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Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Mossad's Former Chief Calls the War in Gaza ‘Useless'
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts In John le Carré novels, the spies often lie and keep secrets even when they don't have to, because it's a 'mentality,' le Carré once explained, a way of living 'you never shed.' So it was notable when 250 veteran Israeli intelligence officers recently signed their names to an open letter demanding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu throw away his plans to escalate the war on Gaza. The war, they wrote, 'doesn't contribute to any of the declared objectives, and will lead to the death of hostages, soldiers and innocents.' At least six other similar petitions have circulated, signed by reservists, retired officers, and veterans from various branches of the Israeli military. 'That's the first time that's happened in Israel,' says Tamir Pardo, our guest on Radio Atlantic this week and one of three former Mossad directors who signed the open letter. After my interview with Pardo, in Tel Aviv, he asked me to emphasize one thing: His position on the war does not make him a 'leftist,' he said. And I could see his point all around me in Tel Aviv, where opposition to the war has spread far beyond the Israeli left, and far beyond the families of the remaining Israeli hostages. In a recent poll, 70 percent of Israelis said they don't trust the government, and about the same portion said they want a deal with Hamas to return the hostages and end the war—something the government has resisted even in this latest round of cease-fire talks. The protests are not, for the most part, focused on the suffering of Gazans, as protests are in other parts of the world. They're primarily about returning the hostages. But Pardo and others made clear to me that they believe the war is not serving Israel in any way. They want it to end. The latest cease-fire proposal includes an exchange of hostages, living and dead, for Palestinian prisoners. Israel has promised a temporary cessation of fighting but, as of yet, no commitment to end the war. In this episode, Pardo, with his decades of experience fighting terrorism, explains his perspective on how the war unfolded, what went wrong, and what should happen now.[] News clip: It's been 100 days since the attack by Hamas in southern Israel. News clip: —100 days of grief and protests— News clip: Israel and Hamas have been at war for six months. News clip: It's been exactly a year— News clip: One year after the horror— News clip: It's been nearly 600 days since Israel's war on Gaza began. News clip: —600 days since Hamas militants staged their murderous attack on October 7. Six hundred days, and they are still holding 58 Israeli hostages. Hanna Rosin: The war continues day after day, month after month. Now over a year and half old, though, it feels like it's at a new breaking point. News clip: In Gaza, concerns of famine grow, which is why chaos broke out at the opening of an aid-distribution site in Gaza that's run by a U.S.-backed group. News clip: Israel imposed a total blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial supplies to Gaza on March 2. Rosin: This week, there's a temporary cease-fire proposal on the table. The potential deal involves releasing 10 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of 18 dead. News clip: Hamas did not explicitly accept or reject the offer, but it said it was prepared to release 10 living Israeli hostages and 18 dead ones in exchange for a number of Palestinian prisoners. Rosin: Israel has already agreed to it, and Defense Minister Israel Katz warned Hamas that it must agree or, quote, 'be annihilated.' But Hamas leaders are so far hesitating. The main sticking point is the same sticking point as always: Hamas doesn't want a 30-day or 60-day or a 90-day cease-fire. They want a promise of an end to the war. I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And that's a question a lot of people have. When will the war end? What will it take? And what happens to Gaza when it does? [] Rosin: I happened to be in Tel Aviv visiting a sick relative when news came out about this latest cease-fire proposal. I haven't been here since October 7, and when I arrived, I was struck by one obvious thing: In the U.S. papers, I read about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is or isn't doing, or what other officials in the Israeli government are saying about the war. In Tel Aviv, what the government wants or says seems irrelevant, or at least totally drowned out by what the people want. The gap between the government and the people seems enormous. The country feels like it's choking on despair and frustration with its own government and the lack of an end to this war. To be clear, what drives the protests here is different than in the U.S. Protesters only rarely hold up pictures of, say, children killed in Gaza. Mostly, they spotlight the hostages and the government's betrayal in leaving them there. And I didn't have to go far to see this discontent. My plane landed, and the flight attendant, in a smooth flight-attendant voice, said, 'Tachzir otom abayita achshav' ('Bring them home now'). And then the plane burst into applause. I went to an ATM machine at the airport, and as my money shuffled out, an automated voice said: 'Bring them home safely.' I arrived at my aunt's apartment building, and a big sticker covered the entryway: netanyahu is dangerous. Her street has been renamed by another sticker: netanyahu traitor street. I happened to arrive at the end of May, on the 600th day of the war. I was taking a bus that day, and the driver stopped in the middle of the road and said, 'Sorry. Can't move. Everyone, get off,' because the streets were clogged with hundreds of protesters, most of them wearing shirts that, in large block letters in English, said N-O-W. 'Now,' as in: Bring back the hostages now. But also end this war. Now. Protesters: (Chanting in Hebrew.) Rosin: 'Six hundred days of darkness,' he says. 'Six hundred days, and there is no light at the end of this war.' Protester: (Shout in Hebrew.) Rosin: 'Enough of this war,' someone shouts in the background. Protester: (Speech in Hebrew.) Rosin: 'How long will we live in a country that's at war?' Protester: Bring all of them back now. Protesters: Now! Protesters: (Chanting.) Bring them home. Rosin: So those are the streets. And there's one more thing boiling over, something fairly new in Israeli society, which makes this anger at Netanyahu and the war seem wider than usual. It's coming from the military itself. Veterans of the Israeli Defense Force, pilots, medics, military leaders en masse from everywhere have been asking Netanyahu to stop the war. In April, more than 250 veterans of the Mossad, Israel's equivalent of the CIA, signed an open letter asking Netanyahu to bring the hostages home, even if that means ending the war. Spies don't usually sign open anything. This letter included three former Mossad chiefs. And while I was in Israel, I sat down with one of them. Tamir Pardo: We are already 600 days after October 7. And we have five divisions deployed in Gaza. And I don't see an end to that war. It is useless. It's accomplishing nothing. Nothing. I'm not talking about those people who are living or dying in Gaza. I'm talking about Israel. From Israel's point of view, it's a waste of time. What we're doing—waste of lives, waste of money, wasting the future. Rosin: This is Tamir Pardo. He's 72 and retired now, but he spent his life in the Mossad, which he ran between 2011 and 2016. He was running the agency when it began placing booby-trapped walkie-talkies into Lebanon, and reportedly planned a string of high-profile assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. In other words, he spent his life fighting against terrorism, exactly what Netanyahu's government claims to be doing in Gaza. In theory, he very much believes in the mission. Pardo: The responsibility of the Mossad is to avoid our enemies [obtaining] nuclear weapons, whoever they