J. D. Vance's Bargain With the Devil

The Atlantic

2 days ago

On this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a Memorial Day message about corruption and extortion in the Trump White House, including revelations about meme-coin pay-to-play schemes and foreign-financed golf courses.
Then David is joined by his Atlantic colleague George Packer to discuss Packer's new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance. They examine Vance's sharp political turn from thoughtful memoirist to contemptuous shape-shifter, and debate whether Vance believes what he says or just knows what power demands.
David closes the episode with a reflection on Edward Luce's new biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski and what Brzezinski's legacy says about American power today.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 8 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be George Packer, an Atlantic colleague and author of an incisive new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, 'The Talented Mr. Vance.'
At the end of the program, I'm going to discuss a little bit—I have some thoughts about an important new book, a biography of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski by Ed Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times.
But first, let me offer some thoughts on the week just passed. I record this discussion on Memorial Day 2025, the day when Americans honor those who have served America to the utmost of human capability by laying down their lives for their country. It seems a fitting occasion to try to address the monstrous display of self-service we have seen in the past days from the Trump administration, this staggeringly corrupt administration—not just the most corrupt administration in American history, but one of the most corrupt administrations in any democratic country ever.
Two things just from the week's docket. This past week, President Trump hosted a dinner for more than 200 people who were invited to dinner with the president of the United States because they had purchased souvenir meme coins directly from his company. They paid millions of dollars. Many of them were foreign nationals. We don't know their names, because those have not been disclosed, but they directly bought access to the president of the United States by putting money into the hands of his own company in exchange, really, for nothing because these are just souvenir meme coins. They're not worth anything. And everyone who's invested in them has lost money because they devalue once you've had your access to the president. Maybe you're investing in the hope of continued future access to the president, but they have no function, no purpose, no value. They're just ways for people who want access to buy it, and buy it directly from the president himself and his family and his companies.
The same week, The New York Times obtained a copy of a letter from inside the Vietnamese government explaining why they were bending their own laws to make possible a golf course—a Trump golf course—in Vietnam, which the Vietnamese government is largely financing, and for which it's providing land and other services. The letter explained that the golf-course project was, quote, 'receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Trump personally.'
Since Donald Trump became president, billions of dollars have flowed from Americans and from people worldwide into his pocket— billions of dollars. And the largest share of those billions of dollars has been from his meme-coin business. Some estimate that the president has more than doubled his net worth just since January, all because of these direct payments to him and, of course, these golf courses that he's opening in the Persian Gulf and in Vietnam, often financed by the host governments looking to achieve Donald Trump's failure. Sorry—looking to achieve his favor. The projects may be failures, but the favor is real.
Now, some trying to explain what is happening invoke comparisons from American history: Watergate; Teapot Dome, a great scandal of the 1920s; if you're very historically minded, you may mention the scandals around the Ulysses Grant administration. But all of that falls so far short of the truth, as to create and enter this world of mind-bending alternatives. Donald Trump's corruption cannot be compared to anything in American history.
I have an article this week in The Atlantic that goes into some of the details, but just to refresh memory: In the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was trying to place bugs or get some information from inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. He used campaign funds to hire burglars to break into the premises and do their mischief. And then when they were caught, he organized further government funds and—sorry; not government funds, further campaign funds—to try to buy the burglars' silence and to use government power to cover it up.
It's a big, big, serious scandal. But Nixon was not doing any of this to enrich himself. He was doing it to compete and win in a presidential election in a way that was beyond the rules. That was illegal but was not motivated by his personal appetite for wealth and position. Teapot Dome, which was a scandal in the 1920s, involved people in the Harding administration—not President Harding himself—accepting bribes to open government oil reserves to private exploration. And the Grant administration was riddled with all kinds of scandals: people cheating on excise taxes on whiskey, speculating on gold and silver and paper money.
But again, President Grant, although he was protective of the people in his administration who did these wrong things, he himself was completely uncontaminated, as was, as far as anybody knows, President Harding in Teapot Dome. Nixon was contaminated, but he was not taking money. He was using campaign funds to support his reelection in a dishonest and illegal way.
What is happening with Donald Trump cannot be compared. The scale of the self-enrichment—billions of dollars flowing to the president and his family, not just from American donors, which would be shocking enough, but from people all over the world—this can't be compared to anything in American history. It's more like something from a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African state. It is a scale—in terms of the money being diverted to the president, it's on a scale as big as anything the world has seen in the modern era.
