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Atlantic
3 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Wrecking of the FBI
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump's decision to shut down the conversation around the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Frum explains why Trump's move has triggered backlash from parts of his own base and why it reveals a deeper political fracture inside the MAGA movement. Then Frum is joined by the former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok, who shares his insights on what's happening at the bureau during Trump's second term. Strzok, who is still engaged in a lawsuit with the government over his 2018 firing, explains how Trump loyalists such as the FBI's director, Kash Patel, and its deputy director, Dan Bongino, are dismantling the agency's national-security functions: purging experts, sidelining investigations, and leaving the United States dangerously vulnerable to terrorism, foreign espionage, and cyberattacks. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who has become a victim of President [Donald] Trump's campaign of retribution against those who tried to apply law against him. Our topic was the hollowing out of the FBI in the second Trump term, and my original plan was to have a monologue that would address that very specific subject. But there have been some dramatic events this past weekend at the FBI, including threats of resignation or reported threats of resignation by both the director and the deputy director to protest the attorney general's directive to shut down the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Because of that, I am changing plans and recording this monologue late on Sunday evening, before the release of the show, which will explain to those of you viewing on YouTube a certain stepping-away from the usual high aesthetic standards we try to maintain for the visuals of The David Frum dramatic events caught me between planes, and I'm speaking to you from an airport hotel and not one of our usual venues. I want to offer some thoughts about the Trump-Epstein matter. Let's look at this for a moment from the point of view of a MAGA supporter, a MAGA believer. Now, if you are such a person, you have refused to take seriously and accepted President Trump's excuses for a long array of shocking events—including confirmed findings by a civil court of sexual abuse, massive self-enrichment, the attempted overthrow of an American election in 2021—and you have agreed to accept the president's word on every one of these matters until now. Suddenly, with the Epstein case, there's been a mutiny in MAGA world where they're abruptly no longer accepting, or many of them are no longer accepting President Trump's orders to step away from an investigation that is embarrassing to him. They're no longer believing the things that Donald Trump tells them. And the question that those of us who are not in MAGA world must ask is: Why now? Why this? Now, obviously, the Epstein matter is intensely serious: many, many cases of sexual abuse of underage women and girls, with overlays of financial corruption and many other allegations, including a highly suspicious account of the death of the figure at the center of the case, whether by suicide—even if the official story is suicide, and even if you accept that, there does seem to be something very wrong with the logs. And there are just a lot of questions. So it is a grade-A scandal. I'm not in any way denigrating that scandal to say other scandals that were also important have been shrugged off by MAGA world. What is it about this one? After all, supposing you were someone who really wanted to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, wouldn't it be that Donald Trump would be about the last politician in America you would trust to lead the investigation? He and Epstein were friends for a long time. But President Trump, in interviews and other statements, made light of Jeffrey Epstein's connections to underage women. They spent a lot of time together. They were good friends, and there's more and more evidence, some of it in a new book by Michael Wolff, of an even closer relationship than that. And after all, if it is the death that is concerning you about—the suspicious circumstances of Jeffrey Epstein's death—that happened not during the Bill Clinton presidency, not during the Barack Obama presidency, not during the Joe Biden presidency. The death happened in the Donald Trump presidency in a prison supervised by Trump administration officials. So if you are wanting to get to the truth of this, why, ever, would you have trusted Donald Trump to do it? And yet so many people in Trump world looked to Donald Trump as the man who would bring this story to truth, and now profess to be shocked and surprised when a person who was so close to Jeffrey Epstein at the last minute says, You know what? We're closing the book on this matter. No more investigation. Why are they surprised? I think the answer to that is that MAGA world, or the people in MAGA world who are really excited about the Epstein matter, thought they had a deal with Donald Trump. And the deal was they would look away from the highly specific Trump-Epstein relationship, the connections between—they would make excuses or pretend to believe them or say Donald Trump and Epstein broke off relations at some point in the past, over business matters. Some people will even tell you that Donald Trump discovered late that Epstein was an abuser of women and was so shocked and offended that he broke off his relationship with Epstein. Let those believe that who will. But they thought they had a deal. Bracket Trump, leave Trump out of the story, and Trump in turn would license them to go on a hunting expedition against all the people they really hated. A long list of liberal icons, people like—people whom they dislike for other reasons who were in the Epstein network. If Trump would just—they would stand back from Trump and he would then deliver to them justice against their ideological and other kinds of opponents. They're mad, these people, because Trump reneged on that deal. In order to protect himself, he ended up protecting a lot of other people, too, or so people in MAGA world who are excited about this issue believe that this has been taken away from them. And for some of the people who are the loudest influencers, losing the Epstein file, having Donald Trump say, There are no records, there's nothing to see here, everybody stand down, that's not just a threat to their belief system. For many of them, it's a threat to their livelihoods. For a lot of influencers, Epstein was central to their engagement strategies, very lucrative engagement strategies, and they now have the choice: If they accept the Donald Trump edict—if they say, Okay, we'll stand down, as President Trump says—then what do they do for engagement? And the Epstein engagement came with an extra-special spicy sauce because for those who really got into this, it was not just an unfortunate coincidence or a happenstance that Jeffrey Epstein's name happened to be Jeffrey Epstein. For some of the people most excited about Epstein, the fact that Epstein had a Jewish name and a Jewish background opens the door to a whole world of conspiracy that they deeply believe in: a kind of anti-Semitic version of QAnon. Remember: The accusation that Jews are child molesters is one of the foundational myths of conspiratorial anti-Semitism. From Hugh of Lincoln and the belief that Jews were murdering English children to get blood for matzo to Fagin in the Oliver Twist novels, this has been a long line of conspiratorial suspicion and accusation, and Epstein seemed perfectly to fit the bill, especially since Epstein had some relationships with some people in the Israeli government. And so for the people who want to blow apart the U.S.-Israel relationship, or who wanna believe that Israel is somehow masterminding the United States, Epstein was perfect. And when they see Donald Trump closing down the investigation, that ignites a lot of their fears that Donald Trump may be suspiciously close to Israel too. I won't say the names. You will know the names. You can easily find the names of the MAGA influencers who have made a very specific point that Epstein is being protected by Trump in order to protect Israel. So this is an essential threat to all of them: an economic threat, an ideological threat. Donald Trump broke the deal. They protect Trump; he gives them Epstein. He's not giving them Epstein. Now, all this is to say, Epstein was a genuine, serious sexual and probably financial criminal, and many people do seem to have been involved in this network, and there's a lot of stuff here to find out. And Donald Trump's actions over the past days have made it all the more urgent to find—to get to the bottom of this. But this break between Donald Trump and conspiratorial and the conspiratorial version of the Epstein story may turn out to be of great political significance as well as moral legal significance. The Trump world is composed of many, many different factions, and they're not all conspiratorial and they're not all anti-Semitic, but the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic group is important. They're not negligible. Until now, they've had nowhere to go. But you know who's been a big hunter-down of the Epstein story? That is Elon Musk. Now, when Elon Musk announced the formation of his so-called America Party, I have to admit, I was at the beginning very skeptical that this party would go anywhere. Now, third parties have been important in the American past. The Free Soilers in the 19th century; free-silver and Greenback parties in the 19th century; Prohibitionist parties, socialist parties in the 20th century—those have been important parties. But third parties become important in the following way. There is an issue—slavery, alcohol, the coinage—that the two big parties, for some reason, don't want to touch. So it remains, it remains outside the party system, but it's important and a lot of people care about it, and a lot of people care about it more than they care