stage, they did start it.

Frum: Let me ask you another question about the lessons of 2003. One of the questions I’ve often wondered is, both George W. Bush and Tony Blair were amazingly charming people. And their charm worked on each other, as well. And they developed this very special bond. And a critic of what they were doing could say, You guys got so into each other. You had so much trust, so much cooperation, [it] became such an intense personal relationship that questions of whether this was a good idea, especially on the British end, got subordinated to the paramount urgency, the paramount delight of maintaining this personal relationship that the two of you have developed because you are both such attractive human beings. Now, the good news is, that’s a problem you don’t have with Donald Trump. But do you think there’s anything to that, and do you see lessons there about the risk, especially to Britain, of overpersonalizing the special relationship?

Campbell: You had the same before George Bush with Bill Clinton, but it was more obvious because the political—

Frum: Also a very charming person.

Campbell: Exactly. Because the political alignment was clearer. I think if you went back to that period and I were to say, on any given day, to Tony Blair, Write down a list of all the things that your job has to do well, okay, you, as prime minister. Write them all down, and then try to put them into some kind of order, and I would think having as good a relationship as possible with other world leaders, and in particular, the United States president, would be quite high up, okay? And I think that’s been the same for Keir Starmer, and he’s worked hard at that.

I don’t think that the George Bush–Tony Blair relationship had the overall impact that you’re talking about, because I think they both, with very different personalities, different politics, different backstory, different histories, actually did passionately believe that they were doing the right thing. But one of the factors that wasn’t necessarily the same for George Bush but was for Tony Blair—in Tony Blair’s mind, it was definitely a factor: If I am not going to be with the Americans, I have to be conscious of being a prime minister who might be doing medium- and longer-term damage to a relationship that we really need. Now, that wasn’t top of his list in the U.S.-U.K. relationship vis-à-vis Iraq, but it would have been in there. Did that mean, therefore, that he sometimes lent into the American position with more enthusiasm than he would if he’d only been thinking about his own political position? For sure. But I think he thought, on the bigger picture of the importance of that relationship between the countries, not just as personalities, I think he felt that was why there had to be really good grounds for not being with the Americans on this.

And you mentioned Rumsfeld earlier—I can remember one day when Rumsfeld spoke to Geoff Hoon, who was our defense secretary at the time, and said, Listen, we can do this on our own. If this is too difficult for you guys, you don’t need to be there. We can do this on our own. And Geoff Hoon reported that back to Tony Blair, and I can remember Tony Blair saying to the room, Listen, you guys have gotta get wise to something: I’m not doing this for the Americans; I’m doing this ’cause I think it’s the right thing for us to do.

So I think the personalities make the mood music of a relationship better, but I don’t think it changed the fundamentals of our position that much.

Frum: When you were kind enough to agree to join this conversation, we were thinking then very much about the Brexit 10th anniversary. And a lot of the questions about Brexit suddenly seem very much more urgent now.

Through the past 200, 300 years, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and then Northern Ireland was always the center of a much bigger political unit. For a long time, it was the center of a British empire that had sometimes included the United States, then went on to include India and other places. But Britain was just What do they know of England who only England know? Britain was the center of something much bigger. And even as the empire began to fall away, Britain became the central point in two other, more complicated arrangements: one with the European continent, one with the United States.

Britain in 2026 finds itself alone in a way that is a very new experience, actually, in British history: no European Union, special relationship that exists more as a matter of courtesy and memory than as operational fact, and just a few rocks and islands that remain of the empire. Britain is a European country that is not connected to any kinds of other European partnerships. Has Britain adjusted to this reality of its self-isolation, both from a trade and economic point of view and a strategic point of view?

Campbell: My answer is no, we haven’t. I think that those who argued for Brexit and campaigned and won the campaign for Brexit are still living under the massive delusion that somehow this isolation is good for us, that this supposedly great freedom that we have to set our own laws—which, by the way, we always did have. It’s just that, in some areas, we’d made a decision to pull sovereignty about some of the laws; that’s all. And we never lost that sovereignty. So what’s happened is that—I think it’s like anything that you do in life, where people will take a long time before they admit something may have been wrong. I think it’s the worst act of self-harm. I find it very hard to think of any other actual, specific choice that a country has made for its own future that has done so much harm. Our economy’s probably about—you can pick your reports and take your pick, but we’re probably 5 percent weaker than we were. Our trade is substantially weaker than it was. Our standing in the world has fallen, I think, as a result of it.

Now, I think one of the things Keir Starmer is doing pretty well as prime minister, he’s trying to rebuild that in the European context. It’s interesting, on the back of Iran, the first statement that came out of Europe was from something called the “E3”: France, Germany, United Kingdom. So he’s kind of working at that, but we’re just catching up. And I think until we acknowledge that it is an act of self-harm and that we need to repair it in a meaningful, substantial way, we’re not going to recover from it in the way that we could.

Frum: It was not just one act of self-harm, and this is where the Trump role becomes really sinister. So the British vote in the summer of 2016 to exit the European Union—and under British law, that vote, while it’s a tremendously important political fact, it has no legal meaning. So the government of the day is free to say, The British people have spoken. What they say is obviously very important. Now it’s for us to figure out what it means, how to implement it. And there are then a vast array of choices, from the most minimal to the most maximal, about what that referendum would mean. So over the next three years, Britain made a series of choices, every time for the most maximal. And one of the reasons it made the most maximal choices was, throughout that period, Donald Trump and people around him were saying, If Britain agrees to make the most maximal choice against Europe, we’re going to cut them a wonderful deal for a free trade deal with the United States.

Now, even if that had been true, Britain and the United States are both service-led economies, finance-led economies. They’re not natural intimate trading partners in the way that Britain and its European neighbors are. But still, it’s better than nothing. And Trump kept promising that something would be available—if only Britain cut itself off from Europe as hard and fast and deep and permanently as possible, and British governments agreed to do that. In the end, of course, the whole U.S.-U.K. promise was—it was never intended seriously. It didn’t exist. Nothing has come of it this decade later. And there’s some amount of Trump deception that led the way to this maximal version of Brexit that Britain’s now got.

Campbell: Well, aided and abetted by the fact that for some of that period, Boris Johnson was prime minister, somebody from the same kind of cloth, where politics is all about the game; it’s all about the personal power and the personal fame and aggrandizement. And you take people for a ride, and that’s what Johnson did. He’s been booted out because, eventually, the Conservative Party saw through him. But nobody in our politics right now really wants to grasp this nettle in a way that will make the big leap forward, which is actually to say, We’ve made a catastrophic error, and we have to fix it.

Now, that now opens, because we left, all sorts of really difficult, complicated questions about whether the Europeans want us back, about whether it’s a European Union we wanna join if the far right come in in Germany, the far right come in in France, whatever it might be. It’s not as if Europe’s just static, either. But one thing you hear all the time—I heard this in Ukraine last week, where I was traveling with people from the European Commission, some of the European commissioners—is that they feel that Brexit’s been bad for us, but it’s been bad for Europe as well. A lot of the smaller countries really miss the U.K. as what they saw as a kind of sensible, pragmatic voice that could just keep their eye on the French and the Germans and just kind of steer things for the smaller countries sometimes.

So I think it’s been a catastrophe, but it’s coincided with this period of politics where populism is rampant, polarization is weaponized, and it’s a successful form of politics. It’s what makes Trump. It’s what helps Nigel Farage here. It’s what helps [Marie] Le Pen and [Jordan] Bardella in France. It’s a very powerful force in the modern media age. And we’ve also entered this era of post-truth, where a fact is no longer a fact. If you talk to the people who fought for Brexit, Boris Johnson will tell you it’s the greatest thing we’ve ever done. Nigel Farage would say, Well, it’s not going exactly as I wanted it to, but that’s because they haven’t done the Brexit I wanted; they’ve done a different sort of Brexit—without ever having to explain what that means in practice. And meanwhile, the reality of Brexit is a weaker economy, a weaker country, and as you say, a country that feels pretty isolated in very, very dangerous times.

Frum: Do you see some possibility of hope here? My sense of it was, the proximate cause for Brexit in 2016 was the Syrian civil war in 2014 and 2015, which sent multiple hundreds of thousands, maybe even multiple millions of people on the way from the Middle East to Europe—and not only from Syria, but the collapse of immigration authority and restraint that happened because of the Syrian civil war also opened the way to people from North Africa, from farther places in the Middle East, from the Far East. And Europe had this sudden shock of enormous numbers of people arriving all at once, and centrist governments all over the European Union collapsed, in Poland and other places; it’s crucial. Viktor Orbán in Hungary was in a lot of trouble in 2014, 2015, and the mass migration saved him and gave him a story that he could tell, and so through the continent. And it pushed Brexit, and it helped elect Donald Trump in a kind of indirect way.

Well, that’s all over, and it’s a decade later, and there are now new political stimuli, above all the threat of Russian aggression. Are we now possibly at the beginning of a new era, where Europeans rediscover why they need to work together to protect themselves against Russia, China, and, unfortunately, Donald Trump’s America too?

Campbell: Well, I’d like to think so, but I can’t say the signs are really great. I do think Europe has done a reasonable job in relation to Ukraine, post–the evidence sign that the Americans were gonna pull the plug on a lot of the military stuff. But I wouldn’t go much stronger than reasonable. I think that we have relied so much on the kind of bravery and the fortitude of the Ukrainians themselves.

And I also think that—you mentioned Hungary there. They’ve got an election on April the 12th. Now, as it happens, Orbán is well down in the polls, but I wouldn’t put anything past him. And he’s now hitting some very, very hard-right messaging in terms of how he thinks he can get through the last lap of this. And don’t forget, in relation to immigration, this Iran conflict is gonna produce all sorts of new pressures on migration flows. And of course, one of the things that the Russians are quite good at doing is stress-testing our borders the whole time and shipping people over and so forth. So, no, I don’t think the immigration issue is over, far from it; I think it’s still a very, very potent part of our politics. And of course, it’s then, on the other side of it, one of the big debates we’re having here are the demographics of the European Union. A society like ours needs immigrants to come and do a lot of the jobs that a lot of British people simply don’t want to do. But politically, that’s a very, very difficult debate to have right now. So, no, I don’t think we’ve moved to that.

I do think that the combination of [the] rise of China; nobody now thinking that Putin, as we thought of it when he first came along, that this is a guy who wants to lean more towards the West—nobody thinks that anymore. But I think the really big game changer on this in the last couple of years has been the American position. It’s a very, very hard thing for a Brit to say this and to feel this, but it’s really hard to escape the notion that, basically, when it comes to Ukraine, the Americans are on Putin’s side, the way they talk about it. And of course, it’s very hard for the leaders to go out and say this because we’re still relying on Americans for intelligence and so much else. But if you look at the graphs of where the money is coming to help Ukraine in its military fight, the Americans have virtually fallen off the graph. And yet still, we’re expected to believe that only Trump and [Jared] Kushner and [Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve] Witkoff have got the power or the authority to negotiate any kind of outcome. Why? Because Putin doesn’t want the Europeans anywhere near the table.

Frum: Last question for you and then I’ll let you go because you’ve been so generous with time. You mentioned hard-right governments coming to power all across the European continent. Are we on the verge of such a thing happening in Britain too?

Campbell: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. But I think we’re in very, very, very volatile times. This could be wishful thinking, but I think Farage, who’s the leader of the best-known populist-right party here—I think we’ve hit peak Farage. I also think he’s made a terrible mistake in being so gung ho behind Trump in relation to Iran. Trump is a uniquely unpopular figure in Europe right now. And he’s actually not that popular in America. I talked on the podcast last week—I saw a polling thing of the most popular world leaders in America. Trump was No. 16. No. 1 was Zelensky, and No. 2 was [Canadian Prime Minister Mark] Carney. No. 3 was [Mexican President Claudia] Sheinbaum [Pardo], and No. 4 was our dear king, of all people. (Laughs.)

I feel that the right wing, they’ve got a lot of traction within the media. We, in Britain, as you know, we have a very right-wing media. We now have our own sort of mini equivalent of Fox News, the GB News. Farage still does not get covered by most of the media as a top-flight politician; he gets covered more as a campaigner and a commentator. But I think as we get nearer to a general election, provided the economy gets better, provided public services improve—which, slowly, they are—then I think Labourers are still in with a fight. However, the fact we’re even saying that, when they got a three-figure majority less than two years ago, is kind of a sign of just how volatile things are. But I’m not convinced the hard right are gonna win here. I’m not convinced. But if you asked me to put my life on it, I wouldn’t put my life on anything right now.

Frum: Alastair Campbell, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining me on The David Frum Show.

Campbell: Not at all. Great to talk you, as ever.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Alastair Campbell for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top of the show, my novel this week is The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, originally published in German in 2023 and translated into English by Ross Benjamin in 2025.

The Director is a book based on historical characters and many true events, which Kehlmann then fictionalizes and reinvents. It tells the story of Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a director who actually existed in the historical record, a prominent maker of silent films in the 1920s, who migrated to the United States in the 1930s and then returned to his native Austria in 1938, after the Anschluss with Nazi Germany.

Now, there’s a lot of controversy about exactly why Pabst returned. Pabst had family in Austria. He was not Jewish. He was able to return. There doesn’t seem to be record of his sympathy with the regime, but he was having career difficulty in America, and perhaps, he felt that the return to the scenes of his earlier success would reignite his career. The record doesn’t show, so Kehlmann invents. And he tells the story of an artist—a great artist, in his telling—who is led by his artistic ambition, but also by a kind of inner moral weakness, into a series of compromises, of ever-intensifying radicalism with ever larger consequences.

Now, the novel is filled with many characters, who, again, existed in the historical record: the actresses Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo. Joseph Goebbels makes an appearance. So, in an amazing display of virtuosity, does the English writer P. G. Wodehouse. Now, the Wodehouse section is worth a mention just on its own. So Wodehouse was very famous already in 1940, very wealthy. He had a villa in France, and he was captured there by the Germans when they invaded France in 1940. He was interned in a camp for prominent civilian prisoners. And then the Nazis struck a deal with him whereby he was released, or allowed to live under more lenient conditions, in exchange for executing a series of propaganda broadcasts, nonpolitical but basically making light of the conditions in which he was held, back to England. Kehlmann creates, invents an entirely new broadcast in the Wodehouse idiom to advance the plot; one of the ways the plot is moved forward is through the mechanism of an imaginary Wodehouse broadcast. And if you’ve read the broadcasts—they are still in print—it is an amazing capture of Wodehouse’s wartime voice, both in its inner refusal to turn traitor, to be a propagandist, but in its kind of moral confusion and its whimsicality in a situation where whimsicality is absolutely the last thing called for. So that is a fine display of art.

And much else in the novel is highly virtuosic and artistic. Kehlmann is able to capture the realities of life under Nazi control through tiny, little devices that make very delicate, subtle little appearances. At a bourgeois tea party, the hostess shows off a beautiful cut-crystal sugar bowl, much finer than the rest of her china, that she has somehow acquired. And when she’s asked where she got the sugar bowl, the room goes kind of awkward, and the subject is changed. Presumably, it’s been looted or stolen from her Jewish neighbors, but she doesn’t wanna say that. The novelist doesn’t tell us that. He just allows us to reconstruct how the moral infections spread through people who thought of themselves as having nothing to do with it, having clean hands, but there they were with a stolen sugar bowl.

There’s a scene in a sanatorium where elderly patients whose minds are a little distracted by old age and dementia help coach each other to seem less impaired than they really are because even in the sanatorium and even in their condition, they are aware that people who seem too impaired disappear to a fate not specified but clearly understood by the people in the sanitarium.

But the central theme of the novel is this question of moral compromise. Pabst is, again, in the novel, a great artist, working on his great masterpiece. And he is drawn to working more and more closely with the regime, in some increasingly ugly ways, in order to achieve the completion of his great masterpiece as the war itself is drawing to defeat for Germany and the war’s completion. And when questioned about his compromises, Pabst explains that he is not a political man. He dislikes the regime as much as everybody. He’s hoping for peace. He has to finish his work because, he explains at one point, the Renaissance was also a time of turmoil, but do we remember the turmoil, or do we remember the art? And Pabst flatters himself that it is his art that will be remembered afterward and that will justify every compromise he’s making.

And the novelist invites us to question whether that is true, and he does it in a way—and this is not a spoiler alert, because it is signaled at the very beginning of the novel—the irony is that the work of art, in fact, will be lost. And the work of art for which he justified everything, which he flattered himself would endure beyond the limits of war, beyond the memory of Nazi atrocities, in fact, that work of art vanishes from the historical record. Again, that’s no spoiler alert; it’s there, at the very beginning of the novel, we’re told that. And so we work through the novel with this ironic awareness that the central excuse the artist is making for himself is not true, will not come true, and what we’re left to wrestle with, the question is, Well, what if the work of art had survived? Would the compromises be worthwhile then? And the answer is clearly no. Art does not excuse everything. In the end, there is a moral reference that is larger than art, and through a series of more ironic displays—and these are kind of spoiler alert, so I won’t go into them—the characters are left to live with the shattered ruins of the lives they have betrayed in order to achieve something they thought was greater, leaving behind the things that were real and in their hands.

I strongly recommend this novel, and there’s a beautiful audiobook rendering of it if you prefer to enjoy contemporary fiction that way.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thank you so much for listening and for watching. As ever, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Let me also ask you, if you are minded, to like and share. There’s been a lot of controversy in recent days about the increasingly insane anti-Semitic and paranoiac and conspiratorial nature of the podcast medium. It doesn’t have to be that way. And one of the things I’m trying to demonstrate with this program is that you can produce a podcast in a serious way for serious people, with some light moments, but without conspiracism and without platforming Nazis. You don’t have to do it to find an audience. We’ve been proving that so far, and with your help, let’s prove it on an even larger scale. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for listening, for watching. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Can’t Stop It, So Lead It

2026-03-16T14:01:00-04:00

The smart political move for Democrats, many will assume, is total opposition to President Trump’s war on Iran.

The war is already nearly as unpopular as the Iraq War was in the worst months of the insurgency, from 2004 to 2006. The current war is also getting bigger and lasting longer than what Trump promised in his optimistic musings. Air power alone has not forced the “unconditional surrender” that he once demanded.

Now the Trump administration is reportedly contemplating an invasion and occupation of the Iranian oil facilities on Kharg Island in the hope of coercing Iran to negotiate. Oil prices have risen and threaten to disrupt global food- and fuel-supply chains. Although the United States and Israel have succeeded in hitting huge numbers of Iranian military targets, the allies seem to have made little progress in upending the Iranian regime.

So if you’re a rational Democratic officeholder, why would you do or say anything to associate yourself with Trump’s Iran war? The president started the war without asking for congressional support and has alienated potential allies across the aisle with crude antics and juvenile insults. He has insisted that his pet voter-ID legislation, the SAVE America Act, which he hopes will help Republicans in this year’s midterms, must take priority over all other business of Congress.

[Nancy A. Youssef: The Iran war has four stages. We’re in the second.]

Worse, Trump will soon have to ask for money. Trump’s war began at a cost of almost $900 million a day, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. At a news conference on March 10, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that a request for a supplemental bill to fund the war is “inevitable.” Given that two House Republicans have already broken with their party in protest over the war, Johnson will likely need Democrats to pass a measure to help fund it. Although the Republican majority in the Senate is larger, Majority Leader John Thune may need Democratic votes too.

Why should any Democrat stick his or her neck out for these reckless architects of an unwanted war? If the war goes well, Trump will claim all of the credit. If the war goes badly, any Democrat who voted with Trump will share the blame.

Yet the political calculus doesn’t end there.

Whatever misgivings Democrats had about attacking Iran, the deed’s been done. In launching this war, Trump has committed not only himself and his administration but also the United States, its regional allies, and the Iranian people. If the war goes wrong, all will suffer.

Some Democrats want to use the power of the purse to end the war “immediately,” but that is like parking a jet in midair. What does “stopping” mean now? Shrug off the danger Gulf states face from retaliatory fire in a fight the U.S. started? End the U.S. air campaign and let Israel fight alone in its own way to achieve its own goals? Leave the mullah regime intact to plot its revenge? “Stopping” is a formula that blinks away every real-world question that Americans now face.

Democrats must instead consider a range of questions, all of which essentially ask: What can they do to limit the danger posed by the Trump administration itself?

The Iranian regime’s usual countermove against the United States is to activate networks of global terrorism. Some Trump allies are reportedly calling for the president to respond by invoking emergency powers to make changes to voting rules, ostensibly to limit foreign interference in the midterm elections. How will lawmakers prevent the Trump administration from exploiting valid concerns about terror networks for bad ends?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that his so-called Department of War is eager to “restore the warrior ethos” to America, with the aim of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” This blowhard rhetoric seems destined to inspire U.S. forces to commit atrocities overseas. How will Congress oversee the conduct of U.S. military operations so that Hegseth and others don’t incite U.S. forces to commit atrocities?

In Venezuela, the president disregarded democratic-election results to install a compliant replacement dictator. Trump seized Venezuelan oil wealth and stashed hundreds of millions of dollars of it in accounts under murky control. He is now making similar noises about Iran. How will lawmakers ensure that Iranians decide their future for themselves?

Since his reelection in 2024, Trump and his family have accepted or extracted personal gifts and payments from Gulf regimes: a plane from Qatar, a huge secret “investment” from the United Arab Emirates. His son-in-law is soliciting billions of dollars in backing from the Gulf countries that U.S. armed forces are now protecting. Who will make sure that the display of U.S. firepower in the Iran war does not prompt a steady flow of foreign emoluments to America’s baksheesh-seeking president?

[Adam Serwer: The American king goes to war]

Only Congress can do these things—and only the active engagement of Democrats will make sure this happens. The power of the purse is the means to impose Congress’s will. Only by being ready to say yes to funding this war—under the right circumstances, with sufficient guarantees—can Democrats in Congress impose their no where it should be imposed.

The United States is already suffering harms from this autocratically decreed war. To limit those harms and actually gain some benefits, the war will have to be put belatedly on a constitutional footing—and only congressional Democrats can make that happen.

Anti-Semitism Is Becoming Mainstream

2026-03-13T13:20:00-04:00

Hypocrisy is not an altogether bad thing. So long as our society has hypocrites, we have not totally lost our moral bearings. The hypocrite pretends to be good because the hypocrite believes that society admires good and condemns wrong. It’s time to worry when the hypocrite disappears—because that is the moment when wrongdoing has acquired impunity.

Yesterday, a man crashed his car into a synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, Michigan. He was armed and may have intended to slaughter the children at the school. Vigilant security officers shot him dead before he could complete his crime.

Since Hamas’s October 7 terror attacks on Israel—and the ensuing war in Gaza and other countries bordering Israel—anti-Jewish terror has spread worldwide. Two Israeli-embassy staffers targeted and murdered in Washington, D.C. Twelve people injured by a Molotov cocktail hurled at a free-the-hostages rally in Boulder, Colorado. Two killed during a terror attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England. The Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre in Australia, the deadliest terror attack in that country’s history. All of these just in 2025.

These killings—and dozens of other attempts and near misses in many countries—have disgusted decent people and embarrassed even many who hold otherwise anti-Jewish views.

They are also expressions of something harder to process: the explosive growth of anti-Jewish sentiment as a broadly accepted part of modern culture.

Almost half of Republican voters younger than 50 believe that the Holocaust did not happen as historians describe, according to a recent study by the Manhattan Institute. One-quarter of that cohort openly expresses anti-Jewish views; another 30 percent don’t reject openly anti-Semitic individuals.

[Read: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]

A 2024 University of Maryland poll found that 7 percent of under-35s of all parties would not vote for a Jewish candidate for office.

A Yale poll of American youth this past fall found that voters under 30 were roughly twice as likely to say that Jews had a negative effect on America than voters in general. More than 40 percent of 18-to-22-year-olds agreed with at least one of a series of anti-Semitic statements read to them by the pollsters.

These are hard data outcroppings from a seething sea of online hate. Every serious TikToker, Twitch streamer, YouTuber, podcaster, and X account has by now observed that a sure way to spike engagement is either to espouse anti-Jewish views yourself, or platform those who do. There’s debate about whether this is an organic product of the mysterious inner workings of algorithms—or deliberately designed by the programmers of TikTok and X. There’s no debate that it’s happening, and that it’s transforming consumers.

A large constituency wants to depict at least some of this transformation as a perhaps regrettable but surely understandable reaction to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Young people see horrifying images on their phones and are duly horrified. If anti-Semitism is on the rise, it must be Israel’s fault. Certain things they see are indeed alarming. But among the flaws in this theory are these awkward facts: Some of the worst images purportedly from Gaza are actually from the Syrian civil war, recycled under false pretenses—and many people seem to become upset by the atrocities only when they are blamed on Israel. Many other images prove to be either wholly faked or misleadingly presented: A Hamas rocket, for example, strikes a Gaza hospital and is maliciously described (and credulously accepted) as an Israeli strike instead.

But the larger problem is that there’s no shortage of horrifying images of atrocities committed elsewhere in the world, including the Iranian regime’s massacre of protesters, or by Hamas against Israelis, including intentional harm to children and sexual abuse of women and girls. Many of these images were shared in real time by Hamas itself. Why did some upsetting images spread anti-Israel attitudes, when other upsetting images failed to rally viewers to Israel’s cause? For some Israel critics, the identification of Israel with “us,” the advanced Western world, imposes a stricter moral standard than is required of “them,” the poor non-West. It would be nice to believe that the human mind builds from evidence to belief, but the sad truth is that we human beings are highly adept at selecting evidence to corroborate the beliefs we wish to hold. Many Americans—many more than before—wish to hold anti-Israel and anti-Jewish beliefs. They select their evidence accordingly, even wantonly false evidence.

[Yair Rosenberg: What J. D. Vance—and many others—miss about American anti-Semitism]

When anti-Israel narratives of “genocide” and “apartheid” are followed by anti-Jewish terrorism on U.S. soil, many propagators of those narratives—especially those in or seeking elective office—hasten to repudiate the violence. “Who says A, must say B” goes an old quote often attributed to Vladimir Lenin. But not everyone can look B in the face when B shows up. And of course even fewer wish to be blamed for B no matter how strenuously they were warned that it was coming when they began their exploration of the alphabet of anti-Semitism.

Still, this particular hypocrisy should be welcomed. It offers a place to start from as we work our way back to decency and tolerance. If the Jewish state is the source of world evil—meriting its eradication from the “river to the sea”—then it’s just a matter of statistics that, sooner or later, somebody will decide to begin the eradicating against easier targets closer to home. The project of encouraging anti-Zionism without fomenting anti-Semitism is reminiscent of many other attempts to separate marginalized groups from their aspirations to equality: anti-feminism without misogyny, anti-desegregation without racism. It’s not theoretically impossible, it just doesn’t happen very often or very naturally in the real world. The anti-Zionist project of ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state implies killing, subjugating, or re-exiling more than half of the world’s Jewish population. There’s no nice way to accomplish that goal. Animosity toward Jews will accompany almost every effort to try—and almost every effort to justify the trying.

Anti-Jewish feeling—whether white nationalist, Islamist, or left-progressive—is not always violent, but it’s always a resource for violence. Holocaust denial is not a theory about history. Holocaust inversion is not an opinion about the present. Both are justifications for yearned-for crimes in the future. In Australia, that future arrived during Hanukkah. In Michigan, it nearly struck yesterday.

In this polarized country, anti-Jewish feeling is one sentiment that reaches across lines of party and ideology. Republicans and Democrats, left and right—both are being subverted by anti-Semitism within. Republicans and conservatives have, to date, moved more decisively to confront it. Democrats and liberals have tended to take the view that their anti-Semites are vile neo-Nazis, whereas our anti-Semites bring exciting new energy to our party! Perhaps Republicans and conservatives have done more to treat their disease because their case is more advanced. But after yesterday, there’s no denying it: The pandemic is raging everywhere on these shores, and if we’re not all working together on containment and a cure, the virus will claim many more victims—both those whose bodies are destroyed by bullets and those whose minds are devoured by prejudice and hate.

Can Democrats Actually Win in Texas?

2026-03-11T13:00:00-04:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on Kristi Noem’s removal as head of the Department of Homeland Security. David warns that the chaos at the department, combined with President Trump’s demand that the SAVE Act be passed before he will sign any budget for the DHS, could endanger Americans as the United States wages war against Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Then David is joined by former Representative Beto O’Rourke to discuss the hotly contested 2026 Senate primary in Texas between James Talarico and Representative Jasmine Crockett. Frum and O’Rourke discuss what this race means for the future of the Democratic Party, why Texas Democrats always seem to fall short of victory, and the importance of the Texas Senate race for control of the chamber.

Finally, David is joined by Samuel Fleischacker, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and discuss how Smith would fit in politically today.

Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Beto O’Rourke, who ran for U.S. Senate from Texas in 2018, ran for governor of Texas in 2022. We’ll be discussing about the politics of the state of Texas after the March 3 primary.

For my book talk this week, we’re gonna be doing something a little bit different. This week marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s [The] Wealth of Nations, and I will be joined to discuss that by one of the world’s leading experts on Adam Smith, an old friend of mine named Samuel Fleischacker, who teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And we’ll be doing a short book dialogue about Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.

Before turning to either Beto O’Rourke or The Wealth of Nations, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about events of the recent days. If you traveled over the weekend just past, you probably encountered snarling queues at TSA or any of the other airport check-ins. This may have been maliciously organized by the Department of Homeland Security to drive home a point. It may be a general, genuine problem. I can’t assess that. But it is true that the Department of Homeland Security’s budget is stalled in Congress, and it is true there is no leadership at the Department of Homeland Security. President [Donald] Trump just removed the head of DHS, Kristi Noem, and her deputy Corey Lewandowski, and he has proposed to nominate someone else, but there’s no action on that nomination, and so there’s no leadership, there’s no budget at the Department of Homeland Security in the middle of a U.S.-led war against the world’s leading state sponsor of terror.

At the FBI, which is also a bureaucracy in charge of keeping Americans safe against terrorism, many of the leading counterterrorism experts have been purged from the FBI because they had worked on cases involving President Trump. Now, just how bizarre is this?

A week ago, the United States started a war, or joined a war, or resumed a war, or intensified a war—you can put it however you like—against the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. It is a predictable response by the Iranians to this military confrontation with the United States that they would try to turn on all of their worldwide terror networks, and the United States is without leadership and without a budget for the agency that is most responsible for keeping Americans safe against terrorism. That’s something you would think that would be thought of in advance, but apparently, it has not been.

Okay, all right, maybe they didn’t think about it in advance, but now, now that the war’s actually here, you would think there would be a big hurry to get the Department of Homeland Security on a counterterrorism footing, to stop the inessentials, like detaining grandmothers and shooting Americans at street corners, and to focus on the core mission for which the DHS was created back in the George W. Bush years: counterterrorism. Focus on that. But no, no. President Trump posted on his social-media platform this past weekend that he would not sign any budget for the Department of Homeland Security unless he got first the passage through Congress of a voting measure to make it more difficult to vote by mail.

Now, why President Trump cares so much about voting by mail is a little hard to understand. Let me just go down this rabbit hole for a second. Who votes by mail? Above all, active-duty service personnel and older people—typically Republican constituencies. So even from a narrow [Republican] Party maximizing point of view, this makes no sense.

But Donald Trump seems to be motivated by a fear that, or by a theory, that he lost in 2020 because of vote-by-mail; therefore, vote-by-mail must be punished. He may also be thinking—and this is pretty sinister, but it’s not, I think, beyond the realm of imagining—that if what you wanna do is a crackdown on voting in 2026 in the congressional elections, and if you wanna use ICE and other agencies to intimidate people at polling stations, you’d better remove the vote-by-mail option because a lot of people who might be afraid to confront federal force at the polling stations may still be willing to vote if they can put their ballot in an envelope and mail it safely and in privacy and not have to worry that, because of the accent of their voice or the color of their skin, they will be wrongly accused of voting illegally and detained and held for however long the government wants to detain them. So they have that fear. They vote by mail. Their vote still counts—they are American citizens, naturalized or native-born, but with just a different accent or a different skin color. So maybe that’s what Donald Trump has in mind.

But whatever he’s got in mind, whether it’s some strange or crazy reaction to his defeat in 2020, whether it’s a strategic plan to stop or harass voting in 2026, or whether it’s just a misconception of who votes by mail—that, in fact, it is a Republican-leaning constituency that mostly uses this option—whatever his motive, the point is, he’s holding hostage, he who started the war or who intensified this war, he’s holding hostage the national security counterterrorism budget of the United States in a war with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, in a war that he timed and that he chose. It just seems like a bizarre abdication of responsibility.

Now, if you watched my dialogue with Tom Nichols last week, you’ve noticed I have a lot of sympathy for at least the stated goals of confronting Iran: to punish the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, to stop the Iranian nuclear program, and to deliver the promised help to the brave people of Iran, who rose in January against an oppressive government, one of the most repressive and aggressive governments in the world. They rose in hundreds of thousands and were killed in the thousands. The president of the United States promised to help them, and I think, even when the president is Donald Trump, the promises of the president should be made good. But the anxiety that Tom and I discussed last week and that I’ve discussed in articles with The Atlantic is, These guys? These guys? These guys are supposed to lead the war? They don’t seem capable of organizing a lemonade stand. What do you mean, they’re going to lead a war, and such an ambitious war? And the proof of all of those anxieties being well founded is what is happening now with the counterterrorism.

The idea you would go to war against Iran with a nonfunctioning Department of Homeland Security and, now that you know it’s nonfunctioning and that the queues are snaking around the block at America’s airports because Global Entry isn’t working and TSA isn’t there and the Department of Homeland Security is not doing its job, it says because it doesn’t have enough budget, that you would not hasten to get that budget passed by any compromise necessary, hasten to install the most professional counterterrorism leadership you could find, and not pick the next DHS leader because that person is good at going on TV and defending President Trump, no matter what he does—and by the way, also hasten out of the building the last DHS leader, who delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising contracts to her friends and supporters on a no-bid basis—that you would not just bring some professionalism to this suggests a kind of negligence in the prosecution of a war of choice.

It’s really hard to wrap your mind around. Nothing like this has been seen before. The United States has gotten into military conflicts that didn’t go as well as Americans hoped, but not because no one did the basic thing of making sure that the agencies of government you need to prosecute the war have a budget and a leadership. That’s, like, 101; you would think that would happen automatically. But it didn’t happen.

So the United States finds itself unprepared, unready for the most frightening possible Iranian counterstroke on the U.S. homeland. There seems to be no progress because, for President Trump, protecting the homeland is a lesser priority than stopping voting by mail, for whatever reason he wants to stop voting by mail. And here we are, here we are as the war continues, as the price of oil surges, as stock markets fall, as Americans face terrible risks in conflict, and as the people of Iran wait for the rescue they were promised that may or may not ever arrive in a way that means any difference to their lives.

And now my dialogue with Beto O’Rourke.

[Music]

Frum: Beto O’Rourke represented the El Paso district in the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2019. He challenged incumbent U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. He lost that race despite winning more votes than any Democrat before or since in a statewide Texas contest, winning 100,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton won in Texas in her 2016 presidential race.

Since then, Beto O’Rourke has worked in Texas political organizing and fundraising. Last month, I turned to him for some insight into the bitter contest for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2026, and we agreed to reconvene after the state primaries on March 3. That primary was won by James Talarico, who will now face either incumbent Senator John Cornyn or state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Assuming neither drops out beforehand, that Republican nomination will be decided in a runoff May 26.

No Democrat has won a statewide contest in Texas since 1994, ao nonincumbent Democrat has won since 1990, and no Democrat has won a U.S. senatorship from Texas since Lloyd Bentsen in the 1980s.

Beto O’Rourke, thank you so much for joining The David Frum Show and for enlightening us about Texas today.

Beto O’Rourke: Oh, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me on.

Frum: So here’s the first question: I sort of gave a summary of what has gone on in the longer view of Texas—what is your interpretation of Texas politics as it stands after March 3?

O’Rourke: It’s one of the most exciting times, at least in my lifetime, especially if you’re a Democrat in the state of Texas. You have a generational talent in James Talarico, who not only won the [Democratic] primary for U.S. Senate in Texas but won it against another generational talent in Jasmine Crockett. I think this contest only made him a stronger candidate. It allowed him to introduce himself not just to the voters in Texas, who are the most important constituency in this, but also to the rest of the country. The Texas Senate race is, by definition, a national race. If Talarico wins this in November, he could very well be the 51st vote in the United States Senate, so the position that he’s in right now, I don’t know could be any better.

And you contrast that, David, with the Republican Senate primary, where John Cornyn and Ken Paxton and their allies have spent more than $90 million—I think it’s the most expensive Senate primary in world history—$90 million tearing each other apart, only to have to face each other again in a runoff to that primary on the 26th of May. There’s two more months of this unless, as you alluded to, one of them drops out at the behest of the president, but I don’t see either one of them doing that, even if Trump demands it. So Talarico has the opportunity over the coming two months to consolidate support, to go out and earn the votes of Jasmine Crockett’s constituency and the people who were most excited about her, and to go into the final stretch into November in a very strong position.

In addition, and this has never happened before, at least not in the last 50 years, there is a Democrat running for every single state House seat in Texas—there’s 150 of them; every open state Senate seat—there’s 16 of them; and every congressional race—there are 38 of them. We have a full ticket for the first time since 1974. And even if many of those Democratic contenders do not win in, let’s say, the Panhandle or Abilene or Odessa or East Texas, they are still gonna draw in net new Democratic voters and send those votes all the way to the top of the ticket, which is only gonna help James Talarico.

So this set of conditions that I just described, when you add that to the fact that we’re in the president’s midterm and he has never been more unpopular, including in Texas—the policies he’s pursuing, the tariffs that are decimating farmers and ranchers in this state, the ICE raids that are breaking up families, the fact that we were already the least insured state in America and now hundreds of thousands more will be kicked off Medicaid—none of this stuff is popular, and it’s really kind of a perfect storm not just for James Talarico but for Texas Democrats. So I’m very optimistic and very excited by what I’m seeing right now.

Frum: So national Democrats have this feeling about Texas that it’s like Lucy and the football: It’s always about to happen, but it never quite does happen, and you have the bruises to show for that. Why is Texas so inhospitable to Democrats? It’s a highly urbanized state. It’s a state crammed with knowledge industries. It’s a state with rising levels of education. And it’s a state, of course, that depends heavily on export industries. It’s not just an extractive state; it’s a state that sells to the world. Those are the kinds of places where Democrats tend to do well and better over time, and yet it never seems to quite happen, not even in 2018, another midterm year when President Trump was very unpopular.

O’Rourke: Yeah, going back to 2018, though, though I lost to Ted Cruz by about two and a half points, beneath me on that ballot, you saw people break through who had no business winning, much less even running: Colin Allred, who defeated Pete Sessions in that year; Lizzie Pannill Fletcher won a congressional seat against an entrenched, well-funded incumbent in southeast Texas; and James Talarico, who no one had ever heard of, defeated an incumbent state House Republican in that year. It was a sea change for Texas, and, David, the response from the governor, Greg Abbott, and the Republican legislature was to make it even harder for people to vote in Texas. This is the state that makes it harder than any other not only to register to vote but to cast a ballot, the highest forms of voter suppression—ironically, in the state that produced [President Lyndon B. Johnson] LBJ and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 in the first place. So those targets are on Black voters. They’re on young voters. They’re on census tracts in communities like Houston, Texas, the most diverse city in America, where Republicans cynically believe that, if they make it harder for people in these communities to vote, they can hold on to power. And so far that has proven true. You see these restrictions getting more onerous with each passing election cycle.

I think this perfect storm that I just described is the best way to overcome that—not that it will be easy. Despite all those conditions that I described earlier, you also have now a president hell-bent on retaining power because he understands the consequences of a potential loss. There will no longer be impunity for his crimes and corruption. There will be the very real prospect of free and fair elections in 2028. And you will have Democratic chairs who have subpoena power to be able to disclose the full Epstein files, for example, or to lay bare the connections between money and influence and outcomes in the White House. He understands what’s coming for him if he loses, hence asking Greg Abbott and the Republican legislature to gerrymander five congressional districts in Texas, which they did last summer; his threat to cancel mail-in voting; and I would not be surprised if he sent federal agents—Border Patrol, ICE, or otherwise—to popular polling places in big cities in Texas.

But here’s a glimmer of hope: In addition to the monster turnout that we saw in Texas over our primary that concluded on March 3 and shattered records across the state, in five of those newly gerrymandered seats, more Democrats voted in the primary in those congressional districts than did Republicans, and that’s with a hotly contested Republican primary for Senate and a hotly contested Democratic primary for Senate. So the momentum is with us right now, and if we needed more proof, you probably saw this, but on January 31, in a special election for a state Senate seat, a Democrat defeated the Republican by 14 points in a district that Trump had won 14 months earlier by 17 points—it was a 31-point swing—in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth.

So there are really good things happening here, but we know that we’re gonna meet the threat of the president trying to control the situation in Texas.

Frum: Can I hit a pause button there? So the claim “Texas is not a red state; it’s a nonvoting state” is a favored talking point, especially of Texas progressives, and it was the theory of the Jasmine Crockett campaign: If only we could get more people out to vote and the voter suppression weren’t so bad. But isn’t it true that every Texas political scientist who has studied this question said if Texans vote in higher numbers, they will actually be more red and less blue because the places where people are not voting are exactly the kind of disaffected, disaffiliated sectors of the population where President Trump does well, and the high-commitment voters are the people who actually are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party?

O’Rourke: I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m smart enough to be able to divine the answer. I spend most of my time with our group, Powered by People, registering young voters, and then it’s important that we not just register them, we stay in touch with them, because we don’t really have so much a registration problem as we have a turnout problem. When I ran for governor in ’22, 9 million registered Texans didn’t cast a ballot. A lot of them were these young people, very often first in their families to be registered to vote, who are intimidated by the voter-suppression, voter-intimidation regime that we have in Texas. So my theory of the case, in part, is that meeting these young voters where they are, getting them registered, staying in touch with them, and having them turn out at much higher rates is going to help Democrats.

But I will concede this much, David, that I don’t think that’s sufficient for the task at hand; I think persuasion is in order as well. And I don’t know that you can do it at a distance, through technology or money. I think you have to be in the 254 counties of Texas, reaching out to people everywhere. We saw what happened when Democrats took places like the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas for granted. It had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats for the last 100, 150 years, and as we saw in 2020, then 2022, and certainly in 2024, there was a big shift that moved over to Republicans and Donald Trump. What we’re seeing from the exit polls from the primary is that population is now open for persuasion. It’s in the game, and it’s not spoken for already. I think that’s an exciting dynamic in Texas.

So I think it’s both a turnout issue and a persuasion issue, and I think we have an amazing candidate at the top of the ticket who can help us accomplish both.

Frum: Persuasion versus turnout was kind of the abstract issue in the primary: Crockett saying, We don’t need to persuade anybody. We just need to turn out the voters who are not turning out—flying in the face of the political scientists, who said, The people who don’t turn out are more Trumpy, not less Trumpy—and Talarico saying, I think I can persuade some of the people who formerly voted for Trump. And that was the question: persuasion versus turnout. And those are both plausible points of view.

Why, given that there were two plausible theories of the election, why did the election turn so nasty? Why can’t Democrats in Texas play nicer with one another?

O’Rourke: I think, to some degree, it’s just a function of a contested primary, which we haven’t had in Texas in as long as I can remember. There nominally have been primary contests, but there really hasn’t been one like this, where you have two people who can raise more money than God, who have almost universal name ID amongst Democrats, and as you pointed out, have two really distinct theories of the case, whether it’s persuasion or whether it’s turnout. And stylistically, I don’t know that you could pick two more polar opposites than Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico.

I think it was a great thing, honestly. Having that spirited contest drew in precisely the kinds of voters who’d been missing from our politics and our elections in the state of Texas—overwhelmingly young people, who turned out at much higher rates in this primary than they ever have before in the state of Texas. And if we can keep them engaged, now that their interest is piqued after this contest, if James Talarico can consolidate that support, especially from Jasmine Crockett’s base and the folks who were most excited about her, I think this just adds more wind to our sail. So I’m not, perhaps, as disturbed as you might think I would be by the nature of that contest. I think overall it was a good thing. It’s a reflection, if the market is telling us something, that this is a very winnable seat.

I take all of this as a good sign, and, David, it’s not just because I’m an optimist; it’s because I really see it in the turnout, where you had really tough contests on both sides, but 100,000-plus more Democrats voted in Texas on March 3 than Republicans. That never happens. It happened in 2020 only because we had a contested Democratic presidential primary, but that’s the anomaly. Otherwise, this never happens in Texas. So that many more Democrats turning out in the primary bodes very well for November.

Frum: But when the race did turn nasty, the weapons everyone reached for were the nuclear weapons in the Democratic arsenal: accusations of race. And it escalated very fast, and Colin Allred—and I know you don’t wanna talk about personality, so I’m not making this a personal issue about anybody—who had also done a statewide race, instead of being, as you have been, a kind of calming force, became an accelerant force. What is missing from the party that it doesn’t have a way to sort these inevitable disputes—as you say, they are inevitable in a hotly contested primary—but in a way where people do not reach for the deadliest weapons at hand?

O’Rourke: It’s really the Wild West out here, David. There’s no Texas Democratic Party relative to, say, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party or the California Democratic Party. This is a party that had been allowed by national Democrats and the DNC, probably going back to the 2008 presidential election and the loss of the 50-states strategy from Howard Dean, to just wither on the vine—no resources. We’re a net donor to Senate and congressional races across the country: more money flowing out of Texas than coming in. You don’t have a senior stateswoman or statesman. If Ann Richards were alive today, I think she’d have the gravitas and the standing and the basis to bring these parties together. Where there’s decentralization, no strong central party, no strong, universally revered leader, you have this fractiousness and sometimes an inability to control these fights.

And here’s the great thing: All of that was settled on the 3rd of March, and you probably saw, the next morning, Jasmine Crockett, I thought, graciously conceded and encouraged everyone who follows her and voted for her to get behind Talarico and other Democrats. I expect to see her, in the coming weeks and months, on the campaign trail across the state of Texas.