are, wherever they are. My responsibility was to stop any terrorist attempt against Israelis that are outside the state of Israel, or from terrorists that are trying to hit us from abroad. Rosin: That description, vague as it is, cements a certain image of deterring terrorism, but not endless fighting. One thing Pardo said to me over and over again is something he thinks Netanyahu has forgotten: War is not the endgame. Pardo: At the end of the day, when I'm thinking about my children, my grandchildren, I would like that they're going to live in a safe country, but in a peaceful country. And in order to achieve peace, from time to time, you have to use your sword. But I don't think that you can solve the problem with your sword. What's happening here now in Israel, it's insane. Rosin: The exact meaning of insanity changes depending on who you ask. For many in the international community, even longtime allies of Israel, it's the situation on the ground in Gaza: the killing of civilians, the failure to deliver aid, the widespread starvation of innocent people. For many in Israel, it's the hostages. A promise between Israeli citizens and their government has always been that they will keep them safe, and if one of them should end up in danger, the government would rescue them. Six hundred days has crushed that promise. For Pardo, it's practical: War requires a goal. And Pardo doesn't believe Netanyahu's stated goal of destroying Hamas is a realistic one, certainly not if you also want to bring the hostages home. Rosin: So today is the 600th day that the hostages are held. There's protests everywhere. I was surprised when I got here. In Tel Aviv, all the streets, they've been renamed Netanyahu Is a Traitor Street. You know, there are posters everywhere. It's a very common position here to criticize Netanyahu. Why aren't the hostages home, in your opinion? Whose fault is that? Pardo: Our fault, Israel's fault. On October 8, it was 24 hours after October 7, and I said to my friends within the old boys' club, 'Mossad: Bring the hostages home now. Don't start a war. Negotiate and bring the 251 hostages home now. Then solve the problem.' That was the biggest mistake of the state of Israel, because those hostages should have been released weeks after. You cannot defeat Hamas and bring the hostages back at the same—the same priority. You have to choose. And our government preferred to kill than to bring the hostages. Rosin: Now, as someone whose job it was to fight terrorists, why is it so clear to you that the first priority shouldn't have been to fight the terrorists? Pardo: Because those people—children, women, civilian, and soldiers as well—were kidnapped because of our fault as a state. The armed forces in every country [are] responsible for the safety of those civilians who are living in the country. And this war, the result of October 7 was because our armed forces, they failed to do it. Now bring them back, and then punish those who did it. And I'm saying punishing, not revenge—different. Rosin: What's the difference? Pardo: I don't believe in revenge. You have to punish, and you have to find out and kill all those who did what they did on October 7. Okay? Full stop. You don't have to destroy Gaza, because it's meaningless. I think that we are creating—in the last 20 months, we are creating more problems [than] we are solving, at the end of the day. Yes, okay, we killed 70 or 90 percent of those, let's say, terrorists that are living in Gaza, but we killed many more civilians. And the day after, when we'll see that day after starts, we are going to have a very big problem there in Gaza. Because I think that when you are gonna have 2.1 million people that don't have no housing, no job, no water, no electricity, no health-care system, we will have to solve the problem. No one else will have to solve it. We will. And then we are creating such a problem that I don't know how we will be able to solve it. I'm not expecting, let's say, Americans to solve the problem. I'm not expecting Egyptians to solve the problem. We are there, so we'll have to solve the problem. Rosin: And you created the problem. Pardo: And we created the problem. Rosin: So recently, you signed an open letter saying: 'End the war in Gaza,' as did hundreds of other Mossad, Shin Bet, generals. Have you seen that level of open protest before? I mean, does something feel different about that to you? Pardo: Yeah. That's the first time that it happened in Israel. Rosin: First time that what—what exactly? Pardo: That so many veterans, with their experience, are watching what's happening here in Israel, and there is an understanding that we are taking the wrong path. We are creating damage, a huge damage, to the state of Israel, okay? By what we're doing, we are accomplishing nothing. [] Rosin: After the break. Pardo explains what he thinks is the real reason Netanyahu is staying in this war. [] Rosin: In the street protests, there's one particular chant that comes up over and over: Protesters: (Chanting in Hebrew.) Rosin: Ad shechem hozrim kulanu chatufim. 'Until they're back, we're all hostages.' [] Rosin: It's easy to understand why the family and friends of any individual hostage are raging in the streets of their government for failing to rescue the person they love. But to understand why the average Israeli so deeply identifies with the hostages, why they are still out protesting 600 days later, you have to go back into Israeli history. In the first decades of its existence, Israel was regularly at war. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Suez War, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War. And then in 1976, a terrorist event happened that in many ways still defines the relationship between Israelis and their government. News clip: Palestinian hijackers are still holding more than 250 hostages and an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport, in Uganda. Rosin: A flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked. The plane and its hostages were taken to Idi Amin's Uganda. News clip: One hundred and one hostages released today were flown to Paris, but another 110 are still being held at the airport at Entebbe, Uganda. About 85 of them, Israeli nationals. The Palestinian hijackers with some non-Arab accomplices now say they will execute the hostages on Sunday unless their demands are met. Rosin: In what was a rare approach for the time but afterwards became a global counterterrorism model, IDF commandos raided the airport and rescued the hostages. News clip: The daring Israeli raid into Uganda still leaves unanswered many questions. News clip: Political leaders and editorialists over most of the Western world and some of Asia were delighted with Israel's bold and successful rescue of the civilian hostages in Uganda. Rosin: The details of the operation are extraordinary: Huge planes flying low over the Red Sea, two Land Rovers and a Mercedes painted black to pose as Idi Amin's presidential convoy, and Israeli soldiers operating thousands of miles from home with no hope of backup. The only member of the IDF team killed was Yonatan Netanyahu, leader of the raid and the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu. The story of his brother's death became a key point in Netanyahu's political rise. It was also a key moment in Tamir Pardo's life. When I was asking him how well he knew the prime minister, he said this: Pardo: I knew his oldest brother, Yoni Netanyahu. He was my commander in the unit that I served in 1976. Unfortunately, he was killed less than one foot from me at the Entebbe raid. Rosin: Inside Israel, the raid at Entebbe cemented a promise: Yes, Israeli citizens are always vulnerable to terrorist attacks, but the government will always—always—rescue them, no matter how hard they are to reach. For many Israelis, October 7 broke that promise. Pardo: What happened in 1976, people were kidnapped, not because we neglected something, we forgot something. October 7 is because we broke our obligation towards our people. The state of Israel betrayed the first thing that the IDF exists for: to