You might call it bribery. Except there's something about the word bribery that conjures up the image that the bribe taker is kind of passive: A bribe taker is in office doing some function, and then there's a rap on the bribe taker's door, and there's the briber offering a bribe to pervert the bribe taker from the bribe taker's proper, official duty.
What's going on in the Trump administration is not so passive as that. It looks like Donald Trump is taking the initiative. The Vietnamese were not urging the Trump family, Please, please, please accept a golf course from us. Donald Trump was squeezing them, as they wrote in writing, in a letter published by The New York Times —Donald Trump was squeezing them—to approve his golf course. It wasn't someone else who said to Donald Trump, Here. Please, take our money. He invented the meme coin—or he and his confederates invented the meme coin—that offered a way for people to seek his favor.
And to back all of this up, at the same time as he was selling these meme coins, his administration has undertaken a series of arbitrary and punitive executive actions that threaten people, If you don't get in my good graces, bad things will happen to you. As a law firm, you will be punished in various ways unless you submit to me. As a private university, you'll be subject to personal reactions that we'll single out a university, and we will say you can't have foreign visa holders. He has attacked other kinds of businesses and institutions. He's got this whole tariff schedule that allows him to retaliate against businesses that incur his disfavor. There's one tariff for Apple. There's a different tariff for other people. There's one tariff for businesses in one set of countries, different tariffs in other countries. And the tariffs, of course, can be laid on and alleviated, laid on again, and alleviated according to his personal whim.
This isn't bribery. This is extortion. This isn't centering the bribe taker as the target of someone else's action, but as actually the architect and author of the scheme. And what we're seeing here is extortion on a kind of scale, again, unlike anything in American history: billions of dollars from people who are seeking favor, seeking to protect themselves from disfavor, and finding ways—not finding ways, being offered by the president and his family ways to buy the favor of the president and his family.
If the president likes you—if you're a candidate for mayor of New York and the president likes you—you get pardoned for your crimes. If you're a candidate for the mayor of New York and the president doesn't like you, he opens an investigation into you. As the president of South Africa said when Donald Trump was lecturing him, 'I wish I had a plane to give you.' Because, of course, if you give the president a plane, there's no limit to what you can get.
It's hard for Americans to wrap their minds around the idea that this country is not an example to others—a positive example—that its institutions are not somehow robust, that everything won't be all right. But what we are watching here is an attack on all of those foundational premises of American life. This is a scene not out of American history; it is an orgy of extortion and corruption unlike anything I've ever seen before in this country, and only comparable to things seen in the countries of the world that Donald Trump once called 'shitholes.' Why are shithole country shitholes? Not because they're poor, but because the authorities are not responsive to the people. The authorities are perverted from their duty and use that perversion as an opportunity for self-enrichment and aggression to the detriment of their own societies.
It's on this day when we ought to honor everything that is good, we ought, also, to hold the measure in our minds of what is happening that is wrong, and not accept easy excuses and not shrug it off and not allow ourselves to find some kind of consolation, that maybe there's something in the 1870s that is like this. There is nothing in American history that is like this, ever. And if we absorb that knowledge and if we feel it, and if we feel the proper shame and anger, only then will we be in position to take the corrective action that your national duty calls upon you. So much was asked from others on this Memorial Day. That's what's asked from you on this Memorial Day.
And now my dialogue with George Packer. But first, a quick break.
[ Music ]
Frum: I'm so glad and grateful to welcome my old, dear friend George Packer to The David Frum Show. George is a writer who braves the darkest and most dangerous places, beginning with his observations as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa in the 1980s. His book The Assassins' Gate is a wise, humane, and chastened account of the American experience in Iraq.
It was followed by The Unwinding, which told the story of the Great Recession and its aftermath, jump cutting from the lives of the casualties of the Great Recession to the men and women in the halls of power. George's biography of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, is a subtle, often hilarious, study of great power in the hands of not necessarily quite so great power holders.
I've known George since the fall of 1978, when he was the bright, shining star of a freshman seminar at Yale University. I'm proud and grateful now to call him a colleague at The Atlantic. We will discuss today his most recent piece for The Atlantic, a profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, 'The Talented Mr. Vance.'
George, welcome to the program.
George Packer: David, it's great to be with you, and I'm thrilled that you've got a show of your own, which you've sort of been preparing for all the years I've known you.
Frum: Thank you. Let me test a thesis on you. Donald Trump is, perhaps, not that interesting a human being. I mean, obviously, it's a hugely consequential presidency, shocking in its effects on the United States and the world. And understanding why Donald Trump is doing what he's doing, that's important and necessary. But as a person, there doesn't seem to be much in there. He's like some beast, some crocodile: He eats. He dominates. He hurts. He's an adaptive predator, but his interior story is not that interesting.