One of the things you saw in the election returns from the 3rd is that Jasmine Crockett did overwhelmingly well amongst Black voters in Texas, and as you probably know, David, there are more Black voters in the state of Texas than there are in any other state in the union. And this is a constituency in Texas, as it has been throughout the country, that I think my party has taken for granted: Your skin is Black; you’re probably gonna vote for me. I don’t have to work on it or earn your vote or spend time in your community. That’s one of the great sins committed by this party. Jasmine was able to electrify, energize, and turn out people who felt like they had been taken for granted by the Democratic Party before. If she and Talarico can work in tandem to make sure that these voters know that they are a priority in this party not just in the primary but through the general election, I really think we have something there, and that hopefully is gonna be the other side to the story that you’ve begun to tell today about this division within our party. These two people coming together, bringing the rest of us together, I think could just be the most positive thing to happen for Texas, and given the outsized role our state plays in our national politics, for the country as well.

Frum: You keep reminding us of the size of Texas, and as obvious a point as that is, it’s really important to keep in mind, and sometimes people in the rest of the country just—the idea that Texas is not just massively large in physical space, but so overwhelmingly populous—I did not know the point you just made, that there are more Black voters in Texas than in any other state. If you’d asked me that in advance, I would’ve guessed that question wrong. So that’s another reminder.

But lemme test a theory on you: that one of the consequences of the vastness of Texas and the fact there are so many different large metropolitan areas means it just takes a lot of money to mount a competitive campaign. And Texas then becomes a magnet for money from all over the country and especially from national donors who are much more progressive than Texas voters, and so you get this push of candidates farther to the left than really suits the Texas electorate. And one of the reasons the Texas Democrats have not done well since the time of Lloyd Bentsen and Ann Richards is they are pushed, unlike Bentsen and Richards, away from the Texas voter by the national donor. And when you look at Talarico, he seems to have staked out a lot of issue positions in pursuit of donations that are not going to suit him as he becomes a general-election candidate against whoever the Republicans produce, especially if it’s John Cornyn.

O’Rourke: Yeah. I guess I’d compare that to Colin Allred, who ran against Ted Cruz in 2024. I haven’t put their voting records or their positions on given policy issues side by side, but my gut is that Colin is a more conservative politician, a more conservative candidate, and has not really staked positions to the left of the center of our party; James Talarico, perhaps a little more progressive or a little more liberal, as you suggest. I don’t know all the dynamics that took place in 2024, but Colin Allred lost by a lot more than I did to the same man in the same state. That might, in part, be a test of whether centrism can work in Texas, although there are a lot of other variables and factors.

The thing with Talarico—I’m sure you saw his Joe Rogan interview; I’m sure you’ve seen his clips of his engagement with Republican colleagues in the state House or speeches that he’s given or his performance in the debate with Jasmine Crockett—I think he really has a way of bringing a lot of people into a shared position by finding the common ground on the issue. He really made his name in Texas, in large part, by fighting for public education. He’s a former public-school educator. He helped, with Republican colleagues, to rewrite our public-education financing and then led the fight against vouchers, which is the privatization of public tax dollars, taking those monies away from public schools and sending them to private schools. He also helped to cap the cost for insulin in the state of Texas at $25 for a co-pay. These are very popular and maybe even populist issues that don’t just play well in Austin and Houston and Dallas, but maybe even more so in remote rural and even red counties, where the public schoolhouse is the largest employer in that given county, where public hospitals have shut down because of Medicaid cuts, and where these two things—public education and reducing cost of prescription drugs—are just incredibly popular, regardless of your party affiliation.

I think if you can keep bringing us back to those things that bring us together, that most of us care about, regardless of where we live or who we voted for for president in 2024, he’s gonna continue to do well, even if he scores to the left of the middle of the Democratic Party on a few hot-button political issues. But even with those, I think he’s got such an incredibly calming manner of listening to people, demonstrating respect, and then trying to find the common ground on those issues.

So you’re right—this will be a test, and I think the A/B is Allred in ’24 and Talarico in ’26.

Frum: Well, let me push you a little more on this.

O’Rourke: Sure.

Frum: It seems to me, and again, I’m looking at this from outside, but that the theory of the national Democratic Party is that the way you hold together a coalition is, you find candidates who give the progressives what they want on the issues, but have some biographical element that, in theory, should appeal to nonprogressives. And that’s how Tim Walz found himself [Kamala] Harris’s running mate in 2024. He was very, very progressive on the issues but a former football coach, and he had this kinda shuffling-dad-from-a-TV-comedy-show demeanor. And so the biography, the physical presence would appeal to the center and the right, but the positions would appeal to the left. Result? Failure. And you can’t blame it all on him, but it obviously didn’t work.

And there seems to be some similar theory about Talarico, which is, he’s very liberal on the issues, much more so than Allred or than you were in 2018, but he speaks a lot about religion. He’s a seminarian. And the theory of the case is that by talking about religion and his background in seminary, that that will offset the issues. He’s a much more refined version of the Tim Walz proposition, but it’s the same proposition. What do you think of that theory?

O’Rourke: I don’t know, and I don’t know how calculated this approach is. I really like to think that this is authentic and genuinely James Talarico and his approach to the world, but I understand how it could seem programmed, right? You’re gonna be a straight white male who’s conversant in Bible verse and New Testament theology and has a way of breaking through to audiences and parts of the electorate that maybe were unavailable to Democrats before and might also kind of buffer the impact of liberal or progressive ideas on hot-button issues.

What I think that people want even more than that package is change from what has failed them so far, and James Talarico is just so different than anything that we have seen, or at least that I have seen, in the state of Texas. That package that you just described—his extraordinary ability to connect with audiences, whether he’s doing it on TikTok or Instagram, digitally through a screen, or in person in large gatherings, in town halls, in rural communities and big cities alike—this feels different to people because I think it is different for all of us. And if 2024 was a change election, I think 2026—and I guess they’re all change elections—but I think the premium on change and something different is gonna be greater than perhaps at any other time. So I think he’s gonna represent that to people.

And kind of interestingly, just from my experience—and we’re very different in many, many ways—but running in Trump’s first midterm in 2018, you’re right, David, I had probably one of the most bipartisan voting records in Congress. I was in the minority the entire time I was there. The only way to get anything passed was to find Republican colleagues with whom I could agree on and then to get Donald Trump to sign that stuff in the last two years that I was there. But I would go to communities where people would say, Man, I love you because you’re one of the most progressive guys I’ve ever seen here. And I’d go to other communities, and people would say, I love you because you’re so conservative. I was different than anything that they had seen before, and they would pin their hopes to somebody breaking through a system that had so badly failed them, wherever they happened to live across the state of Texas. And I feel that same energy as I travel the state right now, in 2026, as I did in 2018, but perhaps even more so. So I don’t know that this is in any way a conventional year, where conventional theories of the case are going to apply.

Frum: Well, not to speak for you, but isn’t the difference, to put it a little crudely, that your message in 2018 was, actually, if anyone cared to look, moderate content but a progressive affect, whereas Talarico is trying to do it the other way around?

O’Rourke: I don’t know; I never thought about it that way, but that could be the case. But I think that the greatest success accrues to those candidates who are most genuinely and honestly themselves. And so, whether it’s an affect or not, I think this really is Talarico, and people really believe that and respond to that, and it energizes them. And in this competition for eyeballs, this premium placed on authenticity that has so richly rewarded Trump, who no one believes that anybody has written any of those speeches for him or the crazy things that he comes up with, I think having somebody who’s equally honest and authentic but is coming from a good place, who says things that we can agree with, that make rational, logical sense and hopefully bring us together at a time of extraordinary division, that might be the ticket in Texas.

Frum: I had a chance to talk a little while ago to a member of the House of Representatives who was a Democrat who had won in a Republican-leaning seat, and I was able to ask, So what’s the secret? What did you do that broke through? And he said, I ran my race for the House as if I was running for mayor of my district. Every water project, every bridge, every bad pothole, I knew them all. I knew the leader of every community group, every chess club, every church. I ran as if for mayor. And he ran on very local issues—he had strong national views, but he ran on local issues and won. Does that formula work for the Senate? Does it work in a year like ’26, when the country is so in an uproar about what the president has done nationally and when now there is a war on, maybe a big war and maybe still on in November? Or is that always the right formula for breaking out in unlikely places, like a Democrat in red Texas?

O’Rourke: Yeah, no, I think there’s so much to that. It’s a challenging moment, though, to pursue that path because of what’s happening in the country. Everything is on the line in November. If Democrats don’t win a majority in the House and perhaps, through Texas, pick up the 51st seat in the U.S. Senate, this slide to authoritarianism and fascism, I think, is unstoppable. There’s no argument that has convinced me that we can get this country back. That Republican-majority Congress will roll out the royal red carpet for a Trump third term or for his designee. We will no longer have real elections in this country. And that’s very much on my mind, it’s very much on the mind of Democrats across this country, and I think it’s what’s driving, to a point that you made earlier, so much of the donations and attention and interest and national media that some candidates, like Talarico, are enjoying right now.

But to your other point, which I think is absolutely excellent, the way that you win on the ground, the way that you win these votes in a general election is by ensuring that the people in this state know that you know who they are and where they live. When I went to King County in 2018, for example, small rural county in Texas that voted for Trump 96 percent in the 2016 election, I knew I wasn’t perhaps going to win a whole bunch of votes there. But meeting the county judge of King County, other people who lived in that community, and understanding their water issues—their water is literally undrinkable, and they were pissed off at the EPA that had come to impose a solution without asking the people of King County what was on their minds or how they would wanna address this in the first place—I knew, if I were to win that Senate seat, that that was going to be a priority for me, and the people in King County knew that I was gonna make that a priority. And I did that 253 other times across the rest of the counties of the state of Texas.

So, David, yes, those were my issues. I wanted to make sure that every single person in every single county knew that I was gonna fight for them, because I had met them where they lived, listened to them, understood their challenges, and we’d agreed we were gonna work on these things together. I think that was so much of the success that I enjoyed. It wasn’t my position on reproductive health care or foreign policy or any other issue. It was that I had been to every county. I had opened these town halls to any person. Whether you liked me, didn’t like me, Republican, Democrat, had a gun on your hip or came unarmed, you were welcomed into our meetings, and there were two microphones so everyone could have a say. That became the story. That’s what you knew about me if you knew nothing else in that 2018 race: That fucker went everywhere. He showed up for everybody, wrote nobody off, took nobody for granted.

And that’s the way that you run for mayor or city council—I was a former city council member here in El Paso, Texas. They aren’t partisan issues. It’s: Do you know my neighborhood? Have you been to my door? Have you seen the streetlight that’s out on my block? Those are the things that matter to people in their day-to-day life. So it’s being able to do both of those things: run a national campaign, because national dollars have to flow into this state in order to win—five of the most expensive media markets in America right here in Texas—and then to win the actual voters, you’ve got to be in their communities, meet them where they are, and reflect their concerns and their aspirations in the campaign that you run.

Frum: Let me end by asking you to lift your eyes a little bit out the time horizon. There’s gonna be a census in 2030. Texas is a growth powerhouse, both for wealth and population, increasingly dominant state in the country. What does American politics anchored in Texas look like in the years after 2030?

O’Rourke: Some people look at Texas as a state that would be nice to win. To your question, this is a state that we must win if Democrats are going to be a national party. In the 2032 presidential contest, if we have one, the Democratic nominee could win all of the so-called blue-wall states, but if they don’t also win the state of Texas, there is no viable path to the White House. After the 2030 census and the reapportionment, those states will lose population, Electoral College votes, to the benefit of Texas and other Sunbelt states. This is a state that we have to win, and you cannot start working on 2032 in 2032 or even in 2030; you have to be working on it yesterday. And that’s what so many of us have been doing. The Senate race in 2018, the governor’s race in ’22, the work that we’re doing on the ground organizing with Powered by People, this is all trying to build the voter power that I wish had existed in 2018, when I took on Cruz in that very close contest.

So you mentioned this—it’s kind of a zero-sum equation on national Democratic dollars and where they flow. We’ve got an important Senate race in Michigan, one in Georgia, another in Maine, another in North Carolina, and then this one in Texas, and I understand people who are saying, Hey, can we really afford to invest in Texas? I don’t think we can afford not to invest in Texas. This is the path to the White House. Last time that a Democrat won it [in Texas], as you know, was 1976, Jimmy Carter. As you mentioned, Lloyd Bentsen, the last Democrat to win a Senate race here in 1988. If we’re in the wilderness, it’s not just to the detriment of the Democratic Party; it means that we may not have democracy in America. This state is absolutely critical, and thank God that the people of this state have not been waiting for the rest of the country to figure it out. I mentioned James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett getting after it, risking their political careers on this prize in November, 150 state House Democratic contenders, 6 state Senate, 38 for congressional seats—this state is doing everything it can with what it has right where it is. As national Democrats also pitch in, I think that this state will ride to the rescue of the country in 2026, in 2028, and then, importantly, in 2032, when I think that the Democratic nominee for president can actually win Texas.

Frum: Beto O’Rourke, thank you for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

O’Rourke: Thank you, David.

[Music]

Frum: So, as mentioned at the top of the show, we’re doing something a little different in the book segment this week. 2026 is the 250th anniversary of a lot of events in English literature and English political theory, not just the Declaration of Independence, of course, in 1776, but as we discussed earlier, February of 1776 saw the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s [The History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and March of 1776 saw the publication of The Wealth of Nations.

Rather than just talk about The Wealth of Nations myself, I thought I would take advantage of the fact that one of my oldest friends in the world is one of the world’s leading experts on the philosophy of Adam Smith. Sam Fleischacker, as I mentioned above, teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and he is the author of a 2004 study of Adam Smith’s philosophy, and I’m gonna ask him to back me up on my limited knowledge of things Smithian today.

Sam, thank you for making time.

Samuel Fleischacker: Oh, thank you very much for having me, David.

Frum: I’m hoping we can get to two questions, but here’s the one that is most important: I think a lot of people have a mental model of Adam Smith as a kind of early libertarian, someone who thought, It’s all about the individual engaged in business and transactions and laissez-faire, nothing to do with society. Is this an accurate reading of Smith?

Fleischacker: So I’m tempted to say it’s totally inaccurate and has his picture of human beings exactly reversed, but that’s not entirely fair. There is some truth to the picture. Smith was very insistent throughout The Wealth of Nations on the advantages of having individuals make their own economic decisions about what to invest in, how to run their business, and what to buy—this is as against sumptuary laws that restricted, especially, the purchases of luxury goods among the poor. On all these things, he thought government should leave people alone and let them do what they think is best in their own situation.

So that idea and the idea that governments actually just don’t have the knowledge base to run an economy, that isn’t Smith. And if that’s libertarianism, that part of it is correct. But his picture of human nature is perhaps the most socially constructed, or the most socially shaped, that you’re gonna find among the thinkers of his time and place in mid-18th-century Scotland and England.

Frum: Lemme pause you there. What do you mean, his theory of individuals—do we need a theory of what an individual is?

Fleischacker: Well, philosophers think we do, and he was a moral philosopher first, and in his [The] Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is his great book of moral philosophy, he says we don’t even recognize ourselves as a self until we start interacting with other people. We’re always concerned with how other people are looking at us. We start incorporating into ourselves a kind of a spectator, an “impartial spectator,” he says, that watches our actions, which is built on the people around us, and we want to be the kind of person other people can approve of. So in that sense, we’re very intertwined with other people. We have benevolent feelings towards them. Friendship, he thinks, is the most important thing in human life.

So in these senses, he’s not at all a believer that everyone should just do their own thing, that individuals are on their own, and he really sees us enmeshed in a society and relating to other people.

Frum: And you’ve always insisted that you have to read both books, not just one, that the two form a unity of understanding how the individual works in the world.

Fleischacker: Yes, and actually, that goes with his life, where these books come from. He was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, following his own teacher, Francis Hutcheson, and he taught a yearlong course, which started with moral philosophy, then went to philosophy of law—he never published that part—and that ended with a discussion of policy, mostly economic policy. So he published the beginnings and the ends. He published the moral philosophy as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He published the economic stuff with The Wealth of Nations. He didn’t put in the law stuff in between. But he saw this all as one large project.

And I think, among other things, if you do see the project as a whole, you realize, for one thing, why he doesn’t want governments to run our lives morally. That’s also a core of truth in the libertarian view. He didn’t think government should impose religion. He didn’t think they should give moral instruction. And one reason for that is that he thought everyday social interaction with your friends and neighbors would do that better than government could ever do.

Frum: So he was someone who believed, maybe, in what would be recognized today as a libertarian approach to governance, but the libertarian psychology of the autonomous individual, the master of his domain, the Ayn Rand superhero, that he had no time for.

Fleischacker: Exactly. In fact, he spends a lot of time arguing against that.

And then I should add, his big concern as regard to libertarian governance is that government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy, they shouldn’t favor one company versus another, and they shouldn’t favor one sector versus another—manufacturing versus agricultural, or vice versa. He did not think government should refrain from helping the poor. So the whole issue about welfare policy, it wasn’t really on the table at the time, but to the extent that it was, he supported the English poor law, and he supported public education for poor people. So he certainly wasn’t in any way clearly on the side of libertarians. And I, as a kind of social democrat, welfare liberal, I claim Smith as an ancestor, and I think both libertarians and welfare liberals can pull on different pieces of him for that. It’s just not his issue.

Frum: Now, he’s got one piece of good luck, which is, thinkers are often remembered for things they didn’t say—Charles Darwin never said survival of the fittest—but Adam Smith did mention the “invisible hand.” What is the invisible hand? What did he mean by it, and why is it different from modern thinking about pure autonomous markets that don’t need any assistance from anybody?

Fleischacker: Right. So this is fiercely debated to this day in Smith’s scholarship. There are some people who think he means the hand of God governing the market, so everything will work out right. I think that’s clearly not true, especially in The Wealth of Nations, which never mentions God and has no—

Frum: Let me pause you. For those who are not familiar with the phrase, let’s put this phrase—I’m not gonna be able to quote it verbatim—but reconstruct the larger sentence in which the phrase invisible hand appears.

Fleischacker: So it appears in the context of his argument that you don’t need to force merchants to favor their own country in their trading, because they will do that anyway because they wanna keep an eye on their goods. And he says they “are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do what is best” for their society.

Now, that’s been read in many different ways. My own version of it is that Smith thinks the opportunities for any individual to make money in an economy are made possible by what other people around them need. So it makes sense that anything that you do to further your own interest will also help the society as a whole. And this is actually, I think, part of his view that societies shape individuals so that even when you think you’re doing something for your own interests, you might be and you might not be, but you’re always helping your society—or not always; you can do antisocial things. But when people are doing their normal economic transactions, and actually, in many other respects as well, they’re helping their society, whether they know it or not, and that’s the core of the invisible hand.

Frum: We are in a world right now where the United States government has moved away from many of Smith’s ideas. There are tariffs. There are efforts to pick winners and losers. Government is taking a share of particular companies and then favoring them. People in government are receiving streams of payment from companies, some domestic, many foreign. And there’s a kind of auction of government favoritism going on in Washington. What would Adam Smith think of today’s America?

Fleischacker: I think he’d be appalled. You couldn’t have a more un-Smithian way of running the economy. He doesn’t trust government figures; he thinks they’re corrupt, and of course, we’re seeing signs of that. There’s nothing, no policy he hates more than tariffs. He thinks that that is really a way of government leaders deciding what should be imported and what should be exported, and in all cases, he thinks, tariffs wind up hurting the home economy more than they help. And that’s even true when they’re imposed for the sake of defense. One point he says, “Defense is more important than opulence,” so in some cases, maybe a tariff on goods that you need for defense purposes would be legitimate. But he actually elsewhere says that even those tariffs are unnecessary and they hurt your economy. So—

Frum: In his context, he’d be thinking, Well, what if you have one cannon factory in all of England or one place where you make ships’ sails? You might wanna protect that company, but even then, you’ll be sorry [in] the long run.

Fleischacker: That’s actually exactly his example, and he still thinks that you’ll probably do better—if another company makes those sails cheaper, you should import them, and at best, you’ll do something that’s useful for defense purposes, but it will have an economic cost. In no case does he think that a tariff will actually help the economy.

Frum: Let’s finish here with one more thought, which is, reading Gibbon, which was published 250 years ago last month, that’s a pretty daunting challenge. It’s very long, and a lot of it can be kind of obscure. But Smith reads today as powerfully as he did 250 years ago this month. People should go read him.

Fleischacker: (Laughs.) I certainly agree. I have to say, it’s funny that you say this. I was just reading yesterday a letter from David Hume to the publisher of both Smith and Gibbon—they had the same publisher—saying, I think that Gibbon will sell much better than Smith because Smith is very hard to read and Gibbon is a nice story, a narrative. And [William] Strahan, the publisher, sort of agrees, but it turns out that Smith was selling better than anybody expected. I think both are still relevant, but Smith maybe even more so.

Frum: Thank you, Sam, so much for making time today.

Fleischacker: Thank you, David, for having me on.

Frum: All right. This is bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Samuel Fleischacker for joining me today to talk about Adam Smith. Thanks to Beto O’Rourke for joining me to talk about politics in Texas. Thanks to all of you for watching and listening to The David Frum Show. As ever, if you are minded to support the program, the best way to do that, and to support all of us at The Atlantic, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

Trump’s War With Iran and a New Danger at Home

2026-03-04T13:00:00-05:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses the recent shooting in Austin. David warns that the shooting is an example of how Trump could use the threat of terror from Iran to crack down on American freedoms.

Then David is joined by The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols to discuss the outbreak of war between the United States and Iran. David and Tom discuss Trump’s motives for launching another regime-change war and assess the competence of the administration to achieve its goals. They discuss the mistakes that were made in Iraq by the Bush administration and how, 23 years later, none of those lessons seem to have been learned. David and Tom wonder if the Trump administration has any plan for an endgame in Iran, and discuss how not having one could lead to suffering among the Iranian people and turmoil in the region. Frum and Nichols observe that the United States has embarked on a costly state-building project—but the question of whether the Trump administration realizes that is a different matter.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I’m recording the show at a grave moment in American history. My guest this week will be Tom Nichols, my colleague at The Atlantic, former professor at the Naval War College. And we’ll be discussing our anxieties about the way the war with Iran has been managed, our fears about the uses to which the war will be put by the Trump administration, and our hopes for a better future for the people of Iran, but a future that cannot be separated from the dangers that this war poses to the people of the United States.

There will be no book talk this week; our conversation will be too substantial for that. So I will just preface now with some thoughts before the dialogue about what is at hand.

I should stress, I record this program midday Monday, March 2. It will not be released on audio for a day and a half. It will not be released on video for two days. So there may be intervals. There may be gaps in the things you know about the situation at home and abroad and what I know as I speak to you. But I wanna speak about something that just happened very few minutes ago that is a real indicator, a real warning, of the dangers that the United States faces in this war with Iran.

Shortly before I began the recording, CBS News obtained and published images, or purported images, of the alleged shooter in the Austin, Texas, mass shooting. The alleged shooter was wearing a T-shirt, which, apparently, according to the images that have been released, reveals an image of the Iranian flag.

Now, I personally very much doubt that the shooter was in any way an agent or operative of the Iranian state or was in any way operating on behalf of the Iranian state—might be wrong, but I doubt it. But there’s no question that Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and that it has, over many decades, not only built networks all over the world but activated, triggered networks that have committed acts of terrorism all over the planet: Buenos Aires; Berlin; Washington, D.C. Any prudent administration in a war with such a power would have to anticipate that one resource available to that world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism would be to activate terrorist networks in the United States. You simply have to plan for that, even the best administration with the greatest respect for American liberties.

What if you have an administration that does not respect those liberties? What if you have an administration with a proven record of falsely accusing Americans of terrorism for acts like legally recording the operations of immigration authorities, that has repeatedly lied about what the Department of Homeland Security is doing and why it’s doing it, that has covered up casualties of American citizens at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security? What if you have that kind of government?

Well, that possibility of Iranian sleeper cells inside the United States, that’s not just a resource for the Iranian regime to use against the United States; that’s a resource that the Trump administration can use against the liberties of American people. After all, if it’s really possible that there about to be acts of terrorism by Iran inside the United States, how can Congress continue to blockade funds for the Department of Homeland Security until it gets reforms in the way that the Department of Homeland Security operates, including an end to the lying that has been such a disgrace of the Department of Homeland Security?

You’re gonna see a real press by the Trump administration to say, Release the funds and let the Department of Homeland Security resume its operations exactly the way it wants to, including falsely calling people terrorists if they operate a camera near an immigration agent. You’re going to see attacks on the freedom of the press. This administration has already made it clear that it regards it as illegal, criminal, for reporters simply to ask questions of Pentagon employees about what they’re doing with the American people’s money, about what they’re doing with the American people’s security, about what they’re doing with the lives of soldiers entrusted to their care. Now, that has been the view of this administration: No, you are not allowed to ask any of these questions, and we’re gonna yank your press credentials if you have any unauthorized conversations with anybody in the building. You’re not allowed to do that. Only the designated leaders of the building get to speak at all, and if they’re not speaking or if they’re saying things that look like they might not be true, you can’t second-guess or question them.

We have had many instances over the first year of the Trump administration of false invocations of emergency powers. The whole tariff nonsense, the tariffs that were struck down by the Supreme Court, those tariffs rested on false claims by the president of the United States about economic emergency. Well, now there’s a real war, and there’s a real risk of terrorist activity inside the United States. That’s a much more plausible emergency than anything Trump invoked about tariffs. And what court will say, You know what? We don’t think you’re telling the truth about this, either. Courts will be very reluctant to do that. So there’ll be new assertions of emergency power in all kinds of contexts. We know that people around the president, people who have the president’s ear, have been urging him to use emergency powers against the elections of 2026. The possibility of that temptation being accepted are much higher today than they were 10 days ago or a week ago. And there may be more legal predicates to allow him to do it.

In every way we can imagine, and in many ways we cannot, we’re moving into a terrain of extraordinary danger to democratic institutions. The war in Iran is not just a foreign-policy question; it is an urgent domestic-policy question. It is a massive grant of power to a president and administration that have proven again and again that they will abuse any powers that they are entrusted with.

We all wish, of course, a safe and swift return to American personnel in danger. We wish a safe and swift return home to all the allied personnel in danger. And we wish, urgently, a better future for the oppressed people of Iran, who’ve been so maltreated and murdered by the most aggressive and most repressive regime, maybe on the entire planet.

But Americans also are entitled to think about their safety, their security, and their freedom. And that is suddenly called into question in a way that has been quite theoretical until the Trump administration came along, and even in the early days of the second Trump administration, while it has been less theoretical and more actual, has not been as imminent and ominous as it is today. But the threat now is as imminent and ominous as it possibly could be, or as it yet has been; perhaps it can get even worse. And as an American, it’s your job now not to lose either your ideals or your confidence. The courts still work. The liberties of the Constitution are still on paper. And it’s going to be up to all of us to make sure that the courts continue to operate and that those liberties remain real against an administration that will use any excuse to try to avoid the courts, neuter Congress, and negate those liberties—any excuse—and now they’ve got a better excuse than they’ve ever had before.

So, as I said, a grave moment in American history, a dangerous moment in American history. Not blind to the opportunities for a better Middle East, but don’t be blind either to the risks of a much worse future for Americans here at home.

And now, my dialogue with Tom Nichols.

[Music]

Frum: Tom Nichols is an ex-professor at the Naval War College, an expert in nuclear weapons, and of course, a colleague at The Atlantic, who filed early in the morning of the first hours of this war, in an act of amazing summary of knowledge and expertise.

Tom is a five-time Jeopardy champion and now a returning two-time guest on The David Frum Show. I’m very grateful to him for making the time on this busy day.

I’m going to, just for the information of listeners and viewers, point out we’re recording midday Monday. The audio will post early morning Wednesday, video midday Wednesday, so there’s a gap for a lot of events to happen in the United States and around the world, but we’re going to do the best we can to focus on some domestic issues raised by President Trump’s action in Iran.

Tom, let me just start with this. I think you and I belong to that tiny little section of the Venn diagram that is broadly sympathetic to action against the Iranian regime and deeply worried about action by the Trump administration.

Tom Nichols: Absolutely. No one should be shedding any tears for the mullahs, and we should all be hoping that, now that we’re committed to this, whatever this is—I suppose one of the things we should talk about—but if it’s regime change, that this goes well. But not only am I worried about the history of regime change—I supported, as you did, the Iraq War, and we saw that regime change becomes a very dicey business—but I’m also concerned about the competence of this administration to pull off something of this size and I think because of the people who are in it. The president is the president, but I wish he had a better team around him.

So, yeah, I’m concerned. I hope the Iranian regime transforms into something else, but I’m very concerned about this team trying to do it.

Frum: Okay, let’s break this into pieces. Here are the pieces that I think we should address. The first is your question, “What is this?” The second is competence of the team. And the third is intentions of the team, both for the region and here at home. I’m gonna try to get to all of those points.

Let’s talk about what this is. I listened to the recent press conference by [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth, who denounced other wars, [in] very personal terms, waged by Presidents Obama and Biden and President [George] W. Bush, I presume. And he said, This is not gonna be a war of regime change. There’s no nation building. There’s no democracy building. And I thought, What kind of guy looks at the Iraq War and says, You know what we did wrong in Iraq? We spent too much time planning for the end state? Everyone thought the problem was we did too little planning for the end state, but Hegseth and company say, No, too much. The answer is: Launch a war, then see what happens, with no particular idea about what’s to come next.

Nichols: You and I were alive during that war and paying attention, and one of the things that I heard constantly, especially from the officers who were coming back to us from their assignments and coming back through the Naval War College, is that it was completely the other way around. Donald Rumsfeld would pretty much throw—the secretary of defense at the time—would throw you out of his office if you started talking about Phase IV and what comes after and nation building and all that stuff. He didn’t want to hear any of that stuff. He was more like Hegseth, maybe, than Hegseth wants to admit. He wanted to prove that a transformed small force could knock over what was, at the time, the fourth-largest army in the world, right, that we could go in, and we did that in ’91, and then we knocked over that army, and then we came back in and that we could do it again with this kind of Jedi force. That’s all Rumsfeld was interested in. So the idea that, somehow, these previous wars, we spent all this time chin-pulling about “What comes next?”—the mistakes that happened were because we didn’t do that.

Frum: Right. The Trump people think they’re doing the opposite, but they’re doing, as you say, Rumsfeld on steroids or Rumsfeld without the good manners.

Nichols: (Laughs.)

Frum: Not that Rumsfeld’s manners were so good—

Nichols: Rumsfeld without the tact. (Laughs.)

Frum: Rumsfeld without the tact. (Laughs.)

All right, let’s talk here about the team at home. I think you and I are worried about slightly different things. You’re worried about the competence of the team. I’m worried that war empowers presidents inevitably, and President Trump and his domestic team have proven they can’t be trusted with those powers. And then now they’re going to have greater powers to, for example, crack down on media reporting. It’s a war—you can’t put troops at risk, obviously. So if Pete Hegseth texts you the war plans by mistake, as he did to our colleague Jeff Goldberg, now there’s a real case for punishing the people who receive Pete Hegseth’s mistaken texts.

Nichols: Well, hold on, let me just check Signal, see if anything’s coming in today. (Laughs.)

Look, I share both of those concerns. One of them is more proximate. Here in the first few days of the war, what I’m really concerned about—our military is, operationally, the most capable in the world; they’re just the best. But they can only do the missions that they’re assigned to do. They can’t run the war. That has to come from the White House and the Pentagon. I suppose I take some comfort in the fact that Pete Hegseth has been relegated to giving cheerleader speeches at 8 o’clock in the morning, when he knows nobody’s listening, to a Pentagon briefing room that’s full of his political allies.

I, like you, the first thing I thought—look, why are we going into Iran? I think it is the president’s vainglory. He thinks he’s on a roll, that this is easy to do, that you can knock off dictatorships like Venezuela and then have a parade, that this solves a lot of his problems. It gets people not talking about the Epstein files. I really believe that a huge chunk of Donald Trump’s foreign policy is rooted in trying to get people to stop talking about the Epstein files. I think he is that narrow and crass.

I had exactly the same thought you did, David, which is, Great, now he’s gonna to say, I’m a war president. That means you can’t criticize me. It means I can stomp on the press. It means that I can declare a national emergency. Maybe, as the British Parliament said in 1944, I think it was, This is not a propitious time for an election. There’s all kinds of mischief that comes with a war because, as you say, presidential war powers, especially once a conflict is underway, become almost unchallengeable.

Frum: President Trump has invoked war powers to justify his stupid tariffs, and the Supreme Court said—no, emergency powers, I should say—and the Supreme Court, correctly, in my opinion, said, There’s no emergency. You don’t have these powers. You can’t oppose the tariffs. But this is a real shooting war. There’s no question; this is a war. Powers come with that. If anybody else were president right now, I think you and I would agree the president needs a broader range of powers to bring the war to a successful conclusion, achieve American aims, protect American lives, protect allied lives. But you fear he will make wicked use of those powers.

Nichols: “What presidential powers does he not make wicked use of?” is really the way to put it. Why would anyone assume that this is the set of powers that he will use with prudence and responsibility? Especially when you cannot trust the rationale behind this war. There was no gathering of allies. Bush 43 took a lot of static for the way he went into Iraq. Compared to this, that was lawyered up like a corporate merger compared to what Donald Trump has done: going to the UN, going to Congress, getting all those ducks in the row, going back to the UN a second time, even though, as you know, President Bush didn’t wanna do that that second time around. There’s none of that here. And so I don’t trust why this war was launched in the first place.

Right now, all I can say is our men and women are in action, and I wish them every success and to come home safely. But that doesn’t mean that we should stop asking questions about things like curtailing the president’s war powers, because—I think I can say with confidence—he will abuse them because he has abused all the other powers of his office and these are the most tempting powers there are.

Frum: Now, let me steelman this for a minute. Let me invoke people I know and I think you know who I know what they’re saying and thinking. And I don’t know how many people in the listenership or viewership will agree with this point of view, but it’s a point of view that is important in my social and personal circle, and maybe, Tom, in yours. So here’s the steelman: David, everything you say about Trump, true. Got it. Don’t disagree with you. But Iran has been a lethal danger to Americans since 1979—one atrocity after another, unceasing aggression, unceasing repression at home. Past presidents have all agreed something needed to be done, but nobody knew what to do. The Obama people sent them money. The Biden people allowed them to seize a warship and paid them more money to get the warship back. They’ve committed assassinations, acts of terrorism, and now we know that they’re massively rejected by their own people, who have sacrificed their lives by the thousands in a bid for freedom. This is the moment. This is the president who happens to be in charge at the moment. How can you say no to the Iranian people, and how can you forget all the crimes that Iran has inflicted against the United States and America’s friends all around the world?

Nichols: I’m going to answer with something Ken Adelman said after Iraq. You may have remembered, David, that some years ago, there was a piece in Vanity Fair called “Neo Culpa,” and it was a group of conservatives who had pushed for the second Gulf War who were now asked their second thoughts. It was people like [Richard] Perle and [Kenneth] Adelman and [Paul] Wolfowitz and others. And Adelman said, Look, your cause can be absolutely right but that you have to put it in the drawer that says Can’t do for now.

If we really decided that this was the moment, because of the regime’s weakness, to say, This is the time that we excise this malignancy from the planetary body politic, then do it by assembling your allies, by explaining your cause to the American people, by getting authorization of some kind from Congress. And by the way, as a side note here, my boss in 1991, Senator John Heinz, he wanted to invoke the War Powers Act. And I felt so strongly about presidential prerogative here that I actually kind of strong-armed my boss about why that’s a bad idea. He and a group of Republicans were going to enact it. And I said, Don’t do this. This is—

Frum: Against Gulf War One?

Nichols: Bush 41. Yeah, this was in the winter of 1990. And I said, Don’t do it, because I think it would be dangerous. So if you’re going to do it, I would say I still would be worried about this team and their motives doing it, but if somehow we have reached a national consensus, which we have not, and perhaps even something like an international consensus—maybe just our top five or six allies, as we did in 2003—to say, This is the time, then fine, do it.

This is not the way—just showing up and dropping a lot of steel on a lot of Iranian targets, and then saying, Well, we’ll see what happens. My biggest fear is that the steelman case about “How can you abandon the Iranian people at a time like this?,” my answer is, the way Trump does things and the way it’s looking right now, this is gonna be, as I think you and others have pointed out, this is a moral peril not seen since the Hungarian Revolution. We’re telling people to go out there and oppose their government and risk getting killed. If we’re gonna do that, we’d better be there.

Frum: So 1956, American radio, Voice of America and stations like that, were saying throughout the month of October of ’56 to the Hungarians, at a time when Soviet power looked a little wobbly, Rise up. Rise up. This is the moment. You will be helped. And they did rise up. And the United States did nothing to help them. And the Suez crisis erupted in the Middle East at the same time, and that had something to do with it, but basically, President [Dwight] Eisenhower was not going to touch it. And as you say, I think hundreds were killed. Thousands were made prisoner. A quarter of a million, I believe, were driven into exile.

Let me continue with the steelman now, remembering that, which is to say, Okay, it’s not the time, not the team. These guys can’t do it. That said, the president of the United States a month ago promised the Iranian people that help was on the way. You know he’s a bozo who speaks without meaning it. I know he’s a bozo who speaks without meaning it. But the Iranian people didn’t know that he’s—they thought he was a normal president, more or less, and they didn’t know that his word was worthless , and he said, I promise the United States of America, for whom I speak, promises to help you. Rise up. They did. They got killed in the thousands. They’re being tortured. They’re in prisons. And that promissory note has been issued, and, yes, it’s by President Bozo, but he’s authorized to speak on behalf of a great and good nation.

Nichols: To answer that steelman argument, so the argument is, because we screwed up and baited the Iranian people into thinking we were going to do this, we have now maneuvered ourselves into a corner where, on the fly, pretty much by the seat of our pants, we’re going to do this because of a situation of our own creation. It’s kind of like the argument that the administration was making that we had to go because the Iranians were kind of forward-leaning and were about to hit us. Turns out that wasn’t true. But the reason we were worried that they were going to hit us is because we had amassed a giant armada packed into a pretty convenient set of target packages around Iran. This is the kind of “killing your parents and then claiming you’re an orphan” problem.

If we wanna do this, state it clearly; go to the American people. We had a State of the Union just before this, and it was a carnival. It was a variety show. It was embarrassing. No explanation to the American people that their sons or daughters may be killed. No discussion with Congress, not even bullying of Congress to say, Look, I’m gonna have to do things, and you’re gonna have to get on board, which is what previous presidents did. No after explanation.

The other day, I put up on social media a screenshot of Ronald Reagan, who went on television in prime time from the Oval Office to address the American people in 1986 about a one-night strike on [Libyan ruler Muammar] Qaddafi, on a nation of 7.5 million people. We have gone to war against 92 million people with an eight-minute video of Grandpa in his silly hat.

So again, my answer to the steelman case is, I grant you everything—that this is a terrible regime, it should be gone—but you cannot defend the way this is being done. And in the end, if the Iranian people are again destroyed by their own government, that blood is gonna be on our hands because we baited them into it.

You know—then I’ll get off this soapbox, David—but one thing that really bothered me is Centcom and the White House both saying to the Iranian government and the Iranian security and military forces, Lay down your arms. Surrender. Surrender to whom? There’s nobody there. To ask Iranian cops—forget about the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] or the real heavies—asking any local security forces to lay down their weapons, you might as well ask them to blow their own brains out.

It’s ironic, right, that Hegseth says, We’re not like these previous [administrations], but as you say, Rumsfeld on steroids. Trump loathes Barack Obama, and yet his strategy here seems to be exactly what Obama did, minus a few more allies, in Libya.

Frum: Well, the State of the Union point that you make is very powerful because there was Trump, I think just hours before, days before the beginning of the strike, and he went to Congress—he didn’t just not make the case for a war. He went out and humiliated members of Congress: Stand up; sit down. Stand up; sit down. Why won’t you stand up when I tell you to stand up? I’m the king. Everyone rises when the king speaks. He insulted them. He berated them. He had previously called the Supreme Court, or six of nine judges, in the sway of a foreign power. Then he said, Oh, by the way, I’m gonna be back in a few days for a multibillion-dollar supplemental appropriation to pay for this war I never asked you to authorize. So that’s bad.

But what’s also bad—and here’s, again, to continue with what this imagined, or not so imagined, circle of my friends would say, is, Look, Trump does actually have a plan. He’s a little shy about admitting it because it doesn’t sound very nice. But his plan is the same plan as in Venezuela but on a bigger scale, which is, with the Israelis, to kill everybody in the top 40 positions in the government and then to keep killing people until you find someone who says, Okay, I’ll do what you want. And then when you find the guy who says, I’ll do what you want, you say, Okay, good. You’re now in charge. And that plan, although unlovely—Anne Applebaum, our colleague, has written very powerfully about the abandonment of Iranian democracy—if the goal is: We have to get from here to there while keeping the electricity going, the water projects working. There are hospitals in Iran that have to keep functioning. Children do need to go to school. I presume there’s some kind of pension system; the pensions need to get to be paid. And on your way to whatever a better future is, in the six months after the collapse of the old regime, someone needs to run the place, and maybe a former insider is the best way to get you from point here to point there. And that seems to be Trump’s plan, to the extent he’s got a plan, is what would be said.

Nichols: Well, yeah, I’m having flashbacks now because these were the same arguments that I had, and I’m sure you had back during the second Gulf War, where I did say—I admit it—I said, Look, I don’t know what comes after [Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein], but it has to be better than Saddam. Chaos would be better than Saddam because of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and terrorism and all the things. And I admit it—I said, I couldn’t really imagine things getting much worse. And then we made it worse, right? We disbanded the Iraqi army. We did all kinds of stupid things.

But to take this and to compare it, say, to Venezuela, we eliminated exactly one level of leadership in one person, and then we said to the vice president, Okay, fine, you can run things. That’s not gonna happen here. This is a total—

Frum: Well, the 40 top leaders are already dead, so.

Nichols: They’re already dead. At some point, this is an ideological regime. This is a totalitarian ideological regime. Now, there is a huge amount of corruption. I read—I think it was somebody writing in The Atlantic pointed out—that it used to be 80 percent true believers, 20 percent kind of charlatans and hangers-on. Now it’s the other way around: It’s 80 percent charlatans and 20 percent true believers.

Great. But in the meantime, you have a gigantic country. This isn’t even Iraq, and Iraq was hard enough. You have this gigantic country of 92 million people that could fracture into some authorities—you’ll get a patchwork of authorities across the country, and that leaves open a lot of mischief.

Frum: It’s only about 60 percent ethnically Persian, as we’re all about to learn.

Nichols: Yes, we’re all about to learn some things. We’re all about to go through some things.

So I think part of the problem is the steelman case rests on, Yeah, these are all valid objections, but we’re in it now. Well, that’s a hell of a way to do foreign policy. The car’s off the cliff and turning to the guy in the next seat and saying, Well, fine, you drive.

Frum: Okay, well, we are—okay, but—

Nichols: But we are in it.

Frum: We are in it. (Laughs.)

Nichols: We’re in it, so that’s—

Frum: And some tactical military successes have been [achieved]. That underwrites it: Some very important tactical military successes have been achieved, as much by the Israelis as by the United States. And part of the problem—and I say this as a great friend of Israel and on their side—but it does seem like they have a clear idea of where they’re driving the car to, and the United States is a little bit along for the ride.

Nichols: Well, yeah, and I suspect that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has learned how, as most world leaders have, they’ve learned how to manipulate Donald Trump. And I’m sure there’s been whispering in Donald Trump’s ear about You’re gonna be the liberator of Iran. There will be songs written to you for centuries. There will be statues in Tehran. Look, Bill Clinton’s got a statue in Bosnia; you need one. I’m sure he’s hearing all that stuff and responding to it the way we know Donald Trump responds to visions of glory and flattery.

But here’s where I wanna be a War College professor for a minute. One of the things we always warn our students is: Operational successes do not by themselves translate into strategic success. The first two years, the first year and a half of World War II was nothing but a string of Japanese operational successes. Things don’t turn around until midway, and we, frankly—let’s face it—too, at midway, we caught a huge amount of breaks and some real luck to turn that around. But the Japanese in 1945, saying, How can this be? It was two years of winning.

So you really have to be careful with—and I’ve said this both to the steelman arguers, Look, this isn’t over; hold the U.S.A chants, just as to the doomers, of whom I am not one, by the way; I’m concerned, but I’m not a doomer. Saying, Listen, there are some ways this can go right, even under Donald Trump, even with this team in charge. They could, in fact, find their way to a better outcome, and we’d all have to be the first one to say, Not a fan of Donald Trump, would never vote for him, but if he does manage to liberate Iran, send our congratulations.

Frum: I just finished reading a book. It was a book based on the Japanese war archives, and the question is: “Okay, what did they think they were doing when they struck Pearl Harbor?” And the answer is: It was exactly Hegsethism. The civilian leadership was intimidated and weak, and they said, Well, what we’re going to do is we’re going to seize Southeast Asia, hit the American fleet, and then see. (Laughs.)

Nichols: Right. There were some Japanese—

Frum: And what then? Who knows. Your guess is as good as mine. (Laughs.) Something good, maybe. (Laughs.)

Nichols: Fate is a harsh mistress, David. There were some guys in the room who went, The Americans are not—that’s a big country you’re tangling with. And the answer they got was—literally, there were people in the Japanese high command saying, Once we destroy their fleet in Pearl Harbor, they won’t like it, but they’ll understand.

This is something I worry about—again, sort of basic strategic analysis, right? I’m worried that the people in Washington are doing a lot of mirror-imaging. They’re doing a lot of what strategic analysis calls “script writing”: If we do this, they’re gonna do that. And then when they do that, that opens it for us to do this. And it’s all very convenient and congenial to your own assumptions. And I think that a lot of that is going on. But as you say, have they thought through what happens if the Iranians decide, We don’t care. We’ll go out in a blaze of glory. We’ll fire everything at everybody? Are we gonna put ground troops in?