defend our civil people. What happened there was a disaster. There were 2,000 people that managed to break into Israel because we neglected our duty. And that's the reason: When you did it, you have to pay the price. And the first price you had to pay is to bring them home, and then, find a way to solve the problem using the stick—but only after bringing them home. Rosin: Pardo has decades of calculating when and how to use lethal aggression and to what end. Here's how he does the math on this war. Pardo: I remember, before the war—and you can go and check the figures—IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) estimated that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 people that can use weapons in Gaza. Nine months ago, the military spokesman said that more than 17,000 Hamas terrorists were killed. So think about how many were wounded. Let's assume that another 6,000 were wounded, and we know that more than 3,000 were in prison in Israel, we captured. So actually, the job was finished. We killed all the generals, the leaders there, the commanders of brigades, platoons, whatever. Okay? So those who are still there, the vast, vast majority are those who were recruited after the war started. And they don't have any experience. Okay? But they can hold a Kalashnikov (an AK-47) and kill a soldier here and there. But the main power—90 percent of the power—was finished more than nine months ago. Rosin: So, enough? Pardo: Enough. At the end of the day, the Hamas is not only a military power, a terrorist power, okay? It's a political power as well. So thinking that you can erase political power by a military attack, that's wrong. That's wrong. And every civilian that is killed today, his brother, his son, his father will hold the gun tomorrow. Rosin: And so why didn't it unfold that way? Again, Pardo is blunt. Pardo: So I think that our prime minister today is trying to solve his personal problems—not our problems, his problems. And that was what he was doing from the first day that he was indicted, from the first day of his trial. He's not thinking about Israel as a state. Rosin: Netanyahu was indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. The prime minister has denied any wrongdoing, and says it's a witch hunt. The trial is still ongoing and has distorted Israeli politics in so many ways, one of them being the war in Gaza. There's criticism that Netanyahu has an incentive to keep the war going to distract from and delay his own problems, to keep lots of wars going. In fact, Pardo is not sure Netanyahu even has any postwar strategy anywhere. Pardo: What is your postwar strategy in Lebanon? What is your postwar strategy in Syria? What is your strategy versus Iran? Okay? Using the stick—thinking that by using the stick, you're gonna solve the problem, it's wrong. Rosin: You need to negotiate. Pardo: Exactly. In order to solve problems, you need to negotiate. Negotiate when you have a stick in your hand. Use the stick if it's needed, but understand, at the end of the day, you should negotiate for an agreement. The point is that our government believes in using the sticks. Not one stick—sticks. Rosin: It is unusual for a Mossad veteran to be so outspokenly critical against the government, but maybe not, in this case, surprising. Ehud Olmert, who's a former prime minister of Israel, last week accused his country of committing war crimes. Or as a hobby. Yair Golan, the main opposition leader, accused the government of killing babies for sport. That one got the most attention outside and inside Israel, even as Golan tried to walk the statement back. Rosin: Yair Golan famously said, 'killing babies for sport.' Pardo: That was awful to say. Rosin: That was awful? Pardo: And it was wrong. I, I— Rosin: That one went too far? Why? Pardo: It's not too far. It's wrong. Rosin: What do you mean? Pardo: No one, even Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, are not killing babies for fun. Okay? I don't agree. They're fascists. They are the KKK in Israel. They're fascists, but they're not killing—even fascists in Israel are not killing babies for fun. Rosin: Let me give you some clarity about who he's talking about here. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, they are, as Atlantic contributor Gershom Gorenberg put it recently, the 'leading extremists' in Israel's most right-wing government in history. They are both West Bank settlers, and 'they both want Israel to reoccupy all of Gaza, to renew Israeli settlement there, and to'—quote—''encourage' Palestinians to emigrate.' Rosin: Do you believe these are war crimes? Pardo: Look—I hope not. I hope not. But fighting in a place like Gaza, 364 square kilometers—in this small place, there are squeezed more than 2 million people, fighting, using all warfare capabilities. Many civilians are getting killed, unfortunately. That there is a war in such a place, it should be very, very short war. Rosin: Short? Pardo: Short. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Pardo: Because as time is passing, many, many more civilians are getting killed. Many more civilians are losing part of their families, losing their homes, losing everything. And to conduct a war for 20 months in such a small place, bad things are happening. Rosin: It would be hard to avoid a war crime? Pardo: It's gonna be very hard. Okay? And that's what worries us, should worry every Israeli. Rosin: I asked Pardo to sum up what he thinks should happen next. Pardo: Stop the war. Stop the war because it takes you to nowhere. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin. Talk to you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Bloomberg
21 hours ago
- Bloomberg
Why the Trade War Is Keeping US Inflation Down—For Now
Subscribe to Trumponomics on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to Trumponomics on Spotify On this episode of Trumponomics, we're checking in on the status of Donald Trump's trade war. Host Stephanie Flanders is joined by Anna Wong, chief US economist at Bloomberg Economics, for insight into the economic impact of the US president's policies so far, and Bloomberg White House Reporter Josh Wingrove, who unpacks how the strategy is evolving. They analyze the legal battle over Trump's tariffs and concern on Wall Street that the trade war could morph into a capital war. When it comes to the economic data, Wong points out that although the expectation is tariffs will eventually reignite US inflation, general pessimism in the US economy is—at least for now—translating into lower demand of discretionary goods. And when it comes to how much damage to the US economy Trump's tariffs have caused, distorted import activity has made it more difficult to determine. In other words, it's too early to tell. 'Trump has a sense of how hard to push the economy and he tends to pull back from the brink if things get really bad,' says Wong, who worked in Trump's first administration on his White House Council of Economics Advisers. 'At this moment the hard data are not causing them to wanna pull back.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Why Are the Media So Afraid of Trump?