about anything else. And so people with many important political differences can sink those differences—they'll say, We're uniting around the cause of free soil. We're uniting on the cause of greenback money. We're uniting on the cause of socialism or temperance and sinking previous disagreements. So that's how third parties work. Where third parties fail is when they are just a grab bag of people who are unhappy with the existing two parties. That's Ross Perot's Reform Party in the 20th century, or Andrew Yang's Progress Party, or Forward Party, I think it was called, in the 21st century. They were dissatisfied, but dissatisfied for lots and lots of different reasons. So they found it very difficult to agree and to work together, unlike the people who united around the single issue: third parties that have been successful. So Elon Musk's America Party looked to me at first a lot like the Ross Perot or Andrew Yang version of a party. He's got a lot of grievances, highly idiosyncratic to him. He's looking for other people with other grievances. They may or may not agree with him. It was going to be a mess, and it was going to sink. But suddenly, there's an opportunity for him to create the kind of single-issue, outside-the-party-system party that has been successful in the past—like Free Soil, like Greenback, like the others. If he turns the America Party into the 'get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, no matter how much it hurts Donald Trump' party, that's something that can unite a lot of people who might otherwise disagree. And it's a real issue—and as Donald Trump signifies every day, much realer than anybody thought before this weekend. It is a real issue. There is a secret there now; exactly what the secret is, we don't know, but it seems very worth getting to the bottom of. I quoted on X, Twitter, an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, with its message, 'If the best friend of the deceased villain tells you, Don't look in that locked closet, that locked closet is the place you need to look.' And if Elon Musk wants to lead the search expedition, he's going to find a lot of people willing to follow him, and he may be able to make an effectual, damaging third party, after all, something that looks a lot more like the successful third parties of the past. If he simply subtracts from the Trump coalition, its most conspiratorial elements—again, that's not a majority of American society, that's not tens of millions of people, but it's an important part of the Trump coalition. Important enough that Trump gave away Health and Human Services and medical safety in order to appease the conspiratorial anti-vax faction. Now he's alienated the conspiratorial Epstein faction, and that may be costly to him if they suddenly discover they have a place to go. And now my conversation with Peter Strzok. [ Music ] Frum: I'm very grateful to welcome today Peter Strzok to The David Frum Show. I imagine that Peter will need very little introduction to most of the viewers and listeners to this program, but just in case: Peter Strzok had national fame thrust upon him against his will. A career FBI officer who specialized in counterintelligence, he was a senior member of the team that investigated both Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server and Donald Trump's tangled connections to the Russian government. When private messages of his were revealed, he became a target of intense personal attack by then-President Trump and by the pro-Trump media. Peter is now fighting a lawsuit for reinstatement and back pay. He teaches at Georgetown University and is the author of the best-selling book Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald [J.] Trump. Peter, welcome to The David Frum Show. Peter Strzok: David, it's great to be here with you. Thank you. Frum: If I may—and don't go into any more detail than your lawyers will allow—but could you give us a sense of the state of play of the litigation you brought against the United States government and the Trump administration? Strzok: Sure. So there were two broad aspects of it. The first was that the government had illegally released text messages that I had sent, and that case settled with [the Department of Justice] last year for $1.2 million. There is an ongoing aspect—which, as you indicated, I want to be careful to respect the court because it is an ongoing process—but essentially, sued under two broad, sort of, aspects. One: that the FBI violated the First Amendment by engaging in viewpoint discrimination, notably that because the things I said about Trump led to my termination rather than anything that was outside of protective First Amendment activity. And then some procedural aspects to employment law. But that case is still ongoing. It's still, you know, after we filed in 2018, so we're seven years later, but I have hopes that that will be resolved later this year, and favorably. Frum: Let me ask you today about your former agency. Donald Trump and the people around him malign the FBI as part of a deep state. And I often think if you remember that when they say the deep state, they mean the rule of law, that's very clarifying. But there's some comfort because you think deep state, I guess it's really solid. It must go deep. It must be hard to damage or remove. But you've often explained that that's not true, that the FBI is a much more fragile institution than outsiders may understand, more damageable than outsiders understand. What is it? Could you explain the vulnerability of the FBI to malign leadership at the top? Strzok: Absolutely. And it's interesting; I take your point that there is some, you know, this idea of the deep state actually in my mind is very much, as you said, the rule of law is and stands for a professional bureaucracy with a capital B that is a professional civil service that we've built up over hundreds of years that is not immune from corruption, but is notably different from a lot of places you'll see in the developing world or even in places like Russia and former Soviet states. But I think what people—you know, when it comes to the FBI, and we can talk about it maybe a little bit later as well, that, you know, the FBI certainly has a troubled history, a checkered history. If you go back and you look at some of the abuses of the Hoover era, particularly with regard to the civil-rights movement, particularly with regard to offshoots of the fight against communism, and you know, there's, to be clear, there was a Soviet effort to infiltrate the U.S. government. There was a Soviet effort to steal the secrets of the atomic and later hydrogen bombs, so the threat from the Soviet Union was real. However, there were certainly under the McCarthy era and sort of the intersection between the Soviet Union and civil society in the U.S.—there were abuses and I think most notably, certainly with some of the bureau's activities related to Martin Luther King. But if you look at the reforms that were put in place following the '70s—and some of that was part of the civil-rights movement, part of that was the establishment of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] and the creation of laws to kind of rein in and govern what the FBI was doing—those led to, again, starting in the early, mid-'70s, decades upon decades of sort of guardrails being put up around what the FBI could or could not do, and separating the FBI from—and the Department of Justice—from the political winds coming out of the White House. Having said that—and I think a lot of people say, Yes, we're all aware of that. We're very—you know, there's this tradition in the FBI and tradition in the DOJ that we're separated. There's this wall between DOJ and the White House, and I don't think people understand that while that is true, a lot of that is not because of law. A lot of that is because of agreement. And if you look at the time of the Church and the Pike Committees, Congress is very much engaged not only in doing investigations, but creating legislation of how are we going to regulate what the IRS does or doesn't do when it comes to things that the direction of the president are, you know, targeting certain taxpayers or protecting that information? How are we going to regulate what the CIA and other members of the intelligence community, what they're able to do domestically and not do domestically? And laws were written—not executive orders, but laws out of Congress—limiting and putting sort of an infrastructure around what those organizations could do. When it came to the FBI and DOJ—then I think it was Attorney General [John] Mitchell, if I recall correctly; I might be wrong about that—said, You know what? We don't need Congress to pass any laws. We can police our own house. We're going to create these. I think it was Attorney General [Edward] Levi, actually— Frum: Attorney General Mitchell, John Mitchell went to jail, went to prison, let's not forget. Strzok: Yes, he did. He is far from the person who created reform within the bureau, so yeah, sort of the Levi guidelines, right? Frum: These are the beginning of the modern era of the FBI, which is, okay, there's the Hoover era with many abuses. There's a period of rapid chaos under President [Richard] Nixon, but then after, in the Ford administration and afterwards, there was an attempt to put the FBI for the first time on the basis of a sound legal footing with clear delineation of what they could do and what they couldn't do. And although for me, maybe for you, the 1970s seem like yesterday, in fact, it's now half a century that these laws were in place, and those are the laws that are now in question. And my question to you is, I think a lot of people think, well, there's a limit to what a Kash Patel can do. But as you've explained to me in the past, actually either a lot of informal levers that he's got, and when we hear, for example, that he's saying, Well, we're gonna redeploy agents to other cities from Washington —that's not just a management decision. That's a tool of power. Strzok: Yeah, absolutely. And so a couple of points to that. One, there is a tremendous amount of discretion when it comes to the FBI