Frum: Well, as we saw in Iraq, I think the military does think a lot about questions like “What if they decide to go out in a place of glory and fire every missile at once?” I’m sure there’s a good plan for that. What is never planned for is “What if everything collapses? And what if you kill everybody, the IRGC take their money and flee, and the electricity stops; the water stops?” It’s not a very forgiving human environment, and there are chronic water problems. What happens if the waterworks stop working? What happens if there isn’t a government and then, whatever organized crime networks exist in Tehran, they become the most powerful force or the IRGC turns into a mafia?

Nichols: I was just gonna say, we should learn from other cases of regime collapse—not just regime change by war, but regime collapse—the former Soviet Union. What happens to the KGB? Well, it turns out they become a powerful mafia and they run the country. What if the IRGC says, We’re the most organized group in this shitshow here, if I can use one expletive, and we’ll get the water back on; we’ll get the electricity going?

But I think the other problem is: Who decides when a war is over? The loser, right? That’s an old adage of strategy. The loser decides when the war is over, unless you literally kill every single person. But it’s the losers who say when it’s done. What if they say, Look, we’ll drag this on forever. We’ll commit terrorist acts. We’ll keep stuff in reserve and blow the occasional thing up. Fine, you’re gonna scuttle part of our fleet; we’ll make the [Strait] of Hormuz practically unnavigable for insurance companies.

In my article—and I know it’s a line you know well from the old days—Barbara Bodine, talking after the war in Iraq, she said, There’s 500 ways to do this wrong and only two or three ways to do it right. And what I didn’t count on is that we were gonna try all 500 ways first.

Frum: Yeah, well, on your point about the loser deciding, I remember reading a memoir of post-war Japan and the memoir writer just marveling that, in the spring of 1946, individual American officers unarmed could go to the market and shop and buy things, and everybody was polite to them. There is no assassination. There was no harassment. They didn’t have to put on a sidearm to go buy things in the market. The society jad collectively decided, We accept you. We accept this outcome. And the United States, in turn, by the way, one of the reasons the Japanese occupation went the way that it did, said to everybody, And by the way, just about everybody here is forgiven. And whoever was the assistant minister of streetcars before is still assistant minister of streetcars today.

Nichols: It was a completely different approach to war. And this administration, it’s almost like the president’s speeches are foreign-policy Mad Libs, where we’re “fire” and just “like I’ve never seen” and “lay down your weapon,” but “this is your moment” and “freedom” and “we’re not—” Who is he talking to? In both Gulf Wars, we, the United States, made an effort to reach out to some of these guys and say, Listen—in Gulf One, I know, particularly—if you use chemical weapons, you are not going to be able to try a Nuremberg defense. We sent word to various generals. Understand what will happen to you. Instead, Trump says, Everybody out there, if you resist us, you get certain death, blood, gore in the streets, but lay down your weapons. I feel like, was there any preparation for this?

Frum: What should you and I, what should anyone who cares about our voices, what should anyone who is watching or listening who shares broadly our perspective, what should we do now? Because American personnel are in harm’s way. We want the United States to succeed in its foreign-policy objectives. This seems, in the abstract, a good cause. And, yeah, it’s run by unworthy—the clowns are the best one. It’s [run] by unworthy people, both morally and intellectually unworthy. But it’s done. There’s no undoing this. What does Tom Nichols, what does David Frum, what do people who care what we think, what should we think and say?

Nichols: Well, if somehow tomorrow Trump fired everybody and he said, Okay, Tom and David, come on in. You’ve got your shot. You got five minutes for an elevator pitch, I would say, This is the time to find somebody that you can talk to. Don’t keep doing this damage that you don’t wanna have to fix later. Go to Congress now—because even I’m getting to the point where I think Congress should invoke the War Powers [Resolution] because there’s a whole issue of constitutionality here that I think we alighted in previous wars that is now completely thrown out the window. And to say to the Iranians, Here’s the new deal: You are going to change your type of government. You are going to stop killing people. Here’s the list of demands. Sign here and you may get away with what’s left of your regime.

Trump’s answer seems to be—and I would say, if I were standing there, I’d say, Mr. President, you can’t kill everybody in Tehran and then say, Now form a government. That’s just not how it works. So you’ve killed the worst guys. Now find the less-worst guys and, basically, get them to seal their own doom over time. But the more that it’s done at the point of American weapons, the more opening there is for all kinds of chaos that could make even worse people more empowered and lose the—this is something very important to point out, not to you, David, but I know that a lot of folks think of Iran as “Death to America” and the whole country hates us. That is not true. The Iranians are an educated, modern people who, actually, a lot of them have a fair amount of affection for the United States, as ironic as that is after everything we’ve been involved with going back to 1953. But you don’t wanna lose that by creating a serious situation where everything gets just pounded into rubble and then people start blaming the nations around the world.

And speaking of blame, I will jump on one thing. Yeah, I think we’re here in this terrible situation because of people like Obama. I don’t take back anything I wrote about Obama’s feckless foreign policy in the Middle East. But the answer to it was not to throw all the cards up in the air and say, Screw it. Let’s just bomb the crap out of everything and see what happens. That is the pendulum in completely the other direction, and I am still really anxious that this is not gonna turn out well.

Frum: Yeah, I have a particular dog in this fight because I’m on record as saying—and people often say this is contradictory, and I keep insisting it’s not—I was against the Iran deal while it was being negotiated. I was against signing the Iran deal. And I was against it in great part because Iran got its benefits up front; the United States got its benefits on the back end. Once signed, once you have made the mistake of signing a deal where the other guy gets his benefits up front, you don’t tear up the deal. He’s already got the $90 billion of unfrozen assets that the Iranians got. At that point, your next choice is, having signed this stupid thing, enforce it, and don’t exit. (Laughs.)

Nichols: For anybody out there who thinks that all of us conservatives from the old days are meeting at the meadows and coordinating our views, the fact that I was exactly—and I was not yet at The Atlantic; you and I were not yet regularly talking—that was exactly my position as well. I was against this thing while it was being negotiated for exact—I said, This violates some basic rules of diplomacy, which is that you don’t front them the hamburger for the money you’re gonna get Tuesday. You don’t do any of that.

Frum: (Laughs.) Right.

Nichols: But once you’re in it and the whole rest of the international community, including your closest allies, have signed on to it, you’re stuck with it, and then you have to make it work. Then it’s the only game in town. And the Iranians,, they were as happy as could be when Trump said, Fine, screw it. We’re out of this. And they said, Great, so are we.

Frum: Well, at that point, the alternative was war, the war we’ve now got.

Nichols: The war we’ve got. But, again, let’s not fall down that hole, either. We’re not fighting this war over nuclear weapons.

Frum: No. We’re fighting over regime change that the administration won’t acknowledge that it’s doing. This is a problem of going in without allies and having alienated all the allies. Supposing we get real lucky, supposing we find somebody who’s assistant to the assistant to the president, he survives, he’s got enough juice to make his writ run, and he says, Right, we’re dealing with the Americans, and we’re undertaking a transition to a better future, and we’re leaving aside the anti-American ideology. We’re giving up terrorism, and we win. We really win; we win the war we want. At that point, it’s still going to be true that Iran doesn’t have enough water for its cities. It’s still going to be true that this country that was on its way to being, had it not—and I quoted this chart where, from 1960 to 1980, the growth in the Iranian and the Portuguese standard of living is identical. Today, in 2020, Iran is really no richer per person than it was in 1980, and Portugal is a fully paid-up member of the first world, the OECD. It’s a wonderful place. And Iran today could be Portugal, but they’re not; they’re poor. So we’re gonna have to help them. We’re gonna have to make sure they have drinking water. And that’s going to cost a lot of money, more, maybe, than the war itself. And Trump has, again and again, made it clear to his base: The United States is not putting up that money. Well, who is?

Nichols: I can think of at least one country that’d be more than happy to do it: China. Or other countries that, perhaps, do not have America’s best interests at heart. The Chinese have been masters at the game of walking in and saying, Listen, the American money always comes with strings, and they’re annoying, and democracy, blah, blah, blah. Here, we’ll just help you build stuff, and we won’t ask any questions.

Frum: And you can take 10 percent off the top, and we budgeted for that.

Nichols: And we budgeted for that, exactly. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.)

Nichols: It’s a lot of overhead. Everybody’s got overhead, David.

But I think it’s a serious problem, right? This does kind of put the screws to Russia a bit. Again, in that mythical moment where you and I get to walk into the Oval and say, Okay, here’s things you oughta do, and say, Oh, and by the way, Mr. President, now is the time to put the screws to Russia and help the Ukrainians really push this thing, because now the Russians have lost a friend, and that’s a good thing. But when Trump talks about this war going on for five weeks, my answer is: To do what?

Frum: To do what. Well, and this is where the refusal to think about reconstruction becomes an impediment to the war aims, because one of the things that the United States came out of World War II with a reputation for was: If you do fight the Americans and you do lose, they help you.

Nichols: Right? What’s the movie I’m trying to think of? The Mouse That Roared, right?

Frum: The Mouse That Roared.

Nichols: We’re a poor country. We need reconstruction. We’ll pick a war with the Americans, and they’ll come in, and they’ll think—it was a hilarious movie, from the ’60s, even, that people knew that. So, yeah, that was part of the deal.

Frum: And there used to be a Twitter account called Good President Trump, imagining him—

Nichols: (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.)

Nichols: I imagine that person just gave up.

Frum: That gave up. Actually, it was interesting because it was illustrated with an image of Donald Trump with a bald head, like he’d accepted it.

Nichols: (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) But Good President Trump would say, And by the way, if you do lay down your arms, that we and our allies are going to be there with the money you need to have proper waterworks, to have the electricity, to improve your roads, to send people back to school, to make universities more broadly accessible. Our goal for you is that those 40 years of development or 45 years of development or 50 years of development you missed since 1979, we’re gonna put you back on that track. And the vision is, 40 years from now, you will look like Portugal.

Nichols: And the United States will now have several friends and allies in that region, including a country of 92 million people who, just as Germany and Japan did, are gonna feel pretty warmly about what happened. None of that is on the table, none of it. As you know, I was working through the weekend and working nights, so I purposely slept through Hegseth’s 8 a.m. briefing, which is why I think he has them at 8 a.m., by the way, ’cause he doesn’t think anybody’s watching. But caught up on it later, it’s just insane. It’s all chest-thumping, Conan the Barbarian stuff, not the kind of thing that’s gonna make anybody in Iran say, You know what I oughta do? I oughta trust Pete Hegseth that I should lay down my arms and everything will be okay. To some extent, by what we’re doing, we’re putting some of these guys on death ground. And that’s a bad plan.

Frum: This is the part that they really seem unconstitutionally capable of dealing with, which is to say to whomever emerges, And if you have a plan for a transition to democracy and if you stop repressing, you will live. We won’t ask too many questions about your bank accounts. There’s a role for you. We are not actually planning on killing you all. We offer amnesty and exit if [it’s] as part of a plan to make a transition to a better future for Iran, which is gonna be defined by the Iranians but shaped by the values of all the people who are going to—and this is the key point—help you pay for it.

Nichols: Yes, and the thing I was gonna say about a transition to democracy—or something less oppressive than the thing we just overthrew. We get it, that it’s not gonna happen tomorrow. We’ve learned our lessons. We’re not gonna send you copies of The Federalist Papers and say, Here’s your homework. Just as I think we should have done in Iraq—there was a plan, I guess, from the British to say, Look, if we don’t disband the military, we take a bunch of generals, and we say, We’re gonna put this country under military rule for now, and we’re watching you, and you’re gonna have to transition to a civilian government, and all the time, with Uncle Sam and the allies saying, Don’t screw this up, because we can come back here any time. Instead, we’re simply saying, Hey, people in Iran, kill your government, and go take power. And we’re not coming, by the way.

Everything that Trump is saying, and I really wanna emphasize this, so much of what Trump is talking about would be more credible if he were talking about doing it backed by ground troops, and I don’t want him to do that. Even though we’re off the cliff, there are still dumb things we can do. Even as the car is plunging, we can unbuckle our seat belts and try and stand on the roof. There are things that we shouldn’t do and that I’m worried that, because Trump is a man who can never admit a mistake, that he will double down. ’Cause you know him, David, that’s what he does with everything. This administration always does that, and sooner or later, I think something could happen where Trump’s gonna wanna double down.

This is the time to think about “What do we want? What are we satisfied with? Who’s gonna guide what happens next?” And I don’t think anybody’s thinking about that right now—or let me put it a different way: I’m sure there are people thinking about that that no one’s listening to right now.

Frum: Yeah. Well, let’s finish here but with this thought, which is: We all wish a safe return home for the Americans in harm’s way. We all wish a better future for the people of Iran. We all wish this situation will be resolved quickly and with minimal harm to innocent people. And as much as our mental skepticism is engaged, our hearts are in sympathy with all of those who face danger in this war that didn’t have to happen but has begun.

Nichols: And I’ll add only one other thing: that whatever my thoughts about this particular government, that the good Lord guides them and grants them some insight and wisdom in doing this because they are the civil authorities right now and they have to do this, and so I think it’s important to point out that I hope they do it well, despite my worries.

Frum: Look, God’s probably doing his part as best he can, but Trump doesn’t listen to him, either. (Laughs.)

Nichols: (Laughs.)

Frum: All right. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Nichols: It was great to see you, David.

Frum: Thank you so much.

Nichols: Thank you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Tom Nichols for joining me today. As I mentioned at the top of the show, there will be no book talk this week. But I do wanna thank you for viewing and listening to the show and remind you that if you wanna support the work of Tom and me, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will like and share this dialogue on whatever platform you use. Thank you so much for watching and listening to The David Frum Show, and I look forward to joining you again next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

This Joke Explains Iran Today

2026-03-03T15:43:00-05:00

The agent asks an Iranian: “Are you willing to work for Israel and the United States to overthrow the Khamenei theocratic regime?”

The Iranian replies: “I am willing!”

The agent says: “That’s awesome! A hundred thousand dollars!”

The Iranian looks troubled, hesitates for a moment, grits his teeth and says: “A hundred thousand it is! But I can’t come up with that much all at once—can I pay in installments?”

That joke, which I happened to come across today, sheds light on what’s happening in Iran.

On Saturday—the first day of the present air war against Iran—the United States and Israel reportedly killed 48 regime leaders, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Today an Israeli strike flattened the site in Qom where the regime’s most senior clerics gathered to elect a new supreme leader—though it’s unclear just how many were in the building at the time.

This targeting success surely owes much to advanced electronic surveillance and deep cyber penetration of Iran’s weapons systems and infrastructure. But in this war, as in the 12-day war last year, Israel and the United States are obviously benefiting from intelligence from some Iranians themselves, who are willing to risk their lives to help bring down the Islamic Republic.

The Iranian regime has oppressed, humiliated, and murdered its people. In anger and pain, those people make a joke out of their readiness to accept rescue from any source—and to aid and welcome that rescuer in any way they can.

Rescue does not always arrive as yearned for. But one weapon that’s always available to the oppressed is the subversive joke. Dark humor expresses an inner refusal to acquiesce in one’s own oppression. When other forms of truth are suppressed, the joke must serve instead.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump has no plan for the Iranian people]

This joke comes from Fascist Italy:

A mother heads to the market to buy food for her children. It’s harvest season, yet there is nothing to buy. She cannot restrain herself from speaking aloud: “He has ruined everything! He has destroyed this country!”

She feels a tap on her shoulder. She wheels around to see a policeman. He asks in a menacing voice, “Of whom are you speaking, signora?”

Thinking quickly, the mother replies: “Of my husband! I was speaking of my husband.”

The policeman snaps to respectful attention. “I beg your pardon, Signora Mussolini!”

A good joke could exact a heavy price from those who told it.

A Soviet judge exits his courtroom, laughing enthusiastically. A fellow judge approaches him.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s a joke, but I can’t tell you,” answers the laughing judge. “I just sentenced the man who told it to me to five years in a labor battalion!”

Laughter is one way to sustain hope until the day of liberation. Or as a Nazi-era German joke puts it:

Every day, a shabbily dressed man pauses at the same newsstand to scan the front pages. He then moves on without buying anything. At last the news seller confronts him.

“I know times are tough, but you must be able to afford at least one single newspaper.”

“I don’t need to buy the whole paper. I only care about the obituaries.”

“You do need to buy the paper, because the obituaries are in the back pages.”

“Not the one I’m looking for. That one will be right up front.”

It appears that Iranian citizens are not merely telling grim jokes or waiting for the obituaries they hope to read. They’re doing their part to speed those obituaries into reality. Until then, one more Soviet-era joke expresses the nightmare the tyrannical Islamic regime has made of Iranian lives:

A man is walking down a Moscow street, weeping uncontrollably. A policeman stops him.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not allowed to say.”

The policeman grabs him: “Tell me or I’ll arrest you.”

The man wipes his eyes and says: “Fine. I’m crying because it’s the only thing they haven’t banned yet.”

The Fortress We Gave Away

2026-03-02T17:07:00-05:00

During the planning for President Trump’s latest strike on Iran, Britain refused to allow the United States to launch air attacks from the U.S.-U.K. base at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Only a few hours’ flying time from the Middle East, Diego Garcia offers airfields long enough for the heaviest bombers and has naval docks large enough for aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. It is British territory, left over from colonial times, but was jointly developed under a U.S.-U.K. agreement signed in 1966. Britain reversed its veto against U.S. use of British bases yesterday, but only for what Prime Minister Keir Starmer defined as “defensive” strikes. The delay and restrictions have dealt a blow to the U.S.-U.K. alliance. Unfortunately, Starmer’s Labour government seems bent on inflicting even harsher blows very soon.

Britain’s veto seems to have been what prompted Trump’s outburst on Truth Social on February 18, which ended with, “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!”

With this, Trump plunged into a controversy that has polarized British politics but attracted curiously little attention in the United States: the looming handover of Diego Garcia, the site of America’s most important military base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, an African country that has become economically dependent on China and India. Impelled by postimperial guilt, the United Kingdom has insisted that this deal is an inescapable necessity, given that Mauritius has found support for its claim to Diego Garcia at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. The treaty is signed but cannot take effect without the backing of the United States, which had at first accepted the British deal as a reasonable solution.

Yet the misgivings are well founded—even if they find an unhelpful voice in Trump’s decision to blast the treaty as an “act of GREAT STUPIDITY.” Escaping the trap that Britain and the U.S. have created for themselves will require far more than rage-posting.

Diego Garcia is the southernmost island in the Chagos Archipelago, which has been ruled by Britain since the early 19th century. The islands are also claimed by Mauritius, some 1,300 miles southwest of Diego Garcia. In May 2025, after decades of dispute and then years of negotiations following the 2019 ICJ ruling, the two sides came to an agreement. Britain would surrender sovereignty over the archipelago to Mauritius. Mauritius would then lease Diego Garcia alone back to Britain for 99 years. Mauritius would gain rights to use the other islands in the Chagos chain, but agreed not to lease any of them to a third nation without British approval.

[From the July/August 2022 issue: They bent to their knees and kissed the sand]

Proponents say that the treaty protects the base and complies with international law. Opponents counter that Mauritius’s claim to the islands is weak and unenforceable. They worry that the little republic has been granted dangerous rights over U.S. security decisions—and that the country’s strong ties to China and India make it an unreliable security partner for the U.S. and U.K.

Britain has long accepted that the United States must agree to any change to the islands’ legal status. This means that Trump needn’t rant and rave on social media to stop the “give away” of Diego Garcia; he could kill the treaty himself. Yet Trump has not done that. Instead, the Trump State Department has repeatedly endorsed the deal to end British sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. Trump himself has praised those negotiations too. Even his February 18 post is phrased as a personal opinion, as if the decision belonged exclusively to Britain. “Prime Minister Starmer should not lose control, for any reason, of Diego Garcia, by entering a tenuous, at best, 100 Year Lease. This land should not be taken away from the U.K. and, if it is allowed to be, it will be a blight on our Great Ally.”

The day of Trump’s online outburst, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt whether the administration now opposed the Chagos treaty it had previously supported. She explained that Trump’s post was the official policy of the U.S. government, “straight from the horse’s mouth.” She did not, however, clarify whether the post amounted to a U.S. veto. In other words, she seemed as baffled as everybody else.

While the world waits to learn whether Trump’s words amount to an actual change of U.S. policy, or are merely a disgruntled man’s opinion, Americans should understand the origins of the Chagos treaty—and its hazards.

Before the arrival of European settlers, both Mauritius and the Chagos islands were uninhabited by humans. Mauritius was named by Dutch explorers for their ruling prince, Maurice; the Chagos were named by Portuguese seafarers, probably for the Portuguese word for Christ’s wounds: chagas.

Mauritius was the home of the famous dodo bird, whose forest habitat would be destroyed by sugar plantations—first under Dutch rule, then French—worked by slaves from Madagascar and mainland Africa. The Chagos were used to farm coconuts, also by slave labor. The British seized both Mauritius and the Chagos islands during the Napoleonic Wars with France, then formalized their sovereignty at the peace conferences that ended those conflicts.

The British Parliament outlawed slave trafficking in 1807, abolished slavery outright in 1833, and then compensated slaveholders. Cash in hand, the sugarcane planters of Mauritius replaced their slaves with contract labor from the Indian subcontinent. As the sugarcane industry expanded, skilled workers and entrepreneurs from India came to manage the needs of the growing colony. When Mauritius became independent in 1968, a large and growing share of its nearly 800,000 residents were of Indian origin.

[Cullen Murphy: Will the expelled people of Chagos finally find justice?]

The atolls and rocks that made up the Chagos Archipelago offered more meager economic possibilities. When slavery ended, the coconut farms paid scant wages to the workers and their children. By the 1960s, fewer than 1,000 people lived in the Chagos Archipelago, almost all of them descendants of enslaved Africans. Whereas Mauritius was four-fifths Hindu or Muslim, the people of the Chagos were almost uniformly Roman Catholic.

For administrative convenience, Britain had ruled the Chagos Archipelago from the Crown colony of Mauritius, as France had done before it. But this presented an awkward problem in the 1950s and ’60s, when the British began decolonizing their African territories. The British had built an airstrip on Diego Garcia during World War II. The Americans now sought to lease and modernize that base. With the advent of long-range bombers, Diego Garcia’s location in the middle of the Indian Ocean was no longer remote, but central. The Americans wanted Britain, not Mauritius, as the landlord for the ambitious air and naval base they had planned. In 1965, the British detached the Chagos islands from Mauritius, then named the archipelago the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Advocates for Mauritius now complain that this was an unjust act. At the time, however, Mauritius took a more relaxed view. According to an account by the former director of the Seychelles islands’ national archives, the Mauritius colonial government reacted to the British proposition by asking to swap the Chagos Archipelago for ownership of the Seychelles, then another British colony in the Indian Ocean. The British had ruled the Seychelles from Mauritius from 1814 to 1903, then severed it to form a separate colony. (The Seychelles gained independence in the 1970s.) If one severance was legal, why not the other? Upon being told that the return of the Seychelles was impossible, the Mauritius government accepted 3 million pounds in compensation for the Chagos chain, about $100 million today.

The Americans, worried about a future independence movement on the Chagos islands, insisted that the new British Indian Ocean Territory be emptied of its residents. The British duly closed the last of the coconut farms and, from 1967 to 1973, removed the Chagossians to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where many suffered extreme poverty. The constitution of the British Indian Ocean Territory specifies that no one has a right of abode on the islands. My Atlantic colleague Cullen Murphy has written movingly about the sense of displacement felt by the Chagossians and their descendants to this day.

In 1972 and 1982, the British government put millions more into a trust fund for the hundreds of Chagossians removed to Mauritius. (The Chagossians in the Seychelles got nothing.) The 1982 payment was presented by Britain as a “final settlement.” Mauritius at first took the view that the funds were meant to offset the government’s costs of absorbing the Chagossians. When payments did at last flow to Chagossian families, their value was much corroded by the inflation of the Mauritian rupee.

In time, Chagossians found ways to immigrate to Britain. They built a community in West Sussex, near Gatwick airport, where many found work. Because British Chagossians were largely concentrated in one parliamentary constituency, their plight became a political matter. In 2002, an act of Parliament granted British citizenship to Chagossians and their children in Britain, amounting to a few thousand people. Groups of British Chagossians have lately engaged in acts of civil disobedience to reassert a right to return to the outer Chagos islands, but as British citizens living under British law on British soil.

Mauritius is one of the most successful countries in the 55-member African Union. Its GDP per capita is second only to that of the Seychelles. Elections occur regularly, most recently in November 2024, and human rights are generally well respected. Yet Mauritius faces many of the familiar problems of a postcolonial society. For more than half of its independent existence, it has been ruled by two generations of a single family named Ramgoolam. Corruption is a serious concern: A former prime minister and a former chief of the central bank were arrested in 2025 on money-laundering charges.

Still, Mauritius’s domestic policies are more in line with American values than those of say, Qatar, which hosts large U.S. installations. Mauritius’s foreign policy is what makes the country an uncomfortable landlord for a major American military base. Mauritius signed a free-trade agreement with China in 2019, China’s first with any African nation. The Chinese communications company Huawei chose Mauritius as its African regional hub. China financed the modernization of Mauritius’s airport, financed and built the country’s most advanced dam, and covered much of the cost of Mauritius’s largest stadium and sports center in 2018. Tiny Mauritius is now one of the top five African destinations for Chinese investment, which is especially impressive given that it is the only one of the five with no mineral resources to develop. Mauritius has received two visits by Chinese presidents: Hu Jintao, in 2009, and Xi Jinping, in 2018. In February, The Telegraph reported that more than 6,000 Mauritian officials had received various forms of training from China.

[From the January 2025 Issue: The Hawaiians who want their nation back]

India, too, has financed important infrastructure projects in Mauritius. Mauritius’s national security adviser and the head of its naval force are both Indian military officers. In 2015, Mauritius leased the island of Agalega—870 miles west of Diego Garcia—to India for development as an air and naval base. Although India is more or less a security partner of the United States and Britain today, that alliance may not always hold.

Mauritius’s deals with China and India may well make sense for a small country trying to succeed in a region where the two emerging powers loom large. But how much sway do Americans want to grant an island nation that is attempting to appease China and India over a territory that hosts the U.S. Navy and Air Force?

Although the agreement that Britain negotiated forbids Mauritius from leasing other Chagos islands to anyone else, nothing is stopping the country from building its own eavesdropping stations and selling the information to buyers in Beijing or New Delhi—among many other concerns raised by China- and India-watchers.

For a long time, Mauritius’s claims on the Chagos islands made only slow diplomatic progress. But in 2017, Mauritius was able to elevate a resolution about the matter to the United Nations’ General Assembly agenda, urging that the conflict over these islands be referred to the ICJ. The motion was well timed. Britain had voted the year before to leave the European Union—burning goodwill with many former partners. And Trump, America’s new president, had just scolded U.S. allies at his first NATO summit in Brussels. So when Mauritius made mischief, America and Britain discovered themselves short of friends. The UN resolution was adopted by a vote of 94 yeses, 16 no’s, and 65 abstentions. Among those abstaining: nearly every EU member state, plus non-EU NATO partners including Canada, Iceland, and Norway.

The matter duly went to the ICJ, which ruled in Mauritius’s favor in February 2019. The ruling was strictly an advisory one. But through a series of deft legal maneuvers—joined to the ever more ambitious self-concepts of some international legal tribunals—Mauritius was able to win a second legal victory at another international tribunal, for the law of the sea. The British government interpreted these trends as deeply ominous for its hold on the Chagos Archipelago.

In 2022, Britain announced that it would enter negotiations with Mauritius. The election of a Labour government in 2024 accelerated these negotiations. It probably did not hurt that the lead lawyer for Mauritius at the time, Philippe Sands, is a close friend of Prime Minister Starmer’s and a former law partner of Britain’s attorney general, Richard Hermer.

The ICJ advisory ruling condemned Britain’s severance of the Chagos islands as a “failure” of decolonization. Yet Mauritius’s ambitions are no less colonial. Heedless of the wishes of the Chagossian diaspora, Mauritius wants to reach across a thousand miles of ocean to claim territory to which it has few ties other than the clerical imperatives of a bygone imperial administration. Mauritius’s motive is not about peoplehood but about power: A Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos will yield more income and influence than Mauritius would on its own.

In the past, the reach of international public law was limited by the ancient rule that no government can be bound by an international tribunal without that government’s consent. But some international jurists imagine international public law as a force that can and should evolve, apart from and even independent of governments. They imagine this evolution as a force that can replace grim power politics with ideals of justice, that can restrain the strong and empower the weak. For them, Mauritius’s maneuvers to adjudicate the status of the Chagos islands despite British objections offer a thrilling glimpse of a better future.

[From the April 1899 issue: Growth of the British colonial conception]

The Chagos Archipelago case also exposes the core weakness of the new approach to international public law. The methods used here would obviously be futile against China. China occupies islands across the South China Sea without even a figment of legal right. No court decision will pry loose any of those holdings. China holds Tibet without noticeable bother, commits crimes against its Uyghur Muslim minority with impunity, launches acts of aggression against its neighbors in the South China Sea, and growls off any court or tribunal that looks askance—which few do. As China gets stronger, illusions about what international public law can do become both more dangerous and more absurd.

The Chagos treaty demands considerable payments from Britain to Mauritius: 101 million pounds a year, on average, for 99 years, much more in the early years of the agreement, with complex adjustments for inflation along the way. The British government estimates the net present value of the payment stream at 3.4 billion pounds, but critics counter that the true cost will be much higher. Regardless, Mauritius has collected payments from Britain before, in 1965, 1972, and 1982, without feeling bound to stop asking for more.

The text of the agreement, which calls on each party “to ensure that in the implementation and application of this Agreement, including activities in relation to the Base, there shall be compliance with international law,” makes it easy for Mauritius to tangle the U.S. and the U.K. in litigation anytime Mauritius (or any future ally or patron of Mauritius) wishes to thwart U.S. military action from Diego Garcia.

Some may say that the U.S. has more than enough military and economic clout to enforce its rights against a tiny country like Mauritius. But 20 years from now, if and when China and India have grown only more powerful, the U.S. may find its clout diminished. The treaty essentially signs up the U.S. and U.K. for shakedowns forever. The British government is currently too naive to imagine Mauritius abusing the treaty this way. Trump, however, is cynical enough to foresee these future threats to the Anglo-American advantage of the status quo.

Which brings us back to Trump’s rage-posting. What does it accomplish? It does not veto the treaty. But Trump’s social-media opposition does create a domestic political problem for Starmer. The British prime minister’s net approval ratings have plunged in recent months to the lowest levels ever tracked by British polling. The beneficiary of this plummet is Britain’s right-wing Reform Party, a kind of MAGA proxy, led by Trump’s longtime ally Nigel Farage. Reform cites the Chagos treaty as proof of the fecklessness and weakness of not only the Labour Party but also the Conservatives, who began negotiations with Mauritius. In short, Trump’s outbursts are doing much more to boost the U.K.’s MAGA franchise than defend America’s strategic position in the Indian Ocean.

Yet Chagos still amounts to one of those rare cases where Trump may break something that actually deserves to be broken.

The goal of U.S. and U.K. diplomacy over Diego Garcia should be to end Mauritius’s pretensions over the Chagos islands, not legitimize them. The genuine wrongs to the exiled Chagossians should be righted, but not by accepting a territorial wish list to supposedly benefit people who never wanted to be governed by Mauritius in the first place. Guilt for European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries should not become the permission structure for new forms of imperialism.

Most Chagossians say in polls that they want to be British. Some may wish to become Americans. Any money to be paid for the benefit of Chagossians should be paid to Chagossians directly. Any money for Mauritius should be paid to extinguish Mauritius’s claims—to make truly final the settlements reached in 1965, 1972, and 1982—while leaving the Chagos Archipelago securely and exclusively in British hands.

Under the American and British flags, Diego Garcia defends the Indo-Pacific region against aggressors who do not trouble their consciences about laws, pacts, or the rights of weaker nations. That’s more than enough moral justification to keep the old flags flying.

The Paradox of Trump’s Iran Attack

2026-02-28T09:30:00-05:00

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President Trump has launched a war that offers opportunities to the Middle East and threatens constitutional freedom at home. American service members are bravely risking their lives to protect their country from nuclear dangers—and to restore freedom to the Iranian people who have sacrificed so much to reclaim that freedom for themselves. The instinct to rally around the flag is, and should be, strong. It’s also urgent to rally around the principles and ideals for which the flag stands.

The opportunity: Iranians rose against their own government by the millions. They died by the tens of thousands. They lacked the strength to liberate themselves. Those Iranians able to communicate to the outside world have begged for help against their oppressors and murderers. Trump promised that help. Now he is delivering it. A tyrannical regime that has been at war for almost half a century against its own people, against its neighbors, and against the United States is suffering the retribution it provoked by its own unceasing aggression and repression. The rulers of Iran have committed outrage after outrage against the rest of the world and their own people. They sought nuclear weapons to commit a second Holocaust against Israel, as they repeatedly and expressly threatened. The outcome of the U.S.-Israel war against the Iranian regime is obviously extremely uncertain. But we can glimpse the possibility of an Iran that is no longer misgoverned by theocratic and genocidal terrorists—and all that that could mean for peace in the region, for U.S. security, and for the freedom, prosperity, and progress of the Iranian people.

The danger: The war is being made by a president who has repeatedly shown his contempt for law and free elections—enabled by a tiny congressional majority that seems to see its job as Trump’s co-conspirator against the Constitution. Trump taxed without Congress, disbursed funds to farmers without Congress, took a stake in private corporations without Congress, brazenly broke anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws despite Congress, tried to send members of Congress to prison for making a video reminding military personnel of their duty to obey the law. Now Trump has started what could be a huge and expensive regional war without even a figment of congressional authorization. War empowers presidents. No president in American history has shown himself less trustworthy with power than Donald Trump.

The danger, continued: Trump has governed by setting Americans against Americans. A week before starting his big war, he denounced the U.S. Supreme Court—or six of its members, anyway—as being under the sway of foreign powers because it found he imposed tariffs illegally. Two days before starting his big war, he delivered a nearly two-hour speech to Congress speckled with insults and stunts to demonstrate to the world his lack of respect for half the country—and by now, much more than half. Federal agencies are still occupying U.S. cities, where they have made arrests without due process and killed U.S. citizens without accountability. Trump has invoked emergency powers of all kinds when there was no justification for them. Some of his supporters are circulating a plan to use emergency powers to seize presidential control of the 2026 congressional elections his party would likely badly lose if those elections were free and fair. Now there’s a genuine military emergency at hand of a kind that federal courts have historically deferred to. It’s frightening to imagine the sinister domestic use that Trump will make of these powers—especially if Trump’s war lasts long.

So far in his presidency, Trump has deployed force in brief bursts, obscured from view: last summer’s air strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, the raid to abduct the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, the blowing up of boats said to be carrying drugs. He may hope that this new war will follow the pattern. But it may not. Once the Iranian regime’s military assets and command structures are battered, then what? What if the regime doesn’t fall by itself? Does Trump accept failure and try to spin it as success? Or does he try to mobilize more resources, all without regard to law, Congress, and U.S. public opinion?

You don’t go bankrupt as often as Trump has gone bankrupt if you’re good at assessing risk. Trump tells ridiculous fantasies presumably because he believes ridiculous fantasies. In his second administration, he has surrounded himself with sycophants who validate his ridiculous fantasies. When his fantasies unravel, Trump has a habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world. When the Federal Reserve does not rescue him from his economic mismanagement, he orders his Department of Justice to open criminal investigations into a Federal Reserve governor and the chairman himself. If an actual shooting war goes amiss—takes too long, fails to yield the cheap and easy success Trump craves—what follows at home may exceed all past abuses of power.

To paraphrase a saying from America’s previous big war: You don’t go to war with the president you want. You go to war with the aspiring autocrat you have. Some of Trump’s moves to second-term autocracy have been thwarted. Trump’s March 2025 executive order purporting to grab presidential control of state elections has been dismantled by the courts. His tariffs to create a revenue source under his personal control have been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Public outrage compelled him to jettison the most violent tactics used by his immigration-enforcement agents.

Now, however, Trump has a much more open field to try new autocratic methods. His majority in Congress remains complicit. The courts tend to go quiet in wartime. The only restraint will be public opinion. The trouble there is that those parts of the public who will be heard first and loudest are precisely those least interested in—or actively opposed to—garnering the opportunity that opened this warning. A free Iran and a free United States: Americans should seek both. If we can get to a free Iran fast, Trump’s plot against American freedom will have less scope to operate. If the war to free Iran falters or slows, the attack on free institutions at home may expand and accelerate.

The ideal palliative would be for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to act, for a change, like the independent constitutional officers they are supposed to be. But they have to date failed to muster the character to do the jobs they swore to do, and not even the bad polls overhanging their party’s prospects have yet recalled them to duty. Only if the members behind them break ranks will the sunlight of democracy shine a little, as happened with Trump’s attempted cover-up of the Epstein scandal. So the call goes out: A dozen Republican House members—even two or three senators—who remember the principles they supposedly believe is all it will take in this moment of danger and opportunity to grasp the opportunities and mitigate the dangers. Congress needs to generate oversight committees dedicated to success in the war against the brutal rulers of Iran, and protection of democracy at home from the war makers.

When Caring Becomes Counterculture

2026-02-25T13:00:00-05:00

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

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now my dialogue with Tim Miller.

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frum: (Laughs.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miller: Yeah, okay.

Frum: I’m not—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miller: Yeah, right. (Laughs.)

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

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

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

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

Miller: Very demonic?

Frum: Demotic, not demonic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miller: Yeah. Anyway, but my final point was just, I thought her speech was more responsible than Marco’s—period, end of story. Does that mean that I’m gonna agree with all of her foreign policy better than Marco—you know what I mean. There are a lot of other things, but that’s just speaking about that speech.

Frum: Let me move the camera a little bit from AOC and back more directly upon you. So in politics, as individuals, we have red lines, things we cannot accept, and green flags, things we believe in and are excited about. Mine would include U.S. global leadership of democratic nations, free trade abroad and free commerce at home, constitutional restraints on the government, but also fiscal responsibility, generally preferring a government that taxes less and does less—

Miller: That’s a red line for you?

Frum: No, that’s my green flag.

Miller: I was gonna say, if that’s a red line, you’ve not had anyone to support for 40 years. (Laughs.)

Frum: No, the red lines are the things where you say, I will fight against this in the company of anybody. Sometimes, when you’re battling the red lines, you can forget what your green flags were or should be or used to be. In fact, this is the story of the first neoconservatives. They began by being upset about disorder in the cities of the industrial Northeast and Midwest in the 1960s, and pretty soon, they’ve become completely different people, with a kind of—Andrew Sullivan calls it the “neocon slide.” And that’s just natural, but it’s also something that maybe you wanna make sure, I’m making my own decisions about where I go. I’m not being pushed by the force of events.

Miller: Yeah. No, I understand that. I’m very conscious of it. I always think about the thing I most took from Jeb,speaking of my losing campaigns, is he had a phrase that he liked to use, that what was his north star was making sure that people had an opportunity to live a life of purpose and meaning. And that’s what’s the government’s job. It doesn’t mean you had to give people purpose, right? If people didn’t want to find purpose in their life, they could go and make fools of themselves, and we’d have a kind of a minimum safety net to make sure that they could enjoy the life part of the having a life of purpose and meaning, but we couldn’t give people purpose and meaning; we had to give them opportunities to. And that the government should do what was possible to nourish that and that the government shouldn’t do anything that would infringe on it, right? And you can think about any policy kind of through that prism.

And so when I see things on the left that I think are dehumanizing, are preventing people from being able to do that, I wanna speak out about it. I know you wanna speak more in the policy space, but just one thing that jumps straight to mind that was a red line for me that I said very clearly in the podcast was I had a pretty disturbing amount of people that came up to me and said that they were basically okay with Charlie Kirk’s assassination—somewhere between it didn’t bother them and they celebrated it. And I was just horrified by that. I was like, No. I believe in humans’ ability to grow and change and be redeemed. That’s why, in Hillary’s “deplorables” line, when she called MAGA the “basket of deplorables,” I didn’t mind “deplorables” ’cause they are, but I didn’t like that the next thing she used was “irredeemable”: a lot of these people are “deplorable” and “irredeemable.” No, everyone is—almost everyone; I don’t know if Stephen Miller is redeemable—almost everyone is redeemable in the eyes of God. And so, my view is, I had to speak out. I had to say, No, I will not actually be side by side with somebody who believes that political violence is either appropriate or allowed or encouraged in service of some broader democratic goal. I won’t. Even if it’s rhetorical, I won’t give any aid and comfort to that. That seems like a very low bar. Unfortunately, we live in a society where the bar is pretty low. We saw a similar thing with Luigi Mangione and others.

And so, look, I think that it’s important to have a north star, to know where the guardrails are. I just also think, in the context of AOC and Zohran, that we live in a world where the old way of thinking led us to two Donald Trump terms and led us, really, to the brink of potentially losing our democracy. I’m more open to creative solutions to that and other solutions that are outside of what my green flags are, of fiscal responsibility and … (Laughs.) I’m more open—I want fiscal responsibility. I want cutting red tape. I would love for those to be elements of a broad coalition that allows us to get our society back on track. I’m also open to the possibility that there might be other, more effective ways of reaching the types of people that Donald Trump reached. And so when I analyze AOC and Zohran, I just try to be mindful of that.

Frum: I sometimes think—and I hope that this is an accurate quote, or that it’s an authentic quote and that I’m reproducing it accurately—but I recall Friedrich Hayek once saying that when he was a young man of 20, the only people he could speak to with mutual understanding were old men of 80, and now that he’s an old man of 80, the only people he could speak to were people of 20.

Miller: I feel that really hard. (Laughs.)

Frum: But what he specifically meant was he had been 20 at the beginning of an era of authoritarianism and war and statism and control, and you had to be kind of a screwy oddball at age 20 in 1917, when I think he was 20, to believe, I still believe in freedom and limited government and a world in which goods and people move. And only at the end were those things rediscovered. And so we say, The old ideas have failed. Well, there were the old ideas, and there was failure. Have the old ideas failed, or is liberty an idea that’s eternally new?

Miller: Liberty is an idea that is eternal in me, for sure. And I think that I do believe that, over the long arc of history, it will continue to bear itself out. And I think that the basic ideas of why I became a Republican, of free markets and free people, will bear themselves out. And I think that my pushback to a lot of what Trump is doing is in that spirit. His administration is a direct assault on liberty and free markets and free people. And so I guess my caveat—not caveat, because I would not be for someone that was anti-liberty; I would not be for someone that wanted to subjugate a certain group of people, even if they were MAGA people I don’t like. But I also think that recognizing the trends, the patterns is the word I was looking for—this is not the first time we’ve been through this, to your point with Hayek, right? And if, in order to get out of it, we need to have an intermediating period where there are people that do not share my total ideology but who I can stand side by side with in protection of liberty and in opposition to the fascist creep, I think that it is important to do that in ways that are strategic and smart. And I think that there are limits on that, but also, I think that being an old man shouting at the clouds, going, If only we had stuck to our guns on Simpson-Bowles, and whatever (Laughs.) while Barron Trump reigns supreme over the land, I don’t wanna be that person either.

Frum: (Laughs.)

Miller: And so I think that these are—it’s a complicated topic, and it’s a challenge; I I appreciate the challenge. But that’s kind of how I look at it. I hope that this makes sense.

Frum: The Atlantic editors advise me to footnote things that need to be footnoted, but you know what? I’m just gonna let Simpson-Bowles pass into the dust of history without elaboration. (Laughs.) Those who remember, they remember, and those who never knew, they’re not missing anything.

Tim Miller, thank you so much. Those were beautiful and wise last words. I’m so grateful you joined today.

Miller: Thank you, David. Appreciate it.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Tim Miller for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my literary discussion this week will be an evaluation or an assessment of the State of the Union address as a ritual.

Now, as you know, the Constitution requires that the president, from time to time, give information to Congress on the state of the union and make recommendations to Congress about the state of the union. That constitutional injunction has become the basis of a ritual that commands the attention of the world: the president of the United States standing in front of two houses of Congress, House and Senate, with the Supreme Court in attendance, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other distinguished people, senior representatives of his administration, the Cabinet. It’s a statement that, whatever partisan divisions Americans may have, on this day, for this ritual, Americans are united.

Now, not everybody claps at the same thing, but there’s an expectation of decorum. Even people who are strongly opposed to the president’s programs or policies are supposed to sit quietly and listen to what the president has to say, and it’s considered quite shocking if there’s an outburst of dissent or interruption or heckling from anybody in the room. It’s happened before and has always been regarded as a grave scandal. You’re supposed to sit there and listen politely as the president speaks.

Well, as I said before, I’m recording this before we know what President Trump did on his 2026 State of the Union, but there’s a pretty high likelihood he’s going to do something untoward. The Supreme Court is supposed to be there. Trump has called them all kinds of names for the tariff decision, has said they should be ashamed of themselves and their family should be ashamed of them, has even suggested that they might be in some kind of thrall to a foreign power. The House and Senate will be there. President Trump recently tried to indict four members of the House and two senators for things they said, a violation not only of the First Amendment, but of the speech-and-debate rights of members of Congress—House and Senate. President Trump has formally opened an investigation into one Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook, and is making a lot of noises about investigating and indicting the other, the outgoing chairman, Jay Powell. And who hasn’t he insulted in that room? If you were a potential guest at the Trump State of the Union 2026, you’d wanna think twice: I’m going to have to sit in my seat, I’m gonna have to behave in a respectful way, and the president might say or do anything.

One of the destructive features of the Trump presidency has been the way his inability to control himself, his inability to respect the rules of the game has actually changed the game. It isn’t just Donald Trump who behaves worse; people, in response to Donald Trump, are put into a position where they either match his behavior, or they look like suckers and fools, or they look like victims who are bullied by him and intimidated by him. And so you’ve begun to hear talk of a number of members of the House and Senate saying they do not want to attend the State of the Union, and maybe they will not. Some people have suggested there might be a lot of visible empty seats or seats where Donald Trump and his people have to hastily scurry to put extra bodies where the senators and members of the House should go.