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic's David Frum opens with a warning about how Donald Trump's second term has brought a more systematic and punishing assault on American media, through regulatory pressure, retaliatory lawsuits, and corporate intimidation. Then David is joined by the legendary newspaper editor Marty Baron to discuss how today's media institutions are struggling to stand up to power. Baron reflects on his tenure at The Washington Post, the new pressures facing owners such as Jeff Bezos, and how Trump has turned retribution into official policy. They also examine how internal newsroom culture, social media, and a loss of connection to working-class America have weakened public trust in journalism. David closes the episode by reflecting on the recent media overhyping of President Joe Biden's age issues. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 9 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, I'll be joined by Marty Baron, formerly executive editor of The Washington Post during the first Trump term and during the transition of ownership at The Washington Post from the Graham family that had led it through so many years to new ownership under Jeff Bezos. Marty Baron is one of the most important media leaders of our time and has spoken forcefully, both in person and in his memoir, Collision of Power, about the threats to free press and the responsibilities of that press. I'll finish the episode with some thoughts about the way the media have covered the old age and infirmity of former President Joe Biden. But let me begin by addressing this larger topic of press freedom and press responsibility in the second Trump term. President Trump began his campaign and has spent much of his first term attacking the media, coining phrases, calling the free media enemies of the people, enemies of the state, and huffing and puffing and complaining, and generally persecuting and often inciting dangerous threats against individual members of the press. If you covered the Trump presidency in that first term, especially if you were a woman, you suddenly found yourself being attacked, both digitally and often in person, in ways unlike anything ever seen before: death threats, harassment, abuse, anti-Semitic and misogynistic, racist—the worst kind of garbage. I even got a little splash of myself. I had an FBI man come to the house to warn my wife that there had been some threats against me. The Atlantic is kind of high-toned, and I think a lot of the people who make the worst threats don't read The Atlantic, and so we get spared to some degree, but it was nasty. But it was also mostly ineffective. The press worked during the first Trump term. Institutions like The Atlantic, like The New York Times, like The Washington Post, like CNN kept bringing to light important stories about what the Trump presidency was doing, about corruption, about ties to Russia, about many things that people needed to know. And while their lives were much more difficult than they had been in the past, and while the pressures on them were real, it did not, in the end, detract from getting the job done, for the most part, in the first Trump term. In the second Trump term, things have been different. President Trump has been much more systematic, much more deliberate, much more sustained, and much more effective in putting pressure on America's free media. He does it by squeezing the corporate parents of media institutions, making it clear that mergers of the upstream parent will not be allowed or will be harassed or even illegally prevented in some way, unless those institutions change the way that their reporting arms behave themselves. And we have seen media people end up paying what look very much like inducements, material inducements, to Trump. Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, paid millions of dollars for the rights to make a Melania documentary, money it has to know it will never see back for a documentary that will probably never be produced. ABC paid millions of dollars directly to President Trump's so-called library, but really to himself, because of pressure put upon the Disney Corporation, ABC's corporate parent. CBS offered a settlement to Trump for an even more vexatious and absurd lawsuit: Trump complained that he didn't like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris—which, So what? You don't like our editing? You have no claim on that. That gives you no right of due action. I mean, send us a letter if you don't like the editing. And other people don't like the editing of the interview we did with you; that's not lawsuit material. The Atlantic, too, after our Signal story, a that reported that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been added to what should have been a more sensitive discussion of a military operation in Yemen: In addition to the usual concerns for accuracy that, of course, we had, we knew that there was a chance that the federal government under President Trump would pursue some sort of baseless, legal retaliatory action against us, and we had to fear that in a way that probably in another time we would not have had to fear. So there are real things to worry about, and they're not just specific to Trump. We've seen other people in American politics do the same. When Ron DeSantis was governor of Florida—or he is the governor of Florida. When he was running for president, he made one of his signature issues threatening the Disney Corporation for exercising its free-speech rights to comment on some of his social legislation by stripping them of various business privileges that they had long had and punishing the corporate parent for exercises of corporate free speech, because Disney was unhappy that the DeSantis administration was penalizing what they saw as the free-expression rights of gay and lesbian people in the state of Florida. So DeSantis took the Trump path. In the end, it didn't do him any good, but Disney still took the blow. We have seen this kind of acceleration of new kinds of threats, and they're working because media institutions of the traditional kind are more vulnerable than they ever used to be before. Look—the companies that were powerful in 1972 are a lot less powerful in 2025, but they remain the main sources of dispassionate, fact-checked, accurate information about the events of the day. New media does not see that as its mission, but the old media do. But because they've been losing audience share, because they're less wealthy than they used to be, they're subject to various kinds of pressure, and those pressures are being imposed on them with real-world consequences for all of us. Meanwhile, the whole mental landscape is being altered by the rise of different kinds of media institutions. TikTok has to be regarded as the most important media company in America today, alongside Facebook and other social-media platforms. These are shaping the minds and mentalities of Americans, especially Americans under 40, especially those Americans who are not closely involved with the political process, and so whose votes are maybe more up for grabs and are therefore some of the most valuable voters to politicians. We have a new kind of landscape, and it's one that we all have to navigate with great care and one in which our responsibilities as citizens are as much at stake as our rights as citizens. The information landscape is being reshaped, and Trump is abusing the powers of state in this new landscape to hasten the reshaping in ways favorable to him. Congress passed a law putting TikTok out of business. The Supreme Court approved that law. Trump has postponed enforcing the law long past all the deadlines that were supposed to be there, because he likes the way TikTok covers him. Remember, one of the rules of authoritarianism is: The protection for the culpable is as much a resource for the authoritarian as harassment of the innocent. The goal and end state of all of these evolutions, of these pressures, of these changes in the media landscape is to create a world—or create an America—in which nobody will know anything that can be relied upon and shared with neighbors. Instead of knowledge informing our politics, our politics will inform our knowledge. Now, there's no ready answer to this, but each of us as an individual has a power to do something about it, to be a better consumer of news, to be a wiser user, to read more carefully, to question more of what we see, to fortify our immunities against the coming wage of AI-fed distortion that is surely on its way. It's going to be a different kind of country, different kind of way of processing information. But the task of democracy and the challenge of democracy remains eternal, even as the challenges and threats change. And we're all going to have to step up and be the best kind of citizens, the best-informed citizens that we know how to be, even as it becomes more difficult in the face of authoritarian pressure and new technology. And now my dialogue with Marty Baron, formerly editor of The Washington Post. But first, a