director because these guidelines were not ever sort of enshrined in law. They were things that were internally adhered to by the FBI and by DOJ. But the downside is, they could be easily changed and you see them—Pam Bondi, one of the things she very quickly did is say, We're going to change, sort of, the rules and regulations about what we do with members of the press. And some of the restrictions when it comes to issuing subpoenas or the process, we're going to look at those in a different light. But when it comes to, particularly—any director, but Kash Patel, in particular, some of the things we've talked about—the bureau is very small. I mean, sum total is probably roughly 35,000 people. The number of special agents is roughly 13,000. Your listeners might say, Well, that's actually really large. If there was a company, that would be a huge company. But if you compare and contrast that to the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, certainly it's a very, very small organization. And if you look at the amount of power that the FBI has, and then you sort of create a ratio of number of people compared to the amount of power, it's an extraordinarily powerful organization. And so for somebody like Kash Patel to be able to come in and say, We are going to shift all of these resources, he has a huge amount of leeway to do that. Now, some of that—and last point I'll make on this—some of that's reasonable, right? Donald Trump ran on immigration. People knew that he separated children from their parents at the border in the first administration, and a plurality of the voters went out and voted for more of that. And so I think we need to be cautious in this debate to be able to say some of the prioritization of the use of the Department of Justice, the use of the FBI, there is a presidential prerogative that elections have consequences. But I think what we're seeing is not just a shift of Hey—I want you to focus on immigration, but a massive, massive reorganization at the expense of other needs. Frum: You made the point in one of our conversations that when you hear the FBI director say, We're going to move 500 agents from Washington, D.C., to Birmingham, Alabama —well, I don't know if that's the number, but a certain number—we think of that as, Oh, okay. Well, maybe you should be closer to the different parts of the country. What people don't understand at the point you made is, FBI agents have spouses with careers, they have children in schools. They have homes and mortgages. When you give the FBI director the power to move a certain number of people from one place to another, you get—and he has discretion over which to pick—you're giving him an ability to force people out of the bureau because some of the people are told, You have to move. The spouse will say, Well, honey, I can't move. So I think in the best interest of this family, you will need to find new work. Or, We have a child with a learning disability. There is no school in Birmingham that can help our child. So our family can't move. And if the director knows that and he says, Aha, there's an agent I don't like and that agent has a spouse with an important job or a special-needs child and they can't move. If I give that agent the order to move to Birmingham, it's as good as firing that agent. Strzok: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I mean, there's a soft-power, sub-rosa element to if you understand that those things can be done, that you can use that ostensibly under the idea of, We're just shifting resources investigatively. But if you understand full well that, whatever percentage of people aren't going to do that, or very specifically to your point, if you know somebody that you're trying to get rid of, or a group of people that you're trying to get rid of, you can use the prospect of reassignment to increase the cost of staying. And I think we've seen that. I mean, I don't know that it, it's not specific to, We're going to move you to a field office to help out ICE with rounding up immigrants. But we have seen—or at least it's been reported, and I've heard through the sort of chain of current and retired agents—a large number of agents who in some way, shape, or form were linked to causes that Kash Patel doesn't like, and Donald Trump doesn't like, and Pam Bondi doesn't like, and so whether they were engaged in investigations surrounding January 6, whether they were engaged in Trump's alleged maintenance, illegal maintenance of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, whether they were engaged way back—and you still see John Ratcliffe at the CIA releasing things about 2016, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and Russia's influence on and attacks against the 2016 elections—all of those people you see having these different sorts of formal and informal pressure placed upon them to move them out of the way, either by resignation, retirement, whatever the case may be. Frum: And the special benefit of a Kash Patel—and again, I only know this because I learned it from you—so, the restraint on perversion of the FBI is that most FBI directors really have cared deeply about the FBI as an institution. And they've made, sometimes—even the ones who were not very Trumpy made compromises to protect the FBI from Trump. So if you had an institutionally minded but pro-Trump director, when they got the order, Move people to places, not because there's a real need to have them go, but because that's the way you can get rid of the people investigating the president, there are a lot of people who would be pro-Trump but would have proper credentials [and] would say, But I have to protect—those are some of my best people. Like, The person you want me to fire is my leading expert on currency fraud, my leading expert on counterterrorism. I'm not prepared to lose that person, even though I don't agree with that person's politics. The special genius of Kash Patel is he just doesn't care. He has no regard for the FBI as an institution. No, I mean, if we say there's a special Nobel Prize for Bobby Kennedy Jr. as maybe the worst Cabinet secretary, not just of this administration but of all time, the most inappropriate, the most 'who shouldn't have the job,' Kash Patel may not quite match a pro-polio secretary of Health and Human Services, but he's an honorable mention, right? Strzok: Absolutely. And it's not only malevolence and lack of care; it's also lack of competence. Like, I mean, he could not—one, he doesn't care and he is just going to go and do whatever the president—and I think they, what the interesting question is all the people, like, clearly Donald Trump is the motive force and at the FBI, it's Kash Patel and to a certain extent Dan Bongino who are motive force, but there are people around them who are taking care of the particulars or informing them of the particulars to be acted on. But for Kash, it's not just a lack of caring; it's an utter lack of knowledge. And to my point earlier, like, the FBI is tiny. There are not enough, things we faced every day or that there are not—and the FBI's not alone in this—the FBI does not have enough personnel and investigators to cover the threats on his plate. There are not enough FBI agents and analysts and investigators to counter all the threats of terrorism, counterintelligence, white-collar crime, public corruption, gang—all of it. You name it, there's not enough. So it is very much, one, you're having to prioritize which threats you do work, and it is essentially very much a zero-sum game. If you take people off of one topic, you're putting them on another, but you're losing somewhere else. But for Kash Patel, because he never worked in the bureau, because he had no experience in DOJ to speak of other than some line headquarters prosecutor, he would not be able to tell Pam Bondi or any of the people at the White House, Look—if we move these people to work immigration, you've got to understand we're going to not be working on this or not be working on that, and your exposure and your threat in those areas, your call at the end of the day, but if you do this, this is the cost that you're gonna have to pay in the way that trickles out down the line. And my hope was he would be so incompetent and so uncaring, he'd be happy to just enjoy the posing and photos and let the professional careers run the place. But I think he's proven to be a little bit more malicious than that. Frum: Yeah. Well, also they're taking the precaution of making sure that he has a similar deputy, that he doesn't have some by-the-book person. But with the lack of background, the normal response would be, Okay, let's have a steely, competent, schooled deputy. But instead, they have someone who may be even more committed to Trump. And who does have—I mean, I've seen Dan Bongino throw a water bottle at somebody's head. He does have some impulse-control issues. I want to ask you about one of the areas where things are not being secured while other priorities go to the fore, and that is specifically the problem of counterterrorism. The United States under President Trump has now struck Iranian nuclear sites. We hope that that is a decisive result and we hope it's the end of the U.S.