It’s a hard thing to think about because even those of us who most wanna retain the great traditions of the American republic, the symbolic demonstrations of unity, have to say, If somebody asked me, if a member of the House or Senate asked me, should they attend, I’d have a hard time telling them that it’s a good idea.

I think we are being pushed toward an evaluation of whether this tradition may have outlived its usefulness, at least so long as Donald Trump is present. Remember, while the president is obliged and required to make a report to Congress, there’s no requirement that he do so in person. From Thomas Jefferson’s time to Woodrow Wilson, the State of the Union was submitted in writing. Thomas Jefferson broke with the precedent of his predecessors, [George] Washington and [John] Adams. He thought that the State of the Union address reminded him too much of a British speech from the throne; plus, he hated public speaking. So he submitted his reports in writing. And so it continued until Woodrow Wilson returned to the spoken form. In 1973, Richard Nixon went back to the speech in writing. He sent six statements in writing to Congress. He did not speak that year. There’s no reason that this can’t be done in writing. It’s just a tradition. It’s just a practice.

And it may be time, as long as Donald Trump is president, to rethink this. And for the next Congress, remember, the president is before the two houses as a guest. That’s why the speaker of the House begins by saying, It is my honor and privilege—I forget the exact phrase. The Congress invites the president to enter its chamber and to speak to both House and Senate. That invitation doesn’t have to be extended. Congress could say, You know what, President Trump, if you’re going to insult the Supreme Court, if you’re going to abuse members of the House and Senate, if you’re going to try to arrest us for things we’ve said or indict us for things we’ve said, why don’t you put your thoughts in writing? Send it to us in writing. If it was good enough for William Howard Taft, it should be good enough for you. So put it in writing. We’ll read it; we’ll debate it. But we don’t want you on our platform, insulting and abusing the people here, people whom you’ve tried to arrest and are opening bogus criminal investigations into. Put it in writing. You stay home. We’ll read it. We’ll get back to you at our earliest convenience.

Thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks to Tim Miller for being my guest. Remember, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you’re so minded, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That’s the best way to support me and all of my colleagues. Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. See you next week. Bye-bye.

The State of the Union Revealed a Sad Reality

2026-02-25T09:04:00-05:00

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President Trump’s State of the Union address last night was very like the man who delivered it: divisive, abusive, and childish.

The speech turned reality on its head in many ways. The president who has enriched himself and his family by more than a billion dollars in his first year in office called on Congress to clean up its corruption. The president who has collected about $175 billion in illegal tariffs from the American people falsely told them that he had given them a great big tax cut. The president solemnly condemned political violence—the same president who ended his first term by inciting a mob to sack Congress and overturn an election. Maybe most shocking, Trump demanded that members of Congress rise to agree that it’s the first duty of government to protect American citizens—even as his own government by its brutal police methods has shot American citizens dead on the streets and then tried to deceive the country about how those Americans had been killed and why. Then of course there were the many misstatements of fact about the economy, about crime, and about wars and peace—many of which look like deliberate decisions to deceive the public watching on television.

The most radical fantasy in the speech, though, was its claims of a new golden age of prosperity. That misstatement surely deceived nobody. Prices continue to rise; the job market stagnates. In almost every way that can be measured, Americans are communicating economic anxiety and discontent. Trump insisted that they are all wrong. It is as if the nation were being soaked by a torrential downpour, water rolling over umbrellas and into boats, soaking everyone’s clothes—and the leader whose job it is to lead them through the deluge insists that it is not raining at all, that in fact it is sunny, the sunniest day ever.

States of the Union are rituals intended to demonstrate the unity of the nation: the president addressing two houses of Congress, backed by his Cabinet, speaking to the largest audience in the regularly scheduled year. Even the nonpartisan institutions of government—the Supreme Court and Joint Chiefs of Staff—attend in robes and uniforms, adding the symbolism of their respectful neutrality.

The ritual depends for its meaning, however, on certain standards of behavior. Something important broke when a member of the House shouted, “You lie!” at President Obama during his first joint-session speech in 2009. Last night, Trump repeatedly and persistently hurled much worse accusations at his political opponents—only days after he accused the six-justice majority of the Supreme Court that overturned his illegal tariffs of being “swayed by foreign interests.”

Through the first Trump term, many Americans consoled themselves that Trump’s outrageous antics would not last forever. He would depart in time, and the old ways could then reassert themselves. The best response to Trump, it was often said in those days, was to defend existing institutions. And the worst response was to respond in kind—because somebody had to protect the institutions that Trump seemed determined to wreck. As former First Lady Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.”

But there comes a point when sad realities must be faced. The speech last night was empty and uselessly garrulous. Its length was its first declaration of disrespect for those obliged to sit through it. Trump’s name-calling of his predecessor and of the members of Congress in the chamber, his demands that legislators rise at his command, his strategic deployment of systematic untruth in service of those demands to rise and clap—put together, he misused the State of the Union ritual in ways so radical as to call the ritual itself into question. Are members of Congress really supposed to sit meekly and quietly while the president uses the rostrum of their chamber to abuse and insult them in the ugliest language? The president is present in Congress as a guest: That’s the reason for the famous language about the “high honor and distinct privilege” of welcoming him to speak. He has no right to be heard in person; it’s a courtesy.

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution provides that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” The Constitution does not set an annual schedule for such information, nor does it require the information to be delivered in person. George Washington and John Adams started the in-person tradition. Thomas Jefferson ended it, both because it reminded him too much of the British practice of the speech from the throne that opens a session of Parliament and (very likely) also because he disliked speaking in public. Woodrow Wilson reverted to the Washington-Adams precedent. Then came television, and the modern State of the Union spectacle. The spectacle is founded, however, on an invitation from the speaker of the House. No invitation, no spectacle.

Given the intentional abuse of Congress’s time and hospitality last night, the next speaker, if there is a different next speaker, should consider very hard whether to extend another such invitation. The case for suffering Trump is that the tradition, if interrupted, may take a long time to return. A future Republican Congress will requite the next Democratic president the same way. But there’s also a risk of setting a precedent that anti-institutional Republicans get to smash things, which pro-institutional Democrats must then clean up. Maybe the only way to restore norms is by imposing some meaningful costs for breaking them. Next January, the next speaker could do everyone a favor with a letter that begins: “Dear Mr. President, the time has come for your State of the Union message. Please send it in writing in the enclosed envelope. Congress will give it all the attention it deserves. This is the method that was good enough for Rutherford B. Hayes, and, Mr. Trump, it is more than good enough for you.”

The Dire Meaning of Gallup’s Announcement

2026-02-21T09:55:39-05:00

Last week, the polling firm Gallup announced that it would no longer survey presidential-approval ratings. This news stirred suspicions. President Trump’s numbers are declining badly, much worse than Joe Biden’s at the equivalent point in his presidency. Gallup’s most recent presidential-approval poll, in December, had Trump at 36 percent—well below the RealClearPolitics poll average of 42 percent. Trump is known for taking punitive action. He sued The Des Moines Register and its pollster, Ann Selzer, for an ego-bruising 2024 survey that suggested he might lose Iowa to Kamala Harris.

Other companies targeted by the president appear to have folded. When sued by Trump in cases that many legal experts expected them to win easily, CBS and ABC paid huge settlements to Trump’s presidential-library fund. On Monday, Stephen Colbert told his Late Show viewers that his bosses at CBS had scrapped his taped interview with James Talarico, a Democratic Senate primary candidate in Texas, owing to threats from Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. Had Gallup taken the next logical step toward appeasing Trump’s vindictive ego?

Assuming the worst is often prudent, but Gallup’s own explanation—citing changes in the company’s business strategy—makes a sad commercial sense. Quality polling companies such as Gallup inhabit a world of rising costs, declining rewards, and multiplying competition. Polling worked because people once accepted a call on the phone the same way they accepted jury duty: as one of the small obligations of citizenship that helped democracy work better. Large numbers of citizens have come to perceive the institutions of democracy as unfriendly to them. The dispassionate stranger on the phone inquiring how a citizen intended to vote—and why—is one of those institutions.

Iowa-born George H. Gallup taught Americans the power of modern polling during the 1936 presidential campaign. Until then, election prediction had been dominated by a magazine called The Literary Digest. In 1916 and every four years thereafter, The Literary Digest mailed postcards to a large sample of Americans to ask them how they intended to vote. These surveys successfully predicted the squeaker election of 1916; then the Republican landslides of 1920, 1924, and 1928; and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory in 1932. In 1936, The Literary Digest reached out to a record 10 million Americans, about a quarter of whom replied. Their answers predicted a crushing rejection of the Roosevelt administration and the triumphant election of Republican Alf Landon and his running mate, Frank Knox.

[Marc Novicoff: Polling was quietly still bad in 2024]

Gallup, who turned 35 in 1936, had launched a research company the year before. To promote his work, he undertook his own election survey in 1936. Gallup reached only 50,000 people, a pitiful fraction of The Literary Digest’s awe-inspiring mailbag. He predicted—correctly—a solid Roosevelt win.

Why did Gallup succeed where The Literary Digest failed? The latter got its list of addresses from places such as state automobile-registration lists and local telephone exchanges. In the Depression, people who had their own phone number—let alone a car!—and also felt so passionately about the race as to take the time to answer a survey were disproportionately Republican. Roosevelt’s strength lay in the much larger number of Americans who went without such things—and were not seething with anger that they wanted to share by mail. The Literary Digest sample was huge but unrepresentative. Gallup’s sample was smaller but more representative. His fame was made; a new industry was born.

For decades, Gallup’s company and its imitators improved their techniques. Then things began going wrong. As the frequency of polling intensified and caller ID caught on, Americans ceased picking up the phone. In the late 1990s, 28 percent of those contacted by Gallup agreed to participate in a poll. By 2017, only 7 percent agreed. At present, the company’s response rate is down to 5 percent, a Gallup spokesperson confirmed to me by email. That figure is typical for the industry. In other words, in the late 1990s, Gallup had to place about 3,500 calls to build a 1,000-person sample. Today it must place 20,000 such calls. Obviously that costs much more.

The difficulty of building sample groups leads to a second and more insidious problem. As fewer Americans answer surveys, are those who do inherently nonrepresentative? Are they more cooperative or more opinionated or, in some other way, simply different from the 95 percent who decline to participate? There are ways to correct this problem. Courtney Kennedy, the vice president of methods and innovation at Pew Research Center, told me that because survey respondents are more likely to claim they volunteer for civic and charitable causes than Americans do generally, the organization overweights the answers of those who say that they don’t volunteer, to make the sample more representative of the country. Developing work-arounds like this, too, costs money.

For many pollsters, costs are covered by media partners. ABC News often hires Ipsos; The New York Times uses the Siena Research Institute. Much of the country’s best polling is done by nonprofit foundations, such as Pew, or by affiliates of educational institutions, such as Quinnipiac University and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Gallup, however, is a profit-seeking company that earns its living by doing commissioned research for governments and corporations. In 2006, CNN and Gallup ended their long partnership. Since then, Gallup has operated its presidential-approval research for more or less the same reason that department stores install shop-window displays at Christmas: in the hope that this public amenity might bring more traffic through the door.

However, that hope was often misplaced. Over time, new technologies made it easy for anyone to create an attention-grabbing poll that met minimal standards of respectability. Remember the 1994 survey that claimed that more young Americans believed in UFOs than believed they would collect Social Security? The poll’s methods were misleading but earned countless headlines nonetheless. In the internet age, the attention economy elevated returns on investment for bad polls, and the returns on good polls correspondingly diminished.

Some companies have responded by developing new methods. Morning Consult, which often partners with Politico, collects very large samples—sometimes in the tens of thousands—-by recruiting people online, which costs less than conducting phone calls. The hope is that the large size of the sample offsets concerns about the demographics of respondents.

All of these methods—traditional and high-tech—have been called into question in the past decade by the worst series of shocks to the U.S. polling industry since Gallup predicted that the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey would defeat incumbent President Truman in the election of 1948.

[Gilad Edelman: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

In 2016, election-eve polls showed Hillary Clinton beating Trump by an average of 3.2 percentage points. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which aggregated high-quality polls, projected that Clinton would win 302 electoral votes; she was favored in Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Instead Clinton lost those five states and beat Trump in the popular vote by only 2.1 points. She won just 232 electoral votes.

What went wrong with the 2016 polls? First, the decline of local newspapers and television stations shrank the resources available for state polling. Many of the polls that purported to measure opinion in swing states relied on smaller samples and weaker methods. The bigger problem was that even the best polls failed to measure what was important. Every pollster must begin with a theory about what the American electorate will look like in the coming election year. Typically, the people most likely to vote are older, better educated, more affluent, and more trusting of institutions than the American adult population as a whole. Yet Trump powerfully appealed to Americans who were less educated, less affluent, and more alienated from institutions—people, in other words, who might not show up in a polling sample recruited by traditional methods but who showed up at the polls when Trump headed the ticket.

Pollsters received an early warning that their methods were under-measuring the disaffected. In June 2016, most polls predicted that British voters would elect to remain in the European Union. Of seven major surveys, only one—which gathered responses online, a conventionally frowned-upon method—accurately predicted that a British majority would vote to leave the EU.

Pollsters readjusted their methods and weightings. Yet they never quite caught up. In 2024, the consensus forecast again underestimated Trump. The core of the polling problem seems to be the changing public itself: How does a company measure public opinion when a big segment of public opinion resists being measured—and when that segment is not randomly distributed, but concentrates behind certain kinds of politicians (such as Trump) or certain kinds of political movements (such as Brexit)? When Gallup’s methods show Trump six points lower than the polling consensus, does that reveal something about Trump? Or does it reveal that methods that worked well in a cohesive, pro-social, pro-institutional country are mismeasuring a polarized country that contains a large anti-social, anti-institutional minority waiting to be mobilized by the right leader?

The Gallup poll once seemed to be nothing less than the voice of the people. The Gallup poll now departs for the same Valhalla as the big three broadcast networks, bowling leagues, and roast beef for Sunday dinner—institutions that were once almost universally accepted but did not survive in a more divided and mutually suspicious America.

The Supreme Court Delivers Trump a Humiliating Gift

2026-02-20T14:10:00-05:00

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In the 1630s, King Charles I tried to tax English people without the consent of their legislature. He lost his head.

In the 2020s, Donald Trump tried to tax Americans without the consent of Congress. He just lost his case.

A tariff is a tax. The Trump tariffs imposed in and after April 2025 were projected to raise as much as $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Constitution assigns authority over taxes, including tariffs, to Congress. It does so for reasons that date back to English constitutional history: An executive who can tax without permission from elected representatives is on his way to becoming a tyrant.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Striking down Trump’s tariffs isn’t a judicial coup]

President Trump has had lots of ideas for how to spend the money he collected without Congress. He has offered it to farmers. He has mused about direct cash payments to taxpayers. He has speculated about creating a sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies. He has disregarded the fundamental principle that spending, like taxing, is a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, not the president.

Now we may be on the verge of a regime-changing war against Iran. War-making is also supposed to be a congressional power—but there’s no sign that Trump will allow Congress to vote on his war. In the past, the ultimate check on the president’s war-making powers was Congress’s power over the purse. When President Clinton intervened in the former Yugoslavia in 1999, Congress deadlocked over a vote of authorization, but approved the appropriation to pay for it, an authorization by a different name. But if Trump were allowed to tax without Congress, then he might reasonably conclude that he could fight wars without Congress.

Trump’s tariffs were advertised as a revenue source liberated from the restraints imposed by Article I of the Constitution. Had the Supreme Court upheld the tariffs, it would have wrought a constitutional revolution. Instead, the court quashed Trump’s scheme. Like every president before him, if he wants money—for an Iran war or any other purpose—he will have to ask Congress for it.

Trump’s theory was that an emergency-powers law passed in the 1970s allowed him to impose permanent revenue-raising tariffs on anyone for any reason. This argument was always far-fetched. The law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, was part of the post-Watergate reform to reduce presidential emergency powers. The IEEPA reformed the Trading With the Enemy Act passed during World War I. President Franklin Roosevelt had used that law to ban most private ownership of gold bullion in 1933, which even supporters had to concede was a fantastic legal reach. After Watergate, Congress sought to restrain the president by limiting the IEEPA to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” The law’s powers can be invoked only after a formal declaration of national emergency, and the word tariff appears nowhere among the powers conferred upon the president by the law. To put it another way, a permanent 25 percent tax on Canadian maple-syrup-tapping technology is not what the authors of the IEEPA had in mind.

Trump gets very impatient when he’s asked about “affordability.” You can understand why he squirms. The price increases Americans have felt in 2025 and 2026 can be blamed in no small part on Trump’s tariffs. Power bill up? Trump imposed a tariff on the equipment used to generate and transmit electricity. Six-pack of beer more expensive? Trump taxed the beer cans. Kids need new shoes? Trump’s tariffs raised the cost.

[Jerusalem Demsas: There’s no coming back from Trump’s tariff disaster]

The ironic political question for 2026 is whether the U.S. Supreme Court acted in time to save Trump from himself. Whether or not it was the justices’ intention to help Trump, a generally Trump-friendly Supreme Court has offered the president an exit from one of his most unpopular domestic policies. Will he accept the handout? Acceptance would be smart, but humiliating. Trump holds other legal means to disrupt international trade, some of which he used in his first term. But those powers have tighter legal limits than Trump wants. They don’t raise the kind of lawless revenue he plainly hoped for, but they can still cause havoc until their abuse is checked—and the federal courts have thus far flinched on supplying such checks on the president’s power. Until and unless a future Congress acts to protect Americans from Trump protectionism, the outlook for U.S. prosperity and security will remain clouded.

While shadows dim the future, the sun shone today. U.S. stocks surged after Trump’s Supreme Court defeat. American consumers may soon feel the benefit. Liberated from this approach to economic warfare, relations with allies may recover some of their former cordiality. And unlike the case of Charles I, all of this was accomplished while allowing America’s president to lay his unsevered head on his pillow tonight.

The End of Reagan-Era Republicanism

2026-02-18T14:54:42-05:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a warning about President Trump’s escalating efforts to bend American institutions to his will. David explains how episodes including the Justice Department’s attempted prosecution of members of Congress, the political pressure on the Federal Reserve, and the campaign-style appeals delivered at Fort Bragg represent a systematic attempt to erode the guardrails of American democracy.

Then, David is joined by Mona Charen, a contributor at The Bulwark and longtime conservative commentator. Together, they reflect on their shared political evolution—from their early days as Reagan-era conservatives to their break with today’s Republican Party. They discuss what they believe they got right and what they got wrong, how Trump transformed the conservative movement, and why the version of conservatism they once believed in may be gone.

Finally, David discusses “My Early Beliefs,” the 1938 essay by John Maynard Keynes, and explores what Keynes’s reflections on changing one’s mind can teach us about political growth.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Mona Charen, and we will be discussing things we’ve changed our mind about since our days as young Reaganites a long, long time ago.

My book this week will be an essay on a similar theme, “My Early Beliefs,” by John Maynard Keynes, in which the great English philosopher and economist discusses how his views had changed from the early 20th century to the time in which he delivered this essay, just before the Second World War.

But before either the dialogue or the book, some thoughts about a remarkable development in the week just past. One of the defining characteristics of the Trump years has been the determination of President [Donald] Trump and the people around him to turn into instruments of presidential will federal agencies that were always thought of as more or less independent and apolitical. The Department of Justice, well, it’s part of the administration, for sure, and the attorney general is an appointee of the president. But there had always been a belief that the actions of the Department of Justice, especially the criminal-enforcement actions, were not dictated for political reasons by the president.

Well, that idea has just gone up in smoke in the Trump years. This has been the most nakedly political Department of Justice perhaps since [President] Warren Harding’s in the 1920s and maybe the most in history because of the recent event where Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—supposedly acting on her own but obviously acting at the command of Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, who was acting, obviously, at the command of Donald Trump—when the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia actually tried to indict six members of Congress, four of them members of the House of Representatives, two of them United States senators, for making a video urging U.S. military personnel to obey lawful orders and not to obey illegal orders, which you would think is something that would be as basic as telling the president of the United States not to take bribes. How could such a statement be controversial unless the president was taking bribes and unless the military was contemplating illegal orders? So they took offense for that reason, and they tried to prosecute members of Congress.

Now, the speech of members of Congress is protected not only by the First Amendment, like as yours and mine is, but by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution, which puts very severe limits on the ability of anybody to punish a member of Congress for something that the member of Congress said. And yet the Department of Justice tried just that. Happily, a grand jury completely rejected the charges—there was reportedly not a single member of the grand jury who took this seriously; it was unanimous rejection, an unparalleled humiliation for the Trump Justice Department. But the litigation of other attacks on those members of Congress continues.

At the same time, we saw in this past weekend a really shocking event, where President Trump traveled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fort Bragg is now Fort Bragg again—it was renamed, and it’s now de-renamed—and so Fort Bragg is what we will call it. And at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, a state where there’s a Senate election in 2026, a Senate election that may prove decisive for controlling the balance of the United States Senate after 2026, President Trump appeared onstage with the Republican candidate for Senate and urged military personnel to vote for that candidate.

President Donald Trump: We have another man who is running for the Senate, Michael Whatley, if here’s here—I don’t know. Michael? Michael. (Applause.) Michael, will you come here for a second, please? He’s running for the Senate. And if he gets in, you’re gonna be taken care of. If he doesn’t get in, we’re gonna be stripping the military like they always do, the Democrats.

Frum: The military is, of course, the most important apolitical institution. Presidents address the military all the time, but they are not supposed to make political speeches, rally speeches, to ask the military to vote a certain way. That’s unheard of. That’s shocking. It’s the prelude to authoritarian rule.

Now, fortunately, again, as with the rejection of the attempt to indict members of Congress for what they said, the attempt to mobilize the troops as political actors, that also looks to have fallen flat. Reporters who were present noted that the soldiers, who maybe were warned by their commanding officers, made a point of clapping for the president’s appearance, clapping when the president talked about raising their pay—well, that’s traditional—but keeping very quiet when the president made his pitch that they should vote for the president’s preferred candidate for United States Senate. But in both cases, these are mere instances of failure, not stories of the successful pushback by institutions. But there is a story from the past week that is a much happier story about institutions actually resisting.

One of the most important independent institutions in the United States government is the Federal Reserve. Again, the president appoints members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, but they are not in any way the president’s creatures. And the theory of the Federal Reserve—which is created by act of Congress, not by an action of the executive—is: The Federal Reserve makes monetary policy based on facts and realities, as best they can determine in their judgment, and not for political reasons. There have been deviations from this ideal; they’ve usually ended in catastrophe: inflations, depressions. And in recent times, the Federal Reserve has been generally regarded by all people, Republicans and Democrats, as setting a model of independence.

President Trump has now made some new appointments to the Federal Reserve. He’s appointed a new chairman to replace Jerome Powell, the existing chairman; Powell’s term expires in May, and President Trump has put forward a nominee. But not content with simply replacing Powell, which, of course, is his right as Powell’s term expires, President Trump has tried to put pressure on Powell to cut interest rates by bringing up all incredible things or by preparing to bring—it’s not filed yet—a criminal investigation of Powell for some series of nonsense charges. Now, the charges aren’t filed, but the president has been huffing and puffing and the Department of Justice has been subpoenaing Powell as if these actions were ready.

And at the same time, he has brought forward a successor—[Kevin] Warsh looks like a solid B, maybe a B-plus nominee. He looks a little partisan. That is, he’s a Republican, of course, and in Democratic terms, he’s always calling for higher interest rates; in Republican terms, he calls for lower interest rates. He seems to be much more a creature of politics than an ideal Fed chairman should be. But he’s obviously an intelligent person, he’s got some knowledge and experience, and he’s not the cringing sycophant that some of the other candidates for the job that Trump might have chosen were. So in a pretty unimpressive Westminster dog show, he may be the least mangy poodle, so fine; pick [Kevin] Warsh.

But Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is outgoing, has said, I am not going to consider any nominee by the president, meritorious or not, unless we end these full prosecutions, these sinister prosecutions, that Trump has instituted against one Federal Reserve governor already, Lisa Cook, and is threatening against another, Jerome Powell, because they wouldn’t cut interest rates as fast as he wanted. Until these prosecutions are at an end, no consideration of any nominee whatsoever. And because of the closely balanced nature of the Senate and the rules of the Senate, Tillis may be able to make this stick. And if he is joined by other United States senators, then there’s a real trial of strength to say, The president cannot treat the Federal Reserve as an instrument of his vengeance and policy and his crass ambitions to cut interest rates and try to get some inflationary juice into the economy before the election of 2026. No one will be considered until the prosecutions are ended.

That’s more than just a defeat; that is institutional counterpoise against the attempt by the president to corrupt institutions. He has successfully corrupted the Department of Justice. He’s trying to corrupt the military, so far with minimal success, but things may get worse. And he is attempting against the Federal Reserve. In the Federal Reserve case, there is resistance, and Senator Tillis is doing exactly the right thing, and let us hope that more senators join him: absolutely no consideration of any Trump nominee to the Federal Reserve until this menace against the existing governors is completely dropped, quashed, withdrawn, defeated, given up, abandoned, sealed forever—only then.

And the irony, of course, is that if President Trump doesn’t do this and the Senate continues not to act, Powell’s term continues. He remains as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even if he’s not chairman. He will stay on the Board of Governors, and the Board of Governors can at that point elect its own acting chairman, and it may still be Powell. So the punishment for Trump’s attempt to pervert the Federal Reserve may be getting more of what he doesn’t like, which would be a fit irony. But the best outcome: End this nonsense. Ideally, replace Bondi with an attorney general with some integrity, but failing even that, just end these shameless prosecutions, end these shameless acts of intimidation, drop the cases, close them, and then let the Senate consider the Warsh nomination on its merits, such as they are.

And now my dialogue with Mona Charen.

[Music]

Frum: Mona Charen is a contributor and podcaster at The Bulwark. A graduate of Barnard, she began her career in journalism at National Review. During the Reagan administration, she served as Nancy Reagan’s speechwriter. She was a panelist on CNN’s Capital Gang in the 1990s and is the author of four books, most recently, Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism, published in 2023. She was an early and prominent leader of the Never Trump movement and stayed that way. Mona was also one of the very first people to welcome my wife and me to Washington when we arrived in the 1990s, so it’s a double pleasure to welcome her today on The David Frum Show. Mona, thank you for joining.

Mona Charen: So glad to do so. David, you guys improved Washington immensely. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) All right, so let me ask you, for the benefit of those whose memory has lapsed or who were maybe born more recently than some of us—

Charen: A lot of people were born more recently than we. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Would you mind recapitulating your political journey, from the start until Donald Trump appeared on the scene a decade ago?

Charen: Well, I don’t wanna bore people too much, but I became interested in politics out of a sense of gratitude. My family came to this country at the turn of the century—turn of the last century, I should say. And I became aware at a young age of what had happened to Jews who were left behind in the communities from which my grandparents had fled and understood that this was political in nature. And so when I was in my adolescence, not something I recommend as a fun way to spend your teenage years, but I sort of immersed myself in Holocaust studies and trying to make sense of how human beings could have done that. And the result was that it made me very, very grateful for the institutions, the stability, the human-rights protections that the United States affords, and so that kind of made me a conservative. Some people have said the primary emotional response of a conservative is gratitude, whereas the primary emotional response of a liberal is dissatisfaction, wanting to improve things.

And so I became interested in reading conservative writings. I also was highly aware that totalitarianism wasn’t just a phenomenon of the right, with the Nazis and the fascists, but that the communists were just as bad, or almost as bad, I would say. And so I was an anti-communist from a young age as well, became a conservative, began reading Bill Buckley in my local paper, and then reading National Review, then began to read other conservative thinkers. I was very drawn to Edmund Burke because he was—it spoke to me, right? He was a gradualist. He didn’t want any abrupt changes that he saw as dangerous and possibly contributing to despotism. And so that’s how I became a conservative, and I stayed that way for a very long time. And I was a conservative columnist and speaker and all of that—pundit. But with the rise of Trump, I saw the destruction of pretty much everything that—

Frum: Let me pause there—

Charen: Sure.

Frum: —I want to take the story up to 2016 and then slow down. I wanna go fast through the—

Charen: Sure, okay.

Frum: So where were you in the election of 2012?

Charen: I was a [Mitt] Romney supporter.

Frum: And why?

Charen: I felt that [Barack] Obama was a bad president. I didn’t agree with a lot of the things that he did. I liked that Romney—I remember when Romney was asked which industries the U.S. should be backing as the industries of the future and he said, I don’t know. And he said, And no one else knows either. I loved that. (Laughs.) That kind of modesty about what government can do or know, I liked all of that, so.

Frum: So you were on board with the conservative program into the second Obama term.

Charen: Yes.

Frum: When Donald Trump declared for president on that June day in 2015, did you take it seriously?

Charen: No, not a bit. And I remember, I think it was the Huffington Post said that they were going to only cover him in their entertainment coverage, not in their political coverage, and I thought that was about right.

Frum: At what point did you decide or accept that this might be a real thing?

Charen: When he continued to dominate the polls, when I saw that even the grotesque—there are a few things that stand out, of course, but the threatening violence against protesters at his rallies, mocking a handicapped reporter, scorning John McCain’s heroism—all of those things that I thought would have disqualified him obviously didn’t, and I began to worry. And then I remember, the primaries in 2015 really gave me chills that—or I guess it would have been 2016 by then—

Frum: So this is a very full buffet, and you can have more than one serving and make more than one trip. But as I hear you talking about your reaction, you are emphasizing, in the first trip to the buffet, the human qualities of Donald Trump. As you’re describing it here, that was the first reaction, the first repulsion.

Charen: Yes.

Frum: And how did the rest follow? Because you start with a human reaction, but since then, you’ve had, as we’ll continue to discuss, a pretty dramatic political evolution. But you started with a human response, that this human being was violent and disgusting.

Charen: Yes, but he was also the antithesis of what I regarded as conservative virtues. So for example, he encouraged people to believe that he personally, through force of will, could solve huge problems that face us as a country. I thought that was the antithesis of everything that conservatism believed; it was Caesarism.

And then, of course, all of his various heresies, like his attacks on free trade and his racism, which, again, I thought was the fulfillment of every fever dream of the left that thought conservatives were all racists underneath, that if you scratched them, you’d find that they were really racist. And here, along comes Trump, who confirms this. So I resented that as well.

Frum: You were one of the contributors to the 2016 Never Trump special issue of National Review. I recently went back and looked at that. There about two dozen contributors. Some stayed true to their original position. Some flipped. Some have just become kind of shifty. (Laughs.)

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: But was that a moment where you still regarded yourself as a member in good standing of the conservative community?

Charen: Oh, boy, that feels like a lifetime ago, but at the time, we still believed, I guess, naively, that National Review had the kind of authority within the movement that we could speak ex cathedra and anathematize Donald Trump, and that people would take that seriously and they would say, Well, look at all these conservatives of long standing, who have stature within the movement, and therefore, if they say he’s not good, then that will be crippling for—I don’t know if we quite thought it’d be crippling, but we did think we had influence, and we didn’t.

Frum: Well, and I should stress that that issue was published, I believe, in January of 2016, so before any Republican primaries. Conservatives had the memory that, in 2012, there had been a lot of wacky novelty candidates who rose in the polls.

Charen: That’s right.

Frum: Date Michele Bachmann; marry Mitt Romney.

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: And I think a lot of people in January 2016 thought, That’s going to be the pattern here again.

Charen: Yeah, yep.

Frum: Date Donald Trump; marry Marco Rubio.

Charen: Yep, that’s right. Herman Cain—yeah, there were a bunch of them—and Ben Carson, of course, also ran in 2016, and I thought he was similar. And I remember discussing this with other people in 2012, that it was a little dismaying to see what was happening in the primaries and saying, The base has some appetites here that are a little worrisome. And in the end, they settled on Romney, but it was a tell that they were flirting with all those other sort of crazy candidates.

Frum: All right, so where were you on Election Night 2016? Do you remember?

Charen: Yeah, I was—

Frum: Maybe blackout drunk. (Laughs.)

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: Rio de Janeiro. (Laughs.)

Charen: I should have been. (Laughs.) Yeah, no, I was at my computer live-blogging and live-tweeting and all that, yeah.

Frum: So when do you internalize that there may be a bigger set of issues here than just the human reaction to Donald Trump, that he’s speaking to somebody, and he’s speaking to a lot of people, and he’s speaking to a lot of people that you knew and trusted, and not just the famous base but to peers and friends of yours? How does that dawn begin to rise?

Charen: Well, [National Review editor] Jonah Goldberg put it best many, years ago where he had an article where he said it was watching people that he knew and believed he understood gradually become Trumpy was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where people, they just were absorbed into this thing. And so I watched one after another, and for a long time, it was a subject of grief for me that I watched these people that I respected bend the knee. It was an ongoing process that took years, and during that time, unfortunately, I lost many friends.

Frum: So Jonah Goldberg, whom you know well and I know, I think, less well, but I know, he would say—and I’m not going to gainsay this, although I think these statements can’t ever be fully true—but he would say, I haven’t changed my mind. I’ve stayed here, and the world has moved, but I’ve been constant. I certainly wouldn’t make that claim for myself. In fact, I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things, some of them in reaction to Donald Trump, some of them in reaction to other things. Where would you situate yourself in that spectrum of saying, I’ve stayed put; the world has moved, and my statement: The world moved, and I moved with it and against it, but I moved too.

Charen: So there did come a point after the initial shock and grief where I was actually not quite grateful, but at least appreciative of the fact that, in my 60s, because of the changing nature of American life, I was forced to reevaluate many things and see it through new eyes and including looking back at my own beliefs and possibly changing my mind on things. And I felt, in a way—I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I did feel like it was a bit of a gift because at our stage of life, people mostly get stuck and rigid, and so I was forced to be a little bit more flexible, and I’ve changed my mind about many things. Look, there are certain things that I still believe and have always believed, but I find myself without a political party that also believes those things, so.

Frum: I’m gonna give you, then, in a moment, an inventory of things you’ve changed your mind about and things you have not.

Charen: Okay.

Frum: You decide which of those inventories you’d like to catalog first.

Charen: Sure. Okay. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.)

Charen: So one big thing is I’ve always been interested in race relations and racial progress in America. If I go back on my work over the decades, I wrote a lot about school choice and about school reform and about family formation and other things where I felt that those were the areas to focus on to lift up African Americans, who lag behind whites and Hispanics on many social indexes. But part of my focus was a belief that the worst days of racism were really behind us, that only really kooks and fringe figures were still, like, old-fashioned racists in America, and that the new problems were things like the teachers’ unions were too powerful and didn’t allow school experimentation and reform, and family structure was a problem in the Black community—of course, in all communities, but it started in the Black community, with family breakup—and that we needed to focus more on building up family structure because that was so important for people’s success.

And what I saw in the last 10 years showed me that I had underestimated the degree to which the naked racism that had been part of American history, and which I was very familiar with but did not think persisted to this day, I now think that was wrong, that there is a tremendous amount of it and that it was naive of me to believe that we had conquered it. So that’s one thing.

Frum: Where are the things that you feel like, I’m still the same as ever; I still believe these things?

Charen: So I still believe that free markets are the best approach to many public-policy challenges. I still believe passionately in free trade. Looking for a party. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Yes, that is the issue where there was the most continuity between Trump 1 and [President Joe] Biden and now Trump 2, wasn’t it, that—

Charen: That’s right! That’s right.

Frum: I had the recent experience of talking to a group of important Democrats and saying, I just want you all to repeat after me the words free trade.

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: And they can’t do it.

Charen: They can’t do it.

Frum: They just can’t. Free and fair trade—no, no. No, no: free trade.

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: Can’t do it. And say, “Tariffs are bad.” And they say, Well, I’m against dumb tariffs.

Charen: Dumb tariffs, yeah.

Frum: I say, As opposed to smart tariffs? There are smart tariffs? For ideological reasons, for interest-group reasons, it’s very hard for—and there’s a lot of this—if we do move beyond Trump, I worry how much the next president, if there is a free and fair election in ’28, how much will the next president unravel, considering how little of the tariffs of Trump 1 Biden unraveled?

Charen: Yeah, agreed. So that’s one. Similarly, I continue to believe in market-oriented solutions to climate change. I think that the idea of creating prizes for new technology or all these kinds of things that economists have taught us are effective, that’s the direction that I would go. I’m afraid, again, there’s no constituency for that.

Let’s see. Fiscal discipline, worry about the debt—again, no party. (Laughs.) But more deeply, I am a believer in tradition and procedure and law and respect for tradition, so that’s one of the things that I find most horrifying about this populist era that we’re in, is that, going back to our earlier conversation about why I became a conservative, it’s the institutions, the procedures, the protections in law that it took hundreds and hundreds of years to enshrine in our system are critical, and so the idea that President Trump is now running roughshod over law and has allies aplenty in the MAGA movement who are ready—in his first term, he was trying to do it pretty much by himself; now he has eager allies. They’re destroying our system of justice and civil liberties in this country, and they’re destroying our international posture. And maybe I should mention, as that’s another thing I still believe in, I still believe the United States should be the leader of the free world, should have alliances, should stand up for countries that are invaded by aggressive neighbors, rather than finding common cause with their oppressors.

Frum: You put your finger there on something that I’ve really been wrestling with a lot, and I recently had this conversation with David Brooks, so let me raise it again with you. And I don’t have yet a developed view on this—I think about it all the time, so I don’t wanna be glib and pretend this is an easy question, and at the end of it, if you were to turn the tables, I wouldn’t know what to answer. So that said, there is a big part of me that wishes that [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and Joe Biden were right in their first-term approach, which is: Donald Trump was this unfortunate error that the American people made. They’d had a pretty good track record of picking presidents to that point; they got one wrong. The Electoral College was maybe to blame. And the thing to do was just to tidy up the mess and move on with as little recrimination and backward-looking as possible.

There is another view, which is: That failed, that Trump came back. As he often said of himself, “I became worse”; he did. The people around him became even worse than that. And we have now a full-throated attack on every American institution, the abuse of law, and it’s not clear to me you can just dust this off and tidy up and move forward without serious backward-looking and accountability. I wrestle with that question. Do you have any guidance to offer, or are you as stuck in the predicament as I am?

Charen: So I guess what you’re describing is lustration. And I think, in order to get to that point, you have to be more advanced than we are. We are still too divided and polarized to even begin to grapple with “How do we fix and put back together what’s been destroyed?” So part of the problem with the Merrick Garland thing was, and the whole approach—the people who said, Trump is a criminal, and we have to prosecute him, and they believed very firmly in the justice of that, and I understand it, but at the same time, it was done badly, I think, because that New York case really was politically motivated, and it’s the one case that they got. But it allowed the MAGA forces to say, You see? Both sides abused the judicial system for political ends, and therefore, when we do it, it’s just what was done to us. This is just payback. And so that’s a risk when you decide to use the justice system that way.

I hope that there will come a time when there’s enough recognition across party lines that we’ve gone off the rails that there will be an openness to a true accounting. There are people who are committing real crimes, including the president of the United States right now. The blowing up people in boats who you just suspect may be drug traffickers is a prime example. But it’s gonna take time and a huge amount of persuasion, and more than the persuasion, it’s gonna take more experience of the awfulness for the American people to get to the point where they’re ready for an accounting.

Frum: Let me go back to the very beginning and raise something, and this is something I think we share. I think we both came to conservatism in great part because of our Jewish identity, because of our inheritance of mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe. In my case, it was almost all of my father’s family came out and they lived, and the vast majority of his family who were left behind, they died. And had my father’s parents made a slightly different decision in 1930, my father would have been murdered at about the time of his ninth, 10th, or 11th birthday. So that’s the starting point, I think, of both of our politics: We come to conservatism by our Jewishness.

The Trump presidency has raised some very special questions, very haunting questions for American Jews. On the one hand, as you say, it’s a highly bigoted presidency, a highly chauvinist presidency, and Trump certainly has won the support of people who are increasingly not only outspoken, but flamboyantly anti-Semitic. At the same time, Donald Trump acted to support Israel, to win a much more decisive outcome in the Gaza war than the Biden presidency or a Kamala Harris presidency. And he’s acted against the Iranian nuclear program, which is an existential genocidal threat to the half the Jewish people who live in Israel.

Most American Jews are opposed to the Trump presidency, but many of the most active and prominent American Jews are quite passionately in support of his presidency for the reasons I mentioned and for others as well. How do you, as someone who, as you said, began your political journey because of this Jewish inheritance, how do you make sense of Trump as a Jewish woman?

Charen: My feeling about this is—there are a couple. One is that there is a tendency all too common to say, Well, whatever else he may be, at least he’s good for my group. And that is not a principled position to take, in my opinion, but also, I think it misses the bigger importance of what his destructiveness means for the Jewish people, among many others, because he is destroying the United States as a bulwark of free nations and a strong alliance. And so even though for now, he has taken positions that seem to please the [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government and supporters of Israel, first of all, he’s for sale, so who knows if that will last. It’s never about his true beliefs; it’s always about what’s good for him, and certainly, there are many people on the planet who have a lot more to offer him in that regard than the Jews do, so who knows how long that would last. But also, a secure Israel and a secure Jewish people depend on moral and principled leadership of the United States.

So let’s leave Israel aside for just a second. What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.) And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.

Frum: Yeah. Let me push back on that just a little, and again, I say this in a spirit of uncertainty, not in the spirit of argument. So the polls look pretty bad for Trump and his party at the moment that we speak. Who knows whether that will continue. Who knows whether Trump will try to find some way, by fraud or by force, to seek a third term. He says so, and I think by now, we should take those warnings seriously, although the body does fail us all in the end. Trump’s running mate and the presumptive front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, assuming there’s still a Constitution in 2028, is J. D. Vance, who’s very close to Tucker Carlson, and I will argue this with some of my more, again, Israel-oriented Republican friends, but I think is clearly not a friend to either the Jewish state or the Jewish people.

On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J. D. Vance is the Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris because he was Jewish and because he wouldn’t renounce his support for Israel and wouldn’t hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on American college campuses, and where important voices in that party are saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is Holocaust inversion, that they are looking for a nominee who will say that the perpetrators of the attempted annihilation of Israel on October 7, 2023, that those attempted perpetrators were the victims of a Nazi-like genocide and the victims, who fought back in self-defense, they were the Nazis who committed a genocide. And that’s, for important parts of the Democratic Party, going to be the litmus test for their candidate in 2028.

It’s great that everyone’s so interested in the Jews as the Issue One. (Laughs.) I sometimes wonder, Why did we have to be so fascinating?

Charen: (Laughs.) You know that old saying—there are only two kinds of people in the world who are fascinated by Jews: Jews and anti-Semites. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Well, yeah, but it turns out that, well, a lot of people are fascinated by Jews. So how do you make sense of this, is [the fact] that you may, given life and health and the continued existence of the United States Constitution, may be called upon next time to make a choice between someone who is backed by domestic anti-Semitism and someone who won their nomination by making some kind of deal or arrangement or truce with those who do Holocaust inversion against the Jewish state and the Jewish people?

Charen: Yeah. It’s a very, very difficult time for the Jewish people, honestly. I think we were born at a time after the Holocaust when anti-Semitism was at epic low rates because of the Holocaust, and that is over. Our children and grandchildren will not be living in that world; they’ll be living in a world where it’s come roaring back. And you’re right—the problem on the left is considerable, but it’s untested as of now. So we know that the anti-Semites are very close to power on the Republican side. As you say, J. D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the precinct of the hard-left progressives. It’s untested as to whether that will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We’ll see. That would be very, very worrisome.

Frum: Let me, as we wind up, take you back to the beginning and ask you, as you look back on the political views you had in the earlier part of your life, do you now feel regret or do you feel like, I got benefit from it even if I don’t hold to all of it these days?

Charen: Got benefit from what—from the views?

Frum: The things I believed between age 20 and age 40, I regret those things, or I don’t regret them, because I couldn’t be where I am and, in fact, there’s some value to them.

Charen: No, there are certain things that I am proud of from that period. I was a firm anti-communist. I think it’s a great boon to humanity that communism is largely a thing of history now. And there are many other issues that I think conservatives were right about. But the world has changed. The conservatism that I signed up for is completely gone. There’s no coherent set of ideas that is held by a movement, far less a party, now that is recognizable.

Frum: Yeah, again, I may be projecting my own thoughts onto you. This is a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot; I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been working on a memoir for a long time, and I’ve been wrestling with these questions, that there are things that, when I look back on the world of my early political views, things that I thought were important, that were the defining thing—as you say, anti-communism, free markets, free trade. And that turned out to be something I cared about but that most of the people I was associated with, turned out, they never cared about it very much at all. And then [there were] other things that I dismissed as irritating or awkward or embarrassing or marginal paranoias and bigotries and conspiracism, and that turned out to be really important to a lot of the people I was formerly associated with.

On the other hand, I do sometimes think that the reason for the prominence of the Never Trump Republicans in the anti-Trump coalition is not just their novelty value; I mean, everyone likes a conversion story. But also, I think there’s something important that we bring, and that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I’m sure you’ve seen often in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they’ll say something [like], Aha, we warned you that the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson, Trump was the inevitable outcome—

Charen: Absolutely. All the time.

Frum: No, he’s not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and George W. He’s different. And we’re here to tell you that as people who liked all those people. He’s different. And because we liked all those people, we can tell you how and why he’s different in a way that the typical commenter who’s blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can’t tell you.

Charen: Well, yeah, the people who are kind of—and I’ll say this—I think they’re kind of smug, and they say, This was always conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case. One thing that pops right into my head, for example: David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. The president of the United States at the time was George H. W. Bush. He said, We want no part of him, even if he’s a Republican, even if he gets the Republican—that’s not who we are, etc. That was just normal, that the party would, and the movement would, reject that kind of thing. Today? They’d say, He’s anti-woke—

Frum: Make him the head of the Department of Homeland Security! (Laughs.)

Charen: Exactly! (Laughs.)

Frum: He’s got the mission. (Laughs.) And he’s got a lot of guys who’d make perfect recruits for our new paramilitary force. (Laughs.)