quick break. [] Frum: Marty Baron is a newspaper editor whose real-life story inspired an Academy Award–winning movie. After reporting for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, he was appointed executive editor of the Miami Herald. From Miami, he moved to Boston, where he led the Boston Globe's coverage of sex-abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That coverage won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and inspired the 2015 movie Spotlight. In 2013, Marty Baron moved to The Washington Post. He led the paper through its purchase by Jeff Bezos and through the first Trump term, winning more accolades and prizes for himself and his reporters along the way. He retired in 2021 and published his memoir, Collision of Power, in 2023. Marty, thank you so much for joining the program today. Martin Baron: Thanks for inviting me, David. Frum: All right, so we've got some things to cover, and we've talked about what those might be, but let me start off with a straightforward question: If you were editing The Washington Post today, do you think you'd keep your job? Baron: (Laughs.) I think I would, actually, because I think I did a good job while I was there, and I think that was appreciated and I was supported by the owner and the publisher at the time. Obviously, some things have changed. But I think it would be very risky for them to fire me. And the news department continues to maintain its independence from the owner. The owner has not interfered in the news coverage, as far as I know. And I think all of us would know, because there would be an explosive reaction within the newsroom if he had interfered. So yes, I think I would keep my job. Frum: It's a major theme of your memoir, Collision of Power, that first-term Trump tried to pressure The Washington Post's new owner, Jeff Bezos, into submission, and that Bezos consistently and courageously resisted. Bezos paid a price for this. Amazon lost a $10 billion contract with the federal government because of Trump's unhappiness with The Washington Post coverage. Amazon and the Post don't have a relationship, but Bezos is the owner of both. They're the largest shareholder in Amazon and [he's] the sole owner of the Post. Second-term Trump seems much more deliberate, methodical, purposeful, and effective in his pressures on the Post and other media institutions. And this time, he also seems more successful, and not just with the Post but with many others. I described in my opening monologue some of the other cases—CBS, ABC. What are media owners so afraid of? Baron: Well, I think what they're afraid of is they're afraid of being made a target by Trump, that he's going to do severe damage to their other commercial interests. I think in the case of Bezos, he's afraid of the impact that Trump can have on Amazon, which has enormous contracts—particularly in the area of cloud-computing services—with the federal government. And he has a private, commercial space venture called Blue Origin, which had fallen well behind SpaceX, the Elon Musk company, but was at the point of launching a rocket into orbit and then being able to start to compete, really, with SpaceX. It has now launched that rocket successfully into orbit. But it's highly dependent on contracts with the federal government, and I think that's true of the other companies as well, the parent companies of CBS and ABC. So in the case of ABC, Disney depends on the federal government for approval of mergers and things like that, and does not want to be in conflict with the president of the United States. And of course, Paramount, which owns CBS, wants to execute a merger with Skydance, and that requires approval by the FCC. Frum: You know, you've had a long and storied career through many, many different institutions, and I'm sure along the way, you have observed close-up and directly how angry mayors, governors, and presidents and members of Congress can get at media coverage. And there's always a lot of huffing and puffing and bluster and anger. What is happening since the election in 2024 seems qualitatively different from anything that I've observed. Is that your observation? Baron: Well, absolutely. Look—I mean, Trump, during his campaign, promised to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies. That's what he's doing right now. You can see that, of course, in his attacks on law firms that have represented individuals and institutions that were opposed to him, seeking to bar them from access to federal-government buildings, seeking to deny them any contracts with the federal government—basically, punish them in every conceivable way—and really, he's seeking to destroy those law firms. The same applies to universities, first with Columbia University and then now with Harvard, of course. You can see that he's applying all of the not just threats, but actually, use of force and denying billions of dollars in grants to Harvard in an effort to force them to submit to his wishes. So that's what's happening. It's qualitatively different from what we've seen before. And of course, the federal government has enormous power. And Trump is exercising that power—actually, not just exercising it; he's abusing it. Frum: Why is it so much more effective now? One of the semi-remembered details of the Watergate scandal was that President Richard Nixon tried to put pressure on The Washington Post at that time because the Post was then seeking permission, or the Graham family was seeking permission, to acquire some radio stations, which required FCC approval. And there's a famous crude quote about it, We're going to put Katie Graham's tits through the wringer. And what that was referring to was that her family wanted to buy these radio stations—or maybe sell them; I can't remember which. But either way, they needed an FCC permission, and Nixon said, Aha! I have the brain wave. We'll use that as a pressure on the Post. And it spectacularly backfired. It didn't work for Nixon at all. Now, a half century later, similar kinds of threats do seem to be working, at least for now. What's the difference? Why was the press so much more robust in the 1970s than the prestige press seems to be in the 2020s? Baron: Well, I don't know if it was more robust. Certainly, in the case of The Washington Post, they resisted. And I wish that Jeff Bezos would do the same. As I said, I think the news department continues to operate independently, and it's doing a great job, an admirable job of investigating what's happening in this administration. And yet he has sought to repair his relationship with Trump by doing all sorts of things, the first one being killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris and then, of course, donating to the inauguration, appearing at the inauguration, Amazon agreeing to a contract to buy the rights to a Melania Trump documentary about her own life for an extraordinary sum of money, and then Amazon agreeing to buy the rights to The Apprentice. I think what's different now is, well, you don't have a Congress that's doing its job. I mean, at the time of Watergate, you actually had some confidence that the other pillars of government would stand up, would hold up. And in the case of Watergate, you had a Congress that conducted an investigation that obtained internal tapes, and that made all the difference in the world. And now you have a president who has control of both houses of Congress, and you have a Congress, a Republican Party, that is a completely servile. Frum: Mm-hmm. Is there something different about the media institutions themselves? Have they changed in some way, as compared to what they were half a century ago? Baron: Good question. Look—in the past, I think sometimes we romanticized what the media was like. Keep in mind: We used to have incredibly wealthy owners of media, people like Hearst, who often collaborated with government and abused their power. I mean, the Chandler family, you know, remade Los Angeles, brought water from the Owens Valley in the north down to L.A. to essentially enrich themselves. So I think we romanticize what media ownership was