-Iran conflict, but it would be unwise to assume that. So Trump keeps insisting it's all over, but the Iranians get a vote. One obvious move that they would have—they've used it before—is to strike targets by terrorism inside the United States and targets of interest to the United States around the world. What is the state of our counterintelligence facilities? There are a lot of reports that suggest there have been important resignations, that there are less qualified people running counterterrorism. How does that look to you? Strzok: Well, I think there is very much a greater vulnerability than there was prior to Kash Patel showing up. I mean, I think the problem with Trump—and this is a microcosm—there's a lack of understanding that all these external actors have agency, right? We're going to treat our Western European allies like crap, not understanding in Canada, there'd be a 51st state, not understanding that, you know, that these are people and entities and states that are going to respond in a certain way. Well, the same thing goes for a terrorist organization. The same thing goes for Iran, which, as you know is—in terms of the size and national capacity—is an economic force from the Middle East to South Asia, is a significant, huge, huge country, particularly when you line it up against many other Gulf states. So when you take the double sort of factor of one, a direct physical violent action against Iran and their nuclear capacity. When you take what has gone on—at least reportedly in the press and what I've heard—that a large number of people who were being forced out, whether because they were perceived to be loyal to [Christopher Wray or God forbid, Joe Biden. The sort of winnowing process as you move up the chain in the FBI takes a long time. I mean, you go—again, like many organizations, but at the FBI as an agent—the people who arrive, traditionally, at the senior level of the organizations have gone through a variety of assignments, both in the field as an investigator, as well as at headquarters doing a variety of things to gain expertise, to run larger programs, to interact with the interagency community and to understand, say, you're a counterterrorism agent. You've worked as an investigator, perhaps against the IRGC. Maybe you've worked against a QAP; you've come back to headquarters— Frum: What are IRGC and QAP? Strzok: So the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. So Iran, in an intelligence and counterterrorism aspect, largely exercises external power through client terrorist organizations through either the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds force, in particular the IRGC, but also some activity through their foreign-intelligence service, which is the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS. Frum: And what is a QAP? Strzok: Al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula. So that's a, you know, not necessarily, that isn't, I wouldn't call them certainly at all, an Iranian client organization. But in the terrorism context, as an agent, you're going to work a variety of these different targets, both as an investigator and then back at headquarters. And maybe you're supervising all these different cases across the FBI. Maybe you're embedded at the CIA. Maybe you're interacting from time to time with Congress helping to draft legislation. And you move up the chain gathering greater and greater experience. And so by the time it gets to the point where you're on that senior staff advising the director and deputy director what to do, you've had probably 20 years of various experience learning this and doing this. Well, when you come in with purges, and you're Patel and Bongino and trying to get rid of everybody so you can bring in people—and again, director of the FBI largely, it depends, but typically is an external-facing figure. They interact with the Hill; they interact with the public; they interact with the White House. The deputy director of the FBI traditionally has always been an agent—Dan Bongino first in memory who isn't—who has a deep understanding of how the bureau works and an accomplished track record within that organization. So then they're gonna rely on the next level down, which all go by the title of executive assistant directors, EAD. Well, they've forced all those people out. And in some cases, the level below that they've forced out—the assistant directors, the people in charge of the counterterrorism division, the person in charge of the counterintelligence division, the person in charge of the criminal division. Well, if you force those next two levels out, you've essentially got two people at the top who have no idea what they're doing relying now on the fifth level down—not to say they're not good agents there, but they just haven't had the time to sort of gain that experience to be able to advise at the level that they're suddenly being asked to do. So that's a very long-winded way to your question. When it then comes to—we've bombed Iran, we are supporting in many ways Israeli efforts against Iran—that when it comes to a potential Iranian response, whether that's through proxies, whether they have sleeper personnel here, whether they have visitors capable of coming into the United States, whether they have established capabilities out of the Iranian intersection or the mission to the UN. The people who know that, the people who are on the street who have that knowledge, one, at a senior level may be gone; two, at a street level, may have gotten pulled to go work, to your point, immigration in Birmingham. So there's a real—there aren't sort of idle agents, the Maytag repairman just sort of sitting around waiting for a call. If you are moving somebody to work on a task, you are necessarily removing them from whatever they were doing before. And in some cases that's going to be terrorism. And if you say, Okay, well, it's true—we're gonna continue our focus on Iran, well, then you're gonna have to find your pound of flesh somewhere else. And so maybe you're not looking at other, you know— Frum: I want to get to the other thing; I want to say something more about counterterrorism. This is actually one of the anecdotes I did not learn from you about the FBI, but at the senior level of the FBI, it is a deluge of information about things, terrible things that could happen. And most of the information is wrong. It's either false from the beginning or it's exaggerated, or it's tainted, and a lot of the bureaucracy of the FBI is a sorting mechanism to be able to rapidly to work through false positives—and by the way, this is not just tips from a concerned citizen. These are foreign governments that—sometimes the foreign government has information. Sometimes it's imperfect. Sometimes they have an agenda. They want you to look at somebody for whom they're mad at for some other reason. But there's this deluge and so a lot of what the FBI has set up to do is to sift—I guess you don't sift a deluge—but to strain the deluge of information and with always the fear that you might miss a true positive, which would be, as happened, that's 9/11, that all the information to stop 9/11 was present somewhere inside the United States government. It just was never connected in ways that allowed the government to act effectively and save all the lives that could have been saved. So you're haunted by that memory, and so when you start breaking things, it's not just that you're not in the field sniffing for clues, it's that you have no way of managing this onslaught of vast quantities of warnings, of terrible things that might happen. Strzok: Right. I think that's an excellent point. I entirely agree with that. Part of what you do is, there's a continuum of that sort of lesson as a baby investigator, as a probationary agent learning to understand what things are worth doing and what things are kind of spinning your wheels. And that's whether you're working an individual case or whether you expand out and you're running an entire program, whether that's the entire terrorism program, the entire counterintelligence program, to have that sort of expertise that builds up over time to understand that if I'm faced with allegation one or element of information one, if it's bona fide, one, I would expect to see all of these other things. And here are the people I can ask to inform me whether those things are present or not. Or ordinarily, if they were present, they would be telling me. And because I'm not hearing it from them, I'm going to question that and know, Hey—why aren't we seeing this from this internal element? Or, Why aren't we hearing this from the NSA? Whatever. And it's very hard to sit there and to explain to anybody in two minutes on a podcast or a four-minute answer at a congressional hearing, how complex those systems are. And it kills me—and I don't want to turn this into a gripe session about the senior management of the FBI—Dan Bongino goes on Fox News and he acts astonished that everything we face is a 10 out 10, like the nines out 10, we don't even hear it. And I barely get home to see my wife and it's like we're divorced. It's like, Dude, what the hell do you think has been going on for the past 20, 30, 40 years by all the people at the FBI and you've been on the job for five minutes and you're complaining? It's like, yes. And the problem is: If you don't have that expertise, you are going to tend to flail. And if you've gotten rid of all the other people who can act as sort of wise consiglieres to tell you, Look, boss—it sounds bad, but this really is probably not what we should be focusing on. Let whoever run this out. Here are the things that you really need to focus on. Those people, those voices don't exist anymore, and there's only so much you can do to reach down and pluck somebody up—again, there are a lot of really great agents and analysts, but they just, they don't have that benefit. You can't suddenly bestow on somebody an extra five years of senior experience. You can't do that. And that's what they're missing, if they care to begin with. And I'm not certain they do. Part of me thinks, there are things they do care about—child predators, I think they actually care about, violent crime I think they care about. Frum: Why do you think they care? What makes you think that? Because they falsely accuse innocent people being child predators all the time. Strzok: I think some of it, it plays into, they have this image—and you see it, whether it's Kash Patel or Kristi Noem—all these people, and they're playing dress-up, right? They've got their tactical gear on. Kash Patel wears this little badge around. I think they have an image in their mind's eye informed by what they've seen coming out of Hollywood about what a sexy FBI or whatever it is they're cosplaying. And so those things that they think are easy to articulate, they're going to lean into that and say, We took this many child predators out of play. Good thing. But I would argue a lot of different things the FBI should be focused on in addition to that. Frum: Yeah. I'm not going to concede that—I think if you're attracted to crazy conspiracy