Charen: Exactly, he can start making those videos for ICE. Yeah, no, it’s really sad and pathetic, but anyway. But that is different, and we’re here to report that we lived through it and we would not have tolerated that kind of thing. We left when this became the party. So it obviously wasn’t the party in 2000.

Frum: Yeah. Are there realistic circumstances where you can see yourself reimagining yourself as a Republican and a conservative again—obviously, there are fantastical circumstances, but realistic circumstances where you can imagine yourself feeling at home again?

Charen: Not until this whole generation dies off, and since I’m gonna die off before they do, no.

Frum: (Laughs.)

Charen: (Laughs.) Because the Republican Party and the conservative movement have both been so deeply corrupted. And so, no, I cannot imagine. There is an argument that, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the neoconservatives, who had all been Democrats—some of them remained Democrats—but when they moved toward the Republican Party, they brought with them a way of thinking and ideas that were incredibly rejuvenating for conservatism. And possibly, the migration of some former conservatives into the Democratic Party can do the same thing? That’s maybe a little bit fanciful, but I hope so.

Frum: And if you were to say, what are the gifts? What are the things that they might bring with them, like the magi?

Charen: (Laughs.) The appreciation—so I’ll tell you one quick story, if I can. I was at a meeting with a bunch of people who spanned the spectrum but leaned heavily to the left, and we were talking about how elections are run in this country. And before the advent of Trump, there were a lot of liberal reform bills and things that wanted to centralize the way we run elections in this country and limit the power of states to control it. And so I remember chatting with this person. I said, The fact that the Constitution gives this power to the states looks pretty good right now, doesn’t it? And he said, Yeah. (Laughs.) So some of those limitations on what government power can do, which are sort of our birthright as conservatives—we’re suspicious of government power. Unlike liberals, who always think only of what good it can do, we’re very imbued with, No, it can also be really, really dangerous. So maybe we bring a little bit of that perspective to policy making.

Frum: Tell us at the end, finally, about the work you’re doing now. What are the things that, in your personal work, you think are important, that get you up in the morning?

Charen: Well, sometimes it’s hard to get up in the morning because the news is really depressing. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Okay, so while you’re there, in bed, pulling the covers over your head and thinking, Maybe this was all a terrible dream, the voice of conscience that says, No, you have to get out and doing, what is that voice reminding you of?

Charen: It is remembering how important—just [George] Orwell’s line about It’s the duty of intelligent men to state the obvious, keep saying it, being unafraid to say the things that a lot of people in mainstream media and, certainly, in the business world and in many of our institutions, people are afraid to be honest and tell the truth. And so those of us who have been foolish enough to lose all our friends by telling the truth in the past can continue to tell the truth as we see it, and maybe that still has value. (Laughs.)

Frum: Mona Charen, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Charen: My pleasure.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Mona Charen for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top, my book this week is actually an essay, “My Early Beliefs,” by the great English economist John Maynard Keynes. Since Mona and I spent so much time discussing our own political evolution, I thought it might be interesting to turn to what is maybe the most famous such discussion ever written, and that is Keynes’s essay, which he delivered as an after-dinner speech in 1938.

Keynes graduated from Cambridge in the early part of the 20th century, and in 1938, he and a group of his Cambridge friends gathered together for a dinner to look back on the changes in their lives over the past third of a century. Keynes delivered this paper talking about the way that he and his friends had changed their minds about important issues. In the last bit of this essay, which is only 13 pages long, Keynes reflects on one of the important shocks that came to him and came to his friends since their undergraduate days.

Now, the early part of the 20th century was, if you were an Englishman of bourgeois background, as Keynes was and as his friends were, a time of extraordinary security. Those of you who have recently watched on your own or with children the Mary Poppins movie will remember George Banks, the patriarch banker, singing, “It’s [grand] to be an Englishman in 1910.” And so, if you came from John Maynard Keynes’s background, so it was; it was good to be an Englishman in 1910 or 1904 or ’05, when Keynes was at Cambridge.

But in the interval between their undergraduate days and 1938, when the essay was delivered as an after-dinner speech, in that interval, the world had passed through the First World War, the Communist revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of fascism, inflations, depressions, and was now, in 1938, on the edge, very visibly, of a second and even more terrible world war. The age of security that Keynes had grown up in was gone forever, and a lot of Keynes’s thinking and work in his later years dealt with the shock to the sensibility of someone raised in that secure world of Edwardian England dealing with a new world of communism, fascism, wars, inflations, depressions.

And so I wanna quote from the later part of the essay a passage that I think resonates through the ages to our time now. He’s talking about this group of friends, and he says of them, “In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence … for [everything and everyone]. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishments of our predecessors [in] the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order.”

As I look back on my early beliefs and the beliefs Mona and I discussed, I realized that Mona and I, our political evolution can be described by exactly the opposite direction. We began as young conservatives—in my case, as early as the 1970s—very aware of, as Keynes put it, that civilization was “a thin and precarious crust.” What we were not enough aware of was the flip side of that. Just as Keynes had to discover the power of order, I think Mona and I—I won’t speak for her; I’ll speak only for myself—that those of us who were conservatives then and are less conservative now, I don’t think we were aware enough that it wasn’t just order that was needed but also the justice and fairness that caused that order to be, to quote Keynes again, something a little bit more than “the personality and the will of a very few.” That the order that we valued so much gained its power because of a broad consensus based on the personality and the will of a great many, and the way to get that great many to back the order was through a sense in most people, in many people, that the order was just. And that if the order was ever felt to be unjust, unfair, to favor only that very few whom Keynes described, then it would have to be maintained in ways that were harsher and more tyrannical than the order that we valued and that we remembered.

I think we all go through evolutions in life, and that’s one of the tragic blessings or one of the blessed tragedies (laughs) of growing old is that you get this critical distance on what you thought before and what you think now. And maybe the outcome that we’re all groping to is to say, How do we hold onto things that we thought were true when we were young, that were correct intuitions when we were young, and how do we enrich them as we get older? That is the topic that Mona and I have spent our time together discussing, we’ve spent so many years of our lives working together on. I’m very glad to have had her today to discuss this working out with me on The David Frum Show.

Thanks so much to you for listening and watching The David Frum [Show]. I hope you will subscribe and share this program widely, that the success and continuation of the program depends on your subscriptions and your sharing. As always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic, and then you can support the work not only of me but of all of my Atlantic colleagues. Thanks so much [for] joining me today on The David Frum Show. See you next week for another episode of The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

How Trump Could Break the 2026 Elections

2026-02-11T13:00:00-05:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reaction to the racist AI video of Barack and Michelle Obama that was posted and quickly deleted by President Trump’s Truth Social account. He argues that when the president engages in this behavior, it undermines his administration’s other actions that resemble those of a normal presidency.

David is then joined by Stephen Richer, a former Republican county recorder of Maricopa County. They discuss Stephen’s experience navigating Trump’s 2020 election denial, standing up to pressure from the president, and confronting election denialism within his own party. They also examine the Trump administration’s current activities in Georgia and how they could set the stage for more election denialism in 2026.

Finally, David reflects on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the series marks its 250th anniversary. Though the monumental work remains essential to understanding the fall of Rome, David explores how Gibbon’s moralizing of history can lead modern readers to dangerous conclusions.

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. My guest this week will be Stephen Richer, formerly recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, the chief election official in the city of Phoenix in the swing state of Arizona, and we’ll be discussing election integrity and the threats to election integrity—the conspiracy theories and lies that are told about elections past, and that present a threat to the integrity of free and fair elections in 2026.

My book this week is The [History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I choose because this month, February 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of that famous book in February 1776. There are six volumes altogether, the last published in 1788, but February 1776 announces the arrival of this tremendous achievement of historical research and English literary triumph.

Before turning to either the dialogue or the book, I wanna begin with some thoughts about a very upsetting thing that happened over the past few days, and that is the posting on the social-media account of the president of the United States of a scurrilous, racist, insulting, and stupid video about the past president of the United States President Barack Obama and his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama.

I’m sure many of you have seen the video or images of it; you know what I’m talking about. You’ve heard the many stories that the Trump White House has told, many contradictory stories about how this came to be. I’m not interested in decoding which of those stories is closest to the truth or furthest from a lie, and I’m not interested in adding my voice, one more condemnation to this offensive and stupid act. The whole country has reverberated with condemnation, which is right and just, and I’ll say I agree. What more can be said?

But there is a deeper thing going on here that does deserve some comment. Race, of course, is the fundamental chasm, a fundamental wound in American society, and moving toward a more just racial constitution of the United States has been the work—oh, well, it’s been a work that you cannot date when it begins and you cannot date when it ends. It goes on and continues to this day. But the society is changing, and a new racial constitution has been coming into being. Right now, about 93 million Americans are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants; that’s almost a third of the country. It’s a different country than it was when the Civil Rights Act was passed or when the affirmative-action programs of the 1970s began to be devised. In the half century since those affirmative-action programs have come to be devised, the racial fabric of America has been reinvented in many ways. And one of the questions that we’re all left [with] in the 2020s is whether these programs of racial restitution continue to make sense in a country that is so different from the country that existed when these programs were put into place.

Now, it has fallen in the Trump administration’s time to respond to these changes. The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled, in important decisions, that it is more and more skeptical of programs of racial preference to correct for past racial injustice. In 2023, a pair of cases ruled that preferential treatment of undergraduates seeking admission to colleges is probably almost always illegal. And the Trump administration, in one of its more normal actions, something that you would expect from a more normal kind of government, has followed up, or responded to this, the lead of the Supreme Court, by issuing executive orders rolling back preferential treatment in many areas of employment and hiring. And many American companies have responded by changing their approach to equal opportunity. They’re ending the practice of trying to ameliorate past injustice by having preferences in the present and moving toward an approach that treats all applicants more equally than they have been treated in the recent past.

I must say, I regard this as progress. I think this is the right way to go. I think it’s the only way to go in a country where, as I say, 93 million people are immigrants or the children of immigrants to whom America’s tortured racial history was something that happened before their families arrived on these shores, and they don’t understand why their life chances should be abridged or artificially boosted because of something that happened in a past that was not their own familial, personal past. It’s not sustainable in such a country to treat people from certain backgrounds more favorably and people from other backgrounds less favorably. It’s not sustainable, and it will only inflame feelings that are already touchy enough. But the administration that has the job of bringing us to a more perfect union, of restoring more equal treatment, of finding some way forward from the preferential programs of the past, it is absolutely indispensable that such an administration show itself in every respect to be animated by ideals of equal treatment, racial fairness, justice for all.

When the president is acting like some kind of internet troll, some kind of Klansman with access to an AI machine, he discredits everything that his administration is doing that looks like something that another administration might also do. He ratifies every allegation of every critic of that administration, of every critic of the Supreme Court, of every critic of anyone who has ever held out for equal treatment under law by saying, You know what? The president is obviously motivated by racial animus. He’s overseeing these acts of racial profiling by a paramilitary force that is masked and poorly trained and poorly led; and that is apprehending people because they don’t like the way their accent sounds, they don’t like the look of their face, and sending them to prisons, where they’re held without due process for weeks and months; that is sending children under the age of 10 to similar kinds of camps—in every way that this administration tries to prove that it is indeed motivated by the worst, ugliest, most primitive kinds of prejudice. And then it asks Americans to trust it as it dismantles outdated correctives to the prejudices of the past. This isn’t sustainable either.

If you are going to attain equal justice, you have to do it by treating people equally; I believe that. I think the Supreme Court, its decisions on these matters have been broadly correct. I think it’s going in the right direction. And I think that the critiques of past diversity programs, maybe they were not as powerful at the beginning as they are at the end, but by the 2020s, they remain very powerful. And there are 93 million people to whom all of this has to seem oppressive, unfair, and none of their concern. But if we’re going to get from here to there, we can’t be poisoned by the kind of talk that comes off the president’s social-media page and comes from the lips of the people around him. The people who lead the government must be seen to be just for anyone to believe in the justice of what they do. And this is one case of so many where even the parts of the Trump administration’s agenda that some people might like, that even I might like, are disqualified and discredited by the Trump administration’s own actions and by the president’s own personality.

It’s so tragic. It’s so unnecessary. It’s so ugly. It’s so stupid. It’s so shameful. It just makes you wince and say, Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t it be better? Why can’t we be having a politics that is productive? Why can’t we be talking about things that matter? Why do we have to have people who act like children and adolescents at their worst when we are discussing the things that matter most, or should matter most, to us all?

And now my dialogue with Stephen Richer. But first, a quick break.

[Break]

Frum: Stephen Richer was elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, in November of 2020, and served in that role from the 1st of January 2021 to the end of December 2024. Maricopa, of course, is the county around the city of Phoenix, the biggest city in what has become a crucial swing state, and the recorder is the most important election official in that county.

Richer, a Republican, held firm against President [Donald] Trump’s conspiracy theories and wild allegations against the election of 2020, and then faced another round of such allegations in 2022 and another round again in 2024, when Kari Lake was on the ballot, first for Arizona governor and then for the United States senator from Arizona. Richer now writes, teaches, and practices law. He’s a native of the state of Utah, a graduate of Tulane and the University of Chicago, from which he holds both his law degree and also an M.A.

I got to know Stephen as a regular contributor to my Frum Forum website in the 2010s. He’s a man of steadfast courage, and it’s a pleasure to welcome him to The David Frum Show at a time when the Trump administration is mounting a renewed attack on the independence and integrity of the American voting system.

Stephen, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Stephen Richer: Thank you very much. Thanks for all you taught me previously, and it’s good to be back. My wife keeps saying, When do you think these invitations are gonna dry up? And then President Trump does something related to elections, and I get another round of interviews and invitations, so it’s good for business.

Frum: So long as he’s crazy, you’ll be employed.

Richer: (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Or you’ll be busy anyway because you have a new life away from all of this madness. But let’s start with your first exposure to the madness. So you take office on the 1st of January of 2021, minutes before the attack on Congress, in the throes of all of these denunciations of the integrity of the vote, especially in your state. What was that like in 2021?

Richer: It was surreal because so many people were asking things about the 2020 election, and I was just getting into this office. I was still figuring out, basically, how to dial out of the office, who works in different spots in the office. COVID’s going on. It’s an office of 160 people; I’m just trying to get to know everyone’s faces. And meanwhile, we have January 6 that happens, and then we have protesters outside of our facility. We have some of my erstwhile allies saying that my office had participated in stealing the 2020 election. And then, by my second week, I had been subpoenaed from the Arizona Senate for all of the materials relating to the 2020 election, and that began the whole endeavor known as the Cyber Ninjas forensic audit. And (Laughs.) boy, we spent a whole year going over 2020, and it was a lot.

Frum: Because you were a Republican and always have been a Republican, people in the president’s camp were looking to you to agree with their story, however farcical it was, and you didn’t.

Richer: That’s right. Well, I was very patient with it, and a lot of the people who were coming to me with these allegations were people who I considered friends, they were supporters, and so they were people who I presumed to have good-faith questions about election administration. And I thought that if I dug in, if I researched them, and if I got them answers, and I did it in a way that was polite, and if I did it in a way that was factual, that this would just be a scientific process, and we would have questions, and we would have answers, and we would move on. It took me a while, but maybe a year into the process, I realized that was not going to be the case.

Frum: Yeah. I’ll say here, as someone who’s known you for a while and then watched you or observed you in your public presence, in these public interactions, you’re a very nonfiery personality. You are very patient and low-key, and you agree to take seriously a lot of things that—people will say, I had a vision. It came to me in a dream. The ballots are hidden in a vault underneath a lake. And you would say, Okay, can you give me the GPS location of the vault and the lake? (Laughs.) And you never lost your cool, but the allegations just got wilder and wilder, didn’t they?

Richer: They did, and more than that, they seemed adverse, they seemed stubborn to getting any answers, and eventually, I just realized, You don’t want answers from me. You don’t want me to investigate. You just want me to affirm what you want to believe to be true. And that was very saddening to me because I come from a world in which the epistemological process is highly valued, in which man is a rational creature and things can be scientifically discovered. And so why did I try to be nice? I tried to be nice because I don’t think anyone has ever persuaded somebody else by telling them that they’re an idiot, even though it might be satisfying to say. And I tried to be nice just so that when I look back on my actions throughout this whole affair, I can hopefully at least feel good that I wasn’t too terribly mean to people. I’ve had a few moments where I’ve slipped, but I think I’ve done pretty well.

Frum: Now, you make the point that what was especially frustrating about these allegations was it was not one allegation that people would dig in and stick to, no matter all the contrary evidence. It was a series of contradictory allegations, and each time one fell apart, another would manifest itself, and then it would fall apart, and then there would be another, and it was just a wild series of mutually contradictory—always the same answer, but never the same explanation.

Richer: That’s right, and you’re on the internet, I think, a healthy amount, but you’re on the internet enough to see that a lot of these claims keep popping up. It’s like Whac-a-Mole. And weirdly, the burden of proof always seems to be on those of us who won all the court cases, those of us who won all of the audits, and yet it’s on us to disprove every single wild-eyed allegation. I really hate that framework—I think it should instead be on the movant, so to speak, on the people who are alleging the thing, to have to bear the burden of proof. But what I do is: Somebody throws out a claim, I investigate it, and then I disprove it, and then they move on to another one. And it’s frustrating, and it’s exhausting, and again, it just goes to the fact that a lot of these people aren’t looking for facts; a lot of these people are just looking for affirmation of their beliefs. But my mentality is that if there’s still people out there who are looking for facts, then I wanna give it to them.

Frum: Let’s bring this forward to the present because the reason all of this is suddenly so very, very urgent is not just that we’ve had this ever-continuing claim by Donald Trump, where he says things like, I won the state of Minnesota three times, when he won it no times. And you might think, Okay, well he’s just a deluded old man who happens to be president, and that’s probably not even the most harmful, untrue thing he believes. He is president now—no one doubts that—and he wasn’t president for the four years after the election he lost, and that’s history. But right now, the president and his supporters, including the director of national intelligence, are engaged in an attack on the voting system in Georgia in 2026, with an eye to what looks like some scheme to distort or twist the elections that are expected in November of this year. You have written about what you think may be going on. What’s going on?

Richer: We don’t know. I think we’re gonna find out more in the next 48 hours because the affidavit for the warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, is going to be unsealed, and that could give us a better idea of what motivated this FBI search, what allowed the judge to be convinced that they had probable cause that a crime had been committed. But I don’t know to what ends. Is it really just to pursue one or two people and try to charge them with a crime? Is it with the goal of claiming that the 2020 election should be, I don’t know, undone for—sort of like when they find out that a football team had actually used drugs or had paid players and they strike off the championship from the historical records, and this way, they’ll strike off Joe Biden’s 2020 victory from the historical records? Or is it for stuff moving forward? I’m not sure, but this is unprecedented territory. Sure, Donald Trump and others have done a lot to cast doubt on our election system, but this is the first time where the entire machinery of law enforcement of the federal government has mobilized and has gone into a county.

Frum: Well, one thing that you hear said that they may be thinking of is, in the wilder precincts of election denialism in 2020 and 2021, there was a fantasy that the government of Venezuela, not a known technological leader, but that somehow had magic technology, which allowed it to change the outcome of votes in the United States. And now there has been the Trump raid into Venezuela, which a lot of us hoped would be some effort to restore Venezuela democracy, but, no, it’s just a kidnapping of one of the thugs who runs Venezuela, leaving all the other thugs intact. But the election aspect is, some people speculate that what Trump has in mind is take Nicolás Maduro, former dictator, put him in front of an American court, and have the prosecutors—the ones who have not resigned because they have integrity, but the ones who remain who don’t—have them say, Dictator Maduro, you can either spend the rest of your life in an American jail, or we can let you go, if you just affirm this crazy idea we have that magic Venezuelan technology changed the results in 2020. Does any of that sound like something that could happen?

Richer: So some of your listeners might be like, What the heck is David talking about? What is he making up? This is so facially ludicrous that nobody would believe this. But people do believe this. This is born out of a theory from the 2020 election that two election technology companies, Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, had connections to [former Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez, who had somehow gotten in cahoots with those companies to rig future elections, and that this tabulation equipment flipped votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. And I should say that we know this isn’t true because 98 percent of Americans vote on paper ballots and those paper ballots can’t be hacked and they are hand-count audited after the election. Nonetheless, people believe this, and so some people think that, Oh my gosh, the reason we went to Venezuela, the reason that we extracted Maduro isn’t because of narcoterrorism, isn’t because of opioids in American streets, isn’t because of wanting to get their oil, but is because finally, the plot will be uncovered to steal the 2020 election.

And so if you’re Nicolás Maduro and you’re sitting there in, I think, presumably not the nicest conditions, I think he’s gotta be thinking about this as potentially a golden ticket out because you and I know, and many [who] are surrounding Trump know, that the one way that you can get in his good grace, no matter what misdeed you have committed in the past, is that you can tell him that he certainly has never lost an election and that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This has just been a path for so many people to get appointments, a path for other people to get pardons, a path for people to get business negotiations. Even right now, Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk who committed a number of felonies under state law in Colorado, but they were done in the name of Donald Trump winning the 2020 election, he’s pulling out all the stops to try to get her out of prison in Colorado, and I think it could even extend to a mass murderer like Maduro.

Frum: Well, Trump let out the former president of Honduras, who’s one of the biggest drug dealers in the world. That wasn’t about the election. By the way, in the Tina Peters case, she was convicted under state law, correct? So Trump can’t just pardon her—he has to muscle the state of Colorado into somehow releasing her.

Richer: But it’s extraordinary what he’s doing right now. He’s pulling funds from Colorado. He vetoed a water bill that was very important to the residents of Colorado. He’s calling [Governor] Jared Polis a terrible person on a regular basis. And so he will leverage whatever power he has. And in the instance of Maduro, he does have much more power than he has over Tina Peters.

Frum: Now, let’s go to the forward-looking part of this. Are we seeing in Georgia some kind of dress rehearsal for using the muscle of the federal government and the military or other assets to intervene in state-run elections in 2026, and try to stave off what otherwise looks like a likely Republican defeat if the elections are allowed to be free and fair? And the scheme seems to be: Find some way, by looking backwards to 2020, to prevent the elections of 2026 from being free and fair.

Richer: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how much of this is about Trump’s ego and about looking backwards. You had the president of the Brennan Center on previously. He’s somebody who has said that this is about looking forwards—this is about the 2026 election; this is about the 2028 election. But your guess is as good or better than mine, and so is this a dress rehearsal for involving the federal government in ways that never would’ve been before contemplated?

And I’ll say that, over the last few months, I’ve ordinarily been pretty reluctant to embrace any sort of theory that Donald Trump can manipulate the 2026 elections. People normally talk about stationing ICE at a few voting locations, or they talk about him pulling federal funding from cybersecurity programs. And to those allegations, or to those concerns, I usually say, Well, at the end of the day, the counties run elections. They’re run by bipartisan teams. They have a lot of checks and balances built into the process. And they’re gonna be administered. But this is the first instance in which I could begin to believe that something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been.

Frum: Well, let me ask you because you sat in the chair; you ran the office. You know the very minute details of how elections are administered, something most of us don’t pay attention to, because we just think we’ll go vote. The votes get counted. We believe what they say. Sometimes the one we want wins, and we’re happy. And sometimes the one we want doesn’t win, and we say, Wait ’til next time. But going inside the box, supposing you—I’m not going to ask you to say anything that, probably, the people who would abuse this information don’t already know—but you’re at a tabletop exercise, and you’re invited, in the name of election-hardening, to say, We want you to play the other team. We want you to play the leader of the team that is trying to cheat in 2026. On the basis of your knowledge, what would be your scheme for interventions to sway the result against the will of the people in 2026 if you had to tabletop that exercise?

Richer: Yeah, so we do a fair amount of this, actually, within a number of different election communities, and I always fall back on where I think President Trump is most potent is still in the post-election procedures, still in sowing doubt in the minds of enough Americans that they don’t think the elections are legitimate and, therefore, I don’t know, they don’t have to recognize the new elected officials, or the Congress doesn’t have to seat its new members. That’s certainly a popular theory that’s floating about: that Speaker Mike Johnson, the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members, because they’re in allegedly disputed elections.

I find that to be much more plausible than, We’re gonna go in, and we’re gonna tip over every single tabulation machine so that those can’t be used, and then there’s just pandemonium because they have to do hand-count auditing. Or: We’re going to try to send the FBI to run the 9,000 different voting jurisdictions in the United States. Our election system is just so disaggregated, so driven by state law, so driven by local nuances, that I think it would be very, very challenging for the federal government to really take over here.

Frum: Well, a lot depends on whether the ’26 elections are close or not close. If we’re in a true wave, and 40 seats are changing hands, and the Senate is changing majority, probably, at that point, if you try to send the FBI to do something, it would be both hopeless, but it would also look obviously illegitimate. But if it’s not 40 seats that are changing hands but just six, and you have an idea in the week before the election which those six are likely to be, could you do something then? Could you send Tulsi Gabbard and the FBI to Charlotte and Tucson and a few chosen jurisdictions and seize machines there? Would that have any positive outcome for them, or is it still hopeless?

Richer: Yeah, so I think that is a scenario that’s been discussed, where you don’t go to every 9,000 voting jurisdictions. You don’t go to all the precincts. You certainly don’t go to all the polling places. But you do go to the competitive swing races for the United States House, and you do something to disrupt them. And perhaps, in that instance, you could present law enforcement on such a significant level that election administrators would just have to throw their hands up and say, We can’t operate in this environment, or We can’t operate without our machinery, such that you can never get a conclusive result. I still don’t know how, at the end of the day, you make the ballot say something different than what they said. But just seizing everything and not even allowing the process to go on, that would be pretty extraordinary, but that would have, obviously, a disruptive effect, and then I guess we would never really know who won those contests.

And I think that this is especially vulnerable in California, where California usually takes about two weeks to complete their count because almost everyone votes by mail, and a large percentage of people either drop off their mail ballot on Election Day or they even mail it, they postmark it, on Election Day and then it doesn’t even arrive until several days later. And so if the administration already knows that it’s gonna come down to just a few swing districts in California, moves in there—California, of course, is already ready to be seen as sort of the liberal boogeyman, and so maybe the narrative writes better there.

Frum: Based on your experience in Arizona, how far down this highway will other Republican officials go? When Donald Trump and the people around him and Kari Lake were saying these crazy things about the elections in your state, did most Republican officeholders sort of shrug wearily, or did they say, Well, it may not be true, but it’s our team that’s saying the thing that is not true, so we have to be full throated?

Richer: Do not underestimate the importance of politics for a politician. David Mayhew said politicians are “single-minded seekers of reelection,” and I learned that when I got into office. And Republicans care about the opinion of Donald Trump because he is uniquely powerful within the Republican Party. And so almost every single Republican that I spoke with after the 2020 election, in terms of elected Republicans, knew that there was very little to Donald Trump’s allegations of a stolen election. At best, they stayed quiet. At worst, they went full-throated along with it because they knew it was a path to political riches, whether higher office or fundraising and so on and so forth. And so I was just consistently disappointed at how few people there were who were willing to stand up and say, No, two plus two still equals four, even if the president doesn’t want it to be so.

Frum: How robust are the state courts and the federal courts in election administration?

Richer: So I do think that this is one thing that we can take some solace in and that was very consistent and strong from 2020 onward, is that—I know that people take issue with courts of appeals and with the United States Supreme Court on some highly politicized issues, but in terms of election denialism, in terms of saying that, for instance, again, that Dominion tabulation was connected to Hugo Chávez, there was not a single state or federal court that indulged those fanciful lies. And so still, I think that if there’s one place where we consistently win because we have all the facts and we have all the law, it’s in the courts. And so I still have put great faith in the courts, I still have a lot of confidence in the courts, and I do think that that is one of the bulwarks against anything that might happen in the 2026 election.

Frum: Can you decode the role? How is it that the director of national intelligence has any role in anything to do with an election?

Richer: Well, I think all the formalities and lines have been blurred quite a bit in the Trump administration, and even this one is a bit confusing because President Trump said that he had no idea why Tulsi Gabbard was there. And then the next day, at the National Prayer Breakfast, he said, Well, Pam—being Pam Bondi, the attorney general—had asked her to be there. And then a number of other people have had shifting analysis as to whether or not she was supposed to be there and what she’s been doing there. But I think Tulsi Gabbard realizes, as many have realized before her, that Donald Trump cares deeply about this and less important than coloring within the lines, or only doing what is within your purview, is showing Donald Trump that you care about this and doing “something about it.” And so I think that, for her positioning within the Trump administration, it was a smart move. Now, will he eventually expect her to produce something? There, I think, she could be in a little more challenging position because I think that most of this is being done by the Justice Department and the FBI, and they would say, maybe, This is our stuff; butt out. But I think being there certainly helped her in Trump world.

Frum: Yeah. The FBI is an institution that is being broken before our eyes as well, and good officers are being driven out; bad officers are being hired. The FBI is being turned into an arm of very, very partisan justice. How much confidence do you have in them? And you’ve seen them in Arizona—what do you think is likely to happen in 2026?

Richer: I have a lot of confidence in the FBI and the Department of Justice as it previously existed, and I still have a lot of confidence in a lot of the people there. These people are amazing. They really believe in the role of the agencies. They believe in doing justice. They’re highly professional. They’re highly skilled. Unfortunately, as you said, those people are leaving. And if you look at The New York Times story, I think, just a day or two ago about what’s going on with the applications to the Department of Justice, it’s very telling. One, the number of applications is way down, and they’re struggling to recruit the same high-quality, high-caliber people that they were previously. And two, as part of the application process, applicants have to answer questions about which parts of the Trump agenda they like most, how they will advance the Trump agenda, and this is just so anathema to anyone who really believed in the Justice Department’s mission and the FBI’s mission that I do think it will have a corrosive effect. I just don’t know how long it will take to get to the tipping point where those are the types of people who are running ops.

Frum: What is the SAVE Act, and why do the Republicans care about it so much?

Richer: Yeah, there’s a few pieces of legislation right now that Republicans are trying to put forward to supposedly close gaps in problems that they see with election administration. One’s the SAVE Act, one’s the SAVE America Act, and one’s the Make Elections Great Again Act.

The SAVE Act is aimed primarily at proof of citizenship when registering to vote. So under the National Voter Registration Act, the NVRA, which was passed in the ’90s, if you wanna vote in elections in the United States under federal law, you just have to attest under penalty of law that you are a United States citizen—you don’t have to show documented proof of citizenship. The Republicans wanna change that such that you have to show either a passport or a birth certificate when registering to vote. Now, I actually think that there’s something to that idea. I don’t think that’s an unduly onerous burden. But the way in which they’ve drafted it is problematic, the way in which they’re trying to impose it is problematic, and there’s also a lot of states’ rights people who say, Well, I actually think that this should be best left to the states.

Frum: And there is also something about this that is a little, like, politicians are older than they used to be—like, not dealing with the present-day America. If the vote were restricted to people who have a valid passport for international travel, wouldn’t that skew the electorate much more toward the Democrats than toward the Republicans? In 1996, having a passport probably did indicate you were a Republican leaner, but not in 2026.

Richer: So I should first say that this is predicated oftentimes on a false notion that there are large numbers of noncitizens who are participating in American elections, and that’s simply not true. It’s not true both by the number of people who have been prosecuted for this, but it’s also not true because a number of states, even in recent weeks, have affirmatively investigated the number of noncitizens on their rolls—I wrote about this in The New York Times—and just, simply, the numbers aren’t there.

And then, secondly, yes, I’m not even sure that the political calculus is right. As you’ve noted before, the demographics of the Republican Party have materially changed, even from where they were in 2016. Republicans are no longer the disproportionately educated, disproportionately affluent country-club party that maybe we once envisioned them [to be], and they are actually potentially less likely to have passports because they’re not living in coastal cities and taking those international trips. And so I do think that that’s another curious wrinkle to the SAVE Act. Now, maybe Republicans would say, Well, that’s not our goal here, and Our goal is just to further secure elections. I would say we need to clean up how it’s being done technically, and I still don’t think that there’s a great justification for it.And a lot of people say, Well, Stephen, voter ID polls really well, and I say, It does—this is not voter ID. Again, voter identification is what you do when you show up to vote, and you take, usually, a driver’s license, and you say, I am the person who is registered to vote. SAVE Act is about, when you first register to vote, whether or not you have proof of citizenship, which might, as David said, be a passport, or it might be a birth certificate.

Frum: So what are the other acts that the Republicans are interested in?

Richer: So the MEGA Act does things like—it’s this whole laundry list of sort of things that the Republicans have talked about in the elections context for a while, stuff like banning ranked-choice voting, stuff like banning states from sending out mail ballots to all registered voters, things like banning states from allowing mail ballots to come back after Election Day if they’ve been postmarked on Election Day. So my complaint against this isn’t necessarily policy item for policy item, but it is very much a federalization of election administration. And if there’s one thing that separates sort of the Trump camp from the [Senator Mitch] McConnell camp is the McConnell camp would say, It was wrong when Democrats tried to do it with H.R. 1 in 2021, it was wrong when I probably looked at this way back earlier in my political career, and it’s wrong now. And the Trump people would say, We want to change election administration. We wanna do it through executive order, even. And if we can’t do it through executive order, then we wanna do it through federal legislation.

Frum: Well, I think there are also Republicans that are in the group of: We remember a world where Republicans were more likely to have a passport than Democrats were, but that was a world of long ago; we’re mad about mail-in ballots because they helped Biden in 2020, because, in 2020, there was a special circumstance where people who took COVID seriously were more likely to vote by mail than people who didn’t take COVID seriously and Democrats were more likely to take COVID seriously than Republicans. But what also seems weird about this, for Republicans to make such a fetish of it now, is in normal times, who is most likely to vote by mail? Active-duty military personnel and older people. So you’d think, Well, gee, if I’m a Republican, why do I wanna make that more difficult?

Richer: Well, this is an irony, and in Arizona, it was the “[John] McCain machine” that we used to call it that really, really got mail voting down to a science for a while. And it was all the people, we like to say, in Sun City or out in Gilbert, which are sort of towns further removed from the central core of Phoenix, who didn’t wanna go into a voting location, who didn’t wanna get out of their 55-plus communities, who wanted to mail in their ballots, and so a lot of these narratives have flipped. It’s interesting to somebody like me, who’s been watching this for a little while. It’s not always rational. But I’m trying to meet it where it is.

Frum: Yeah. These are things—you can debate the SAVE Act, you can debate these other measures, in a way you can’t debate someone who believes that Hugo Chávez, from beyond the grave, is tampering with American voting dials.

Richer: That’s right. And again, my complaint with the SAVE Act is often about the predicate, the false predicate, which is that large numbers of noncitizens are voting in our elections. And that, again, that has been demonstrated time and time again to be false. Now, absolutely, we can have a public-policy debate about what’s the appropriate amount of documentation for proof of citizenship—public-policy debate. But too often in the Trump world in election administration, we’re debating facts that shouldn’t have to be debated.

Frum: Let’s wrap this up with—take us back to what happens on a voting day in most of America. So you show up, you stand in line, you execute your vote however your county does it, and then you leave. And then you don’t think about it until you turn on the TV. What happens after you leave that room?

Richer: So if you vote at a voting location, you’ll either fill in your ballot with a hand mark—you’ll hand mark it with pen, and you’ll fill in the ovals—or you’ll have a touch screen, and then it’ll print a piece of paper. And then you’ll feed it into a tabulator at the voting location.

Frum: Let me pause you right there. So even though you’ve used a machine to generate the ballot, the ballot remains a paper ballot.

Richer: Correct. Again, so 98 percent of Americans have a paper ballot of some form, whether that’s filling it in yourself by hand, or whether that’s touching ovals on a screen and then printing it off and still having a paper ballot.

Frum: Right, and here in my precinct in Washington, that’s what we do: We touch the screen. We get a piece of paper. Then what happens?

Richer: And then you’re going to go, as the voter, and you’re going to make sure that it has all of your selections as you intended. So it would say, For this race, you voted for this person. For this race, you voted for this person. For this race, you voted for that person. And then you’re gonna feed it into a little mini tabulator that is at a voting location. At the end of the night—

Frum: Wait, stop—who supervises this?

Richer: County or city workers who have been trained to do this, who are bipartisan teams. Oftentimes, depending on the jurisdiction, they’ve been offered up by the county Republican Party or the county Democratic Party. But these are almost, in most circumstances, a bipartisan team of paid temporary county or city employees.

Frum: So they’re not full-time city or county employees; they’re people who have been specially recruited for that one-day service.

Richer: Correct. For working a voting location, those are ordinarily temporary workers.

Frum: And there’ll be someone named by the Republicans, someone named by the Democrats.

Richer: That’s right.

Frum: Okay. And they’re watching what’s going on.

Richer: That’s right. And there’s a whole bunch of procedures. Usually, you have to document a whole bunch of different things. But at the end of the day, you’re going to take all of the ballots that have been run through that tabulator, and you’re going to take the memory device from the tabulator itself, and you’re gonna wrap that memory device in tamperproof packaging, make sure that it can’t be damaged, make sure that it can’t be tampered with. You’re gonna give it to a bipartisan team, and they’re going to take both those ballots and that memory device to a central count facility—so that will be either within your county or within your city—where all of the different voting locations go into in order to aggregate the results. And when they aggregate the results, not only will they load that memory device into this main server to add to the other votes that have come in, but they’ll make sure that the number of votes that it recorded is the same as the number of ballots that were returned from that voting location, such that if the memory device reads, 1,123 ballots have been read on this, there better be 1,123 ballots that are in the drawer where they went after they were tabulated.

So that’s one component of it. There’s a whole bunch of other components because, obviously, some people vote by mail; some people get a mail ballot, and they drop it off. But an important part of this is we don’t just load those into the elections-management server, print the results, and then say, Well, hope everyone enjoyed their election. There’s always going to be post-election audits that are going to be open to public observation and are gonna be done in a bipartisan manner. So here, we really get to the core of the Hugo Chávez claim, which is that the tabulation equipment itself took votes that were for Donald Trump and it awarded them to Joe Biden. And we know that’s not the case because what we do is we select random batches of ballots, we see what the machine count was on them, and then we give those physical paper ballots to bipartisan teams of Republicans and Democrats, who hand-count them and they make sure the machines got the count right.

Frum: One of the complaints that the Trump people had was they couldn’t bring their bands of enthusiasts into those counting rooms.

Richer: Yeah. So, one, every county differs in terms of how many observers it allows, but in terms of people who actually work the process, we, in Maricopa County, we welcomed all types. If you were somebody who didn’t believe in the validity of elections, that’s fine; we still took you in. But we didn’t just take you and your five buddies and just send you off to one voting location. We take you in, we train you, we talk with you, and then we integrate you into other teams—teams of people from different backgrounds, teams from people of different politics, teams from people who have been doing this different lengths of time—and there is a little bit of that sort of almost watchfulness over each other. And I think one of the really beautiful things about election administration is that, in almost all instances, the people who come in and are part of this process develop a camaraderie with the people that they work with, and they develop a sense of pride in the results, and they develop a sense of defensiveness in that they were part of this process. And so I say to anyone who is still questioning how these things work, either go and get a tour of your elections facility, or better yet, figure out how you can be an observer for your political party, or figure out how you can participate in at least one part of the election process.

Frum: You mean convert cheap cynicism on Twitter into actual civic participation, and maybe not only will you have a better understanding, but you might be a better person at the end of the process.

Richer: Yeah, and there’s some great social-science studies about people who serve on a jury walk away with a better perception of the criminal-justice system. And while this hasn’t been as studied in the election-worker context, from my anecdotal experience, I firmly believe that is true, and it is something that is constructive, and it’s something that’ll actually teach you, rather than just retweeting or resharing the Rumble video or the Truth Social post or the Twitter post.

Frum: In Maricopa County, how many people are involved in the process in a big year, like in a presidential year?

Richer: Yeah, so for the 2024 presidential election, we had about 2.6 million registered voters in Maricopa County, and we had over 3,000 temporary workers helping with that process. That’s everything from the people who are working at a voting location, to people who are driving box trucks, to people who were working in our warehouse, to people doing signature verification, to people who were actually taking the ballots out of their return mail envelopes in bipartisan teams and smoothing them out and making sure there aren’t rips or gum on the ballots before we put them into the tabulators. And so, really, it’s a very time-intensive process, it’s a very redundant process, but it’s a pretty remarkable process, and there are lots of ways to get involved, and I think that you’ll find that, far from being complicit in a grand international scheme that seems fitting for a Mission: Impossible movie, I think that you’ll find that it gets a little boring, tiring after you’ve been doing it for hours and hours and hours. But it’s important because that is how we can affirm the validity of the election.

Frum: So in just your one county, in just Maricopa, we need to get 3,000 people to be involved in the conspiracy.

Richer: And so that is really another reason why our system is hardened against broad-scale attacks because, I mentioned, there are about 9,000 different voting jurisdictions in the United States, and each of those voting jurisdictions, they’re not as big as Maricopa County—Maricopa County is only smaller than Los Angeles County in terms of elections jurisdictions—but they have a number of people working. And so to have a conspiracy, you would have thousands and thousands of people in on it, and my experience with most political secrets is as soon as more than three or four people know about it, it’s probably getting out.

Frum: Stephen, thank you so much for joining me today. I learn so much from you every time we speak. I’m grateful to you for speaking to me today.

Richer: Thanks, David. I really appreciate it.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Stephen Richer for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Now, as I mentioned at the top, this month, February 2026, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of the first of six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s [The History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now, I won’t claim to have read every word of all six volumes, nor have I listened to all 126 hours of the audiobook, as recorded by Charlton Griffin, who is an incredible hero. I’ve listened to a lot of them, and I strongly recommend the audiobook; it is a fascinating way to spend time. But it’s a lot either way, whether you read the six volumes or listen to the 126 hours. But I’ve dug deeply enough into the book to have absorbed its message for our time, and that’s what I wanna talk about today, because this series of books remains not only a tremendous monument of history, not only a great milestone in intellectual development, it continues to shape discourse in our own time in ways that are powerful, but also sometimes a little misleading. So let me explain what I mean, why this book is so relevant and why I’m talking about it today.

Edward Gibbon was a man of the Enlightenment. He was a secularist. He was someone who had what we would call a broadly liberal—the word would not have been used that way in his time—but a broadly liberal view of politics. He was a man of great tolerance. He was an easygoing man, the opposite of a persecutor, the opposite of an advocate of any kind of arbitrary or absolute authority, so in that sense, a very modern figure. But in another way, as an historian, he was quite an old-fashioned figure, a backward-looking figure. His book, begun in 1776—the last volume was published a dozen years later, in 1788—is very much under the imprint of the ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli, who lived 250 years before Edward Gibbon, and through Machiavelli to the classical literary tradition of the Romans and the Greeks.

When Gibbon is explaining the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he, again, is a very modern man—he uses not only literary evidence; he uses coins and inscriptions and all the techniques that were made available by archaeology as it existed in his time—and many of his ideas, as I say, are very strikingly modern, but his central explanation of what happened to the Roman Empire is backward-looking. It’s the Machiavelli explanation. What he thinks happened was that there was a decline in the civic virtue of the Roman people, and this decline in civic virtue was the key culprit of the collapse of the Roman Empire. What did he mean by civic virtue? What he meant was a kind of self-denying, materially austere commitment to active citizenship, active participation in public life. There was more of that early; there was less of that later. As that civic participation declined, so did the Roman Empire. And many people who read his book, in 1776 and after, took from that reading a message that was, in some ways, very helpful to building modern societies—we all should be active citizens—but also misleading because it created an idea that people are more virtuous at one period, less virtuous at another. It made the story of the success or failure of societies very much a matter of individual behavior and less of institutional success.

Now, again, Gibbon was in no way a naive person; he understood the importance of institutions. One of the big villains of his book is the rise of the Christian Church, which, in his telling, diverts Roman attention from this-worldly to otherworldly activities, from being willing to work on behalf of the commonwealth in the here and now to looking for some kind of reward in heaven, for being less willing to use weapons to serve in the military and more inclined to privatize their life. And there’s obviously some truth to this. Christianity did change the way the Roman civilization worked. But it’s not clear that there was any less involvement in civic life in Roman life in the 400s or 500s than there was in the 100s, when he begins his story. But what he did introduce—and this is really the thing we need to be cautious of—was a kind of biologization of history, an idea of decline and decadence. Decline makes sense when we talk about individual creatures. After a certain point in our lives, we are all on the path of decline, leading to extinction. And he brought concepts from the idea of art and science, the idea of decadence, into history in a way that biologized the development of societies. And this is an idea that, in our time, can lead to some pretty sinister complexes, this hunt for decline and decadence, and this desire to reaffirm society by somehow purging us of the things that make us freer, that give individual life more scope—again, not blaming Gibbon for that, but these are ideas that, through, Gibbon have haunted the discussion of political science and economic development and historical development.

I think, as we return to this mighty work from 250 years ago, there’s a lot to benefit from, including, above all, the extraordinary labor that went into producing this giant work that is still so fascinating to read, still so eminently quotable, in a literary style that resonates to this very day. But the reason the Roman Empire declined and fell was not because the Romans were virtuous at one time and less virtuous at the other. They were met with concrete problems of the here and now, problems of climate change, problems of plague, problems of the faster military development of their neighbors. Romans started with a big organizational advantage over the less-organized societies on their borders. As the Romans developed, as the world developed, those neighbors caught up and equalized the military balance, and the Romans were not up to the task. The Romans also developed problems of succession. They couldn’t provide orderly ways that didn’t involve coups and assassinations and civil wars, of making sure that executive power flowed in continuous ways through bureaucratic systems. Partly, that was because of the material primatism of the time. Partly, that was because of just the scale of distance on which they had to work. But partly, that was an institutional failure that was inherent in the way they organized the world and that we can learn some lessons from.

The world is always old and always new. Human beings age, but societies don’t. And if there’s a lesson to be learned from The [History of the] Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it is to think less about decline and fall and think more about: How do we preserve and maintain the success of the society that modern-day people have, Americans and people in other democracies? How do you preserve what you have as institutions? How do you keep alive the incentives to maintain the act of citizenship that Gibbon taught as so important?