in the past. I think that now, you know, a lot of media—big, institutional media—is owned by, first of all, very wealthy people who have other very substantial commercial interests. And you have, also, these parent companies, which have other substantial commercial interests. And they're highly dependent on the federal government, and the federal government has probably more power today than it had back in the previous years, previous decades. Frum: One reason it seems to me that media institutions are weaker in the 2020s was because they went through a self-imposed spasm of self-cannibalization in the late 2010s, culminating in the events of 2020. The most famous example of this is the forced resignation of James Bennett from The New York Times op-ed page for the sin of running an op-ed that some of the staffers thought was too interesting. They claimed that the op-ed would lead to violence, which was, on its face and certainly by the result, a false claim. But Bennett was forced out, and other institutions saw these kind of little staff mutinies. You experienced many at The Washington Post, and the hypothesis is: Was there some kind of weakening of the sinew, some kind of weakening of the courage, some kind of weakening of the solidarity between staff and leadership at the institution that happened between 2015, culminating in 2020? And is that in any way responsible for the weakness of institutions today? Baron: Well, I don't disagree with you that there has been a certain ideological rigidity within newsrooms and unwillingness to recognize nuance, a tendency on the part of, particularly, the younger generation, I think, to divide the world into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed, and basically see the world without a nuance, see it through sort of a binary separation. I think that what that has done—I don't know that it has weakened. Certainly, there have been rebellions within newsrooms. I did experience that due to my efforts to try to enforce social-media guidelines, for example, and then, also, in reaction to the George Floyd killing, the demand for greater diversity in the newsroom and in leadership. But I think that the unwillingness to sort of recognize nuances has hurt our credibility with the general public. That's where I think it's done real damage, is that it has contributed to the decline in confidence in major news institutions. And that's a perilous place to be. Frum: You know, diversity is a complex concept with many different meanings, and I think what it can sometimes mean and has sometimes meant for many institutions is that while the staff become more diverse in a series of biographical attributes, they become more monolithic in the way they think and more different from the people to whom they want to deliver their product. So if you've got a newsroom that is all full of—from every background, every climb, but—all graduates of certain four-year institutions with certain common outlooks, and the readership doesn't meet those qualifications. I mean, they may, you know, have different biographies, but they have similar outlooks, and it's one that puts them increasingly at odds with who their consumers are, in a way that just wasn't the case when you went to a newspaper from high school, not from college. Baron: I think that's true. I think that we do not have a certain level of diversity that we should have. It's people from a lot of different backgrounds, people who didn't go to all the same sorts of schools. I certainly didn't, by the way. I did not go to an Ivy League school, and I grew up in Florida and not in the Washington area. And I just ended up there because I was approached about taking on the editorship of The Washington Post, which was a surprise to me. So I've always seen Washington as a bit of a bubble, and I think it is. Look—we did work when I was at the Post to increase the diversity, in and in respects other than demographic. We tried to hire more military veterans. We thought that was important. The country had been at war for so many years, and yet we had very few military veterans in our newsroom. We needed more. We hired people who came from evangelical Christian colleges. I thought that was really important, given the importance of religion in this country, and particularly evangelicalism in this country. And to try to get more people from working-class backgrounds as well. And we need to do more of that. There's no question. I think there are a lot of people in the newsroom who don't understand the struggles and lives of ordinary people in the middle of the country, and we need to work harder at that. There's no question about that. Frum: One thing I think that gets lost sight of—and I'm old enough to remember it, and maybe you are too—was: In the middle of 1970s, most of the people who worked for a newspaper were engaged in a form of manufacturing. The paper, yes, it was written. But after it was written, it was then composed by people who worked for the newspaper, and it was then physically printed and then physically distributed. It was a giant manufacturing enterprise, and most of the staff were blue-collar people who had nothing to do with the content of the paper and everything to do with the physical existence of the paper. And this was brought home when my wife's stepfather created a newspaper in Toronto—which was created in the early 1970s, The Toronto Sun—which was like this. You saw it when you went to the athletic events, or the picnics, the softball games that the reporters might have had a slightly more-educated background. But most people who were there were blue-collar people when they played softball together, when they did picnics together, when they socialized together—that the newspaper affirmed its identity as part of the culture of the city, and it was a manufacturing enterprise. Well, technology has changed that. Newspapers don't manufacture anymore. They deliver a nonphysical product. The people who produce the product are highly educated. The production staff are probably even more technically skilled than the content staff. And all of them are more and more unlike the rest of the people of the city or country in which they serve. Baron: Well, I agree with you on that. Look—this was evident prior to Trump being elected. People have asked me what our failures were prior to Trump being elected, and I always say, It wasn't the coverage of the campaign. It was what occurred prior to that—years prior to that. It's that we didn't understand the country well enough. We just did not understand people's struggles, their expectations, their aspirations, and we needed to do that better. And there's no question that—look: Everybody, people talk about their life experiences these days, but everybody's life experiences, by definition, are narrow. It's just them. Our job as journalists is to get outside of our life experience and understand the life, the experiences of other people. And we need more people in our newsrooms who come from a variety of different backgrounds. And I think we should get to work doing that. Frum: A point I made in my first Trump book about this is a way of driving it home. So the great opioid toll begins in 2014. By 2016, it's killing more Americans than Vietnam. I went to The New York Times search engine and typed in, for the year from January 1, 2016, to the end of 2016, the two words opioid and transgender. And I don't want to derogate from the importance of any issue. If I remember right, there were, like, 80 or a hundred times more stories about transgender issues in The New York Times in 2016 than there were about the opioid epidemic. Now, that would change the following year, but it just marked that something could be happening in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and it was invisible to the people who produced the country's most elite newspapers. And one of Trump's secret weapons in the campaign of 2016 was he would campaign in these places and just say the word opioid. He had no plan. He had no concept. And indeed, the problem would continue to get dramatically worse under his