theories about child predators, you're not that interested in child predators. Someone who cared about child predators would say, You know what? I'm going to invest the time to learn about this issue and see where the threats are because, obviously, child abuse is a huge problem. You'd learn about it. And if you can't be bothered to learn about something, and if you instead get all your information from insane QAnon groups, that tells me, you know what? You don't actually care what you, you care about pursuing tribal enemies and you want to accuse them of the worst thing you can believe that they might be guilty of, but you don't care enough about the underlying issue to learn, how does it work? Where are the guilty? Where are the non-guilty? How do you apportion resources? How do you really chase this thing down in a way that actually will save children? If you can't be bothered to learn, I don't believe you really care. Strzok: Yeah, and I think they're fundamentally lazy, and I'm talking about Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. I think Kash Patel has spent the, you know, entirety of his life cozying up to political figures that he could hitch his wagon to, whether it's Devin Nunes and then Donald Trump and otherwise selling God knows what on various podcasts, whether it's, you know, I don't know, but things that are not of substantive value. And same with Bongino. You know, manufacturing and selling outrage for a podcast does not create a value add to society. Frum: Hey! (Laughs.) Strzok: It is selling outrage, not informing. (Laughs.) There's informing with informed reasonable expertise. And then there's just selling outrage that—I don't think they care. And some of it—I mean, again, you know, one of the built-in good things I think about the FBI is it's too big for them to have a role in field officers out there investigating crime. And so sometimes when you get successful investigations leading to arrest, I'm willing to grant the argument that they're not truly interested in whatever it is. But when they're presented with the fact that the Miami Field Office just arrested these 12 people for topic X, if that makes for a sexy tweet—and by the way, we can open for debate, I have never seen any FBI director, let alone deputy director on social media—But one thing that Patel and Bongino were doing, prolifically, are posting to Twitter/X, going on Fox News, going on Joe Rogan. They are playing like everybody in the Trump ecosphere; they're playing social media in a fundamentally different way than has ever been done by the FBI. And we can debate whether it's good or bad, but it has a different impact. And the question is gonna be: When we, God willing, return to normal times, should we maintain that? Or is that something we should try and put back in the box? But that's an interesting phenomenon. Frum: Let me ask you about a slightly different area of vulnerability from the counterterrorism file, and that is counterintelligence. Now, it didn't have to be that the country's chief federal-police force was also the country's counterintelligence service. Other countries do not necessarily organize things that way. I've had a chance to put this to senior people at the FBI, and they have defended the duality of these missions and say it's a source of strength to the United States that the FBI does both. I'm not well informed enough to have an opinion, but it doesn't have to be that way, and other countries do it differently. But it is that way here, and so let's talk about the risk. First, tell us what counterintelligence is. Define that in case anyone's unfamiliar. Strzok: So I would say counterintelligence is—in the case of the U.S., the U.S. response to foreign nations who are engaging in clandestine intelligence activity in the United States. So whether that is trying to steal trade secrets, whether that is trying to steal our secrets of the CIA or the FBI, the Department of State, whether that's trying to clandestinely influence public opinion, all of those things that, you know, China, Russia, Iran, Cuba's version of the CIA would be doing, the FBI is the primary organization within the United States to combat that, to prevent it, to roll it back, to prosecute it where they can. But because it tends to be very classified, it doesn't get talked about a lot traditionally, but it is—I think, again, a lot of your listeners would be very surprised to hear about the level of effort and resources that are put into protecting the United States against those foreign efforts. Frum: Now, this is where you invested a lot of your career. Can you give us any sense of specifics about what the condition of that work is in the second Trump presidency? Strzok: Well, I think it's strained. I think you have what we talked about earlier, a huge loss of expertise, certainly on the counterintelligence side. You have a lot of emerging threats. And when I say emerging, these are things that because of changes in—changes in the world, in one case, you know, changes in the information space, and changes in social media, we've seen a proliferation of perception management, foreign influence–type activities, whether that's, you know, people think about the Russian attacks on the 2016, 2020 elections, but also think about things that our team might be doing to influence public opinion about the war in Ukraine. Think about things that the PRC might be doing to influence U.S. perceptions about Taiwan, or about the Uyghurs or about the Dalai Lama. These sort of both traditional things like a Russian Soviet spy trying to recruit somebody in the CIA along with these influence-type operations along with, you know, China's efforts to surpass the United States and the global economic sphere. Whether it's like stealing the secret sauce of why American jet engines are so vastly superior to anything that the Chinese can make, whether it is looking at emerging AI models or supercomputing models or quantum technology and trying to steal that to then take it and incorporate it in the Chinese manufactured goods or technology. All of those things are going on. And so when you say we're going to take 30 percent of our workforce and move it over to rounding up immigrants, not even violent immigrants—we're just going to round up immigrants so we can get our numbers up—those people come, not entirely, but one of the places they come from are all those folks who are doing it. So not only do you have, it's a sort of a double whammy. You've got a brain drain, particularly at a senior level of people who are getting forced out because a lot of them, by the way, senior counterintelligence people happen to be involved with the investigation of Donald Trump allegedly maintaining illegally classified documents at his place at Mar-a-Lago. You have any number of people who were in some way, shape, or form looking at combatting foreign influence in our elections. And so whether it was 2016, whether it was things like the Biden laptop, whether it was whether or not the Chinese were or weren't trying to influence our election, the people who had the expertise and knowledge to do that are getting forced out. Units are getting disbanded. In the case of foreign influence, there's an entire task force that was disbanded with a corresponding set of folks at DOJ reportedly that were all reassigned somewhere else. And so you've got both expertise loss and on the ground you've got investigative-manpower loss. And so those things, there's no question in my mind that we are more vulnerable than we were. And this is a microcosm of Trump. Trump is very much, he's, like, a day trader. At the end of the day, he just wants to be ahead, right? How do I look? How am I doing with the trade deal? There is no—strategic thought for him is four hours from now. It is not five, 10 years from now. And when you have an adversary like China who's got five-, 10-year plans where they're saying, Where do we wanna grow our economy? Where are we behind in the West? What are the technologies that we lack? Okay, we're gonna recruit scientists. We're gonna steal it if we need to, and we're gonna go about it methodically for years and years and years and years. You've gotta respond to that threat in a similar long-term way. And when you've got somebody in charge trickling down that just wants that big I just wanna close up my books ahead at the end of the day. I want a snappy tweet at 1 a.m. that I can say I'm the best, the biggest, the most awesome. Frum: I would—my analogy is a little darker than the day trader. I have always thought that Donald Trump, before he became president, most of his business career since he took over the business from his father was as someone who was bankrupt a lot of the time. And so his job every day was keeping the creditors at bay for the next 24 hours. And any lie would do to keep the creditors at bay for the next 24 hours. And then you worry about Tuesday's creditors on Tuesday, because that'll be a whole different problem. Strzok: It's the con; it's the con. That is the confidence-man MO, is exactly the same thing, right? It's like, at some point, I've got to persuade you to give me the money. And when the shell isn't there, I've got to distract your attention over here. Frum: But there's a bureaucratic problem. If you get the order from the top at an agency, like the FBI, we want to see you arrest or detain 1,000 suspected illegal migrants a day, everyone can see whether you got 998 or 1,002; that's very visible. And tomorrow, if you got 996 versus 1,003, that's very visible, and the agency can keep feeding resources to the challenge until it meets the numerical target. But there's no—in the counterintelligence world, there's no numerical target. How do I know whether we've had a successful day, week, month, year of thwarting schemes? Especially since many of the operations are classified; many of the biggest successes are thwarting things before they really can get organized to happen. Like, the Chinese are trying to steal something. There's a person at a company who has the knowledge they're trying to steal. That person is under some kind of stress. You quietly alert the company. You've