Anyway, those are my reflections on [the] 250th anniversary of this amazing work. But go read some of it, more of it, all of it if you can, yourself and see what you think.

Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you want to do so, is by subscribing to The Atlantic and supporting the work of all of my colleagues. Please share and subscribe to the program and share it on social media if you’re so minded. And you can follow me on social media as well: @DavidFrum on X (Twitter) and on Instagram. See you next week on The David Frum Show—oh, and one last word: I wish a very meaningful Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate this often difficult but potentially very rewarding holiday. Thank you so much for joining me this week on The David Frum Show.

Trump vs. Canada

2026-02-04T13:00:00-05:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his thoughts on the reported $500 million-dollar deal between World Liberty Financial, a Trump-family business venture, and the United Arab Emirates, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. David discusses the helplessness we feel as we are bombarded with stories where it seems all restraint has broken down and explains what laws exist that are meant to curtail corrupt practices.

Then, David is joined by former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney to discuss the Trump administration’s overtures to an Albertan secessionist movement, the harm the Trump presidency has done to the American-Canadian alliance, and how Trump is pushing Canada into China’s arms. David and Premier Kenney also discuss how the failures to address immigration by liberal parties across the West have led to dangerous far-right populist movements.

Finally, David discusses The Imperialist, by Sara Jeannette Duncan, and how it can help us better understand what is being lost by Trump’s destruction of the relationship between America and Canada.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Jason Kenney, former premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, former Canadian minister of immigration, former Canadian minister of defense. My book this week will be a 1904 novel by a Canadian writer named Sara Jeannette Duncan, titled The Imperialist, which casts a reflective light on some of the themes of my conversation with Jason Kenney.

Before turning to either, some opening thoughts on an absolutely astonishing story reported by The Wall Street Journal on January 31. According to The Wall Street Journal, four days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as United States president, a United Arab Emirates businessman made a $500 million commitment to invest in one of [the] Trump family’s companies, his cryptocurrency company, a decision that resulted in a payment of $187 million to the Trump family up front and $31 million to the family of Steven Witkoff, the Middle East envoy. The investment, which amounted to $500 million over a period of the deal, made no apparent business sense. The company in which this astonishing half-a-billion-dollar investment was made, that company had almost no products, and its few revenue sources were outside the limit of the deal. It is impossible to understand how any of this could have made any business sense. But the businessman, who is a member of the royal family and a brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates, and who oversees not just his own enormous wealth but the very important state investment fund, committed this vast amount of money to these two families—in return for what?

A potential answer to that question emerged just two months after the $500 million deal. At that point, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration gave the U.A.E. access to 500,000 a year extremely high-tech computer chips, chips that could help build one of the largest artificial-intelligence data centers in the world. This was a departure from the Biden administration’s approach, which allowed the United Arab Emirates a limited number of chips, due to concerns the chips could make their way to China. So there’s a big deal allowing the United Arab Emirates access to tightly held chips, coming so soon after a $500 million investment into a Trump family entity.

A spokesman for World Liberty told the Journal that President Trump and Steve Witkoff “had no involvement in the deal” and that “the deal didn’t grant either party involved any sort of access to government decision-making or influence over policy.” White House counsel also told The Wall Street Journal—and I am quoting again—“The President has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities”; that’s the end of that quote. Next quote: nd Witkoff “has not and does not participate in any official matters that could impact his financial interests.” This is an astonishing story, a disturbing story, a story with implications not only for U.S. public integrity but for United States national security.

I’m not gonna comment more on the story because the story is much discussed already. (Laughs.) You will have your own thoughts about its meaning and implications. I wanna talk about the feeling of helplessness that this story leaves behind. I think a lot of Americans read things like this and just say, What can we do? The Donald Trump administration, there’s story after story that seemingly attests to corruption on a scale never seen not just in American history, but in the history of any democratic country. You get big corruption, billion-dollar corruption, in authoritarian societies with unfree presses. But where the press is free, where the parliament or congress is open, normally, there is some restraint on this kind of behavior by high officials. But in the United States, over the past year and a bit of the second Trump administration, all the restraints seem to have broken down; there seem to be no rules at all.

The New York Times has estimated that the Trump family has made over $1 billion in this first year-plus of the Trump administration. The New Yorker has an update in which they estimate the Trump family’s stake at $4 billion. Whatever the actual number is, again, it is an astonishing sum never before seen in the history not just of the United States, but of any pure democracy, and such things are unimaginable, or have never happened before. And we’re left feeling, What can we do? And the thing I wanna stress here is that, while the laws are dormant, they are not dead. There are recourses that can be had—not immediately, because we have this broken Department of Justice and a supine Congress, but soon. There are relevant statutes that bear upon what seems to have happened here between the Trump family, the Witkoff families, and the United Arab Emirates.

Now, let me first remind you that the United States, it seems hard to believe, but it actually does have a law governing public corruption. It’s Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 201. And I’m going to read from the United States Department of Justice explainer of 201. This is on the United States Department of Justice website. It hasn’t been taken down yet. They’ve left it up. They may wanna take it down later, but I’m going to read some relevant passages from it to you now.

“Section 201 of Title 18 is entitled ‘Bribery of public officials and witnesses.’ The statute,” says the DOJ, “comprises two distinct offenses … and in common parlance only the first of these is true ‘bribery.’”

“The first offense, codified in section 201(b), prohibits the giving or accepting of anything of value to or by a public official, if the thing is given ‘with intent to influence’ an official act, or if it is received by the official ‘in return for being influenced.’”

“The second offense … concerns what are commonly known as ‘gratuities’ … Section 201(c) prohibits that same public official from accepting the same thing of value, if he does so ‘for or because of’ any official act, and prohibits anyone from giving any such thing to him for such a reason.”

Now, the Supreme Court has sharply limited the application of sections 201, both the section on bribery and the section on gratuities. But it remains against the law for someone, anyone, and a public official—and a Middle East envoy is also a public official—for anyone who is a public official—and a president is a public official—to give or do anything, any official act, in exchange for something of value. If that’s what’s happened here, that is a crime. It remains a crime. And it’s a crime that, even if the Trump administration chooses not to act on it today, has a statute of limitations of five years from the last act necessary to complete the crime. If some future Department of Justice, some future prosecutor, were to deem that payment unlawful or an effort to influence the behavior of the United States government, from the day that the last payment is due, there’s five years in which an action could be brought. It is not hopeless. The law is not dead; it is just dormant.

And meanwhile, there’s another legal wrinkle that I invite people—imagine that the United States will again have a more active Department of Justice and a more independent Congress—to bear in mind, which is the United Emirates officials who made this purchase, whatever its purpose—and, again, we’re not gonna use legal language here; we’re mindful that nothing has been proven, but the facts are suggestive—they are exposed to something even more formidable, which is, in 2016, the United States Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed a measure called the Global Magnitsky [Human Rights Accountability] Act.

This act, named for a murdered Russian businessman, Sergei Magnitsky, gives the president, and the president alone, considerable power to act against non-U.S. entities and persons deemed to be active in global corruption. Under the Global Magnitsky Act, a future American president can take sanctions against any entity or any person—a businessman or any friend controlled by the businessman—and can impose the following: economic sanctions, including asset blocking and prohibitions on transactions. They can freeze any property held within U.S. jurisdiction and prohibit U.S. individuals or entities from entering into transactions with the designated person or entity. And they can impose visa restrictions to deny entry to the United States and revoke any already-issued visas to any person that the president of the United States, under the Global Magnitsky Act, by executive action, deems to have participated in significant global corruption. So there is a lot of exposure here. There are a lot of remedies at hand. There are tools. And the fact that those tools are not being used today does not mean that they cannot be used tomorrow.

Now, Trump and those around him understand the danger to them as well or better than I do or than you now do. That could be one of the reasons why Donald Trump is so panicky to ensure that, by any means necessary, he retains control of Congress, both houses, in 2026 and why he so covets a third term: because only by overthrowing the electoral system of the United States can he feel that he has security from some of the legal risks to which he might be exposed if the implications of these latest reports turn out to be valid and true. For Donald Trump, he may feel that his alternatives are power or prison. And for the rest of us, those feelings of Donald Trump should be a beacon to remind ourselves that the law is alive; the law matters, that things that you think of as shocking and outlandish and impossible and un-American, other people have thought about them before you and have taken measures to make sure that they don’t happen and that, if they do, they are punished.

Punishment for crime is not something that just happens to 5-year-old people who have overstayed their visas or who never had a visa in the first place. Punishment for crime is something that can happen to the most powerful people in the land. And indeed, it’s more called for against the most powerful than it is against the least powerful because it is the most powerful who are also the most dangerous. They have the greatest responsibility. They have the greatest visibility. They have the greatest position of trust. They have the least excuse for using their power to benefit and enrich themselves, and to plunder the Treasury, and to put American national security at risk.

Again, this is a news report. There is more to be learned. None of this has been proven in court. But it oughta be tested in court. And let’s hope that if the American people are allowed the right to make their voices heard freely and fairly in 2026 and 2028, it will be tested in court in due time and by the executive actions allowed by the Global Magnitsky Act.

And now my dialogue with Jason Kenney.

[Music]

Frum: Jason Kenney served as premier of the province of Alberta from 2019 through 2022, leading the province through the shock of the COVID pandemic. He held, previously, major offices in the federal Conservative cabinets of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, including as minister of citizenship and immigration and as minister of national defense.

This listing of jobs does not begin to do justice to Jason Kenney’s importance to Canadian politics over the past two decades. More than any other Canadian politician, Jason Kenney built the Canadian Conservatives into a truly multiethnic party, competitive among Canadians of every origin, whether South Asian, East Asian, Afro Caribbean, or from the traditional immigration sources in Europe.

Since leaving politics, Jason Kenney has worked as a corporate director and adviser, and a senior fellow at two Canadian think tanks: the free-market C. D. Howe Institute and Cardus, an institution that applies Christian teaching to industrial relations.

I’ve known Jason Kenney since his days as head of the Canadian [Taxpayers] Federation, a long, long time ago, in a very different world, and it’s a pleasure to welcome (Laughs.) Jason to The David Frum Show. Jason, thank you for joining me.

Jason Kenney: Great to be here, David.

Frum: So let’s start by talking about some very Alberta-specific things that have been much in the news recently, which is that the Trump administration seems to be trying to foment an Alberta secessionist movement as a preliminary to annexing either the province of Alberta solo or the entire country of Canada. Can you help the non-Canadians among us understand what’s going on here? Why would the Trump people be trying to break up Canada and grab a piece of it?

Kenney: Well, as you know, the annex Canada stuff started in December, after the last U.S. election, when [Trump] was visited by [then-Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago. And [he] apparently used this line, Fifty-first state, you’ll be the governor, as a joke, to which Trudeau responded, and he saw that he rumbled Canadians; it got a lot of attention. And I think it suddenly became a new squeeze toy for the president-elect. So he spent much of December and January of last year toying with this idea, to the point where a year ago, he was asked, Mr. President, would you use military force, as you have threatened to do with Panama and Greenland, to annex Canada and make it the 51st state? And he said, No, I don’t need to do that; I will just use economic force. And that became a pretty consistent rhetorical theme, which was then followed in February, March of last year with the imposition of prejudicial tariffs on Canada, treating us as though we were as large a source of narcotics and illegal migration as Mexico, which is, of course, patently absurd. And it’s been a very bumptious relationship ever since.

Concurrent with that, we’ve had an emerging—well, there’s been a marginal separatist movement in the province of Alberta for five decades, rooted in historical alienation but really amplified by the 10 years of Justin Trudeau’s premiership, which was really problematic for Alberta’s large oil-and-gas industry. And my successor, the current premier, has enabled, through a much more accessible citizens’ initiative referendum process, a referendum that looks likely to happen later this year. And so people in the Trump administration, and certainly MAGA influencers, are now toying with that: Perhaps if Canada is not willing to be annexed, Alberta is.

Now, Alberta’s always had a large history of American immigration. Southern Alberta was settled by farmers and ranchers from the upper Midwest. The oil industry was often populated by American professionals. And so there are closer connections, and in many cultural and economic ways, those connections are very durable. But the vast majority of Albertans have no interest in this, but some of these marginal separatist leaders have been paying visits to Washington and apparently meeting with Trump administration officials. That’s been confirmed now by the Financial Times. And [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent recently intimated that, If [Canadian Prime Minister] Mark Carney doesn’t watch his manners and mind his p’s and q’s, perhaps we’ll invite Alberta to be part of the United States.

So you see this kind of growing momentum. And I think it’s time for Prime Minister Carney, if he’s not already done so, to telegraph some very strong messages that this is one red line that cannot be crossed; it would result in significant sanctions. And I think we should start—and perhaps this is partly what Prime Minister Carney’s Davos speech was about—start building a Denmark-style coalition, which was very effective in forcing Trump’s 180 on Greenland. I don’t think we should overheat this yet, but they need to know that if they actually play in this space and start making offers of debt forgiveness and lines of credit and all this nonsense, or actually offering prospective-state status for Canada, that that will be a bridge too far.

Frum: Let me just go a little slower through what you just said, because some of this may be a little insider-y for any non-Canadians listening. It’s when Trump and Bessent and others talk about annexing Alberta that there is a mechanism by which they could really make trouble. There is a scheduled referendum. The legal status of this referendum is very hazy; Quebec has had two referendums, and the Canadian Supreme Court has imposed very stringent conditions on whether those referendums would mean anything. But Alberta does have one. There is an opportunity to make real trouble if an American administration were minded to do it, and it sounds like this administration is, with a view to breaking up Canada, detaching Alberta, which is the most oil-wealthy part of Canada, and seizing it as an American Puerto Rico or other territory of some kind.

Kenney: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any realistic prospect of actually making Alberta a U.S. state. It would require, obviously, a constitutional amendment. And by the way, the sane Republicans would pretty quickly calculate that Alberta, even though it’s the most conservative province in Canada, would most likely send, reliably, two Democrat senators to Washington. So it actually doesn’t make sense in American partisan political terms.

But you’re right—Trump has often said he needs nothing from Canada; he wants nothing from us. And yet he’s always wanted to get Keystone XL built, the prospective enlarged pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Context, as you’ve said, is that Alberta has the third-largest proven and probable oil reserves in the world, 180 billion barrels of accessible crude reserves, and the third-largest natural gas reserves. We are by far the largest supplier of imported oil to the United States. Any given year, 60 to 65 percent of U.S. oil imports come from Alberta; that’s 10 times what you import from Saudi Arabia and five times from all of OPEC combined. And for all of the noise around Venezuela’s famous reserves, which, like Alberta’s, are very heavy and therefore the right kind of product for a lot of the U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, the truth is we have a well-developed industry. We are producing 6 million barrels a day, unlike Venezuela, at 800,000 a day, and given the technology and human capital in Canada, [it’s] much easier to increase that. So this notion that Venezuela is suddenly going to become the major source, I think, is a misdirect. If he was actually thinking in avaricious terms, as he tends to, Alberta would be an obvious target.

Frum: So a couple of points to amplify here: The United States, of course, is now by far the world’s largest producer of oil and gas; it is net-net totally self-sufficient in petroleum products. But the United States imports certain products from Canada, certain heavier grades of oil, to meet the needs of certain refineries, even though overall the United States is not an importer. And then it exports other things, so while it’s a net exporter, there’s a category of imports from Canada.

I often think, when people make this comparison between Canada and Venezuela, I think about the offer to an oil-industry executive. You wanna get more of this kind of heavy oil that comes from either Canada or Venezuela, so you have two places to put your net investment for your marginal return: one, a place with a long history (Laughs.) of confiscations, nationalizations, kidnappings, murders, guerrilla warfare, no electricity, in the jungle; or the other place, where you can stay at a Westin hotel overnight and drive out in perfect safety to the fields, where there are no murders, no kidnappings, (Laughs.) no guerrilla warfare, and lots of electricity.

Kenney: Exactly. I’ve often made the comparison with other sources of U.S. imports, which is you don’t have to park a U.S. naval fleet off the northwest coast of British Columbia to guarantee security of supply. So we’re the obvious partner. And, David, when I was premier, I actually helped to de-risk—that was, provide government financing and loan guarantees—to get the Keystone XL project done because it makes perfect sense for us to be selling more to the United States. It would be good for both parties. But Trump has had this bizarre contradiction where he says he doesn’t want anything from Canada, doesn’t need our energy; yet he’s wanted a Keystone XL. That would add upwards of a million barrels a day. Despite all of the rumbling from Trump, that would be a longer-term project; we should pursue it. But the point is that all of this, I think, in the back of his confusing mind—I am concerned, at least, and many others are, that if we do end up with a referendum on Alberta separation later this year, that that’s an invitation for a great deal of mischief from President Trump.

Frum: Well, the precedent here would be the 2015 referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, where malign Russian actors do seem to have played a very big role in trying to promote the breakup of the United Kingdom, with a view to making Scotland some kind of adversarial entity. As I understand it, the British submarine fleet is based in Scotland, so if Scotland were to withdraw from the United Kingdom, it would make it harder for Britain to be a nuclear power. And the Scottish referendum failed, but a lot of mischief was done, and now the United States seems interested in repeating this playbook against Canada, only with the United States in the role of [President Vladimir] Putin’s Russia.

Kenney: And the complicating factor is that some of the separatist leaders here have been quite clear that they actually prefer U.S. state status, as opposed to that of an independent nation, because the whole Alberta independence project is rooted in totally understandable frustration with Ottawa. Some of this is rooted in Canadian history. Alberta [and] our neighboring, resource-rich province Saskatchewan, which happens to be the largest source of potash in the world and the second-largest source of uranium, these two provinces were created as a bit of an afterthought in confederation and had a history of being sort of mercantilist outposts for central Canada, so that’s part of our history, amplified by the recent Trudeau government.

So people are using this as a kind of opportunity to express their frustration; that’s understandable.But the notion of turning Alberta into a landlocked statelet, where people would have to get a work permit to go and work in British Columbia or other provinces in Canada—Albertans are fundamentally patriotic. They’re happy to sing “O Canada” at the hockey games. They’ve migrated to the province from elsewhere in the country. Their kids have served in the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] or the military very often. So there’s a fundamental attachment to Canada. And yet the separatists, who are kind of confused in their ultimate goal—some of them are suggesting they can get a sweetheart deal from Donald Trump that will forgive our debts, give us some line of credit, facilitate our exit from the country. And for a fairly small portion of our population, that’s actually a seductive proposition.

Frum: Yeah. Let’s put this in the context of a larger U.S.-Canada relationship. Now, one of the things that’s so bizarre about the Trump era is, as you know and as I know, until Donald Trump, you could not get Americans to pay any attention to the U.S.-Canada relationship whatsoever. It was, Canada, friendly neighbor to the north. It could not be a more boring subject, because things just hummed along. I’ve given talks to audiences of Canadian officeholders, where they would say, What do we do to get more attention from the United States? And I’d always say, Why do you want that? If you have kids (Laughs.) and you’ve driven them [on] any long road trip in a car, you know there’s one kid in the corner who’s reading their comic book, not bothering anybody, and there’s another kid who’s kicking the mom’s seat.

Kenney: (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) You’d rather be the kid in the corner reading the comic book than kicking Mom’s seat. But now there is this enormous attention, and where does it come from? What is the possible basis for why Donald Trump has decided that Canada is, maybe after Denmark, America’s leading geopolitical problem that must be crushed by military force?

Kenney: No idea how it developed, because it wasn’t the case in his first term. It was never part of his public rhetoric. I think he barely ever mentioned Canada in his last campaign, in ’24. And a lot of people hypothesized that it was just that he was irritated by Justin Trudeau, but Trudeau’s long gone now. In fact, Trudeau’s exit was accelerated by all of these Trump threats. It sort of focused the mind in the Liberal Party and our politics more generally that we needed somebody capable of dealing with Trump and his threats. I don’t know why President Trump didn’t say, Look, I helped you Canadians get rid of this clown Trudeau. But he’s continued these erratic threats.

And most recently, for example, David, Prime Minister Carney welcomed Donald Trump’s invitation for Canada to diversify our trade relations and so went to Beijing, like most historic U.S. allies are doing right now, to repair relations with the People’s Republic of China and made a fairly limited tariff deal to lower Canadian tariffs on electric-vehicle imports in exchange for lowering Chinese tariffs on—or, effectively, a blockade on some Canadian ag exports. So Trump, when presented with this, said, Good for Carney. He should do this. He should make deals. I make deals; he should make deals. Then Carney gave his speech at Davos, which I thought was a fairly persuasive argument about how middle powers should work together to deal with this destabilizing threat. But I think what happened was Trump was furious at being upstaged by Prime Minister Carney at Davos and so immediately threatened 100 percent tariffs in response to Canada’s China deal.

So from day to day, we just don’t know where this is going. We have the renegotiation of USMCA [United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement] coming up this summer, a deal that Trump once called the greatest trade deal in world history, which Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade rep, and [Secretary of Commerce] Howard Lutnick have suggested they don’t need, they’re just going to tear up. For their second-largest trading partner—and Canada is the most important trading partner for 24 of the 50 United States; as I say, by far the largest source of energy; the only source of fertilizer for your farmers; totally integrated economies in many respects. And we are now being forced to do things we don’t want to do, like reengaging the PRC on a bunch of issues.

Frum: Okay, let me just underscore what happened with that PRC deal. So the Biden administration, I think—I forget the year, ’23 or ’24—wanted to put big tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and thought it would be much more effective if there were a united North American front on this issue. The North American electric-vehicle industry is disproportionately located in the United States. Canada signed up and imposed exactly the same tariff on Chinese vehicles that the United States did, at the American request. The Chinese delayed their retaliation for a while and then, very cunningly, took disproportionate revenge on Canada, recognizing Canada as the weaker link, who got less from the tariffs and were more exposed. They imposed penalties on Canadian agricultural experts that were very, very painful to Canada and that Canada absorbed as part of its alliance with the United States.

And when Donald Trump came along and Howard Lutnick, who seems to be the designated blabber of this administration, and said, We’re gonna take the entire automobile industry away from Canada and relocate the North American automobile industry entirely to the United States, Canadians naturally thought, Why should Canada suffer these agricultural punishments to protect a North American industry that the Americans are now proposing to take away from Canada? In that case, why not at least sell agricultural exports to China? And that was the origin of the deal, is Canada said, Canada will reduce its tariffs on Chinese EVs in exchange for some relief on Canadian agricultural exports to China. And this was a war that Canada did not start, Canada did not want, Canada volunteered to join, and that Canada took disproportionate pain for participating in.

Kenney: All of that’s correct. To be clear, you know I’m one of the original China hawks in Canadian politics, so I don’t like the deal. It has all sorts of add-ons. Of course, the Chinese insisted that it be framed as a “strategic partnership.” It includes strategic cooperation on policing, on media, lots of bizarre things—the kind of nastiness that the Chinese require if you want access to their market in the long run. I don’t like this.

And let me just say this, David: I think one of the great, perhaps accidental, achievements of the first Trump administration was his resetting the Western policy paradigm on China, something that the Biden administration continued and, in fact, amplified. And Canada, by the way, David, it’s not the first time we’ve been through this, having to pay a trade price with China for being loyal American allies. Several years ago, we, at the request of the United States Department of Justice, detained the daughter of the CEO of Huawei, who was charged in the U.S. with various kinds of fraud and embezzlement. And in response, the Chinese kidnapped a couple of our diplomats, detained them for years, and slammed an embargo on a bunch of our major Canadian exports—again, agricultural products.

So I think they’re entirely unreliable, and I keep telling Canadian exporters, If you think this is a reliable market, wait until [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] launches his planned invasion or blockade of Taiwan and we all have to stop exporting to them. So I think it’s very regrettable, but here’s the point: President Trump had an opportunity, I think, to double down on the new Western policy setting towards the PRC by creating a free-trade alliance against unfair Chinese trading practices, industrial espionage, political interference, territorial aggression, and all of that. Instead, he has inexplicably done the opposite by creating a rupture in the historic political and trade alliances of the United States, forcing Europe, Canada, and others to turn back towards China and reverse the progress that he had made in isolating China, to some extent, in his first administration. So I don’t know how these guys like Elbridge Colby at the Defense Department, these people who have given some veneer of intellectual respectability to Trump’s geopolitical strategy, feel when, in fact, he’s doing the opposite of their stated intent.

Frum: So the situation that President Trump inherited in 2025 was a lot of mood in Canada that said, We want to cooperate more closely with the United States for protection against a common threat. And what Carney’s trip to China represented was Canadians saying, or at least the important parts of Canada, including the prime minister and his government saying, We’ve decided that, of these two threats, the more immediately dangerous is the United States, not China anymore. That’s quite an achievement.

Kenney: It is, and we’re not the only ones—you’ve seen the train of European leaders beating a path to the door of Beijing recently. It’s so terribly unfortunate and counterproductive for the interests of the United States.

And by the way, Trump made his own tariff deal with them. He’s given them access to advanced Nvidia chips to help them catch up to the United States in the AI arms race. And he says he wants a megadeal—he admires Xi, and whether Xi invades Taiwan is up to Xi. So we’re watching this, saying, You’re gonna impose 100 percent tariffs on us for a minor sectoral tariff deal when you want a grand bargain with the same country. It’s very hard for us, like other U.S. allies, to unpack how to deal with all of this.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about your former portfolio: national defense. So Canada has been, admittedly, a defense laggard for a long time. That now seems to be changing. And there was a program, over many years, to make a major Canadian commitment to American airframes for defense of the skies over Canada and the Arctic. And that now is one of the potential casualties of the Trump-created crisis. Talk a little bit about what’s happening to the U.S.-Canada defense and especially to the F-35 fighter program.

Kenney: Well, first, some context: Canada, as you know, used to have a very robust post-war military—we had played an oversized role in the Second [World] War and in the first half of the Cold War. My dad was a Canadian fighter jet pilot in those days. We had a very robust Arctic defense through NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command]. But regrettably, since [Canadian Prime Minister] Pierre Trudeau’s administration, there’s been this drawdown in our defense. We, like the European countries, took a very big peace dividend and ended up averaging 1.5 percent defense expenditure on GDP for the past, let’s say, 25 years, although we did punch above our weight again in Afghanistan, demonstrating our reliability as an ally.

Now, credit where it’s due, Donald Trump’s been right about calling on his allies to pay their dues on alliance defense, and so Mark Carney has responded remarkably, with a commitment to go from roughly 1.5 percent to 2 percent to 3.5 percent, with an outlined commitment to go above that. So we’re doing this huge defense enlargement. Predating that was this commitment to replace our fighter jet fleet. It was a long and protracted process that settled on the F-35, and almost all defense experts in Canada will agree it is the best platform for us, in part because of the interoperability with the U.S. and other allied F-35 fleets. So we’re committed to buying 88 of those. The first tranche of 16 will be arriving in the next 18 months. And that’s all good, but with the Trump threat, suddenly, we’re looking at our major defense supplier moving from being our greatest ally to, in some respects, hostile. And as you know, Trump has said, on the next-generation fighter, they’re going to ensure that foreign purchasers get a less-capable grade than the United States Air Force does. So we’re now wondering, Are we exposing ourselves to some kind of vulnerability, about which we are unaware, if our entire air force is dependent on American support, American parts, American political goodwill?

And so I think Mark Carney has, quite prudently, while proceeding with the initial tranche of the F-35 purchase, launched a review about our broader air force needs. And there is a view, which I think is not irrational, that perhaps we should purchase a smaller fleet of 35s and then look at a European platform, like the Gripen from Sweden, to complement that. Again, most defense hawks here want the full F-35 purchase. The argument is we could buy a lot more frames from the Swedes, which are, in some respects, more operable in the Arctic because they can take off short landing strips, gravel landing strips, and so forth. So there is an argument, and I think it’s worth having. It is enraging Trump’s ambassador in Ottawa, who is the most ineffective and unpopular U.S. ambassador, I think, in history here. But I think it’s only natural that we should at least take a look at this.

Frum: Yeah. By the way, how easy a job is it to be U.S. ambassador to Canada? How much does everybody like you and want to see you? How welcome are you [in] every business community? To screw that up, that takes a kind of perverse genius.

Kenney: Especially for this guy, [Pete] Hoekstra, who is a Dutch immigrant to the United States, whose family was liberated from the Nazis in Holland by the First Canadian Army in 1944.

Frum: Well, let’s talk about these airframes. I was in Norway at the beginning of last year, where there was a vigorous similar debate about what kind of frigate platform to buy. And there were a number of choices: There was an American choice, which was, by all accounts, the most capable but also the most expensive, and there were choices from other countries as well. And the Norwegians had been in advanced talks to purchase—they’re a Russian neighbor, they’ve had a lot of Russian aggression in their waters, they’re very wealthy because of their oil resources, and there was a lot of inclination to buy the American platform, the most expensive but the best. And after Trump made his comment about, We’re going to put a kill switch on U.S. equipment, the Norwegians flipped and realized, We don’t need the best frigate in the world. We’re not gonna fight the Americans. We need a frigate that’s better than the Russian frigate. And the British frigate is better than the Russian frigate, cheaper, and now more secure. And they ended by buying a fleet of British frigates rather than [American], not as a punitive measure, but because they could no longer trust the American product to be consistent with their self-defense and sovereignty.

Kenney: That’s a precise echo of the debate we’re having now on the Gripen. Look, as a former defense minister, all of the guys I worked with would want me to be unqualifiedly committed to going the full distance on the F-35 because of the capability of that platform. I understand it, but I do think it’s prudent to look at, For every incremental F-35, could we buy two or more Gripens that would be perfectly adequate for our needs, complementing a core F-35 fleet? It’s a debate worth having, but it’s only happening—it’s only happening—because of the instability that Trump has imposed in this relationship.

Frum: Let me ask you now about your other portfolio, citizenship and immigration, which in Canada is one of the most important portfolios in the government because Canada is such an immigration country and continues to be. You won’t say this, so let me say it for you: You were not just a minister; you were the leader of a comprehensive political transformation of the Conservative Party, where I can’t begin to imagine how many Lunar New Years, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, dedication ceremonies you went to and what a toll it took on you personally, psychically to do it, but—

Kenney: Yes, it’s true.

Frum: (Laughs.) And you learned greetings—

Kenney: My nickname was the “minister of curry in a hurry” because I would do as many as five curry banquets in a night. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) And you’d record greetings in Vietnamese and in Punjabi and in Italian. And you did this while Canada was simultaneously expanding its immigration intake, but also upping the quality in terms of human skills of the immigrants it took.

Now, that was a while ago. Since then, we’ve had the Syrian civil war, which sent a lot of refugees into Europe in ways that have been very destabilizing to European politics. We’ve had the Brexit referendum, where Britain made, in my opinion, the self-harming choice to leave the European Union, in part because of fear of the consequences of the migration into Europe of the refugees that came in 2015, or the so-called refugees. And now we’ve had two terms of Trump. You’re one of the leaders of Canadian intellectual, capital-C and lowercase-c, conservatism. How should conservatives in Canada and elsewhere—in the United States, in Britain, in the West—think about immigration now? And you speak as someone with this history of being a leading advocate of immigration. How does it look to you today in light of the past decade of developments?

Kenney: Well, let me say that people like Reihan Salam at the Manhattan Institute and scholars around the world have said that Canada’s Harper-era immigration policy was really a model of immigration policy for a developed country. In the late ’60s, Canada developed the point system, which was essentially a human-capital model, to select economic immigrants based on an analysis of their language ability, education, adaptability, their age— more points for younger immigrants—etc. This did significantly change the composition of our immigration, from post-war, it was more typically blue-collar Europeans, to white-collar people from the developing world became the predominant economic immigrants.

And it worked very well, but it was starting to—there were problems in it. There were integrity issues, large numbers of fake asylum claims, human smuggling, lots of kinds of fraud, and a degrading of the system. So I went through—you’re absolutely right—several years of a rigorous reform, which really, I think, created an optimal system. We had robust but manageable levels. On a population of 33 million, we were admitting about a quarter of a million people a year. And there was a broad public consensus: 80 percent support. Canada was the only developed democracy, with the possible exception of Australia, which had broad cross-partisan support for immigration generally.

And then, unfortunately, Justin Trudeau, with his typical liberal naivete, which was given a kind of veneer of intellectual respectability by business-interest groups, said, Canada needs a population of 100 million as soon as possible—pressure from the business community, as always, for more access to foreign labor. A bunch of these pressures had Canada quadrupling, quintupling intake levels: huge intake of low-skilled guest workers, huge intake of poorly qualified foreign students at dodgy diploma mills. And then, concurrently, Trudeau basically invited anybody from the United States who had a failed asylum claim to come up here. That’s cratered the asylum system. And all of this in the face of a housing crisis, a crisis in access to health care and other public services, and stagnating incomes for people—as you’ve often pointed out, David, high levels of sustained, low-skilled immigration inevitably reduce per-capita GDP, and Canada has been on a multiyear decline in per-capita GDP. All of this has accelerated our reduction in competitiveness and productivity. I think it’s perhaps the worst legacy of the Trudeau decade.

And so it’s really regrettable, and now we have seen, quite predictably, that broad pro-immigration consensus—which I was always mindful that it wasn’t something we could take for granted; we had to demonstrate that immigration was a net positive for the country—that has now frayed, and public support for immigration has turned upside down. So the Carney government is trying to get some of this back on track. But it is a concern, and it’s a reminder that even a model system with broad support is conditional and it can be upended overnight.

Frum: So you may be a little reluctant to speak about the American context, but let me ask an American question, and you take it where you wanna go.

So under President [Joe] Biden, the American asylum system just collapsed. A system that was designed to welcome Anne Frank’s family from Germany, Hungarians fleeing the Soviet crackdown in 1956, that’s what the asylum system is for. And it became, basically, a backup immigration system for those who had no other way to get into the United States, and hundreds of thousands of people came into the United States until Biden’s last year, when he course-corrected. And this doesn’t seem to have been so much a policy as the absence of a policy, driven by veto-wielders who were important to the Biden coalition.

So this does tremendous damage to Biden’s standing, and it helps to reelect Donald Trump in 2024. And now we have paramilitaries (Laughs.) running the streets of Minneapolis and American citizens being gunned down by poorly trained Border Patrol, who have no business being inside an American city. And it seems like there has been this veering from one crazy extreme to an even crazier and more murderous extreme on the other hand. What should politicians and people who are trying to be prudent, who lean conservative—how should they think about any of this?

Kenney: It is tragic, and I do think you’re right that Biden and the left of the Democrat Party, who dominated his domestic policy agenda, bear a lot of the burden for what’s happened in the United States. I’ll remind you that people like Marco Rubio tried to get a comprehensive immigration settlement in the United States, which made a lot of sense—which was basically what [President Ronald] Reagan did. But I recall meeting with Janet Napolitano when she was secretary of homeland security about cooperating on stopping illegal border crossings from the U.S. into Canada. I was looking for an agreement to help us…send back, illegal border crossers. And she said, Look, we can’t do anything until we have comprehensive agreement in Congress, which is, I don’t think—is that at all possible in the United States, David? Is it at all possible? I can’t see, even post-Trump, anybody winning a Republican primary if they have any commitment to regularize long-standing, law-abiding overstayers in the United States. So I think the United States is locked into a permanent catastrophe when it comes to mismanaging immigration.

Frum: But in all the democratic countries, or almost all—in Britain, in Germany, in France—you have parties of the far right that are running on programs of xenophobia, xenophobia that in the United States has turned violent and deadly, and parties of the left that are not able to articulate, What would border security look like in a context of the need for human beings? It looks like 2025 will be the first year since the first American census in 1790 when the population of the United States shrinks. Birth rates in almost every developed country—maybe Israel is the exception—are below replacement, so simply to keep your population stable, you need to bring in people. And of course, you need skills and different human capacities, not all of which occur spontaneously in every country on its own. And there are people who wanna move, which if you want to see human beings be free, if human beings wanna move, you’ll wanna start with, Well, they should be able to if they want to.

So you need to control the borders. You need security. You need not to have police states inside the United States. How do we think about this? What’s the answer? If someone from the moderate side of American politics were to call you and say, What should a post-Trump American immigration policy look like?, what should it look like?

Kenney: Well, the starting point has to be systems characterized by integrity, which is to say with minimal space for illegally regular migration, smuggling, trafficking, mass border crossings. You’re quite right: That means significant reform of our asylum systems. The principal driver of the rise in xenophobic anti-immigrant politics has been large-scale illegal migration. You cannot sustain broad public support for, or demonstrate the net benefits of, regulated immigration if your vast majority of migrants are people who just crash your borders, in the case of Europe, primarily young military-aged men, coming from problematic source countries with a history of violence and with very poor integration results—let’s be honest. The people who are voting AfD [Alternative for Democracy] and for the Le Pens and for [U.K. politician] Nigel Farage, they are observing things happening in their communities that are unpleasant, that are disruptive of social cohesion. It’s not xenophobic or racist to note that. It’s necessary for mainstream politicians to be serious about dealing with those challenges, as, for example, the Aussies were, very effectively, in stopping illegal marine migration and, as I would argue, we were in the Harper government in stopping some of this.

So I think a shared commitment, left to right—like the Danish government, a social-democratic government, has been very hardheaded about these things and has avoided the emergence of a xenophobic alt-right. So I think, from the center left to the center right, we need to be a little more hardheaded and a little less softhearted when it comes to those issues.

Secondly, maximizing human capital when it comes to the selection of economic immigrants so you get more bang for the economic buck from the newcomers that you welcome. If immigration is nothing but a tool for large businesses to commodify labor and to, consequently, suppress wage levels for lower-skilled workers, then, again, you’re undermining the economic case for immigration. That means we’re all going to have to, per the Japanese, invest more in automation and coping with shrinking populations. That, I think, is inevitable.

Frum: And at the same time, a rule of law governing the immigration-enforcement apparatus within a country, because you can’t have these paramilitary forces roaming the streets of cities masked.

Kenney: Of course you can’t. But on the other hand, you can’t be overly sentimental about this either, David, if you’re gonna have a system with integrity. In the case of Canada, for example, our version of ICE, the Canada Border Services Agency, is resourced and they only do about 13,000 removals a year. Because of the overhang from the Trudeau catastrophe in mismanaging the system, we probably have 3 million, going on 4 million people who are falling out of status who are now here illegally, and that population is going to keep growing. If you don’t deal with it, what’s the point of having an orderly system?

Frum: A more legal process, a warm welcome, and the rule of law.

Kenney: It’s not mysterious what we need to do.

Frum: As you see the rise of these xenophobic parties, is there any space for the kind of politics that you’re talking about?

Kenney: Right now, it’s hard to conceive of that, isn’t it? You see this huge momentum from the august British Tories, the most successful party in the history of the democratic world, towards reform, driven largely by these issues; this momentum from the Aussie Liberals to One Nation. Canada, David, is perhaps one of the only major democracies where we do not see—yet—the rise of that kind of xenophobic politics.

And I would like to say to my friends on the Canadian left, who are sometimes hysterical about the populism of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre—look, I think his populism is largely stylistic. It’s basically focusing on the concerns of ordinary working people. Pierre Poilievre’s populism is, Let’s focus on issues like the cost of living, the cost of food, and lock up really bad, violent repeat criminals. And let’s keep immigration levels at a manageable level, where we can properly integrate people. That’s Pierre Poilievre’s populism. If you don’t like that populism, then take a look at what’s happening in the U.K., Australia, Germany, France, and elsewhere. We have a party like that, which Mr. Poilievre has been very effective at pushing out to the margins—the People’s Party of Canada—at, like, 1 or 2 percent in the polls. So again, if you don’t like this kind of mainstream fusion of center-right conservatism and sort of stylistic populism that Mr. Poilievre represents, then you’re gonna get something a hell of a lot more problematic in our politics. So I’m grateful to live in a country where we still, despite the disaster of the Trudeau years, have something more like a mainstream center-right conservative consensus in Canadian conservative politics.

Frum: And let me end with this last thought. There has been now a 40-year consensus in Canada in favor of stronger U.S.-Canadian ties. At the beginning, it was quite controversial, but it’s become a position that is held by both of the two big parties and broadly by people across the Canadian political spectrum. That was true from the middle 1980s until the middle 2010s—warmer, closer integration on everything from trade to national security to food and energy and environment. And this is now in jeopardy because of actions by the Trump administration. And the reactions that are being seen in Canada—much as the present U.S. ambassador to Canada blames Canada for flinching every time it gets slapped, let’s not overlook who’s doing the slapping and why the flinching is happening.

Kenney: Yeah, I will confess I’m quite annoyed with many on the Canadian right, who are reflexively blaming Canada, Carney, whatever, for the disrepair of the relationship when it’s entirely the doing of the United States. There is sort of an element on the right of Canadian politics who, actually, in some bizarre sense, admire Trump and his disruptive—because he “owns the libs” and he’s fighting “woke.” And Trudeau built up such animosity that there’s, unfortunately, now a reflex for, as I say, some on the right to blame Canada for all of this, which I think is absurd.

Look, we’re stepping up to our responsibilities on defense in a very significant way. We have been the most important trade ally of the United States for decades. We are the largest source of energy, of fertilizers. We’re natural partners, and we’re prepared to make pragmatic deals with Donald Trump to respond to rational elements of his agenda. So hopefully, saner heads will prevail after he loses at the Supreme Court, I think, on the emergency tariffs and perhaps is chastened at the midterms. Perhaps we can finally get back to some semblance of normalcy in this critical and historic relationship.

Frum: Jason Kenney, thank you so much for joining me today.

Kenney: Thank you, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Jason Kenney for joining me today on The David Frum [Show]. Now, as mentioned, my book this week is a 1904 novel by a writer named Sara Jeannette Duncan, titled The Imperialist. Many of the books I’ve discussed on this program—Jane Eyre, Frankenstein—have been famous classics. I would venture a pretty firm guess that very, very few people who [are] watching or listening to this program have ever read or even heard of the novel The Imperialist, by Sara Jeannette Duncan. But I read it as a young man, it made a big impression on me, and I wanna talk about it today because I think it’s very relevant to my discussion just now with Jason.

Sara Jeannette Duncan was a Canadian-born writer who wrote many, many novels, most of which I have not read, many of them set in India, the country where she settled in after marrying a British civil servant who was responsible for the administration of British rule in India. She wrote one novel about her native Canada, and that is this book, The Imperialist.

Now, the phrase the imperialist today conjures up images of brutality and exploitation. But in 1904, it was a word laden with some irony, but a great deal of idealism. Here’s the story. The story concerns a young man named Lorne Murchison, the son of Scottish immigrants to Canada. He lives in the fictional small town of Elgin, Ontario. And he becomes interested in politics. He makes a trip to Britain, his first, the home that his parents came from, and is inspired by a vision of the grandeur and beauty of the possibilities of a united British empire.

Now, this was a topic much on the minds of people in Britain and the British dominions at the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th. Sometime in the late 19th century, the economy of the islands of Great Britain was overtaken in size by the United States and Imperial Germany.

But the economy of the British empire as a whole—Britain plus Ireland plus Canada plus Australia plus New Zealand plus South Africa plus India plus the other British dominions and overseas colonies—that entity remained the world’s largest economic unit until during the First World War. And many in that unit were captivated by the idea, What if this economic unit could also become some kind of strategic unit? And they are captivated by a vision of an imperial federation, with a parliament in London, where Britain would be an important partner, but just one, and where Canada and the other dominions would have representation. For Canadians, this was an especially exciting idea because it offered the possibility for Canada to be less vulnerable to its American neighbor and to achieve, with the other countries of the British imperial system, some kind of collective power that Canada on its own lacked.

The novel is not a political treatise. It’s actually really more a study of small-town life, with many ironic comments about class divisions and the sharp ethnic divide between people who came from England and people who came from Scotland; people who worshipped in Anglican and Methodist churches on the one hand, and people who worshipped in Presbyterian churches on the other. And that will be a very particular treat. But this vision of Canadians wrestling with their place in the world, I don’t know that it’s ever been dealt with better in literature than by this one book, written now more than 100 years ago.

And it captured that Canada has long wrestled with this question of, Was Canada to be a country unto itself, small as it was, or was it to be part of something bigger? And again and again and again, Canadians have been attracted by the vision of being part of something bigger—whether it was the British empire before the First World War or before the Second World War, whether it was some kind of transatlantic community of nations, whether it was part of some kind of North American free-trade zone. This has been an idea that has really spoken to not just the practical, but the romantic element of the Canadian mind. And this is an ideal and a vision that has really taken a tremendous pummeling (Laughs.) during the Donald Trump years. And what Americans are hearing from their Canadian friends is not just a shock to Canadians’ economic self-interest, although that’s very real, but a puncturing of a kind of pan-national dream that expressed itself at one point through imperialism and at other points in other ways.

I remember, during the great debate in the middle of the 1980s over the free-trade agreement with the United States, my wife and I were newly married, and we were very engaged in this debate, and both of us were strongly in favor of the free-trade agreement with the United States. At that time, much of the opposition to the agreement came from the literary and artistic community in Canada. And there were many, many statements and open letters and signatories on statements by writers and artists who were against the free-trade agreement. So Danielle and I and some friends organized a signature of writers and artists who were in favor of the agreement, and we put together a very impressive list, and there was an open letter published in the newspapers. And it was to Danielle that fell the job of recruiting the signature of Mavis Gallant, the great writer of Canadian short stories, then living in Paris, and Danielle spoke to her in Paris.

And Mavis Gallant recounted to her a conversation that she had had with one of the leading opponents of the free-trade agreement. I won’t mention him because he’s still alive—I won’t mention the name, but his quote struck me as really quite incisive and profound. He said, What Canada is debating in this choice is whether Canada wants to be a big small country or a small big country. And he saw himself and his fellow opponents of the agreement as advocating being a big small country, kind of a greater Belgium, and those on the other side as wanting Canada to be a small big country, a kind of lesser France or a lesser Britain. And I thought that was a very profound and true insight. And Canadians did find, in their partnership with the United States that has been so intimate since the middle of the 1980s, a way to be a small big country. And Donald Trump’s attacks on Canada’s continued national existence have really changed the grammar and have re-empowered those who, as this incisive opponent of the agreement said, thought of Canada as being instead a big small country.