presidency, but at least he knew it was there, which other people seem not to know. Baron: That's a very interesting data point, that research that you did. And I think it does highlight just how sorely disconnected we are from so much of what is happening in the country, and I think that's something that definitely needs to be corrected, and corrected quickly. It's cause for a lot of self-reflection on the part of all of us who are in the media, and we need to make sure that that doesn't continue. Frum: As we talk about media, of course, people of a certain generation have an idea of what media is, and we often have a way of using that phrase to mean institutions that were important in 1972—The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News. And it's a little hard to absorb that everybody who has one of these devices, which everybody has, can communicate instantly any image or any language to anybody on the planet on a scale that would've staggered the editors of The Washington Post in 1972, or even the CBS Evening News. And I suppose one of the questions we have to think more philosophically about is: What is media in the 2020s? I mean, TikTok shapes more minds than The New York Times, and Joe Rogan has a bigger audience than 60 Minutes. And we have a kind of anti-media that creates relationships with its consumers by presenting itself as non-media, by attacking the institutions that were important in 1972 but that are themselves also forms of media, obviously, and that are different from the traditional institutions only in that they seem to have no code of conduct, no code of ethics whatsoever. Baron: Well, clearly the definition of media has expanded tremendously. We've seen a radical change in the kind of media there is, and a radical change in the way that media is consumed. And a lot of the new media is communicating with a level of authenticity—or at least perceived authenticity—that institutional media has been unable to deliver. We in the traditional media have always focused on our authority, the reporting that we do, the verification process—all of which, of course, is essential and core to who we are and what we ought to be doing, what our mission is. At the same time, we are not communicating the same level of authenticity that a lot of the new media are. And because we don't do that, because we don't communicate authenticity, we're not getting credit for the authority that we have. And people who do communicate authentically, or perceived authentically—a lot of the new media—they're being given credit for authority that frequently they don't deserve. Not always. There are people who are quite capable who are doing that, but a lot of them don't deserve the authority. And look—this is a huge challenge. I mean, it's an opportunity, of course, to reach more people. But it is a huge challenge to traditional news institutions, and that's one that we clearly have to confront and we have to change. Frum: Well, you're very polite about it when you call it authenticity. I think one of the lessons I think from a media-business point of view: The media of the 1970s ignored large parts of demand. It turns out, there's a much bigger demand for virulent anti-Semitism in America than anyone in 1975 thought there was. There's much more demand for crackpot medical advice than people used to think. And in 1975, if you'd said to The New York Times or The Washington Post or CBS, You know, you could make more money by serving the anti-Semitic market or the medical crackpot market, they would say, You know what? We're making enough money. Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need to tell people the polio vaccine is no good. But people, entrepreneurs have discovered there is a big market for anti-Semitism. There is a big market for The polio vaccine is no good, and you can get very rich—or at least selected individuals can—meeting that demand, which is not infinite but large. And we are in a world that is, you know—the price of the internet may be the return of infectious diseases that had been banished in 1998. Baron: Look—they are an enormous number of bad actors. By using the word authenticity, I don't suggest that many of them aren't bad actors. There are good actors too. There are people who are doing really good work. And I think there's a reason you have a podcast, that you developed a podcast because you saw it as a better way of communicating with people or, at least potentially, a more-effective way of communicating with people. And there are a lot of other people who are doing that as well. So I don't want to discredit everybody who's in new media, because they don't deserve to be discredited, because many of them are quite good. But there are a lot of bad actors in spreading crazy conspiracy theories and a lot of hate. And that is the nature of the internet these days, is that it allows for that because it's a highly fragmented market, and people are going to exploit that fragmented market for their own personal, professional, political, or commercial gain. And that's exactly what's happening. I would say, however, that traditional media is not irrelevant, as is often claimed by people in that new-media field, by a lot of our politicians today, including Trump and Musk and whoever. The reality is that we remain relevant. There's a reason why Trump is completely obsessed with traditional media. He would not be obsessed with traditional media if it were irrelevant; that would be insane. And by the way, when Elon Musk just recently stepped away from the White House, who did he give interviews to? Amazingly, traditional media, the very media that he had denigrated all along. Frum: How should we think about what is and what isn't media? A person offering makeup advice on TikTok to a million viewers, is that media? I don't know anymore. Baron: Yeah, it's media. I mean, I think it is media—media writ large. Absolutely. People who are on TikTok are having an enormous impact. I mean, people are forming their opinions of what's happening, let's say in the Middle East, based on a 15-second TikTok. They think they know everything based on the 15 seconds that they saw on TikTok. Now, that is appalling, of course. Anytime you're dealing with a complex subject, like the Middle East, which has centuries of history behind it, you don't want to think that you've absorbed everything you need to know based on something you saw in 15 seconds on TikTok. But there's no question. That's media. That is how people are receiving their information, like it or not. Frum: Let me offer you a last question, some advice for the viewers: How does one become a better consumer of media content in this day and age? Are there any guidelines or advice you can offer to the viewer who is not selling makeup tips to a million people, but who has a phone, uses it, looks at it. How do we use this incredible new device, this incredible new power, responsibly and effectively to live better and more informed lives as citizens and individuals? Baron: Well, look. I mean, one of the biggest challenges today, a huge challenge and problem for us, is that we can't agree on a common set of facts. We can't even agree on how to determine what a fact is. All of the things that we've used in the past—education, experience, expertise, and actual evidence—have all been discredited. Not discredited, but denied and dismissed and denigrated. I think that consumers should be looking at that. They ought to be looking: Does this person actually have an education in the field? Does this person have experience in the field? Does this person have expertise? Is there actual evidence? Can I see the evidence? Who is behind this? Use your critical faculties to judge the quality of information and the quality of the people who are disseminating that information, and determine whether in the past you've relied on them. I mean, one of the interesting things about traditional media is that when there's a natural disaster, guess where people turn? They turn to traditional media. They don't turn to some of these fringe outfits to tell them where the hurricane's