got an insecure person in this job. Maybe they need to be doing something else. Maybe you need to move them to accounting or move them to HR, put somebody more trustworthy in that place. You've done enormous work, but how does anybody measure that day? Yes, we got north of a thousand detainees. Oh, today we fell, you know, below. You can't. And so bureaucracies do tend to, even with the best will in the world, overinvest in things that are measurable at the expense of things that are important. And with the worst world will in the world, then it becomes even more of a risk and threat. Strzok: Absolutely. I have a formative memory in the FBI; I was an analyst. I started out my career as an analyst working in domestic terrorism, and I had the extraordinary fortune of sitting next to Elliot Richardson at a dinner, and he asked, he was like, Oh, the FBI. He started talking about what I was doing and — Frum: Past attorney general of the United States. Strzok: Yes. One of the primary moral fiber during the mass firings, and resignations, during Nixon. But he said, upon hearing I was working terrorism, he said, You know, I've always been fascinated about how you measure something when success is not visible or measurable. And I think that's—again, you articulated it well. I think that is the challenge of every organization when you work in something where, when the bomb doesn't go off, when the secret isn't stolen, when somebody doesn't do something, that is a result, in many cases, of resource expenditure and effort. But trying to articulate that is necessarily vague, is necessarily fraught with, Well, can you assure me that it was your efforts and your seven agents doing that, that caused this? And you can't. And so when it comes to somebody who is sitting there on the one hand getting pressure from Stephen Miller— You must arrest 3,000 whatever it is a day. You have to, you have to, you have to. And you get on a call with all the other field officers that the FBI, the special agents in charge, and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel say, What are you doing in your field offices? And one special agent in charge says, Well, we arrested and deported—we got 3,100 people over to ICE this month. And somebody else says, We got 2,700 over to ICE this month. And when it comes time at the end of the year to determine ratings and bonuses, your SEC bonuses based on performance, the easiest way to do that? Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah, so you did a bunch of, you threw a bunch of people at the Chinese intelligence threat, but I don't really—yeah, China bad, but I don't really know what it means. Yeah. But you add, you know, over the course of the year you add 25,000 folks arrested and given to ICE. Yeah, that's great. And so I'm gonna—here's your bonus. Here's your performance appraisal, and you're the kind of person we need back at headquarters for a promotion. So if you are craven, if you are interested in career advancement, even if you're not craven, but nevertheless want to advance, it's clear that the metric that is going to be heavily weighted is that. And the same problem was out there with [J. Edgar] Hoover. One of the biggest problems was he loved, again, same issue, like, oh, bank robbers, like literally interstate transported, stolen property, ITSP, those things that the FBI first started doing, tangible, measurable, they look sexy. You went out and you arrested a bank robber. You compare that to like, Well, we stopped, you know, the government of X from doing Y. It's hard to compete. Frum: Or worse—we dissuaded the government of X from investing the resources to try Y. Strzok: Yes. Frum: Because they knew it wouldn't work because we're there. This is a chronic—I think, going back to the 9/11 analogy, one of the things that happened after 9/11 was the decision was made to harden cockpit doors. What if somebody, a year and a half or two years before 9/11 said, You know, why don't we harden the cockpit doors? Why don't we do that? See how that maybe that would be an improvement. And they did it. We would probably now be studying that hardening of cockpit doors as an example of government waste. Right? Strzok: Yes. Frum: We hardened all the cockpit doors. It cost all this money. No one ever tried it. Nothing ever happened. Why did we ever do that in the first place? What a waste of time and money. Government overregulation hardening cockpit doors. This is the great injustice of government. No one ever knows what's behind door number two, the thing that didn't happen, the thing that you prevented. Strzok: Right. And, you know, that's one of the critiques of DOGE, right? Like, why does this function, why does this entity exist? It's like, well, it's, you know, they never get used or it's not necessary. It's like, well, in many cases it's because five, 10, a hundred, whatever years ago, something horrible happened and we decided, you know what? The cost of this to protect against this happening once every 20, however infrequent it is, is important enough that we're going to spend money to put resources into doing it. And even the people doing it sometimes don't understand why they're there. And again, look at all the people who took the fork, right, and resigned from the National Weather Service, and whether or not, you know, the impact that, you know, I don't want to get into debate about whether or not that impacted the response in Texas. But coming into hurricane season, the government is not a private company. The government efficiency and ruthless cost-cutting and return on shareholder investment is not the analogy of what, necessarily, government should do. And particularly in the counterterrorism counterintelligence context, you know? It's one thing if you've got somebody out there who's building a bomb, but to your point, somebody who might consider, Well, you know, I do want to build a bomb and there's this synagogue over there, and I think I'm going to try and get a couple of people to attack it. But if you know that, Well, God, but the FBI just arrested a couple of people for trying to do the same thing. It's really hard for me to try and get explosive material because the FBI's all over it. I'm not going to do it. That. Right. You can't— Frum: Yeah. Strzok: You'll never know that. Frum: A friend of mine had an example that made this very vivid. He worked in the Air Force, and one of his assignments was he worked as the, whatever you call the particular officer who works the controls of an intercontinental ballistic missile. And every day, his job was to drive across the prairie, go down a silo, sit at the bottom—and there are various things you had to do to keep things, you know, training exercises and maintenance, but mostly your job was reading paperback novels because you weren't allowed to take any electronics down there, reading paperbacks and coming up. And you'd come home and your wife would say, Well, honey, what did you do at work today? And the answer was nothing. (Laughs.) It was a really good day because we're going to pay you, Mr. Ballistic Missile Officer, we want to pay you for what we really hope is at the end of your 30 years, your productivity was zero. You fired not one of those suckers. Thank you very much for your non-service. We're really grateful for it. Strzok: To your first question, where do we stand—better or worse? In my opinion, unequivocally worse. Yeah. Because there are people who don't understand it. They don't care to understand it. In many cases, they couldn't if they tried because they're just not—this isn't even the B team, right? These are the people. It's like nobody in the first term wants to work for them again. So this is like the last of the—you know, they're there because of loyalty, not because of competence, and that's part of what ensures their loyalty. Frum: One more point about systems in that, I think one of the things that, when you think about the United States government over my lifetime, which began in 1960, here's the most obvious example. Think of how many human beings did it require in 1960 to produce, process, send, and deliver a Social Security check. A few, right? You had to, you know, keep the records. How many does it require now? Like, fractions of one because it's all done electronically. An organization like the FBI, think how much effort went into records management in 1960 versus how little has to go into records management today. So the agency is that the federal government has been upskilling. This is, I think the thing that the DOGE people really didn't understand is they constantly compare it, the federal government, to the DMV—which, by the way, is a slur on the DMV. But leave that aside. I don't think people understand that the federal government is the largest purchaser of information technology on Earth. And the federal civil service has been upskilling at a blistering pace with just all kinds of clerical functions ceasing to be done by human beings. And given that agency numbers have been, I think in most places, pretty static since the Kennedy administration, what that means is that people who used to be doing jobs of records management or mailing Social Security checks are now doing other things. We have more, and so their work becomes more and more demanding, more abstract. Also a little, sometimes a little harder to explain because everyone knew what a file clerk did. Everyone knew what it meant. Okay? I'm the person who, you know, feeds the Social Security checks into the postage-stamp-issuing machine. But it's a little hard to explain that you're the person in charge of, you know, investigating how disabled somebody must be in order to qualify for a disability pension. Strzok: A couple of thoughts on that. One, it is so much easier to break it than it is to fix it, both in terms of the resources to break it versus the resources to fix it. And the other thing is, it's like climate change. There's a delayed response. It's like when the coyote runs off the cliff and he's still kind of running, but he's suspended in the air and he hasn't fallen into the scribbling little puff of smoke. We have run off the cliff in many directions at this point, and you can't get back to the cliff. At some point, that bottom is gonna fall out, and hopefully it's only a four-foot drop and not a 200-foot ravine. But again—and it isn't intuitive—these systems have become so complex. It's not, you know, the Jenga 20 stack of blocks where you pull one out and you know it's gonna fall. It's this elaborate, complex system where you're willy-nilly pulling. Well, it's still running. Yeah. But you just, right, you stuck yourself off the cliff six years from now, the next pandemic from now, the next hurricane from now, the next terrorist attack from now. And you're not gonna know it until you go to turn on the radio or go to do something and it doesn't work. And then you're shit outta luck. Sorry—I shouldn't swear on your show. Then you're outta luck. Frum: Let's leave it there. Strzok: Yeah. Frum: Let's just hope—I say, let's just hope we are lucky, because luck may be the best friend the United States has these days because it's surrounded by enemies abroad and insufficient guardians at home. Peter, thank you so much for making the time. Always such a—it was an informative experience to talk to you. Thank you. Bye-bye. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks so much to Peter Strzok. Thanks, all of you, who bear with me from the strange backdrop. It does look strange; we are going to try to return to our usual high aesthetic standards—the flowers and so on. But thank you for watching. I hope you'll like and subscribe future episodes with the higher aesthetic values. And remember: The best way to support this podcast and the work of all of my Atlantic colleagues is by subscribing to The Atlantic, and I hope you'll please consider doing that. See you next week here on The David Frum Show. Thanks for watching. [ Music ] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.
Atlantic
09-07-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Courts Won't Save Democracy From Trump
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum opens with a warning about the deep implications of President Donald Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill'—not only for Americans' rights and freedoms, but also for the future of American economic strength. David argues that Trump's budget and tax policies are reshaping the U.S. economy in ways that will leave the country poorer, less innovative, and more isolated from the rest of the world than we were before. David is then joined by George Conway for a conversation about the dangers our legal institutions are facing in the Trump presidency. They discuss Conway's journey from corporate litigator to outspoken critic of Trump, the dangers of relying on courts to restrain executive lawlessness, and the failure of Congress to uphold its constitutional duties. Conway also explains why our legal system, even when functioning properly, may be structurally incapable of stopping a president who is determined to ignore the law. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week is George Conway, and we will be discussing threats to the rule of law in the United States, and the question of how well the federal courts are coping with the challenges to legality under the Trump administration. I'd like to open, however, with thoughts on a slightly different but related subject, and that is the big budget and tax bill. I'm not proposing to enter into the specifics of the various tax increases (because tariffs are a tax), tax cuts, or spending decisions that constitute this bill. Instead, I want to take a larger look back at what this bill is going to do to the whole future shape of the American economy. A budget bill is a way to finance the government, but because the federal government is so big and its actions are so important, the decisions made in how to finance the government end up shaping all the rest of the American economy, all the rest of American society. I want to start with a clean piece of paper and think about the questions here that are raised and the choices that are being made, because I think the real message of this bill is not just that it cuts health-care benefits for many people. It cuts other kinds of benefits for many, many people. It's going to raise a lot of revenue by heaping tariffs on the people least-well positioned to afford them. It will give big tax cuts to many other people, and despite all this—all the cuts in spending, all the new tariffs—the tax cuts are so big that this bill will lead the United States more in debt than ever before, running bigger deficits than ever before, and paying more in interest payments than ever before. All of that you know. I want to, though, look at the economy and its larger effects. If you were to think about how you build an economy for economic growth, well, we think about that all the time. That's maybe the most important question not only in economics, but in social policy. I think it's been said that once you start thinking about the miracle of economic growth, it's impossible to think about anything else. This world was so poor not so very long ago, and it's become so wealthy, so abundant for so many people—all of that because we are able to extract more value from fewer resources at an ever-accumulating pace, on and on our way to bringing full development to more and more of the planet's population. What is the difference between being a fully developed society—a society that can meet the needs of people—and one that isn't? If you were to start at the beginning of this project, what would you do? I've made a little list of some things. This isn't exhaustive, but I think these are the main things you would think about. And every one of the items I'm about to indicate, you'll see that the Trump budget and the Trump presidency leaves the United States not just a little but dramatically worse off in all the ways that are going to matter for the next decade, the indefinite future. So here's the first thing you would do if you were to build an economic-growth society. The very first thing you would do would be to build a society that respects rights and liberties. People have ideas. They need to be able to act on those ideas. They need to live in a society of rules, not a society of fear. Many societies have economically developed without being full democracies. Great Britain, or England, wasn't a full democracy when it began developing in the 18th century. Singapore and South Korea weren't full democracies when they began developing. But they were rule-of-law societies where people could think for themselves, they could worship as they please, they could have their own ideas, and they didn't live in constant fear of arbitrary process. Maybe the societies weren't as free as they later would become, but no one was grabbing people off the streets, putting bags on their heads, and sending them to a foreign country to be tortured indefinitely without any kind of hearing, rights, and liberties. But those are very much in question under the Trump presidency. More and more Americans—because many of the people who live inside this country live with a status somewhere between that of an alien and a citizen (they're green-card holders; they're on temporary visas)—those people, more and more of them, live in a fear society. And that makes them less effective as economic actors, among many other things. It changes the nature of the society in which they live in ways that are less productive, less innovative. The next thing you would think about doing after having a society that respects rights and liberties is making sure the government is honest. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect, but people need to know that they can go about their business without being extorted to pay some kind of fee or bribe to somebody in a position of power, and that the people at the top of the government are not looking around the society like predators, thinking, Whose wealth do we seize? Whose do we take? Well, here again, this is a way that, under the Trump presidency and especially with this bill, we are really failing. This is an administration that is more and more a predatory one, and where the methods that it is using to pass its measures involve seizing or manipulating or extorting, bribes, presence, gratuities. The permission to have mergers depends on if the merged company owns a media company, controlling the content of that media company. We are not living in a world of honest government anymore. A third thing you'd really want to have as you develop your society of economic growth is a stable currency. The best way to predict whether the currency will be stable in the future is to look at the finances of the government. Governments that run big, chronic deficits, that have large debts—those are governments whose currency is probably on the way down. You may have seen, on the day I'm recording this, news of one of the worst years in the performance of the American dollar in a long time. The markets around the world are seeing that the dollar is soon going to bear a level of debt and interest payment that is going to raise questions about that currency's ability to keep its value. And when the president of the United States is haranguing his Federal Reserve director for cheap money, cheap money at any cost, regardless of the economic situation— Yes, we are running these giant debts and giant deficits, but I want you to lower interest rates —well, it's a good bet that the currency is going to become less valuable in the years ahead, so this currency will be less stable. So that's another price of Trumpism: fewer rights and freedoms, less-honest government, and a future of a less-stable currency. It's very important to have a predictable tax regime. Obviously, you want taxes to be light, but more important than even that they be light is they be predictable. Businesses need to make long-term plans. Investors need to make long-term plans. They need to know: What is the rate if I make this investment today? And if it succeeds, what will I owe the government at the end of seven, eight, nine, 10 years, 12, 15, and more? Well, the essence of the Trump fiscal policy in this