Great villains require more of a backstory, more interiority, more rise and fall. And—let me keep testing this—J. D. Vance has that backstory. You know, the greatest of all literary villains is John Milton's Lucifer, who starts as the brightest of the angels and then has the steepest fall. Maybe there's something kind of Luciferian about J. D. Vance. I mean, he's someone—we know this from his own words—that he knows the difference between right and wrong. He saw Donald Trump as wrong. He became one of the most eloquent critics of the wrongness of Donald Trump. And then when opportunity beckoned, he chose wrong. He chose wrong, fully knowing what he was doing, aware of its consequences. He took a long time. He brooded over the decision, and then he made the choice. It's epic. It's literary. It's Luciferian. And it's more interesting than the crocodile that simply bites children and drags them under the Nile and drowns them for fun.
Packer: Lucifer's strong, David. That's a tough one to embrace. But I was with you most of the way, and here's why: You're right about Trump—completely right. Crocodile is the perfect analogy, and Vance is a far more interesting creature because of his life story. He came from nowhere and from a lot of deprivation and abuse. Because of his talent, because he's thrived in so many different environments—whether it was the Marine Corps in Iraq, or Yale Law School, or the world of Silicon Valley investors, or the world of the far-right MAGA politics—he's risen through all of those.
And so he is sensitive. He is empathetic. He is capable of self-criticism and self-reflection. Just pick up Hillbilly Elegy and open it anywhere, and you find this voice of someone who you want to talk to and who perhaps could have been a writer, because of that ability to think about himself and the world in ways that are surprising, complex, and, above all, honest. There's none of that skimming and shining the surface a little bit that so many public figures do when they write a book.
He was not a public figure when he wrote it, a bit like Barack Obama with Dreams From My Father. He was not a public figure when he wrote that, and it's a far better book than anything Obama has written since then. And I don't expect J. D. Vance to write a better book than Hillbilly Elegy at this point.
Where I might disagree, or at least question, the Lucifer thesis a bit is: I am not certain that he knows that he chose wrong. I'm not sure about that. I think he convinced himself, because it's very hard to live with yourself if you know you've chosen wrong. Just day after day, it's hard to live with yourself. I think he convinced himself sometime after 2016—when Hillbilly Elegy became a sensation and Trump won the presidency, he convinced himself—that what his people, the working-class people, especially the white working-class people of the Rust Belt, needed was Trump's policies. And from there, it was another step to Trump's manner, to Trump's rhetoric, to Trump's whole thing.
And so I think at some point, he decided, Those Yale Law School people, those FrumForum people, those moderate conservatives have no real interest in my people. And in fact, their policies have hurt them, and so I'm going to go all in with Trump. It just so happened that that coincided with the path to power because it was the only way a Republican was going to rise at that point, was to go along with Trump. So I think he persuaded himself he was doing the right thing, even though he was so blatantly betraying just about everything that he had written in Hillbilly Elegy.
Frum: You allude to my own personal history with J. D. Vance in our days together from FrumForum, a website I ran from 2009 to 2012. But before I get to that, let me just pick up on your answer with a reference to the title of your story. The story is called 'The Talented Mr. Vance,' which is a reference to a novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a sociopathic killer who has no interior life at all, who simply adapts himself, sequentially becoming one person after another with nothing on the inside. That play on words in the title, is that supposed to tell us your idea about who J. D. Vance is?
Packer: Again, I can't read the book—and even more than that, listen to him talk about the book as he did a lot back in 2016, 2017—without feeling that there is a thoughtful, decent, reflective man inside this sort of unformed, not-quite-there 30-year-old who had suddenly jumped onto the scene. I can't help thinking that he was not a hollow man, that he had gifts—not just the gifts of rhetoric and intellect and appetite for power, which clearly he has and had—but gifts of thought and moral reasoning. And so in that sense, even though that title was very clever—wasn't mine, but I salute whoever came up with it as having put a clever title on the piece, because there is something about Vance that makes you think, Is there anyone there? He seems able to move from A to Z without blinking.
Nonetheless, I think maybe compared to the original, there's more there. And that, too, makes him interesting. And I think you mentioned this, maybe—I don't know: There's a Nixonian comparison to be made. There's a comparison to a man who came out of nowhere with a very rough upbringing and a grievance, a sense of having been wronged, who had tremendous talent and intellect, and could have risen to greatness, and then also chose wrong. So of all the figures from our lives, David, that I would analogize him to, it would be Nixon.