The future is quite dark for the North American relationship. I think there are people now in their 20s who will carry the memory of the Donald Trump administration with them to the end of the present century and maybe even beyond that. And to understand what has been lost, no one voiced it better than Sara Jeannette Duncan in 1904 in her novel The Imperialist. It’s still in print if you wanna take a look.

Thanks so much to Jason Kenney for joining me today. Thanks to all of you for listening and watching The David Frum [Show]. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. Follow me on social media, @DavidFrum on Instagram and X (Twitter). Thanks so much for joining. See you next week on The David Frum [Show].

[Music]

What the Neocons Got Right

2026-01-28T13:00:00-05:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reflections on the recent shootings in Minneapolis. He argues that these killings, alongside ICE’s warrantless home raids and mistaken detentions, and the reports of deaths in custody, are not isolated abuses but signs of a rapidly deepening crisis in American democracy, one in which basic rights and due process are applied unevenly and increasingly contested. David asks whether the country can find a way back from a dangerous moral and political impasse, as a majority of Americans recoil from these actions while a determined minority continue to defend them.

Then, David is joined by the New York Times columnist and Atlantic contributor David Brooks. Frum and Brooks discuss the origins of the term neocon, what the neocons got right, and why they should be listened to today. Brooks describes how America’s problems long predate Trump, and why elections alone cannot fix what has been lost. Together, Frum and Brooks explore whether the country is capable of moral renewal, what rebuilding would actually require, and why recovery, if it comes at all, will be slow, difficult, and deeply personal.

Finally, David ends the episode with his thoughts on Death by Lightning, a television series on Netflix based on the assassination of President James Garfield, and how, when watching historical dramas, we need to look back on the past with a contextual lens, one that we should bring to our present too.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. If you have listened to or watched this program before, you will notice that this present opening looks and sounds a little different from usual. Let me hasten to assure you that most of the show will look as normal. There will be a dialogue between me and David Brooks, columnist at The New York Times and contributor to The Atlantic; that will look and sound normal. And we will conclude with a discussion of the new four-part Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning, a dramatization based on the assassination of President [James] Garfield; that will look and sound like normal. But this opening will not, and does not, look and sound like normal, and I have to beg your pardon for that.

Here’s my excuse. I planned a family vacation in South America for the final two weeks in January. I prerecorded the dialogue and the book talk and also the opening monologue because I thought, What crazy things can possibly happen in the last two weeks of January? Well, you know as well as I what crazy things have happened in the last two weeks of January: NATO allies like France and Britain, Denmark and Norway moving troops into Greenland. An altercation at Davos between the president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada that concluded, or has yielded. Members of the Trump Cabinet now promoting the secession of the Canadian province of Alberta to retaliate and threatening Canada with all kinds of massive tariffs to punish Canada for its prime minister getting too much attention at Davos. President [Donald] Trump making it clear that everything he’s been doing in foreign policy is motivated by his thwarted desire for a Nobel Peace Prize. And of course, and above all, the terrible events in the city of Minneapolis, where a second American citizen has been killed by agents purportedly enforcing the law while that American citizen was, according to most, if not all, video evidence presenting no danger to anybody, least of all officers of the law. And the terrible, systematic lying that has surrounded each of these terrible incidents, with their attacks on basic norms of American rights and process.

It’s not just the American citizens who have been killed that are a scandal that shocks the nation coming from Minneapolis; forces of the law have burst into private homes without a warrant, have seized people—the wrong people—hauled them out into the streets in their underwear in a Minnesota January. We are hearing reports of deaths in detention, people being reportedly killed in detention. This is all on top of the previous cases of people being sent by American immigration authorities to torture centers in third countries, centers that have been closed down by American courts because they violate basic norms of due process, and American civil rights and civil liberties. It’s a shocking, shocking story.

And even as I record, in the final week of January, it is amazing how much of this story remains murky and mysterious. An American citizen has been killed. We don’t know the names of his killer. We don’t know whether the killer has been removed from the streets of Minneapolis. The representatives of the state of Minnesota have been debarred from investigating what happened, how this terrible event could have unfolded in the way that it did. A man has been shot in the back when he was disarmed, while he was being beaten—in a beating we all saw on camera—for the apparent offense of recording the activities of law enforcement and personnel, which was his total personal right to do, while carrying a gun, which was his right to do. I’m someone who’s pretty skeptical of the way American gun rights have unfolded, but skepticism does not mean that, if you carry a gun according to the law of your state, that that gives the agents of the state power or right to seize you, force you to the ground, remove the gun from you, beat you, and then shoot you in the back, reportedly 10 times. Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong, and it’s getting wronger.

Now, the good news is that a substantial majority of American citizens object to this wrong and oppose it, and that majority seems to be growing. The bad news is, is that an important minority continue to defend these actions, and are rallying to the support of the personnel who commit these acts and the larger structures of permission that authorize and enabled and defend these acts.

This a country that is now split on the basic question, “Can an American citizen be gunned down on the streets of his own city while carrying in his hands nothing more dangerous than a cellphone?” Opinion is split.

David Brooks and I, in our dialogue, will talk a little bit about how, someday, the MAGA forces, the people who supported MAGA, may be reintegrated into the American family, into American democracy. David Brooks advocates a very open-armed and forgiving approach; I’m not so sure that he’s right about that. But that is something that we’ll discuss, and you will form your own opinion after hearing our discussion.

For now, we have the problem that the people who are carrying out these acts, against the wishes of the great majority of Americans, with the support of a minority of Americans, they remain in power. Now, I think we all know MAGA people and we all know that, most people who supported Donald Trump, or many of the people who supported Donald Trump, did not begin as bad people, but they are justifying bad things—and things that are getting worse and worse and worse at an accelerating rate. It is sobering to consider, if this is what has happened in year one of the Trump administration, as Trump and his people come closer to whatever kind of reckoning is available in November of 2026, what will the year ahead look like? What does 2026 hold? It looks like it will hold more abuses, more offenses, more attacks, more contempt for basic American values and law. And we all have to find our way to come up with some kind of effective collective response.

We appear to be heading to a government shutdown, as Democrats in the Senate say they will not vote to fund ICE if it continues the kind of operations it’s been doing. This may be quite a long government shutdown because there’s going to be a lot at stake for everybody involved.

But we are facing a kind of crisis in American democracy that is worse than anything that even people who were really worried about it, as I was, predicted a year ago, never mind at the very beginning of the Trump experiment in 2016, 2017, 2015, when Trump declared for office. We’ve been kind of walking a path to moral degradation, and we’re trying to stay away from the finale of moral ruin.

I don’t know what’s ahead. I’m terribly worried. I hope we find a way out together, that there can become some kind of collective American agreement on what it means to hold the rights that American citizens should hold, on what it means that American citizens are being gunned down in the streets of their cities—on the sidewalk, in their cars. That American citizens, naturalized citizens, but American as anybody else, are being hauled from their houses without a warrant, and that important people in American government insist that there no warrant is due because the provisions of 1776, which listed abuses of the search power as one of the causes of separation of the United States from Great Britain, that those principles no longer apply, at least they don’t apply to Americans of certain kinds of last names, and certain kind of accents, and certain kinds of backgrounds and personal stories, and certain kind of skin colors—that other Americans have got them. that MAGA people carry guns at their events and, of course, don’t expect to be executed for it, but other Americans don’t have those rights; MAGA people expect to be served with warrants in their homes if someone needs to search their homes for something, but other people don’t have those rights. They don’t extend to others the rights they claim for themselves.

How will we find a way from this impasse? Well, David and I will talk about it, and I hope you will stick around to watch a more normal-looking version of this program.

And now by dialogue with David Brooks.

[Music]

Frum: David Brooks is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Oh, he’s also one of the most popular writers and speakers in the entire English-speaking world, with a career that spans many decades at every distinguished institution. I was a colleague of his at The Weekly Standard in the 1990s. But you probably know him from his role at The New York Times as one of the most influential newspaper columnists in America for more than two decades, from his appearances on PBS and NPR, or you may have seen one of his innumerable appearances on public platforms, where he delights audiences in every state of this country and every country of the world, it seems. He is an indefatigable writer. He is the author of more books than I can even tally, all of which have gone on to enormous success. Most recently is the 2023 book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. And I’m just so grateful he has taken time away from his whirligig of activities to join me today on The David Frum Show.

David, welcome.

David Brooks: I think we were actually colleagues at The Wall Street Journal first, before The Weekly Standard, back in the ’80s—

Frum: You know—

Brooks: —or ’90s.

Frum: —that’s true. That’s true. And you went off to glory at The Wall Street Journal Europe, where you covered the ’89 uprisings, terrifying your grandmother. You had a wonderful line—I remember this—that she called you in Brussels and said, But, David, what if the revolution spreads?

Brooks: (Laughs.) True, and sure enough, it did.

Frum: (Laughs.) I wanna talk to you about your recent article for The Atlantic that appeared online in December and then in the print edition in January, called “The Neocons Were Right.” I think a lot of people are used to hearing this term used as a kind of shorthand in politics or conspiracy theory, but maybe some of us don’t know exactly what the term means. So could you explain what a neoconservative is, or was, and why it mattered once upon a time and now?

Brooks: Yeah. When people hear these days neocon, they think of the Iraq War, and they think of Republicans who supported the Iraq War. But neoconservatism, actually, it has its roots in a dining hall, a college dining hall.

The City College of New York was a school, or still is a school mostly for immigrant kids—in those days, I think no tuition; now very low tuition. So if you’ve just come to America and you wanna make it, City College is a great place to go. And in the 1930s, there were a group of young, mostly Jewish kids who were communists. And they had names like Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset and Irving Kristol. And they were a certain kind of communist; they were Trotskyites. And the Trotskyites were the smart communists, basically. (Laughs.) And there were another kind called the Stalinists, and they were sort of the dumb conformists, to be honest. And in the dining hall, the Trotskyites, like Kristol and Nathan Glazer, ate in Alcove 1, a little part of the dining hall, and the Stalinists ate in Alcove 2. And the Trotskyites were so much better at beating the Stalinists in argument, the Stalinists, in true Stalinist fashion, forbade their members from debating with the Trotskyites.

And so they were communists in the ’30s. And then along comes the war; a bunch of the neocons, like Irving Kristol, served in World War II. And they realized communism was not gonna work. And so they became disillusioned with that. And then they became pretty standard Franklin Roosevelt Democrats. And some, like Nathan Glazer, went to work for John F. Kennedy. And in the early ’60s, there was great faith in social science. Politics didn’t have to be this big, messy ideological thing; we could just sic a lot of economists at a problem, and they would devise a rational, technocratic solution. And Irving Kristol and another, vaguely, person called neoconservative, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, formed a magazine called The Public Interest, and in the very first issue, Moynihan said, We’ve learned how to make a society work. And they were just standard-issue Democrats.

And then along comes 1968, ’69, a lot of the policies that they had so earnestly championed in the early ’60s were not working. American cities went into decay, rising crime rates, rising divorce rates, more kids born out of wedlock. There was just a lot of social anarchy. I was a kid in New York City in the 1970s, and everybody got mugged. The crime rates were incredible. There was a serial castrator on the Upper West Side who would take kids, lead ’m into Central Park, castrate them, and then murder them. And his nickname was Charlie Chop-Off. (Laughs.) And the crime was so bad in those days, Charlie Chop-Off was not even a big story. (Laughs.) But so there was so much social decay, and so the neocons, the people we now call neocons, said, Whoa, all the social planning that we had such faith in 10 years ago, we were wrong. Like, Well, the world’s a lot more complicated than we thought. And as Irving Kristol famously put it, a neoconservative is “a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.”

And the second thing that happened in the 1960s was a group of—these immigrant kids believed in the bourgeois values: Work hard. Dress neatly. Respect your parents. Along came these rich hippies, saying, Don’t work hard. Drop out. Do drugs. And they were outraged; they were just morally offended.

And so that’s really the roots of neoconservatism. It’s not some right-wing Republican thing; it started as a strategy of dissent within the Democratic Party.

Frum: Okay, but the distance in time from the 1960s to us is the same as the distance in time from when these people were young, in the 1930s, to Reconstruction.

Brooks: (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Did I just do that math right? Yeah, it’s, like, 60 years. So why would you write a magazine article in 2026 saying these people who were active from 1930-something to 1960-something were right about anything to do with us? How does this bear on our lives today in any way?

Brooks: Because I’m a human anachronism. That’s why.

Frum: (Laughs.) No, no, you have your finger on the pulse. We count on your observations to tell us what’s going on in America, so what’s going on in America that any of this helps us with?

Brooks: I think what the neoconservatives can do is they teach us, first of all, some of the things they learned in the ’60s: Life is really complicated. You should do social policy. You should try to improve government, but you should realize that most policies fail, and you should really have good reasons, and you should make it bureaucratic. But I think the core insight for the neocons—they not only grew up as policy people; they were influenced by literature, by culture, by theology, by Talmudic study. And so they made no distinction between what you would call theological, philosophical, cultural growth—moral formation—and policy. And so they brought a much more humanistic lens to see policy; it’s not just about economics and growth. [The] elemental question is (a) can we build a civilization we can be proud of, and (b) can we create policies that will nurture values, the right kind of values?

In 1985, one of the great neoconservative political scientists, a guy named James Q. Wilson, who spent much of his career at Harvard, said, All we’re trying to do is trying to inculcate certain virtues, whether we’re talking about education, when we’re talking about trying to reduce recidivism, when we’re trying to talk about conducting our fiscal policy. And we can either have good values, and for the neoconservatives, the good values were the bourgeois values—being decent to people, being neighborly, showing up on time, working hard—not lofty Kantian values, or we can have bad values. And if we run deficits, we’re basically behaving selfishly to future generations. If we subsidize nonwork, then we will discourage people from becoming industrious and that kind of person. And so I think one of the things they do—and especially in a moment right now, when we’re in a myriad of really moral [crises] in our politics, where basically 78 million Americans take a look at Donald Trump and they see nothing morally wrong.

Frum: Okay, so we are at a moment—I was wondering where you were going to go—we’re at a moment when agencies of government, Cabinet-level departments, are, for their own amusement, tweeting out variations that are obviously intended to be variations on Nazi Party slogans: “One people, one empire, one leader”; when we have masked armed men roaming American cities, detaining people without any right to detain them, beating up people, in some cases killing them. We have the most corrupt administration—not in American history, but I keep saying, if this were a Nigerian administration, it would be one of the most corrupt administrations in Nigerian history—to your point about bourgeois values, where the president of the United States was a close friend to, and seems to be operating a cover-up on behalf of, one of the most notorious child-molestation rings (Laughs.) in American history. And how is Irving Kristol going to help us with any of this?

Brooks: (Laughs.) Well, (a) ’cause he reminds us—and especially his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian—he reminds us the power of the spirit of an age, that we live within a moral ecology tnd that moral ecology is not only constructed by each of us in our own behaviors, but it’s constructed by the arts, by literature, and by the example set by great political leaders.

This is Gertrude Himmelfarb, the great historian of Victorian England—in 1810, it was completely normal for a guy to get drunk after work, go home, and beat his wife. There was no harsh judgment about that; that’s just the way things are. And along came a group called the Clapham Sect, who were basically evangelicals, and they said, No, that is not gonna be acceptable behavior anymore. So they reset the norms of what acceptable behavior was going to be. They’re sort of the beginnings of Victorian morality. And as part of that, they said, We have such respect for human dignity, we’re gonna campaign against the slave trade. And so what Himmelfarb describes is a period of moral improvement for a whole society. We all live on the cultural capital of centuries gone by, and if we tear away at that capital, then we’re lost in the world Stephen Miller talked about last week, which is a war of all against all, where force is the only thing that matters; a shared morality does not matter.

And so I think they give us the tools to think about, How do we reconstruct a social order so we can trust one another once again and so we can treat each other decently once again?

Frum: Many of the people that you and I knew when we were young have gone on to power and prominence, and they started off sharing many of the ideas, or at least participating in many of the ideas that you’re describing. And today, we have a world in which the bright lights of the younger intellectual right are inspired at best, at best, by the idea of abolishing the difference between church and state and letting the church run everything, and at worst by outright fascism, and at very worst by flirtations with literal Nazism. So, that’s what’s happened to the conservative world in which we’ve moved. And the result is that people of conservative instinct, which I still consider myself to be and I think you may as well, find ourselves mute and voiceless when we hear things from people on the more liberal, or left, side of the spectrum, saying, Well, they have some things we don’t like, but what do we have to set against this when the choices really do seem to be wokeism or fascism? (Laughs.) How is Irving Kristol going to help us with our dilemma? If I have to choose, I’m choosing wokeism over fascism, but I’m not crazy about either.

Brooks: Yeah, you’re really cheering me up. So glad I came on the podcast. No, I’m kidding. (Laughs.) You and I—

Frum: (Laughs.) No concessions—speaking of, like, the neoconservative spirit—no concessions to the need for uplift here. We’re going for the full gloom-and-doom situation.

Brooks: (Laughs.) So you and I got out of school at about the same time and entered our business at the same time. And at that time, I was working at National Review in the mid-’80s, and another group of people came out of school at the same time. And I came out of the University of Chicago; you came out of a fancier school back east. But there were a group of students from Dartmouth—

Frum: I think you meant easier school, but you’re being polite.

Brooks: (Laughs.) Maybe easier, yeah.

Frum: (Laughs.)

Brooks: So there were a group from Dartmouth who worked at a magazine called The Dartmouth Review, and people will know some of them still: Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza. There was a guy named Ben Hart. There was a guy named Greg Fossedal. And I did not appreciate the distinction; I thought we were all on the same team. But there was a distinction—I think earnest people like me and you, we were pro-conservative. We had read Edmund Burke and Isaiah Berlin and Adam Smith, and we had these earnest ideas that was pro-a conservative vision of society. But Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, they were not pro-conservative; they were anti-left.

And there was an episode that illustrates for me how they were different from us: that during the ’80s, to protest apartheid, students on a lot of campuses put up shantytowns, and it was to represent the suffering of Black citizens of South Africa under apartheid. And one night, a bunch of the editors of The Dartmouth Review descended on the shantytown protests and, with sledgehammers, slammed them down. And I remember being appalled, (a) because apartheid really was evil and was worth opposing, but (b) going through a protest with sledgehammers and destroying it, that’s not America; that’s [Joseph] Goebbels. That is really thuggish fascism. And I thought they were low-rent; I thought those people were intellectually mediocre. But it turns out there were a lot more people who were anti-left than there were pro-conservative, especially as the time went [by].

And so what you have in the Trump administration is people with the same profile as the Dartmouth Review crowd: They went to elite schools, but they hated what they found there. That’s Steven Miller, who went to Duke. That’s Pete Hegseth, who went to Princeton. That’s J. D. Vance, who went to Yale Law. Now, you can go down the list. It’s Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to Penn. And so these are not pro-conservative. These are oppositional nihilists who hate the liberal establishment. And I found it easy, when I was saying college, to be more conservative than my professors but still have reverence for their learning. But these people do not have reverence for learning; they just want to offend the bourgeoisie. And so that’s what it’s become. And then they’ve produced spawn of young people who just think, That’s cool. That’s edgy. And of course, you have to up the dosage when you’re giving people edgy nihilism—it just has to get worse and worse and worse. And as Richard Weaver, a philosopher from the 1950s, said, The problem with the younger generation is they haven’t read the minutes to the last meeting. And so you get a group of people who, when they see fascistic behavior, don’t understand where that eventually leads.

Frum: When you set out the stage for us, you described events or thinkers or currents that were active between the 1930s and the 1960s. How does any of this get attached to the Iraq War all those years later?

Brooks: Well, I think it got attached—and I’ll tell my story—I think what happened was, neoconservatives, as I said, really believe in the nature of a regime. They want America to stand for certain values, and they’re appalled by regimes that stand for evil values. And the Soviet Union was like that, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was like that. And so they said, If you have a regime that is internally and domestically poisonous and oppressive, it will be dangerous to the world. And I would say, in my life in the ’90s, I was covering the end of apartheid, the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the Oslo peace process in the Middle East. I was watching democracy be created, and it seemed to me we were on a tidal wave of creating societies with better democratic values. And so I think a lot of neocons like me or others and our elders supported the Iraq War for that reason: because they thought fighting for a democratic wave was the right thing to do.

What they did not sufficiently appreciate, what we, and especially me, did not sufficiently—the other thing I had said earlier about neocons: epistemological modesty. Be careful about trying to change complex circumstances, ’cause you’re gonna screw it up. And we ignored one of the core tenets of our own belief system; we were so swept up in the moment. And if we’d only gone back to the single most famous neoconservative foreign-policy essay of all time, was written by Jeane Kirkpatrick, and her argument was that if you’re gonna try to a democracy in an authoritarian context, you need generations of civic planning, of civic organization, of moral foundations of a democracy. You can’t just imagine you can do it overnight. And we forgot that lesson.

Frum: Mm. Well, we are, in many ways, living in the 2020s in the Iraq hangover, that many people—people of good faith, people of bad faith—took the lesson from the Iraq experience to stay out of everything. And so we’ve had a decade and a half where America has largely been absent from many of the great decisions of the time. And in the Obama administration, [President Barack] Obama backed away from the Syrian civil war, a war that looks more and more important the farther we get from it. He laid down some red lines, and he said he would enforce them, and he had, certainly, I think, abundant authority on his own to do it, but the moment Congress raised any objection, he backed away and then said, Okay, well, it’s because of Congress. My hands are tied. I’m powerless to intervene. And so you got this extraordinary wave of refugees from Syria—I forget the number of how many millions of people. Half the population of Syria was internally displaced; millions left. Millions of other people from other places moved at the same time and destabilized the politics of Europe and the whole world.

The United States was quite passive when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014, and the Trump years are their own story. And now we see people in the streets of Iranian cities chanting, looking for American help, and we are in a country where people no longer feel that there is a right, a calling, or any likelihood of success in America intervening in these important conflicts. And the world is on its own now, without American guidance, at the mercy of whoever looks like the second-strongest candidate to guide the world.

Brooks: Yeah, when we withdrew, our friend Robert Kagan wrote a book called The Jungle Grows Back, which is to say, when there’s no social order holding the world, then the wolves take over. And wolves like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] and others have taken over. And people [in] this country on the populist right and sometimes on the left think, Oh, that old neoliberal order, that was all a scam. It was a scam for America to exercise imperial hegemony, but it was all just words. But that liberal world order that people built after World War II, and that people like Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman enforced, that really did restrain people. And so the world has just become a more dangerous place. And America has taken one of our great assets, which is our ideals—I’ve covered so many people around the world, and they want democracy; they want dignity—and we have squandered that strength. It’s an actual source of strength. And then the final thing, we replaced it now with Donald Trump. We’re no longer hanging back. Suddenly, we’re launching forever wars all the hell all over the place, but we’re not doing it on behalf of ideals; we’re doing it on behalf of nihilism, on behalf of oil. I feel sorry for all my left-wing friends, who used to—and when they talked about George W. Bush, they would say, He claims to be for democracy, but really, this war is all about oil. And they had the subtle ways to see what the real meaning of what Bush was saying was. But that skill’s no longer necessary because Donald Trump says, Yeah, it’s all about oil. What are you gonna do about it?

And so I would ask people, “If you thought American foreign-policy idealism was discredited by Iraq, which it largely was, how do you like the anti-idealistic foreign policy, a policy of pure material greed?”

Frum: Let’s go back to these old books and essays, and think about, What are the lessons that, in the age of Trumpism, we need, whether we are broadly sympathetic to conservative projects or if we’re broadly unsympathetic. Let’s start with the other side. If you’re someone who’s not a conservative and you think of yourself as a liberal or even a progressive, is there any value in any of these old ideas in the face of an administration, as I said, where at best we’re looking at people who wanna overthrow the separation of church and state, with the church in charge, and at worst functional fascists and on the edge outright Nazi sympathizers and apologists? Why isn’t the lesson for a person of liberal views or progressive views to say, You know what? Conservatism was always a terrible idea. I never liked any of these folks. They’re now even worse than before. I have nothing to learn from any of them?

Brooks: Well, a lot of my more progressive friends are always nostalgic for the last conservatives. And so I started saying, Well, wait ’til we have a Republican government that makes you nostalgic for Donald Trump. (Laughs.) So that seems to be the trend.

I would say there are certain things that are not liberal or conservative. They used to be consensus American positions. One is that we have a social order, that there are certain rules and certain beliefs and values that we share, that form the basis of how we live. George Marsden is a great historian, and he wrote this about Martin Luther King [Jr.]’s rhetoric: He says, What gave King’s rhetoric such force is the idea that right and wrong are written into the fabric of the universe. That slavery is not just wrong in some times and some places; it’s always wrong. Segregation is not just wrong in some times and some places; it is always wrong. Right and wrong are written into the fabric of the universe. And when you have that social order, people feel held. You can have a society ’cause we have a shared understanding of what’s right and wrong. We have a shared sense of norms about what’s right and wrong, so we’re gonna behave [with] each other; we can trust each other. Two generations ago, 60 percent of Americans said, Yeah, my neighbors are trustworthy. That’s not a liberal or a conservative thing; that was a great human achievement. And what happened? We shredded the shared moral order. And that was not just a conservative project; it was a liberal project too.

And so one of the things we did is we privatized morality. We said to people, Come up with your own values. And the problem with that is that there’s no shared morality if everyone has to come up with their own values. And the other problem with that is, unless your name is Aristotle, you can’t come up with values. Walter Lippmann, a great columnist in the 1950s, wrote a book in which he said, If what is right and wrong is based on what each individual feels according to their emotions, then we are outside the bounds of civilization. And so this moral collapse, I think, is what undergirds the rise of Trump. It undergirds the alienation. It undergirds the idea that we want a politics that’s based not on ideals and values, that it’s about power and it’s about who has more force. And so if we’re gonna get over Trumpism or the [Alternative for Democracy] AfFD or [French politician Marine] Le Pen, we need a set of ideals that can hold society together and create some social trust, and we need ideals that have some roots—and this is what the New York conservatives were good about—in universal values. It’s not just my kind. All through much of human history, my kind of people are the kind of people I care about, and I don’t care about the other kind. But it was a great achievement of civilization to say, No, I care about all people, maybe not all equally, but there are certain ideas that apply to everybody, ideas of dignity, democracy, and kindness. And that was an achievement.

And so I think the neoconservatives were inheritors, maybe more conservative than not, some not, but they were the inheritors of that idea, and they caused us to see politics and see our national culture through the lens of either a shared moral order or a lack of one.

Frum: I am, like you, formed in many ways by this tradition. I’ve got some critical distance from it. I never really felt like I was a part—I read the books; I never felt like I was part of the social circle that was such an important aspect of the neoconservative world when it was a real thing. So I knew these things through print rather than through personality. And in a way, that was kind of disqualifying because neoconservatism was as much a milieu as it was a set of ideas, and I was not a member of that milieu. Maybe I’m just anti-social. But the question I think about a lot as we are trying to move beyond Trumpism is it does seem like there’s about to be a big swing of political power in the United States in ’26 and ’28. I worried through the year 2025 that Trump would somehow be able to distort the election enough to hold on to power, the coming congressional election. I think the tide against him is now too big for those methods to work. Unless he tries an outright coup d'état, I don’t know how he stops it.

So there’s likely to be a shift in power. And the question I find myself thinking about a lot—and I have no answer to this, and I’d be very interested to be guided by the wisdom you draw from these texts and your own wisdom. When President [Joe] Biden entered office in 2021, clearly, his thought, or clearly to me, his thought was, We need to get past the recent unpleasantness. We need a policy of accommodation. We need a policy of looking forward, not backward. And while, when people have actually sacked the Capitol, they have to be held to account, we’re not gonna object too much if their higher-ups—a justice system goes real, real slow on bringing justice to the people who gave the orders for the sacking on January 6, 2021. We’ll punish the actual foot soldiers, but we’ll leave the colonels and generals alone mostly, to the extent we can. The question I am struggling with is: If and when power does shift, was the Biden attitude the right one, to be reapplied in ’27 and ’29, or do we need some kind of lustration, something like what the Czechs and Hungarians and Poles did after 1989? They said, Look, we have an elite that was authoritarian, corrupt, and criminal, in some cases homicidal. And we can’t do justice in every case, but we need to find some system to hold the previous administration to a moral and legal account, and exclude them from power. I can’t make up my mind what’s the right answer. What guidance would you draw from these old texts?

Brooks: Yeah, I guess I would not be for mass defenestrations.

Frum: I’m not throwing them out the window.

Brooks: (Laughs.)

Frum: No, I’m serious. What should happen—Jeanine Pirro, a U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who’s leading the charge to bring these utterly ridiculous criminal charges against the head of the Federal Reserve to destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve and subordinate monetary policy to Trump’s election needs. What should happen to her?

Brooks: Yeah. So first, I think the problem with the Biden administration, one of them, was that he said, correctly, “This is a battle for the soul of America”; he had no idea how to think about that. And then he should have read more neoconservative books ’cause they would have said, Here’s the soul of America. Here’s how it’s being destroyed. [Here’s] how you can restore it.

The second thing, and one of the reasons I’m not against going after these people as aggressively—when they broke the law, if they break the law, they should break the law. George Santayana, the philosopher, said that Americans don’t solve problems; they just leave them behind. And I think what’s gonna happen after Trump is that people are gonna take a look at corruption in Washington on an unprecedented scale, and they’re gonna wanna do what Americans did after Watergate: They’re gonna wanna turn the page. And in 1976, Jimmy Carter looked like integrity. And so it’s not like—and I actually think Gerald Ford did the right thing in pardoning Richard Nixon because we didn’t need to wage the same war over and over again. I thought the indictments of Trump during the Biden administration ended up helping Trump get reelected. And so I worry that that will happen again or that will just motivate the same battle lines over and over again.

Voters who voted for him, they have real issues, real concerns, which Trump is not addressing. The job is to win them over, not to lock them in the same battle lines as before. I think societies move forward the same way human beings move forward: through a process of rupture and repair. Trump has ruptured our society from top to bottom, and I think you just move on, you turn the page, and you offer something different. After Nixon, you got something different in Carter. After Carter, you got something different in Reagan. After Reagan–[George H.W.] Bush, you got something different in [President Bill] Clinton. And people want to try something different.

Frum: You make a very compelling case, and as so often, you’re almost certainly right. But let me just keep thinking.

One of the teachings of the neoconservative world was that these moral beliefs matter, that culture matters. And they were very impatient with social scientists who said, No, what matters are deep structures of wealth and power. They didn’t like that way of thinking. But deep structures of wealth and power do often matter. And so after Trump leaves office, it will still be true that the people who became corrupt billionaires under Trump will remain corrupt billionaires, with all the political power that that entails—including, by the way, Trump’s children, who have made a corrupt fortune in the single year of his first year of his presidency through these cryptocurrency operations they’re running, which have left every purchaser losing 95 percent of their money but have left the sellers very rich. That is not just wealth; that’s power.

The changes in the media landscape that have concentrated informational power in the hands of people who are beholden to the Trump administration, whether it’s the social-media companies or the new conglomerates in what we used to call television—I don’t know what we’ll call it [as we] go on—those will still remain. The changes that have happened inside the Republican Party, those will remain. People talk about doing something about these ICE recruits, but they’re still going to remain, probably, government employees with this rogue police force that doesn’t seem to answer to any kind of—that’s all going to be there.

And how do you say, Well, we’re going to re-moralize the society, when the structures of wealth and power bequeathed by what used to be there, where those structures are all still there, just waiting for the next economic downturn to take power? That’s what happened to Biden: He just assumed, Well, we can re-moralize society, he thought and forgot, well, if there’s a little bit of inflation in ’22 and ’23, all of this changes, and everything that was sinister before reemerges from the surface of the waters to claim new victims.

Brooks: Yeah, there’s clearly a lot of weight behind your argument. I think we all acknowledge that it was a big mistake not to punish any of the 2008 financial-crisis architects. That just struck people as a moral job undone. So sometimes you do have to have truth and reconciliation, with the emphasis on truth.

On the other hand, I think the big test for people in the years ahead is to separate Trump voters, working-class voters, from the Trump cronies. And I think that will happen (a) as people are realizing that the Trump cronies ride to power on the votes of the working class. And the working class die much sooner. They earn much less. They’re much more likely to get divorced. They’re much more likely to say they have no friends. So the needs of the working class are really something that needs to be addressed, and Trump is not doing it. And the job is to separate those working-class voters from the cronies.

The Republican Party in our lifetime, in my view, is always gonna be a working-class party. That’s true of every right-wing party in the Western world. What used to be the bankers’ party is now a working-class party. And it is a great achievement to become a multiracial working-class party, if the Republicans can pull it off. And so we’re not going to go back to the Republican Party that you and I knew in 1990. It’s gonna be a working-class party.

Frum: What does that mean? What do you mean when you say it’s going to be a working-class party? My sense of the Trump vote in 2024 was that the Trump voter was more affluent, on average, than the [Kamala] Harris voter. And while Harris did better among college-educated people than Trump did, that Trump was competitive and that noncollege voters are not always the same thing as working-class voters. They may simply be older voters who finished their schooling at a time when education was less prevalent than it’s been since the 1970s.

Brooks: Yeah, there are obviously a lot of Trump billionaires floating around out there. But if you look at the upper-middle, educated sectors of our society—whether it’s Palo Alto; Bethesda, Maryland; Westchester County, New York; Boston—those are all Democratic areas. And to me, the best predictor of voting patterns is no longer income; it basically is not a predictor of voting patterns anymore. It’s education levels. And Democrats are winning over the highly educated former Republican suburbs, and Republicans are winning over the less-educated working class in rural areas. And I guess I use working class a little loosely; I really mean education levels.

And it’s simply, that’s the divide not only in this country, but across Western Europe. And why is it the divide? Because the Information Age economy rewards education with money. And a lot of people look around their societies, whether it’s here or in Hungary or in England and in France, and they see the 20 percent most-educated people living in extremely affluent lifestyles, sending their kids to the same schools, replicating a caste system based upon education and inherited privilege, and, by the way, ruling working-class and conservative voices out of the media and out of college campuses. And if you tell people that one top 20 percent is gonna rig the game generation after generation, they’re gonna flip the table. And that’s why populism is not only an American thing. This phenomenon is happening everywhere in the Western world as we screw up the need to respond to the nature of the Information Age economy.

And so, to me, the central challenge is to separate those people from MAGA. And I think [the way] that is most doable is if we try to put Trump in the rearview mirror.

Frum: Yeah, well, MAGA is doing a pretty good job of separating themselves. And the tariff policy, which is essentially a tax on purchases of goods, and the less you make, the more of your income is taken—it’s a nakedly, upwardly redistributive thing—you combine that with the other things they’re doing, not just the tax cuts, but the destruction of tax enforcement in ways that favor those who own businesses. So for the affluent self-employed, paying taxes becomes ever more optional. For the people who spend their income on goods, taxes become ever more baffling and mysterious, and are included in the prices of the things you buy. So that’s doing a separation. And I think that the way that the Trump people have chosen to do immigration enforcement is destroying the prospects of the Republican Party as a multiracial party. So that work is being done.

But we are going to be left with, yes, many of the disaffections you described, but also with a governing elite, on the conservative side of the spectrum, that really has tasted the benefits of jettisoning democratic norms, jettisoning democratic institutions, and using violence as a tool of power. Do they unlearn those ideas from mere political defeat, or does something more need to happen? What does Irving Kristol tell us about that?

Brooks: (Laughs.) He would talk about the circulation of elites, that you can circulate elites pretty quickly. And all the people who were the elites in the Republican Party under George W. Bush, they thought they were gonna be in every Republican administration going forward, but that didn’t happen because Trump and Heritage Foundation and all those people brought in a new elite. CPAC, when I was a young conservative, was considered the fringe of the fringe, and it became the mainstream.

This is not unusual in American history. The people who were the elite under John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman were no longer the elite under Gary Hart and Bill Clinton. They had an entire shift in elites. And so you can have a shift in elites. And I’m hopeful that there is a group on the Democratic Party that is now acting like an elite, and I mean that in a good way. They’re running universities, and they’re trying to be less crazy-left than they were. They’re running institutions that they’re trying to reform. Isaiah Berlin, who I mentioned, he had a phrase, I find myself on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency, and that’s where I find myself.

Frum: The analogy I should have chosen was not lustration after 1989; it’s Reconstruction. That’s the American analogy, where the traditional governing elite of one of the great parties of much of the country committed itself to something not just in the defense of slavery, but to slavery-plus, fortified and amplified by treason. And until that generation has spent its 40 years in the wilderness, and a new generation has grown up, and the policies of the country have changed, and their victims have been brought into the political system—not just their disaffected followers, but also their victims—then you’re not going to have true stability again.

So I think, What are going to be the equivalents of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that go into place to make sure not just that we put Trumpism behind, but so it really can’t happen again. And so the people who got rich and powerful, and who will remain rich and powerful, don’t use that wealth and power to attack American institutions in the way that the Trump people did in the first year of the second term, and looks like we got three more years to go.

Brooks: Yeah, let me try a historical example on you. So in the 1920s and ’30s, we had vicious anti-immigration movements. We had the America Firsters, and we had Father [Charles] Coughlin, who was sort of a radio priest who had semi-fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies. And suddenly, along came Franklin Roosevelt, along came the Depression, along came World War II, and they were just discredited. And they were discredited from 1941 to probably 2006, at least. And they were discredited not by elites; they were discredited by the whole country. You did not wanna say the phrase “America First,” ’cause that would discredit you. And along comes Donald Trump, and when he first started saying the word “America First,” I was like, What is he doing? Everyone knows what “America First” is. (A) I’m not convinced he knew what the original “America First” was, (B) people had either no historical memory or they didn’t care, and so ideas that were discredited came back. And that is the nature of politics: It’s never over. No argument is ever settled. They come back. But, to me, it’s not what a certain set of prosecutors do. It’s whether the mass of America decides: That was despicable. That’s discredited. We don’t want any piece of that. And you can learn that lesson.

Frum: That history is not going to repeat itself, because it took the Great Depression to discredit high tariffs, it took the Holocaust to discredit anti-Semitism, and it took Pearl Harbor and then the subsequent American triumph in two oceans and the complete collapse of fascist ideas in the fascist countries and the repudiations by the fascist countries themselves of their previous fascism. (Laughs.) And that string of things is so dramatic, it’s very unlikely to repeat. So it’s much more likely to happen that the Trump people are going to have a bad election or two. There will be some of the more selfish, materialistic plutocrats who will say, You know [what]? We overdid some things. We overdid some things. We shouldn’t have shot that woman in Minneapolis. We shouldn’t have done the tariffs so much. And if you wanna get rich out of politics, you should just have the deferred gratification to wait until you’ve left office, and then we’ll make you rich. Don’t do it while you’re in office; that’s just impulsive. And maybe less denigration of women and other minorities. And also, by the way, leave the anti-Semitism for the podcasters; don’t bring it into public. So those may be the lessons. But otherwise, good job, everybody, because what we’ve learned is that the system is much more vulnerable than anybody thought it was to authoritarian means for plutocratic ends, and let’s just get smarter for the next try. That’s what I worry is going to be the outcome, not the kind of grand repudiation that you got because of the series of catastrophes of the 1930s and ’40s.

Brooks: Yeah, one of the things I think about and worry about is, I don’t think we’re ever going back to a pre-Trump presidency, which we had presidencies that were self-restrained, and they were strained by norms; they were strained by laws. But the presidents, I would interview them all, and I asked one president on his final day in office, What’d you learn being president that you didn’t know before? And he said, I learned there’s a lot of passive-aggressive behavior in government. The president says something, and nothing happens. And those were the restraints that were built into the system. Donald Trump has shown you can crash through all those restraints, both the legal and normative ones. And I have trouble believing any future president is gonna want to give back all that power, and so, whoever wins, we could be walking into an age where presidential power is ramped up and congressional power continues to deteriorate, which is a primary distortion of our system of government.

Frum: David, thank you so much for making time. Thank you for sharing all this wisdom and history. I learned a lot, and I’m sure every viewer and listener did too. We’re grateful to you. Thank you.

Brooks: It’s great to be extending our lifelong friendship.

Frum: (Laughs.) Okay, bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to David Brooks for joining me today. Now, as I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is not a book at all; it’s a TV series, a four-part series on Netflix called Death by Lightning, about the presidency of James Garfield and his assassination at the hands of a killer named Charles Guiteau. It’s a delightful four-part series. I strongly recommend it. I enjoyed it enormously. Michael Shannon plays President Garfield. Matthew Macfadyen plays the assassin, Charles Guiteau. There’s both humor and heartbreak, and it’s really lovely. And I’m not here to be a total buzzkill about the series, just a little bit of one. There are some historical inaccuracies; I’m going to let them go. I’ll mention a couple of them.

When we first meet James Garfield, he’s working on his farm. He seems a man of the soil. You see someone far away from the dirty word of Washington politics, utterly surprised that he’s invited to speak at the Republican convention of 1880. You wouldn’t know from the opening of the series that he was, at that time, a ninth-term congressman who had just been elevated to the United States Senate (Laughs.) and whose main residence was a three-story townhouse at the corner of 13th and I in Washington, D.C. Okay, let that go.

Nor am I going to complain about the hilarious depiction of his vice president, Chester Arthur, as a thuggish boozer, although, actually, Chester Arthur was quite a gentle man and had been, in his day, a pretty serious scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. I think he was one of the stars of his class at Union College in upstate New York, and he was made Phi Beta Kappa.

So now, I’m not gonna quibble about those things. But what I am concerned about is this show introduces viewers who probably don’t know that much about it to an important period in American history, but at the price of deleting what made the period important, what the politics were about. It shows a lot of very personal quarrels, and many of these quarrels were indeed very personal, like the famous quarrel between Senators James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling, which was driven very much by ego and mutual dislike. So, yes, that’s all true, but it obscures, because it’s just too difficult to explain, what drove the politics of the period. And I wanna talk about that today because it confronts us with the tragic choices that people in the past have faced and helps us to maybe understand or have some patience for the tragic choices that we will face in our own time.

James Garfield was elected in 1880. He entered Congress during the Civil War. And in the post–Civil War period—and he retained a seat; he represented the northeastern part of Cleveland, near Lake Erie. The Civil War left behind two great issues to face for the traumatized country.

The first was what to do for and about the population of freed slaves, who had been subordinated, dehumanized, abused, who now were to be granted their freedom, but what did that freedom mean, and how was it to be made real? The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery. The 14th Amendment granted civil rights. The 15th Amendment granted voting rights. But those rights were often attacked by violence, by the neighbors of the freed slaves, and it was going to take a big military presence to continue to protect the slaves and their rights. What was to be done about that? How are they to be made full Americans? Should they be made full Americans? Should the rest of America undertake the costs and sacrifices necessary to make them full Americans? Problem one.

Problem two: Before the Civil War, the federal government of the United States was a very tiny and slapdash affair, but it didn’t matter because the federal government didn’t do much before the Civil War. During the Civil War, the United States had become the most powerful military force on planet Earth, and even after the demobilization, everyone saw the tremendous latent power of the United States, both military and economic. But the government, much bigger than before the Civil War, was still a scandal. Jobs were given by patronage. The government was financed by tariffs that were kind of random and crazy and punitive. And all of politics was about distributing government jobs to people who would help the government, whoever won the election—usually the Republican—to win. There was no rational administration. Levels of corruption were extremely high. This all had to be brought into the modern era. That was problem two.

The great tragic choice was the political coalition that supported justice for problem one—that is, bringing the freed slaves fully into national life—was a very different coalition from the coalition that might exist to pull the United States government into the modern era. And politicians of the time were forced to choose. The so-called Stalwarts, who were the group around Roscoe Conkling, who was one of the characters in the drama, said, Our job is to try to bring the freed slaves into national life. Now, that’s gonna mean some very dirty politics—because this is not a popular cause in the Northern part of the country, certainly not after about 1873; it loses all its popularity. The only way we’re going to keep winning elections is if we use the tariffs to raise a lot of money from protected industries; if we use patronage and pork barrel to get a lot of votes and persuade people to vote for us even though they don’t like very much the things we’re doing for the freed slaves, but they like what we’re doing for them; and, above all, avoid anything that smacks of reform. It’s the old flag, it’s the old cause, it’s a Republican Party based in the Protestant small towns of the North, and we remain very suspicious of the Democratic big cities and certainly suspicious of the South. That’s coalition one.

Coalition two said, No, we need to modernize. We need to bring some rationality to the tariff system. We need to suppress the post-war inflation with a new kind of monetary system and a new kind of banking system. We need to have a much more professional government. And that coalition means making inroads into the Democratic big cities of the North, and that means, of necessity, jettisoning concern for the freed slaves. And the people who took this approach to politics, unlike the Stalwarts, who took the first, they were known as the Half-Breeds. And a lot of the battle of the 1870s and 1880s are these battles between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds. Should you have a Reconstruction politics, or should you have a modernization politics?

I’ve simplified this enormously, and people who are versed in the period will detect many errors of nuance and emphasis in what I just said, but that’s basically the problem. And without telling people who are long dead (Laughs.) what they should have done, understanding that problem helps us to understand the period and it helps us to understand ourselves because their choices were ugly, and our choices are often ugly too, and political success goes to those who best manage the choice.

Garfield became president in 1880, and inaugurated in 1881, not because he was a hero—he had been a very great war hero; he’d behaved very gallantly at the Battle of Chickamauga especially. But he was not a political hero. He was a person who balanced and served political expediency. There’s a scene in the series that, when you put it into context, shows what Garfield was and what he wasn’t.

So there’s a scene in the series where Garfield is visited by men, African American men, in what appear to be Union uniforms, and they appear to be Union veterans. And he says to them, “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.” Well, that’s very inspiring. That’s very inspiring. Did it happen? So I pulled off my shelf the 1978 biography by Allan Peskin and looked up the incident. And sure enough, it did happen. And those words were spoken.