going to hit and what they ought to be doing, or where the tornado is, or anything like that, or where the flooding is going to be. They turn, typically, to traditional media because, look—there's a reserve of confidence in them because they know that they're going to get accurate information. And so I think consumers of information need to look for that education, expertise, experience. And what is the evidence that they are providing? Are you just relying on your beliefs, or are you confusing your beliefs with actual facts? Frum: Maybe the good news or the bad news of the same, which is we all have many more opportunities, but we're all going to have to work a lot harder to make sure that we are accurately and truthfully informed. And while it's never been easier if you have some medical symptom—never been easier to find out for yourself what that probably is—it's also never been easier to be deceived by people who, for reasons of gain or sociopathy, want to make you sicker or want to deny you the medicine you really need. And so we have seen the decline in vaccinations. It's still more than 90 percent that are properly vaccinated. So nine out of 10 people are doing the right thing. But five or eight out of 100 are doing the wrong thing, and they pose risks not only to their own children, but to everybody's children. Baron: And I think the consumers of information have to work harder, but also, those of us who are delivering information have to work harder to show people our work, to show people why they should believe us—not just to tell them what's happening but to show them the work that we've done, the evidence that we're relying upon. Be as transparent as possible, communicate more effectively, and make sure that we're covering the entirety of our communities and our society and our country, and do a better job of that. Frum: Marty, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your candid memoir—it's going to be an important resource for anyone who wants to understand the Trump era, and also the transformation of media under new kinds of ownership, and, above all, your extraordinarily important institution, The Washington Post, which you led to such heights, and which we hope is able to retain at least most of the glory that you delivered for it. Baron: Thank you, David. I appreciate it. Frum: Thank you. Bye-bye. [] Frum: Thanks so much to Marty Baron for joining me today. If you appreciate this dialogue and the others like it, I hope you will subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you use. I hope you'll also consider subscribing to The Atlantic, in print or in text form. That is how we under support all the work of this podcast of myself and of all my Atlantic colleagues. As we wrap up this all-media day today, I want to delve into one final topic, and that is: the way this scandal, this outrage, this outcry that has been womped up about the age of former President Joe Biden. Everyone saw the debate that President Biden had obviously become infirm, and now there is a lot of accusation that this was somehow covered up or neglected, and that not only were the people around President Biden culpable, but that somehow the press was implicated, too, in its failure to address the question sufficiently and in time. This strikes me as something with a kernel of truth to it, but more distraction and misleading than truth. And let me explain what I mean. Now, I'm proud to say that The Atlantic was early and direct on the Biden age story. We ran a piece in June of 2022 by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich saying Biden was too old and should not run again. Had Leibovich's advice been followed, history would've taken a very different course. And I think you'll find many other examples in many other places—Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine—of people who brought attention to the President Biden's gathering infirmity. Obviously, there were people around him who tried to put the best face on the president's health. That's always true. President Kennedy was much sicker than anybody knew at the time when he was president in the early '60s, when he seemed to be a model of physical fitness. President Eisenhower, the severity of his heart attacks—again, that was not known to people at the time. The full seriousness of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981—his recovery, it was much more touch and go than people were allowed to think at the time. People are invited to think of the president as healthier than the president often is. It is a body-killing job, and nobody comes out of it in the same shape that they went into it. And surely, the people around President Biden tried to represent him as healthier than perhaps he was, especially toward the end. And it is an important news story to cover the capability of the president. Kudos to those who dig into that topic, who separate what is true from what is rumored, and who alert people when the president isn't as capable as the president should be, or as those around him want to be. That's a job that continues even after the presidency. As I said, with these previous presidents, the full degree of their infirmity was often not known until sometime afterwards. Woodrow Wilson was struck down by a stroke in October of 1919. Now, people understood that he was ill and was invalided, but how radically invalided he was, that was something—and he was invalid from October of 1919 until he left the presidency, in March of 1921, almost a year and a half—that was covered up by his wife and his doctor. And the full truth was not known for a long time, and that really did change the course of history. Many of the worst acts of the Wilson presidency happened after the stroke of October 1919, and it's not clear whether Wilson approved of them, authorized them, or even was aware of them. The Palmer Raids, for example, where immigrants were rounded up and deported without much of a hearing, if any—those started in November of 1919 and were at their peak in January of 1920. Not clear that Wilson even ever knew about it. So bringing the truth retrospectively, also an important task. And I understand that journalists, when they follow these stories, can sometimes lose perspective. You know, if the school superintendent is stealing pencils from the supply cabinet, that's probably not the most important story in the world. But the only way you're ever going to find out about it is if one person in the local paper decides that for him or for her, that story will be the most important story in the world for however long it takes to get to the bottom of it. And only a person who acts as if the superintendent stealing the pencils is the most important story in the world will bring the story to light at all and give it whatever attention it deserves. So their tunnel vision is kind of a bona fide job qualification for being a reporter. But when you consume and read and react to news, that's where the perspective comes in. And you need to say, Okay, maybe the people around Biden did try to hush up how sick he was. And maybe not every journalist worked as hard as Mark Leibovich to get the truth. Not every journalist worked as hard as Olivia Nuzzi to get the truth. Not every journalist was willing to brave the blowback that Mark Leibovich and Olivia Nuzzi got for their reporting of the truth. But how important was this story, really? And today—when there is an effort to make it seem like this is the biggest scandal in American history, or at least the biggest scandal going today—at a time when the present president is pillaging billions of dollars, the story now that is the overwhelming story here in Washington is corruption on a post-Soviet, postcolonial Africa scale. Billions of dollars going into and affecting everything, every decision that this administration makes, from pardons to foreign policy. That's the story. Everything else, also interesting. But don't oversell it, and don't overbuy it. Thanks very much. I hope to see you next week here on The David Frum Show. [] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