Frum: George, your reference to J. D. Vance and his attitude toward 'my people' summons to mind a story. I didn't spend a lot of time close-up to President Obama, but I had one occasion to have a close-up view of him when he came as near to losing his cool as I can imagine Barack Obama ever came. We were in a group of writers, and one of the writers arraigned President Obama for not doing enough for Black America. And Obama, he just seemed to tighten up, and he explained, I'm not president of Black America. I'm president of all of America. And he said, in fact, They're all my people. And that's the attitude we hope to see from the leaders of the nation: however the route you took to power, that when you get there, you get this wider view. That doesn't seem to have happened to Vance at all.
Packer: Vance does not see himself as the vice president of all Americans, and he behaves as if he's the vice president of MAGA and of, quote, 'his people.'
But 'his people' is—I think it's become a very instrumental term for him because anything can be justified in the name of the mistreated working class of America, any policy, any lie—for example, the lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He was called out on that because he had to admit that he had made up the story, or the story had been made up and he had amplified it. But when he was called out, he said, I'll do anything to get the media to pay attention to the suffering of —he didn't put it this way, but— my people. In other words, I can lie. I can justify cutting off aid to Ukraine and anything else you'd like, in the name of where I come from.
It reminds me of his speech at the Republican convention, where he made a point—something I've never heard an American politician at that level say—which was: We're really not so much about ideas, or not only about ideas. The great principles of the founding documents were about a home and a place you're willing to defend. And he began to talk about the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where his ancestors are buried, and where he hopes to be buried, and he hopes his kids will be buried. It was a little bit of a disturbing image to me. That's America. So, It's soil. In fact, it's blood and soil. And now we're nowhere near liberal democracy. We're in another place. And so I think however much he believes in that, that is where J. D. Vance has gone. And it makes him not the vice president of America, because to be the vice president of America, you have to believe that those ideas are vital and foundational and for all of us.
Instead, it's class war. And he once said, Everything makes sense when you realize that culture war is class war, meaning: All the culture-war issues that he has been using in the last few years to rise in power, he turns into class war against the elites and is therefore, in his own mind, justified in using them.
Frum: To what class does he think Peter Thiel and Elon Musk belong? Because he works for them as much or more than he works for anybody in Ohio.
Packer: Yeah, he has swapped one set of elites for another, and in that sense, there is a kind of 'Talented Mr. Vance' quality because he had to be, in a sense, civilized by Yale Law School. And he writes about this quite candidly in Hillbilly Elegy, partly with the help of his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Usha. He had to learn the ways of the Ivy League. He had to learn how to use the silverware at a dinner party. He had to learn that when someone asks whether you want white wine, you then have to figure out which kind of white wine you want.
All of that took a toll, I think, but he did it brilliantly. Then he abandoned that elite, the meritocratic elite—the Ivy League elite—for a different elite. He swapped one for another. And as you say, David, the new elite that he's part of—and they are an elite—is the elite of the far right who are billionaire tech investors and entrepreneurs and media figures: Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr. Those are his patrons now. Those are his friends. And so it's a bit rich to say, Yeah, we're fighting on behalf of my people against the elites.
Frum: Yeah. It's a funny construction of social class when you say that the real elite are people who say, I have read some books, not people who say, I have some billions of dollars.
One of the things that makes you the great writer that you are is your wide human sympathy, your ability to go into all kinds of situations and see people, both what they are and what they could be. And that's your genius as a writer. And my limit as a writer is that I don't have that, and I take just darker views of why people do the things they do.
So I was present at the creation of Hillbilly Elegy. I met J. D. Vance—I think it was maybe the summer before he started Yale Law School, or the summer after his first year at Yale Law School, and he began submitting articles to my website. We had lunch in Washington, D.C. I got to know him. He came to my house a few times, sometimes with his wife, sometimes not. And I wouldn't say we were exactly friends, but we were friendly. And I thought I knew him, and when the book was in the genesis stage, he originally sounded me out on: What did I think of the idea?
And the idea was, he wanted to do a book about practical solutions to the problems of poverty in white, rural America. And this is—the FrumForum website was very technocratic, very solutions oriented. I thought this was a fantastic idea. It's a fantastic idea, and I encouraged him and promoted it and urged him to go forward with it. Along the way, another of his mentors at the time, Amy Chua, said, This book would be even better if you wrote a short, personal introduction describing who you are and how you fit into all these solutions you're about to offer. And then this package fell into the hands of a genius editor, Eric Nelson, who's also the editor of my Trump books. And Eric said, Fine. Let's take those two pages. That's the book. Let's throw away all the rest, because no one's going to read that.