But something else (Laughs.) then happened. So the people to whom he spoke those words were not Union veterans. They were a group of singers from Fisk University, an all-Black college, who had come to serenade him, and he thanked them for the serenade, and he gave them a little speech afterwards. And he ended the speech by saying those words that the series quoted: “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.” But when the account was written up for the press by Garfield’s political team, that sentence was suppressed (Laughs.) according to his biographer. They left that out because that would cost votes. They did not wanna say to everybody—they wanted to say to the people who were there, We’ll be with you. But to everybody else, mm, maybe not. Garfield was a balancer, as political leaders so often are.

As I say, I’m not here to be Captain Buzzkill about this. I enjoyed the show; I hope you will too. But I do think we need to look back on the past with a tragic lens because we need to look at our present with a tragic lens. And understanding the past better helps us understand—and its problems, and the unsolvability and difficulty of its problems—gives us more sympathy and pity for the people who lived in the past and gives us more preparedness for our problems in the present.

Thanks so much for watching and listening to me this week. Thanks to David Brooks for joining. As ever, the best way to support the work of this podcast and all my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll consider doing that. I hope you’ll consider also following me on social media: Instagram, @DavidFrum; Twitter (X), @DavidFrum. Thanks so much. See you next week on The David Frum Show.

[Music]

Why Trump Sides With Putin

2026-01-21T13:00:00-05:00

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum examines one of the most consequential deceptions of the Trump presidency: the insistence that grocery prices are falling when Americans know from lived experience that they are not. David explains how tariffs and trade policy are deliberately driving food costs higher, why Trump keeps lying about it, and how breaking this promise strikes at the core of the fragile trust between voters and government.

Then David is joined by Fiona Hill, a former adviser to three U.S. presidents and a key witness in Trump’s first impeachment, to analyze how Vladimir Putin sees the world and why Trump remains so drawn to strongman power. Frum and Hill discuss Putin’s long game in Ukraine, Trump’s archaic and backward worldview, and how Trump’s presidency has been a gift to Putin while steadily eroding American credibility abroad.

Finally, David closes the episode with a discussion of Among the Believers, by V. S. Naipaul, reflecting on the Iranian Revolution and why authoritarian regimes repeatedly fail at modernity.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Fiona Hill, an adviser to three American presidents on Russia and Eurasia generally, and of course a central figure in exposing President [Donald] Trump’s wrongdoing that led to the 2019 first impeachment of President Trump.

My book this week will be a 1981 travelogue by the great writer V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers, which took him to, among other countries, Iran in the immediate aftershock of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Before I get to the dialogue and the book, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about a domestic subject. And that is this extraordinary moment where Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins informed a TV interviewer that her department had run thousands of simulations, and good news, it was possible to feed an American person for less than $3 if that person ate a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing. She didn’t have enough respect either for her audience or for the people she was talking about to remember what that fourth thing was that would make up this kind of snack plate. And this has attracted a lot of question marks: What if you want a second corn tortilla? And by the way, with chicken selling even at Walmart for between 25 and 30 cents an ounce, how big a piece of chicken is that piece of chicken going to be for under $3?

But aside from the “let them eat cake” aspect of this, one of the things that is really striking has been the refusal of the Trump administration even to acknowledge that there is a food-affordability problem in the United States. President Trump has responded to the increases in the price of food, the general price increase under his presidency, by simply lying about it. I’ve got a little summary here—I don’t pretend this is an exhaustive summary. Here he is on October 21: “Grocery prices are way down.” Here he is on October 16:. “Groceries are down.” Here he is on October 14: “Now, as you know, groceries are down.” October 10: “We’ve gotten prices way down for groceries.” At the United Nations [on] September 23: “Under my leadership … grocery prices are down.” I’m sure there are many other instances. On January 13, President Trump addressed the Detroit Economic Club, and there, he spoke from a script, so there was a little bit more effort to make the words not a complete lie. And his quote on January 13 was: “Grocery prices are starting to go rapidly down.” (Laughs.)

Now, grocery prices are up, up, up. Data released in the week that I record this program by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the cost of food at home rose 2.4 percent overall in the 12 months of 2025 and 0.7 percent in December alone, the fastest single-month increase since October of 2022. And the rise in food prices stands out because many other prices are ceasing to go up so fast. Gasoline, rent, other similar prices, the worst of the inflation for them seems to have at least taken a little pause in December, but grocery prices continue to grow. And many individual food items are up astonishingly high: the price of beef, up 16.4 percent; the price of coffee, almost 20 percent; price of lettuce, other fresh produce, the price of frozen fish, again, up. The one exception to all of this is the one price that the Trump people love to talk about, and that is the price of eggs. Those are down. But across the board, grocery prices are way up.

And this is not, as it was under [President Joe] Biden, just a product of a general price inflation affecting the whole world. Many of the price increases have been driven very deliberately upward by particular policies. Price of a can of beans is up because the price of the can is up, and the price of the can is up because the metals in the can have been hit by tariffs by President Trump. You put a tax on aluminum and steel, you make cans more expensive, and if you make a can more expensive, the thing in the can becomes more expensive, whether it’s beans, whether it’s soda. Trump threatened to put a 92 percent tariff on Italian pasta. He backed away from that threat a little bit in January, but pasta is still tariffed, and the Canadian wheat that goes into American-made pasta, that’s also tariffed.

So this was done deliberately and on purpose—and without a lot of regard for the fate of the people on the other end. This could be dealt with by a different kind of president by some argument that it’s worth it: Yes, you’re all going to have to pay more for food, but that is on the way to my vision of self-sufficiency through tariffs. We’ll seal off the United States economy in the world, and even though you’ll all pay more and maybe be a little poorer, at least you’ll have less trade with foreigners. But the Trump people are just systematically incapable of dealing with trade-offs and telling the truth. And they’re especially dishonest about the distributional effect. When you put food prices up, not everybody pays equally. The richer you are, the smaller proportion of your income you spend on food and the less you notice the price at the grocery. But the people who are in the middle or in the lower part of the income distribution, they feel it most, and they are many of the people who trusted Donald Trump to help them because through campaign 2024, he promised that that would be his first priority—not just that he would stop, right, prices from going up, but that he would make them go down.

Now, Trump lies about a lot of things, and a lot of the things that he lies about are things that it’s difficult for people to check, or maybe they just seem too abstract to check: Our economy is the hottest in the world. How do you prove that right or wrong? But the people who decide elections, they know what everything in the grocery basket costs, and they know that the president is lying to them again and again and again. And that has an impact on their faith [in] him personally and directly—it has an effect on the political calculus. But it has an effect generally on the way politics works.

The Americans who turned to Donald Trump were those most distrustful of the political system, most inclined to believe that the political system is indifferent to them, deceitful to them, and they put special and unique trust in this one person, whom they regarded, falsely, but whom they regarded, trustingly, as a great business leader, to tell them the truth and to deliver them relief. When he breaks his word to them, of course, he breaks the special political bond that he once had, and you can see that in all the polls that show him down, down, down, and especially down on economic issues. But it’s an attack on their faith in the general political system because if this one unique figure that they were willing to trust, if he too is deceptive, then what is there? It raises the question, again, of how we go on from here and how we restore the relationship of trust between the American people, their government, and the president who leads the government and symbolizes the government. If he’s not a person [you] can trust, how can anything be trusted?

It’s a haunting and difficult question, one probably that won’t be resolved so fast, but a question that is going to dominate our politics for the three remaining years of the Trump presidency and through this election year of 2026, when people will once again get a chance to say, We resent these prices. We resent the deliberate policy to make the prices go up. We resent being lied to. We want something different. We want a change.

And now my dialogue with Fiona Hill.

[Music]

Frum: Fiona Hill has served three presidents as a deep expert on Russian affairs and Eurasia broadly. Born in the United Kingdom, educated at Harvard and St. Andrews University in Scotland, she is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and chancellor of Durham University in Great Britain. In 2021, she published a memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here, about her upbringing in England’s former coal country.

Fiona Hill is best known for her courageous integrity during and honest testimony about President Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine for his personal political advantage in his first presidential term. In this moment of global crisis, I am one of many who turns to Fiona Hill for insight and guidance. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me today.

Fiona Hill: Thanks so much, David. It’s really great to be with you.

Frum: So let’s start by looking at the world from the other side of the board, from [Russian president] Vladimir Putin’s point of view. You have spent a lot of time thinking about how he thinks, what he’s thinking about, the way he’s different and surprising from an American point of view. How does the world look to him? Ukraine, a pending crisis in NATO, but he’s taken some blows in Iran and Venezuela—how does the world map look from his point of view?

Hill: Well, David, it’s good that you pointed out those negative aspects of some of the recent changes for Putin from the start, thinking about those blows, as you put it, I think very aptly, in Iran and Venezuela, two countries which have very close relationships with Putin and Russia, which I’m sure we’ll get to in the course of our discussion. But if you put some of those downsides, again, on the shelf for the moment, until we get back to them, if you took it at just face value, the world would look pretty propitious from Putin’s point of view. Because you mentioned in your introduction Trump’s efforts to extort, as you put it, President [Volodymyr] Zelensky of Ukraine in the run-up to that first impeachment trial, and Putin’s all in the business of extortion, basically using all kinds of manipulation or force, bullying, you name it, to get what he wants. And he wants a world in which might makes right, in which it’s a battle for, basically, spheres of influence by strongmen, and on the surface, that seems to be where we are.

If we look back to the first Trump administration in 2016 and then, of course, the whole period with Biden, things look much more ambiguous from Putin’s point of view. He wasn’t really quite sure what the trajectory was going to be. He wasn’t sure what the direction of travel was going to be. But he was certainly hoping that he would be able to take advantage of circumstances and to push Russia’s advantage.

You may remember that he also tried to bully Biden in 2021—it seems so far away now that none of us can really remember it—when he basically put the United States on notice that if Russia doesn’t get what it wants in terms of the United States pulling out of Europe, pulling back from Ukraine, taking NATO back to the studs, back to the borders, which it was in before its expansionary phase in the late 1990s, then Putin was gonna do something extreme, which, of course, turned out to be the full-on invasion of Ukraine in the February of 2022.

And so Putin has been pushing for advantage that whole period. And so from his point of view, if you look at it, it now looks like we are in a world where sphere of influences and strongmen and transactional relationships are shaping the environment.

Frum: As you and I speak, we have troops from NATO countries—including, of course, Denmark, but some of its Scandinavian partners, France, the U.K.—on their way to Greenland. How big a win is that for Putin?

Hill: (Laughs.) It’s enormous. And the posited reasoning for the United States of wanting to acquire Greenland—and again, this does actually go back, again, to the first Trump administration, 2019—but the posited reasoning is really acute pressure from Russia and China. And we’ve also had President Xi Jinping of China saying, We’re not interested in Greenland, not on us, and Putin also having never actually made any kind of claims against Greenland. So this is really something that is a fairly absurd development from everybody’s point of view. But for Putin, obviously, this is potentially a bonanza.

But this is where kind of a flip side of uncertainty might come into this because, as you’re saying, who are the troops? Perhaps not in the large-enough numbers—actually, if I was the Europeans, I’d be sending even more in. And what we’re seeing here is Europeans having to stake out their interests in the name of their security, but it’s in reaction to the United States, not just in reaction to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and that brings, I would say, a bit more uncertainty for Putin just along the lines of the blows that he’s already had in Iran and Venezuela.

Frum: Well, let’s look at the Ukraine map from his point of view. The war, as a military matter, has gone catastrophically badly for him. As I am told, at least the post–February ’22 conflict has now lasted longer than the Soviet involvement in World War II—they started late, of course. And the toll in life and money is overwhelming. But he is maintaining his position on the ground, and he’s got an American administration that seems to conceptualize a peace treaty as finding out what Putin wants and giving it to him at the expense of the Ukrainians.

Hill: That’s absolutely right. And this is where Trump’s return to the White House has been a real boon for Vladimir Putin, because he is now operating in a world which is, for Putin, a very easy one to navigate in the sense of you’ve got global leaders—and he only really counts as global leaders Xi and Trump—who have the same sort of mindset of wanting to go and return to that 19th-century or even 18th-century, certainly early-20th-century, view of transactional relationships among the big powers, with everything defined, really, by politics at the top, not this kind of mass politics that came in much later. So Putin’s very comfortable in that environment.

But as you’ve pointed out, Ukraine was a catastrophic blunder. He did this full-on invasion in Ukraine not expecting it to be all the things that you’ve described. This wasn’t intended to be the largest military action in Europe since World War II. It certainly wasn’t intended to last longer than the Soviet Union was battling Nazi Germany, which that’s the threshold, as you point out, we just passed this month. That is just remarkable. It was supposed to be a “special military operation.” In many respects, it was supposed to be something along the lines of what the Trump administration just pulled off in Venezuela, a decapitation, thinking that they would remove Zelensky, and they’d probably get, in fact, what the United States government is angling to get in Venezuela, a pliable alternative leader, who might have actually come out of the same system, and it would be business as usual for them, not basically new forms of business for Ukraine. So it’s been an absolute disaster.

But the point is that Putin is something of what one might call a survivalist and a prepper. He’s basically been building up resources. He’s been thinking long and hard about what it takes for Russia to be more resilient, even though it is quite brittle in terms of its political system and in terms of what we see unfolding there in Ukraine—you can’t keep this up forever. But Putin has marshaled resources and all the capabilities of Russia to the point— heavily militarized the economy, heavily militarized the whole system—he has this vertical of power that enables him to do all kinds of things that other leaders cannot, even Trump. You can’t really sue Vladimir Putin as you can, currently, still sue the United States government. But his bet is that, because of these changes in international circumstances, especially because of the incumbent in the White House, that he will be able to last everyone else out. He will have the ability to, basically, press this to a final conclusion that, despite all the losses, all the incredibly high costs—and he is ruthless, and he’s prepared to pay that price—everybody else will fold. That’s his bet.

Frum: I think of [Lord] Farquaad in Shrek: Some of you may die, but that is a price that I am willing to pay.

Hill: (Laughs.) Yes, in fact, that’s a great analogy. And all kind—

Frum: Also a very small leader. (Laughs.)

Hill: (Laughs.) Exactly. Probably about the size of Vladimir Putin, in fact, and always on a horse.

Frum: (Laughs.) How bad is the news for him from Venezuela and from Iran?

Hill: Well, it depends, right? Everything always depends. And this is what Putin is very good at: He’s got strategic patience. Everybody talks about now—it’s become a complete cliché, but it certainly wasn’t 20-odd years ago, when people were trying to understand Vladimir Putin. Remember, he’s actually quite predictable now. We’ve got 25 years of data points from a man that we knew very little about, that Masha Gessen called “the man without a face.” We now know his face. (Laughs.) We know about his family. We know all kinds of different things about him that we did not know before. And what we also know is that he bides his time.

If you think about Yevgeny Prigozhin, who, a couple of years ago, we thought, Oh my God, is it all gonna teeter? He’s getting this backlash from the war in Ukraine. He’s got an insurgency. There’s a man marching on Moscow. Could this be it? Could this be a coup? And there wasn’t a lot of support for Putin. But of course, that fizzled out. And it’s many months before Yevgeny Prigozhin meets his demise by literally falling from the greatest window in the sky, as people have a tendency to do in Russia—meeting mysterious and unfortunate deaths. And that’s the end of all of that.

So what Putin is waiting for right now is to see if, in many respects, those escapades in both Iran and Venezuela, which look extraordinarily harmful from all the vested interest that they have, in particular, in Venezuela in terms of oil, sending in security forces to prop up [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro. Iran’s support for a whole matter and manner of different issues for Russia, from actually helping them counteract Sunni Muslim insurgents in the country, ’cause, of course, Iran is Shia; to helping produce that first batch of drones that Russia has used against Ukraine, to pretty good effect as well, the Shahed drones; to being that other great kind of power in the region. Their hope, I think, now is that everything else goes kind of haywire, that it doesn’t follow those trajectories that everyone might anticipate—Iran, the theocracy, doesn’t fall, because that would bring all kinds of uncertainty and actually not a good look for Putin—and that, as we’re already seeing in the case of Venezuela, Maduro is just being replaced by his deputy. So for Putin, that’s actually not that bad, so he will wait to see how this plays out. It’s like a judo tournament for him: You wait ’til everybody else is off-balance. You just kind of wait, and you figure out what the opponent is gonna be; you don’t just leap in there. Again, that’s his expertise in judo. You just wait until you can leverage everybody else’s strength against them.

Frum: And he’s got, once again, the help of his friend, the president of the United States, who in both countries, Venezuela and Iran, really seems to have betrayed any ideal of democracy. In Venezuela, he seems to have made it very clear that he wants the next thug in line. This is not regime change; it’s dictator rotation. In Iran, the president promised the Iranian people that help was on the way. As you and I speak, that promise seems to have been utterly empty and not honored, and people have died in the thousands and maybe the tens of thousands believing the word of the United States, a mistake. It’s such a shame and a sorrow even to think that the word of an American president could be so worthless, but there it is. So Putin is going to get maybe some second-bests, thanks to Donald Trump.

Hill: And that’s good enough for him because you can rack up a lot of second-bests; then you win a tournament. The whole point for Putin is staying in the game and kind of waiting out his opponents and seeing if he can outfox them over time. Again, he’s pretty predictable in this. And he knows that Donald Trump’s word is empty—let’s just be frank—because the one thing that Putin is extraordinarily good at is figuring people out: figuring out their vulnerabilities, figuring out their weaknesses. He’s less good at figuring out people’s strengths because he doesn’t believe that anybody’s altruistic. He doesn’t really believe that anybody would do something for goals that are not venal or not personalized, for example, so Trump fits his category of the person that he’s used to dealing with perfectly. There are people like the pope, the current pope, who I think Trump would have a more difficult time of dealing with—Putin would, rather. Did I say Trump? I might have said Trump. (Laughs.) But anyway, Trump might also have a difficult—

Frum: It’s a natural mistake.

Hill: —with the current pope as well. But Putin—anybody who actually stands for something that’s different and actually looks like they actually mean it and is not trying to achieve something that Putin can actually get his hands on and try to manipulate it, that is more difficult for him. But right now Trump is playing to form. It’s the form that Putin expects. And I’m pretty sure that Putin, perhaps misplaced, in any case feels very confident that he can manage everything that’s happening. But I say that could be misplaced, but it’s not for the reasons of Trump suddenly getting religion, to use this kind of metaphor and pull it out a bit further.

Frum: One last question from Putin’s side of the playing board. You mentioned a couple of times that Putin thinks in terms of power. But when he thinks in terms of power, he thinks in terms of military power, espionage power, maybe natural-resource power; he doesn’t seem to have a very sophisticated grasp of the way economies work. And so one of the things that has happened since February of ’22 is that Russia’s slide toward becoming a Chinese economic colony does seem to have accelerated, and if he emerges from this Ukraine war, even with a seeming military success—with a change in the borders, or a friendlier regime in Ukraine, or withdrawal of American support from Ukraine or Poland or the Baltics—he still has the problem that it’s China who pays his bills. And—

Hill: I think that’s spot on.

Frum: —does he think about things like that?

Hill: I’m sure he does, because he certainly had plenty of warnings in the past. But I think, at this point—and again, it seems that this is the trajectory that he’s on—he’s not really thinking of a period when peace breaks out. He’s become a wartime president, and I think he feels that he can keep a wartime economy ticking along for quite some time and maybe put off, then, the kinds of problems that he will inevitably face.

We’re seeing all kinds of problems in the U.S. economy, and the U.S. economy is immensely resilient because of the structure of it, the nature of it. And the Russian economy is resilient in some similar but very different ways, more related to autarky and just the vastness of its natural resources. But that, of course, makes it very difficult to marshal them and to move into those value-added chains that we expect in a more sophisticated economy. And Russia had been moving in that direction up until the full-on invasion of Ukraine, but it was quite difficult because its economic model was running out of steam. And the war has injected a new head of steam into it.

Now, the one thing that Putin clearly doesn’t care about is human capital. And that is also very interesting ’cause you wouldn’t, in that regard—and this is why I think President Trump just doesn’t get Putin at all: He cannot understand why you would slaughter all of these people that you actually need to make your economy work. Even with a miraculous shift to AI, you’re still gonna need people. And that’s what Putin has done: He has squandered the future of his human capital. A lot of people are working, admittedly, offshore, particularly in the Gulf and other places, and still contributing to the Russian economy. But you look down the line and that idea of economic recovery, that idea of innovation that’s not just related to defense and to innovation on the battlefield, that’s one of the areas that Putin has likely squandered. And of course, he’s completely eroded trust. And although other countries look to Russia right now and still want to factor them in as a great power, they no longer think of Russia as a superpower, and they absolutely, certainly do not think of Russia as a technical, innovative, economic superpower. And as you said, it’s much [more] likely to end up being some kind of appendage of China at the end of all of this, even more so than it already is.

Frum: Yeah, when you mentioned Putin’s belief in “might makes right,” one of the most striking legacies of his rule is going to be the definitive end of Russia as a mighty state. It may overpower Ukraine; it can certainly scare Estonia. But if you think—and you used to do this kind of work—if you project the world of 2036, 10 years from now, we’ll have two superpowers: the United States and China. We’ll have a number of countries that are economically very important, but not militarily strong: India; the European Union, if you think of that as a power player; possibly Japan; possibly Britain. Where’s Russia? Maybe there with Japan and Britain as countries of some economic power because of their natural resources, some military power, but nothing like an India, let alone a China or the United States, in the way that Putin imagined he might be when he started the Ukraine war.

Hill: Yeah, and actually, Russia was on, before this—and, in fact, before seizing Crimea, which I think was the moment where Putin shifted the trajectory of his presidency—Russia was up there in the larger economic powers. There was a whole goal of being not just in the G7 or the G8, but being one of the top five or six global economic powers, and at one point, that looked like that might be possible. But as you’re saying, that’s not likely to be where Russia is, although shifts in its trade patterns still, the commodities, that might bring something. But I think that the world is gonna be a very complex place if I look out to 2036.

I think we’re squandering ourselves, the United States, some of those fundamental bases of power, which you’ve been pointing out in many of your podcasts and other things that you’ve been writing and with your colleagues in The Atlantic. I think that we’re gonna look more at much more regional bases of power. But of course, the United States is still gonna have the ability to shape things in the world, and China is increasingly gonna have more ability, particularly in terms of technology, research, education, all kinds of innovation, to shape the way that everybody else responds. But I wouldn’t rule out India, Brazil, even South Africa, which the United States seems to be in a fight in at the moment, and European countries, perhaps not in the EU configuration, but there’s just been such a jolt to Europe that we shouldn’t rule out some constellation of European countries, maybe in Northern Europe—Scandinavians, the Balts, the Poles, and others—actually really stepping up there in response to what’s happening, especially what’s happening in Greenland, and becoming a much more military place. Finland is significant as a military. We’ve still got Turkey as a major military power. So things could change quite a lot in this next decade.

Frum: Well, the most dramatic slap in the face, and I can’t quite do this math in the head while I’m talking live, but as I sort of pull up what I recall of the figures and just do a quick calculation, we’re not very far away from Poland overtaking Russia in the size of its economy.

Hill: Yes, and Poland is spending about 5 percent now of its GDP on its—

Frum: Yeah, this puts Russia back to where it was in the 1600s, when Poland was the stronger, at least economically. Let me ask you—

Hill: Well, and remember the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was actually Europe’s biggest country and most significant for that period up until when you’re talking about.

Frum: Let me ask you now to change the lens back to Washington. There has always been this strange, mysterious, difficult-to-explain, but unmistakable-to-observe affinity that Trump has had for Putin. And that does seem to continue, that the big Trump idea for ending the war in Ukraine is to cut off the flow of information, reduce the flow of supplies to Ukraine, and put pressure on them to yield to Russia’s terms. Do you have any sense of why, not just Trump, but [special envoy] Steve Witkoff and people around him, think that that’s such a good idea?

Hill: It’s how they think about power and the manifestation of power. They don’t think about “we the people,” as in you, I, and, what is it, 340 million people who live in the United States or the 140 million and declining in Russia. They don’t think anybody has agency apart from big guys and—usually men, of course. And if there are no checks and balances, and you have unfettered power, then that is kind of the epitome of might and might makes right. As Trump himself has said over and over again, most recently in The New York Times lengthy interview, he sees no constraint apart from his own. And that’s how they see Putin, and indeed, Putin has whittled away all of the checks and balances in his system. He seems to be at this pinnacle of this vertical of power and to be unchecked, unconstrained in every way imaginable, and so for them, he’s the guy to deal with. Steve Witkoff and Trump, as real estate moguls, they’d go to the guy who was in charge and then get their guys on lower levels to deal with things from there.

And it’s really the kind of power that Trump has. I remember in Trump 1.0, the former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, who was a good friend of Trump’s—he was a jeweler from New York and had known him for many, many, years. And he was talking about [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán. And in fact, I think it was an interview in The Atlantic, of all things, in which he said, This is what Trump wants. It’s what Donald Trump wants. He wants to be that kind of leader. And in many respects, that means that’s what Putin’s got on him, because he knows that Trump needs his respect, his validation. And I saw that over and over again in Trump 1.0, where Trump would want to call Putin ’cause Putin had said something nice about him on international television or he’d want to talk directly to him, and of course, those discussions are mediated for Trump—and for Witkoff as well. They don’t speak Russian, so it’s always through a translator. They hear what’s being presented to them. They don’t get the sense of the man and how he’s making fun of them and what he really thinks. So this is always problematic. They see what they want to see, which is their own validation in Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin sees that, and he just gives them what they want.

Frum: Is it all about that kind of petty vanity?

Hill: Of course. That’s at the root of things. I’m sorry; it’s just from years of observation of this. Putin knows exactly how to do it. I and many others who study kind of Russia, we’ve all been subjected to this.

There’s a famous episode of Putin helping a Russian politician who there’s no reason why he would help him, and I was related this story by the politician himself, who was done a pretty significant favor by Putin. And this person has actually told this story publicly, but when we asked him why, and he said Putin said to him, when he’d asked the same question, Well, you never know who you might turn out to be or when I might need something from you.

Putin plays to vanities, he plays to vulnerabilities, he plays into times of need because he never knows when he might need something. And they act in the same way—Witkoff, Trump, they’re all kind of birds of a similar feather. But unfortunately, they’re not quite as good at this as Vladimir Putin, because he’s had years of training and honing these skills as a KGB agent, and 25 years of being president of Russia in a pretty vicious political environment.

Frum: It’s like the opening scene of The Godfather: One day, and that day may never come, I will ask a service of you in return.

Hill: Exactly right, exactly right. And the thing is, they all think in similar frames because of where they operated: real estate. It couldn’t be any more similar to the kinds of environments in which Putin operates in. But the thing is, Putin thinks of himself as the head of a state of a state with millennia of history. He talks of himself in that regard. He’s got an idea about being cloaked in the mantle of the power of the state and the church. He sees himself as the heir to all kinds of emperors and even empresses, with Catherine the Great. Trump thinks of just himself. And if he’s thinking of American heroes, it’s just as he defines them, not as they might define him.

Frum: Well, one of the things, if you say it’s about vanity, that is disquieting about all this—there are, of course, all these theories, and I never pretend to know if any of them are true or if none of them are true. There are theories that there is compromise. There are theories that there is bribery. There are theories that Trump is looking forward to some future payoff. And I must say, as contemptible as all of those things would be, they’re somehow less pathetic than he’s looking for compliments. But when you see Trump in the Oval Office with someone else’s Nobel Prize in his greedy little hands, with a smile on his face as if the stolen cup of apple juice tastes just as good as the cup of apple juice that was intended for you, it occurs to you, Yeah, maybe it’s just as dumb and pathetic and cringey and embarrassing as that: that he just loves the compliments.

Hill: It is cringey, and I felt like that many, many times when I was in his presence with world leaders. I would cringe because he was also making himself incredibly obvious. And that’s what Putin is: He’s the master of, obviously, domineering and dominating people. He’s the master of seeing the obvious, but he’s also the master of digging a bit deeper.

Now, in terms of compromising material, we’ve all got all kinds of information on Trump and the enrichment of him and his family. Meme coins—it’s all in plain sight. What more do we need to know about? We’ve got the [Jeffrey] Epstein files and all the scandals about all of that at the moment. Putin doesn’t need any of that. I remember once saying to one of the Russian ambassadors, ’cause I was supposed to be, obviously, giving them the kind of equivalent of démarche about interference in the United States elections, and he ran off a whole host of different things that different people, Americans, had done and said, Can you blame us for that, Miss Hill? And I thought, Got me. Of course not, because we do plenty of things ourselves that actually lay ourselves open to this kind of manipulation, all the mistakes that we make that turn out to be fateful, and we can’t blame Russia for everything here.

Frum: It’s not a question of blaming them—

Hill: No—

Frum: —it’s a question of punishing them.

Hill: —but we’re blaming them for finding information and for using that, because, again, we’re producing plenty of these scandalous episodes and problems ourselves, and they just know how to use them. So I’m just saying that I’ve never been really convinced that Putin had something that was so off the charts in terms of its radioactivity that it could bring Trump down, because so many other things have failed to do so.

Frum: Why can’t Trump see that Putin is less powerful than he was three years ago?

Hill: I think it’s because of his frame from the Cold War in the 1980s. I think it’s still that idea. He’s said it many times in relationship to Ukraine, that Russia is just a big power. He thinks of it just as Putin does.

Frum: But it’s not. That’s the thing I find baffling. The Soviet Union certainly was, and in the first decade of Putin’s reign, Russia looked that way, whether it was or not, but it doesn’t look that way now.

Hill: Yes, but it does to Trump because he doesn’t really listen to the assessments of you, me, or anyone else on this score. For him, it’s the size of a country. So we’re getting back to what we were talking about before: Why does he want Greenland? Because it’s 2 percent bigger, 10,000 square miles bigger, than the Louisiana Purchase. So it would be the biggest real-estate deal in history. Who’s got the biggest real estate in the world? It’s Vladimir Putin. He’s been sort of described as the richest man in the world by everybody from Elon Musk, who clearly is, not Vladimir Putin—he’s not going to cash out and kind of run around the world behaving like a tech mogul. But everybody thinks of this still in terms of just its size and the weight of it on the world stage.

Frum: And the animosity to Ukraine and Zelensky, is that personal? Is that a grudge about 2019 and Zelensky not doing what Trump wanted for the election? Is there something more going on there that—

Hill: It’s all of those things.

Frum: It seems to be a real antipathy. And in [Vice President J. D.] Vance’s case, I get that it’s ideology. Vance wants to bring far-right powers to rule in Europe, and Zelensky’s success would validate the liberal parties. But Trump, it just seems very—what is it?

Hill: It’s those things that you’ve laid out, completely, but I think there’s also another edge to it that gets back to what we’ve just talked about. I think he’s envious, in some respects, about Zelensky, though he would never, ever say that, because Zelensky’s got all the accolades, rightly so, of being a real wartime president, of being somebody who didn’t back down in the face of attempts to push him out. He’s also a small guy, and Trump thinks it a small country, though, in territorial size, Ukraine isn’t a small country. And he’s somebody who has been given the wartime mantle of a Winston Churchill. And Trump hates that. It’s just like [Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina] Machado getting the Nobel [Peace] Prize. And Zelensky just hasn’t backed down, and Zelensky’s had the temerity to take him on, on a number of occasions, to push back. He hates that.

Frum: I know talking in the way I’m about to talk would get me thrown out of a National Security Council meeting for moralism and so on. But is there an issue just that Trump is wicked and cowardly, and he hates people who are good and brave?

Hill: Yeah, look, that’s a cartoon version of it, but obviously, one would kind of say, yes, in some cases, that is the case, but not in all cases, because there are some times when he does express admiration for something that somebody’s done, but it doesn’t necessarily directly affect him. I think that’s kind of the problem, is when somebody takes something that he thinks is his: a Nobel Peace Prize, the attention of the world as a wartime president or somebody who’s at the statue of Winston Churchill, kind of literally—and then he was soured on Churchill for a while when everyone kept comparing Zelensky to Churchill. So I think it comes into that frame in which his own personal validation is at stake. But I think that he can admire other people ’cause I’ve seen that. He isn’t a cartoon character. He’s complicated and complex, even as a—

Frum: Who have you seen him admire? Who have you seen him admire who deserves admiration?

Hill: I was sort of thinking that it’s often people who are not necessarily kind of world figures, somebody who has actually even done something unspeakably good for people, somebody who’s been really brave. He’s often kind of put himself out there for some of the hostages, not just to get accolades for bringing them back. There have been times when he’s done something that won’t necessarily give him popular acclaim all the time, and look, there are a couple of issues that I think he has to be given some credit for. He’s not the kind of person who wants to preside over mass slaughter, even though it might look like it at times when we see what’s happening currently in the country. But he is appalled by what the Iranians are doing. He’s appalled by what Putin’s doing. He was appalled by what [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad did, and he wanted to do something kind of about it. He’s not somebody who wants to have the charnel houses filled with mountains of skulls; that’s not him.

The other thing is that he genuinely wants to see an end to the risk of nuclear war, nuclear Armageddon, just as Biden did—they’re the same age group. He’s been pretty consistent on this. He really did want to finish off the efforts that were started in the 1980s. And this is what’s ironic at the moment because, of course, we’re in a bit of a pickle because the New START treaty has now lapsed. But he really did want to have those big arms-control, arms-negotiation talks, not just with Russia, as the former Soviet Union, but also with China, with Iran, with North Korea. He does actually want to make the world a safer place from a nuclear perspective. And I feel that’s the tragedy, because he perhaps could have done something to that if he’d been more disciplined and more focused and less worried about whether he was going to get all kinds of accolades for it. That was what he was trying to do in Helsinki, back before that disastrous press conference and his first proper meeting with Putin. I think it’s a genuine sentiment on his part.

Frum: So that does de-cartoonify things. So you can give him that.

Hill: Absolutely. Look, and you still get lots of people saying, Look, he’s warm. He’s charismatic. I’ve seen flashes of that. But that’s not sufficient, in my view, to normalize a person (Laughs.) who is doing an enormous amount of damage. And the other thing is that, just like Putin, he’s a pattern breaker, but he’s even more of a pattern breaker than Putin, which actually means he does, obviously, see all of the problems that we’re facing. He’s identified them all, I think, extremely well. He’s broken the pattern. But he’s just not somebody who, beyond real estate, is actually really building something. And because his tendency is towards dividing everyone and conquering them—again, like Putin—and he’s not bringing people together to do things, which perhaps he could have done. So I think it’s almost Shakespearean for me, as though you have the hero, or the person who’s the hero in their own telling of the tale, but their own flaws prevent them from doing the things that they actually think that they want to do and for actually addressing the issues that they have correctly identified as being the key ones.

Frum: Yeah. So it’s part of his self-image—he would like to be a peacemaker if it just didn’t require so much reading.

Hill: Yeah, well, it requires patience (Laughs.) and some strategic thinking. It requires working with others and not short-circuiting the process, which is what he often does and declares peace when it hasn’t actually happened, which then enables the people like Putin and others to come back around again and take advantage of the situation.

Frum: That seems to be what’s happening in Iran as you and I speak, that he made a promise he didn’t mean to keep; the promise became embarrassing, so he declared that the killing had stopped when it obviously had not stopped.

Hill: Right. Look, and we can list all the different places where that has particularly happened. We all know that creating and building peace is very difficult—that’s why we call it “building.” And it’s not the same as building a wonderful tower or kind of a real-estate portfolio. There’s so many other elements of it. And again, Trump’s view, getting back to where we started from, is dealing with just a group of guys and then thinking that everything gets done from that direction. I think he does believe that Rome can be built in a day.

Frum: Last topic area and then I’ll let you go with thanks for your generosity with your time: Nothing lasts forever, and while Trump speaks of wanting a third term, that will be difficult, even assuming his health permits, which is another question mark. In whatever a post-Trump world means, it’s pretty clear that Russia has put some deep grip on the American political right. Trump’s next in line is even more anti-Ukraine than Trump himself. And there are all kinds of influencers and others in the Trump orbit or the pro-Trump world who have received all kinds of benefits from the Russians, and their propaganda messages do seem to shape a lot of the dialogue on the right-hand side of the spectrum. Do you think that outlasts Trump? Is that a phenomenon of Trump’s special affinity for Russia, or have they discovered some technology to influencing right-of-center parties in the United States and Europe?

Hill: Well, it’s definitely the feature of technology—I think that’s absolutely right—and just all the constant innovations that we have in technology that make it much easier to propagate information, and to get the same ideas seeded on larger and larger groups of people than they could have done previously. But in terms of the form of this, we could have said the same about the American and the European left during the Soviet period. You might—

Frum: We could, and we did. (Laughs.)

Hill: And we did, exactly. So there you go, right?

Frum: And we did because it was true.

Hill: It was true, exactly. But what was going on there was, in many respects, there were, as was termed at the time, fellow travelers. Sometimes they intersected, but they were all developing their ideas in parallel, and what, really, was useful to the Soviets at the time was that all of these groups were thinking the same way, and that’s, I think, what we’re seeing again now. We’ve moved around to the views of the right are now in parallel with the views of Russia and of other states, and I think it just makes it easy to become fellow travelers, and sometimes they get on not just on the same bus, but right in the seat next to each other. And of course, that did not completely fade away, because you still see the ties that come out of the old French Communist Party and Italy, for example, and in eastern Germany that still bond with Russia on the left, even though Russia is very much over here on the right, although we all talk about that horseshoe in which the politics have bent around.

So it’s not, I think, self-evident that this will continue post-Trump, but I think it’s now shaped very much these politics of the future. And the real challenge will be how to find a way back again to some central or other definition of our politics in which this trend is neutralized, just as is what happened over time in Europe and in America on the left.

Frum: And this phenomenon seems to be as advanced, if not even more so, in Europe and England than it is here.

Hill: Well, I don’t think it’s more advanced than here, but I think that the United States is playing a role in advancing that.

Frum: In advancing these kinds of pro-Russian, far-right, authoritarian—

Hill: People like [British politician] Nigel Farage and others have had to kind of repudiate their links with Russia in the current European environment, but Farage and GB News, of course, are just joined at the hip with Truth Social. Farage is very much driven by his relationship with Trump. And so it’s been quite difficult. You’ve had their head of reform from Wales in jail from actually accepting money from the Russians.

Frum: Reform is the new right-of-center party that is overtaking the Conservatives in support in the United Kingdom.

Hill: Correct, the U.K. Independence Party successor, with Nigel Farage at the top, shifting from pushing for Brexit, for the U.K.’s removal from the European Union, now using immigration. And now they’re trying to also pick up the same sets of issues that has been shaped here in the United States rather than in Russia, per se.

But we’ve seen funding from Russians. We’re now seeing quite a lot of efforts from the United States. And ironically, it’s both the U.S. and Russia that are shaping a lot of the thinking of these right-wing movements and parties, as you said, in the U.K. and in Europe. At the same time, you’re getting quite a lot of popular and political revulsion to not just what Russia is doing in Ukraine, but what the United States is doing with Greenland, etc. So I think this is gonna be pretty messy.

Frum: Yeah. Last question—then I’ll let you go. The czarist regime looked enormously strong until it unexpectedly collapsed. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union looked terrifyingly strong until it abruptly collapsed. Do you see any possibility of a similar kind of collapse of Putinist power?

Hill: Sure. We’re only one step away from all kinds of uncertainty with his health as well. And as Bill Burns said some time ago, former head of the CIA, unfortunately, he seems extremely healthy. (Laughs.) He’s had his health scares, like most of us do, but he’s in his 70s now; he’s heading towards his mid-70s. He was born in October 1952, so he’s not quite 75 yet, but this year, he’s 74. You don’t know how long people are going to continue with all of their faculties. Trump, of course, turns 80 this year. So anything where Putin looks like he might be losing his grip, any singular disaster within the Russian economy or something else that is a major setback—look how fragile things appeared to be when Yevgeny Prigozhin started his march on Moscow. We don’t know what could trigger things off; it’s all about events.

There is a great deal of uncertainty here in this current geopolitical climate, as you’ve already laid out, and the economy isn’t doing as well as it [was]. What if the Europeans suddenly get a backbone and a spine? What if there’s a change of heart or a change of government here in the United States? What if President Xi of China suddenly starts to feel that maybe this close association with Russia is not benefiting in the way that they thought, and they might need to nudge Putin and Russia in a different direction? I think it’s gonna be very hard for Putin to contemplate peace, for all of the reasons that we talked about before; he’s purely now a wartime president. He came into office against the backdrop of the war in Chechnya in 2000 as a wartime president. It’s been the hallmark of his presidencies for 25 years. He could have done something different, but there’s still kind of all of that risk, because he’s chosen war over peace, that things could go wrong.

Frum: Fiona Hill, thank you so much for your insights and for your service.

Hill: Thank you so much, David. Great to be with you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Fiona Hill for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a travelogue by the great novelist and essayist V. S. Naipaul. The book is Among the Believers, published in 1981. It’s V. S. Naipaul’s account of journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia in the years 1979 and 1980—that is, in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution that has now misgoverned Iran and has come to such bloody spasms in the days and weeks just past.

Naipaul wanted to understand how it was that a country that’s seemingly on its way to modernization, as Iran had been in the 1970s—Iran under the Shah [Mohammad] Reza Pahlavi had been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world—how a country seemingly fast-forwarding toward modernization could have taken the giant step backward that it took with the Iranian Revolution. He interviewed people in the city of Qom, which is the center of the Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini’s, the first supreme leader of Iran’s, religious power. And he interviewed everyday, ordinary people as well.

There’s no big moment of reveal in these encounters; they’re very everyday. They’re very perceptive—he is a brilliant novelist, and he can make a character come to life with a few strokes of a pen. But he did have one guiding insight that he repeats a couple of times in the course of his visit to Iran in 1979 and ’80 and this travelogue in 1981, and it’s really worth thinking about today as we try to understand how the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and ’80 went so disastrously wrong in every way for the people of Iran.

Naipaul’s observation was that the new religious leadership of Iran, although they took a step backward in terms of human rights, women’s rights, human autonomy, they did not want to give up the good things—the tools of power. I shouldn’t say the good things; they were prepared to get rid of music. But they didn’t wanna give up the instrumentalities of wealth and power of the modern world. They didn’t wanna stop the oil from being pumped by modern oil-pumping technology. They didn’t wanna give up buying weapons and surveillance technology. They wanted all of those things. And he was baffled as to how people who turned their back on the culture and civilization that could produce these good things still wanted and still believed they could wield these instrumentalities. And he discusses this at two or three points in the course of the book, and let me quote just a couple of them here as guides to Naipaul’s thinking.

One of the things about Naipaul’s career as a writer, I should say, was he was a famously kind of dyspeptic and even misanthropic person, without any kind of regard for the niceties of human existence. That made him a very difficult person to be around, and those people who knew him have all kinds of harsh stories (Laughs.) about how difficult it could be to know him. But it also meant that he was utterly free from cant and euphemism in a way that will maybe seem a little startling in the world of 2026, when cant and euphemism surround us so often.

He described the affinity of the revolutionary groups in Iran for these Western technologies. He says, and I’m quoting the beginning of a sentence here, Western—that’s not in the quote—Western, and here the quote begins, “technology surrounded us in Tehran, and some of it had been so Islamized or put to such good Islamic use that its foreign origin seemed of no account. The hotel taxi driver could be helped through the evening traffic jams by the Quranic readings on his car radio; and when we got back to the hotel there would be mullahs on television. Certain modern goods and tools—cars, radios, television—were necessary; their possession was part of a proper Islamic pride. But these things were considered neutral; they were not associated with any particular faith or civilization; they were thought of as the stock of some great universal bazaar.”

And as he gets to the end of his trip, he returns to this observation, and this time, he turns it into kind of the conclusion or the thesis of his whole section of the book—I won’t discuss the parts on the other countries—but the whole section of his book on Iran under the ayatollahs. He describes the Ayatollah Khomeini, the maker of the revolution, as self-perceiving himself as an interpreter, and this is [where the] quote begins, “interpreter of God’s will, leader of the faithful, he expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith: the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of [a] great encircling civilization. That civilization couldn’t be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time, it was to be depended [on].”

Now, in the years since 1981, it’s become apparent that these tools of technological power can be developed by societies that reject Western ideals of freedom and individuality. China is, for all practical purposes, a technological peer of the Western world without absorbing, or preserving, many of these Western ideals of individuality and freedom and autonomy. So it can be done. But in the core of the Islamic world, and especially in Iran, it was not done. And Naipaul challenges us to think, Why not? Why couldn’t the Islamic Republic achieve what China achieved: some kind of self-sustaining capacity to run a modern state in an effective way? They had the oil. They had the money. Yes, they had extreme plans of aggression. They poured hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of wealth into building the kind of empire of aggression aimed at Israel, but also at other states in the region. They built an empire that reached, at one point, all the way to the Mediterranean, all the way to Afghanistan, and they paid a lot of money for that. But they were never able to develop, despite the extraordinary skills of Iranian hackers that we see of Iranian computer culture, any kind of properly functioning technological economic system. Something went terribly wrong, and that has been the trigger for this revolution. Because for Iran, maybe unlike China, that encircling world, you’re either in it, or you’re not in it. And one of the messages of the tumults we have seen in Iran is that people, even people who maybe reject some of the values of the Western world, they want its benefits.

That project of getting the benefits of Western civilization without its freedom and rights, that’s one that has vexed tyrants all over the world. Some of them have somewhat succeeded, like the Chinese. The Iranians, like the Russians, have failed. And that failure is having enormous political consequences. And all of us who watch these horrible events in Iran from afar have to wish this brave and courageous people every success on their way to rediscovering, reclaiming what should be theirs. And we who have watched this also have to deal with the feelings of terrible shame that the United States made such promises to them through the mouth of its president, promises that, at least as I record, have not been honored and that have led many to tragic and perhaps unnecessary and avoidable deaths.

Thank you so much for watching The David Frum Show this week. As ever, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you will consider doing that. I hope you will consider following me on social media, especially Instagram, X (Twitter). At both places, I’m @DavidFrum. I will see you and talk to you next week on The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for listening and for watching. Bye-bye.