And look—from a literary point of view, yes; from a commercial point of view, yes. But you know what, I think? I think he couldn't write the other book. I think he actually didn't have any ideas about what to do for Ohio and rural America, and that he went into the personal end into the story then with the grievances a minor theme, later to the grievances—because when you say, Okay, well how do we get them better internet? If we can't bring jobs to them anymore, maybe we should encourage, you know—find ways that the federal government can help people to move to where the jobs are. People—you know, as our colleague Yoni Applebaum [writes in] his new book out—people move less. But all the things using the mechanics of government and public-private investment to help people.
And he came to that point in the project and was just rendered mute because it wasn't the way his mind worked. It wasn't the way his nature was. It wasn't what he was interested in. And so he doesn't want to help his people; he just wants to use his people. Where his heart is—you know, he now claims to be a Christian and a Catholic. But as the holy book that he claims to believe in says, 'Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,' and his treasure is with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, not with the people back in Ohio.
Packer: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I wasn't there at the creation, so I didn't have that that moment of revelation that you did when you realized, No, he actually can't write this book, whether it's because he doesn't have the answers or doesn't care enough about the answers, or there are no answers. It's a pretty compelling insight into him. I don't know. I honestly don't know.
As I said earlier, David, I think he thinks that tariffs; and mass deportation; and telling the Supreme Court, The Chief Justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it; and deification, as he wants to put it, of the civil service; and all of the destructive (really, the nihilistic) policies that MAGA at least claims to be for—I think he really does believe that those are somehow in the interest of his people. Are they? I don't think so. In fact, I could go through each one of those and say why it's not going to work or it has nothing to do with his people.
And the proof of that is: well, look at the bill that is slowly limping its way through Congress. What does that bill have to do with the interests of the son or the daughter of a waitress and a laid-off steel worker? Almost nothing. It has a lot to do with the interests of Elon Musk. And J. D. Vance will say anything at this point to let Donald Trump know, I no longer think you're cultural heroin, as he wrote in The Atlantic. I no longer think you might be America's Hitler, as he wrote in a private message. I think you're the greatest president in history. He has to prove his loyalty every day in order to have a shot at the next level. Because all Trump cares about is loyalty, and even that, he doesn't care all that much about, because he'll certainly cast you aside if you're no longer useful to him.
And so he's going to go to bat for every one of these policies, and he's going to do it, in his own mind, in the name of his people because it gives him a sense, I think, of moral purpose, of political destiny. And his trajectory is—it's fascinating. As I wrote in my piece—and I'm getting a bit away, now, from what you just said, but—he has been there at every interesting moment of the American story in the past 25 years.
And in a sense, at every step that he has risen, America has declined a little more. His rise coincides with our decline, and in a way is an emblem of our decline. Because why does he say the things he does and has been saying since 2021 or 2020? Because that is what his political movement requires. It requires him not to be, as you said, vice president of all America. It requires him to actually be actively hostile to a lot of America, to target them, to speak ill of whole groups, large groups. So that's in a sense, in order to succeed in the political world, the culture we live in, he had to become the figure that he is. And whether or not there was anything authentic in that conversion, whether or not he is a deeply believing Catholic or has used Catholicism in a way to get bona fides with a certain kind of intellectual, conservative movement. I don't know. I just can't say.
Frum: Yeah, let me ask you one more. I mean, in the end, you say in the piece that what we pretend to be is what we become. And there are very few consistent phonies or self-conscious phonies because it's too hard. But to a point about who he is and how real it is, you wrote your own origin story, Blood of the Liberals —and it's a very powerful and beautiful book, and it's about the coming together of, among other things, two different lines of American life, your father's line and your mother's line. Very, very different stories of very different kinds of people, and they produce you. And probably almost every American can say the same thing. You know, On the one hand, I'm this. On the other hand, I'm that.
So when Vance gave that 'blood and soil' speech about seven generations of Vances buried in this cemetery and, I hope my kids will be there, the little bell didn't ring. Well, that's true of one side of your children's life. But the other side is not seven generations of Americans. There's seven generations somewhere—everyone has seven generations somewhere—but they came here, they're new, and they're part of the American story too. And do you not honor your wife's place in the American story? And do you dishonor, therefore, half of your children's existence? That only one side of their family story deserves to be told?
And if writing the newcomer out of the American story is un-American, there's something even more strange, unfatherly, about writing your children's mother out of your children's life story.
Packer: Mm-hmm.
So there was a moment when his wife was introducing him at the convention, and she mentioned that she had taught him to make vegetarian Indian cuisine, and there was a sort of gasp or unsettled murmur in the crowd. That did not go over well with the delegates at the Republican convention.
What I've read and heard is that his children are being raised with both Catholic and Hindu traditions, that they were dressed in traditional Indian clothing when he went to India with his family and met with [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi, that, in other words, he hasn't written that out of the story. And he got married in two ceremonies: one Christian, one Hindu. So I don't know that he is unfatherly in that way. I wouldn't say that.
But I would say that we don't hear much about it, that a lot of what he says could be taken as a kind of an affront to that other side of his family and his children's family because he has nothing good to say about immigrants. Even legal immigrants, they're just not part of his vision of what makes America great. It's, What makes America great is the soil, the home, the willingness to defend the home, the ability to trace your home back a long, long way. And anyone else—including you and me, David, because we're coastal elites who despise, supposedly, the people buried in that cemetery—we are to be targeted as well. We are to be mocked and written out of the American story.
And so it's gotten narrower and narrower, that vision. Until now, it's about as narrow as a grave in an Appalachian cemetery. And it's chilling because, as you said earlier, very wisely, it should be growing with each rise to a new level of power. But that's not his America, and it may not be the America we're in right now, where a politician rises by having an embracing vision of the country.
Frum: Let me ask you one last question, then I'll lead the mic to you because I know you have some things you want to say.
Is it worthwhile, judging him at all? Are we going through a worthwhile exercise? And let me elaborate: There's a school of political science called functionalism that studies authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany but others too. It says it doesn't matter who these people were, what their backstory was. It only matters what they did, and the way we understand the regime they served is by looking at the regime's actions.
And one of the things I notice is—and there's a lot of chaos, of course, in the Trump administration. But as you watch who lost employment after the Signal scandal, who is being purged now from Pete Hegseth's chaotic Department of Defense, what's happening at the State Department, what's happening with the departure of a hundred professionals from the National Security Council—and each of these events has its own complex history and its own explanation, but—the net effect of them has been, as I see it, to disempower the more inherited Republican Party. And the test for that is support for Ukraine.
And [the effect is] to empower—I wouldn't call them the Vance faction, because they're not necessarily Vance's particular people, but they're—people who share his view and the Musk view and the Thiel view and the Tucker Carlson view of, America is just another predatory great power with no friends. And there are no moral constraints on American action. And by the way, if the president steals or extorts or takes bribes, that's not a problem from an American foreign-policy point of view. In fact, that's kind of a feature. That's a microcosm of the way the whole country is going to treat the rest of the world.
That's the way the administration is going. And, again, Vance doesn't exactly articulate it. I don't know that these are people who are loyal to him. I don't know how much personal say he has in saying, This person leaves the Defense Department, and this person comes in, but add it all up, and it's the administration becoming more Vance-like all the time.
And maybe the question of who he is and why he is doesn't matter very much. Maybe we just need to understand what he's doing and what is happening around him.
Packer: Well, I was interested in who he is, because I'm interested in human character, but I think if you simply are interested in the present and future of the country, of course, you're right. What matters is what they do and what they are willing to do.
That's the thing that frightens me about Vance, is not only what he's doing now—and perhaps he is having a hand in the purging of those internationalist Republicans who are the last of that dying breed in the Trump administration—but what he's willing to do, because he does seem willing to do or say a great deal that you would never have anticipated 10 years ago or even five years ago. And whether or not we should be judging him morally, he is constantly invoking morality in what he does and invoking his Catholicism in what he does.
He was in Rome just twice in the last few weeks, the first time as the last foreign leader to see Pope Francis before he died and then one of the first foreign leaders to sit down with Pope Leo. So there's a kind of moral story that he wants to tell, which is the story of the return of the oppressed. And those oppressed are not just any oppressed—they're his oppressed. But [it's] to justify, as I said earlier, almost any policy, any cruelty, any violation of, whether it's the Constitution, the law, or just decency, including sending, first, noncitizens and then possibly citizens to foreign gulags. So that's all of that somehow in the name of making this class of Americans the center of our life.
Again, once you've decided that that's your mission, then there really isn't much of a limit, because you have a moral justification in your own mind. And I do think the administration—I mean, Trump, was already there, so it's not as though Vance is pushing Trump in this direction. Vance has aligned himself with this direction and has said essentially to Trump and to the country, In four years, in three years, I will be the reincarnation. I will be the next installment of this brutal, narrow vision of what America is—this bully, great power, this Russia of the West that simply does what's in its interest and has no friends, no allies, and is just looking out for the next deal.
And that means that we will be looking at more of it in the indefinite future from the Republican side because Vance is the heir apparent, and there he will allow no daylight between himself and Trump.
Frum: There was a saying in the days of the Habsburg monarchy that ruled Austro-Hungarian [empire] from 18th, 19th century, that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a system of despotism mitigated by Schlamperei, which is a Viennese German word that translates as a 'slovenliness,' but funny, desperate, doesn't admit it. So the saving grace of Trump is always the slovenliness, the carelessness—that he has an executive order to cancel the free-trade agreement with South Korea; his top economic aide steals the executive order off his desk before he can sign it, and then he forgets all about it because he's consumed with Shark Week. I mean, it's not a very appealing escape clause, but it did provide some relief, especially in the first term. He was just so chaotic and incompetent and forgetful and didn't have object permanence.
There's no slovenliness with J. D. Vance. I mean, now, he has probably less of a connection to the actual vote. For all the talk of 'my people,' they probably like him a lot less than they like Donald Trump. They may do less for him. They may be less likely to turn out for them. But he is an ideologue, and he may be more than a believer. And his people serve as a justification for the ideologue. He's not actually serving them, but he's invoking them to justify what he wants to do.
He may be the most ideological person in one of the two top jobs. I'm trying to think of who would be the previous example of someone who was. I mean, Reagan was pretty Reagan ideological—
Packer: Reagan.
Frum: —but it was tempered by his good nature.
Packer: —and long experience and practicality. Yeah, pragmatism. Sure.
Yeah, I think that's right. He is an ideologue, and he reads—at least claims; his friends say. You know, in the Marine Corps, they talked about [Christopher] Hitchens and Ayn Rand and even Locke and Hobbes, and before he ditched the classical liberal writers for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and the new right of Patrick Deneen, who he considers a kind of mentor, I think.
Yes, he's an ideologue. And what is it that motivates his ideology? I find it hard to describe it in any positive terms. I think it's motivated by the enemies who he hates. What groups are the outgroups? What groups need to be punished because they have somehow betrayed America, whether it's Harvard or Paul, Weiss law firm or the bureaucracy in Washington.
And so there is that kind of malignant impulse to hurt, to punish, that seems to drive him more than any shining vision. And that's always been true of Trump at the moments when he is capable of articulating anything. Vance articulates it all the time because he is disciplined and intelligent and hardworking, and actually has thought through who he hates and why he hates them. And that's maybe—what you're saying, it seems, David, is that there's more to worry about in three or four years, even, than there is now.
Frum: Well, I don't know that I would say that, because the lack of, I think in the end, the thing that's going to maybe be his great impediment—I don't know what the lord of the world will think about the various patterns of vices in Trump's nature versus Vance's.
But the ideologues and intellectuals tend not to go far in American politics. It may be that Trump is successful precisely because of the part of him that is chaotic and the Schlamperei, not the despotism. And when Vance says, I've got my five-year plan for American purification, that's—we are here for the show. This sounds like work.
Anyway, your last statement was so powerful. I would almost want to end it there, but let me give you the last word. Is there something that we haven't said here that you'd like to say before we wrap all of this up?
Packer: Really, David, just that, for me, it's a deep satisfaction that you and I are sitting here having a really lively, interesting conversation about this man. You and I go back to college. We were rivals. We both were columnists for the school paper, and we probably named each other in our columns. And over the years, we went far apart—right and left—and then maybe came back a bit toward the center, both of us. And I have so many memories of seeing you at different intervals, especially after William F. Buckley [Jr.]'s funeral, when you told me, you know, If it's going to be Palin, I'm not sure I can be for the Republican ticket, which was the first time I'd heard you say anything like it.
And you have made a very—I've got to say this—a courageous journey in which you were alone or could have been all alone for long periods of time and lost friends, I'm sure lost homes, institutional homes, lost a kind of identity. And you've made a new one, which is as a truth teller. And what you've been saying today is, I feel, the kind of the sharp, hard edge of someone who's been refined by loss and by this journey into someone who, when you open your mouth, I think truths come out that are pretty painful and that are worth listening to. And so here we are in our 60s, 45 years after we met, still talking, and maybe talking almost as fluently as we did when we were young.
So I just want to say thanks for having me on your show.
Frum: Well, thank you. No, the memories go very deep. I hope we're talking less fluently, but more worth listening to than we spoke 45 years ago.
Packer: Please let that be the case. I do not go back and look at those columns, and I hope you don't either. We need to keep our eyes on the future.
Frum: Thank God we lived before the internet. That was our greatest privilege.
Packer: Exactly.
Frum: George, thank you for making the time today.
Packer: Thanks for having me, David.
[ Music ]
Frum: Thanks so much to George Packer for joining me today. George Packer is a colleague of mine at The Atlantic, and if you like George's work and want to support it—if you want to support the work of all of us at The Atlantic, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you'll consider doing so if you don't do so already.
And of course, please subscribe to and share this program on whatever platform you like best.
Before I wrap up with the concluding thoughts of this program, I need to make a correction of something that was said mistakenly on last week's program, on Episode 7. A listener flagged this error in my discussion with former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Susan Rice referred to Canada, or described Canada, as a participant in the Vietnam War, alongside the United States. Canada was not a combatant in the Vietnam War, as was mistakenly stated. Now, thousands of individual Canadians saw combat in Vietnam as volunteers in the United States armed forces, by some estimates, as many as 40,000. And more than 100 Canadians fell in action in Vietnam, fighting with the United States. But unlike Australia, and unlike Canada's own role in the Korean War, Canada was not a belligerent nation in Vietnam.
As we conclude the program, I want to finish with some thoughts about an important new book by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce. The book is a biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under President Carter in the late 1970s.
The book is called Zbig: [The Life of] Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet. Now, Zbigniew Brzezinski died in 2017, at the age of 89. His lifelong friend and rival Henry Kissinger, who made it all the way to 100, jokingly said at the end of his life, This is so tragic. He was so full of promise to be cut off so young.
That jokey remark sums up a comparison and a contrast that might serve us well to think about in these times. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger were both exiles: Henry Kissinger, a German Jew driven into exile by the Nazis; Brzezinski, an aristocratic Polish family also driven into exile by the Second World War, cut off from their homeland of the Second World War, and then permanently exiled by communism.
These exiles from different traditions reached the very highest levels of the American power structure. They both served as national security adviser—Kissinger as secretary of state as well. But they're both very different men with very different outlooks. And it's that contrast that I want to talk about.
It's not the whole subject of Edward Luce's book, which takes you all through Brzezinski's fascinating life and deals with many of its most-important challenges in the Carter administration and after. But I want to focus on this one thing: The best book to my mind—the book I like best—about Henry Kissinger is a book by a writer named Barry Gewen called The Inevitability of Tragedy. And it describes Kissinger's worldview being formed by the experience of being driven into exile by his neighbors, the people that he grew up amongst turning against him and his family for no rational reason they could see. And although he found refuge in America, he was never entirely confident that Americans were altogether different from the Germans who had driven him into exile.
He was a remarkably pessimistic student of American life and always believed that something could go badly wrong here. And in all of his management of American foreign affairs and all of his advice to presidents, that undercurrent of doubt and despair and anxiety is present. Kissinger was the very opposite of utopian. Sometimes he sold America a little short as a result, and he never took seriously—and in fact, to the extent he took it seriously, he disliked—the concept of the ideals and principles of America being a driving force in how the country could, should, and would act.
Brzezinski, as Luce describes him, was very different. Although he, too, started a life of tragedy—lost his country, could never return—he came to believe very much in the promise and ideals of America. Although not idealistic in the way we use that language, he always was optimistic that America could and would prevail. Henry Kissinger saw the Cold War as an enduring problem to manage; Brzezinski thought the United States could and would win. Kissinger doubted that democracy was better than other systems; Brzezinski believed that it would be not only morally better, but actually practically better too.
Now, the dialogue between these two men will be with us forever, much like the Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton dialogue. We'll find in future generations sources of truth in both of them, and we'll constantly need to check our instincts, one against the other. Sometimes it'll be Kissinger's pessimism we need to hear; sometimes, Brzezinski's optimism. But at this moment, when the future of the country seems so doubtful, when American power is being used for such bad ends, it's a great moment to rediscover this man who, through all the realism he learned from hard experience, never stopped believing in the possibility of America.
He believed that America could and would prevail against enemies, internal and external. I think we need a little of that faith, too, which is why I so enjoyed this book this week. Thank you so much for joining me on The David Frum Show. I'll see you in this place again next week. I hope you'll return.
Thank you.