big, bloated bill, BBB, is tax rates come and go. They twinkle out; they twinkle in. No one quite knows what they are going to be at any given date in the future. There are tax concessions that last as long as Trump does. There are other fiscal measures that are timed to go out of existence. Nothing is predictable. And the most important of the fiscal measures of the government is tariffs—those are utterly unpredictable. No one knows next week what you'll have to pay to unload freight at an American port, never mind next year, the next 10 years. So the tax regime—although the Trump people keep advertising that tax cuts are coming, the tax regime is less and less predictable. Predictability more than level is the most important thing about a tax. So fewer rights and liberties, less-honest government, less-stable currency, unpredictable taxes. Here's the next thing you would be thinking about if you wanna build growth for the long term. You would be thinking, How do I have a healthy and well-educated workforce? Adam Smith taught us a long time ago that the real wealth of nations is their people, their people's collective ability to solve problems. It's not an accident that Adam Smith when he wrote those words, Scotland in the 1700s probably had more literacy than any place else in the world, thanks to a good system of religiously founded, comprehensive primary schools. Almost all Scottish people could read or write. Many more English people could read or write than could read or write on the continent. America in the 18th century was a reasonably well-educated society, especially in the northern free states. More people in the northern free states could read or write than in most places, Scotland apart. Well, are we building an ever-more educated and ever-healthier society? It doesn't look that way. We're certainly not going to be a healthier society when we're getting rid of vaccinations and waging war on modern medicine and bringing back a treatment regime of amulets and trinkets, instead of proper health and research, when we're punishing universities for other things the president doesn't like by shutting down cancer research and other forms of medical research. And when you're taking away health coverage and other health benefits, you're not gonna get a healthier population. And as for a better-educated population, again, this administration is undercutting in every way it can the availability of education, limiting the availability of college education, and cutting back spending on primary and secondary education, and having a culture war against institutions of not only higher learning, but secondary learning. So our future is one of more plagues and more ignorance, not fewer plagues and less ignorance. So fewer rights and liberties, less-honest government, less-stable currency, unpredictable tax regime, a population with declining health and levels of education. What else are we doing wrong? Well, in a modern economy, one of the drivers of economic growth is investment in science and technology. And the United States, especially since the end of World War II, has led the world in big investments in science and technology. And many of the investments in science and technology are not the obvious ones. You know, whenever you hear some congressman trying to score a point by making fun of some kind of research— The love life of mosquitoes; who'd wanna study the love life of mosquitoes?— it usually turns out that study on the love life of mosquitoes is a subject of some kind of medical research that is connected to another piece of medical research, which when connected to a third piece of medical research will bring about some new treatment or drug. But we are seeing enormous pressure on institutions of higher learning and independence of research, closing down of atmospheric research because it yields conclusions that are unwelcome or unwanted by the Trump administration. So we are decreasing our investment in science and technology. And when you look at the plan the Trump administration has for the future, the things they seem to really want are to make this an economy that is about coal, that is about oil extraction, that is about cutting down trees—the industries of 100, 200 years ago, not the industries of tomorrow, which they find kind of ridiculous and embarrassing. Wind technology, which they seem to hate for some reason, and which Trump wrongly says doesn't exist in China—China's the world's largest producer of energy from wind. These are industries of the future. We seem to be attached to the industries of the past. So less support for science and technology. One of the things you'd wanna make sure to do is: While you would have a limited government in a high-growth society, you would wanna make sure that that government does what it does do very well, very effectively, very efficiently. You'd want a competent, well-trained civil service recruited for merit, not for political loyalty, with some security of tenure and some independence from pressure from interest groups. Well, we're going the opposite way on that. And finally, what you would value above all—not above all, but climatically—is commerce with the rest of the world, because as big as the U.S. economy is, the world is bigger. Americans out there to succeed need to sell to the whole world. And selling to the whole world means having world-competitive prices. And that applies that Americans must buy world-competitive components, which they integrate into their goods and into their services at the world price. Well, Donald Trump is trying to sever the United States economy from the world, having special, higher made-in-America prices for everything. The world's most expensive components mean the world's most expensive outputs. When you don't trade in peace and freedom with the rest of the world, your goods and services become less sellable in peace and freedom to the rest of the world. You wall yourself off like a hermit kingdom. Well, that is hardly a path to progress. And the last thing—and this is climactic—societies that are growing faster than their neighbors tend to attract labor. And that's true whether you're Holland in the 1600s, Britain in the 1700s, America in the 1800s, Canada and Australia in the 1900s. Fast-growing societies need more labor, pay higher wages, and attract more labor. Now, the movement of people must always be regulated according to law, but when very large numbers of people want to come to your country—again, you have to regulate it, but—that is a sign of strength. And when very large numbers of people don't want to come to your country, that's a warning that your country is developing in ways that are slower growing than other places where people could go. The Trump administration wants to enforce immigration laws, and I commend them for that. They're trying to bring an end to the period of unregulated immigration that we saw in the period after the pandemic. Well, that's a good idea. But oftentimes, it seems like their idea is to repel as many people; to scare away people; to make people who have uncertain status, who are here on as permanent residents or student visas, to make them feel unwelcome; to empower every agent of government to be as hostile as possible at ports and airports, at border crossings; to harass and belittle and monitor and bully those people who are plighting their faith and their future to the United States. That is not the path to wealth, but it's the path that the United States is on. In area after area—again, not everything in the Trump big, bloated bill is bad. Most of it is, but not everything. The direction is bad from a fiscal point of view. There's gonna be a lot more debt and a lot more interest to pay. But it is shaping a society that is just less-well suited to succeed in the 21st century. The big decisions that have to be got right—predictability; stability; honesty; integrity; money that holds its value; investment in knowledge and technology; making people feel that they live in a society of rules, not a society of fear; and understanding that the pressure of immigration, which always has to be regulated, is nonetheless a sign of your society's success, not a betrayal of the people who are already here—flunk, flunk, flunk, flunk, flunk. Without doing the kind of micro budgetary analysis that is also necessary, I think you can look at this bill and say, This is a blueprint for society that is poor, more backward, more fearful, more isolated, and less the leader of the 21st century than it was in the 20th century. That is not the America I think most of us believe in. That is not the America we'd like to live in. That's not the America we'd like to leave our children, but that is the America that is being bequeathed to them unless something quite decisive is done quite soon. Thanks so much for listening to this outburst by me about the future of economic growth. And now my dialogue with George Conway. But first, a quick break. [ Music ] Frum: I imagine George Conway needs very little introduction to people who watch or listen to this podcast, but just in case—maybe somebody's been living in a cave or under a rock somewhere and has missed George's explosive impact on the American political debate—let me read a short introduction. George Conway was a litigator in a preeminent New York law firm. Among his achievements there, he won a major securities case unanimously before the United States Supreme Court, and he was offered the job to head the civil division of the United States Justice Department at the beginning of the first Trump presidency. And that is the most important job any corporate or civil lawyer in the United States can be offered. A lifelong conservative and Republican, George had voted for Trump in 2016, but he soon repented of his choice, and he rejected or refused the Department of Justice job offer. In 2019, he published in The Atlantic —our Atlantic —the definitive case, over 11,000 words, for diagnosing Donald Trump as a narcissistic sociopath, and not as an insult, but in the most clinical sense of those terms. George was a founding member of the Lincoln Project, and today is the president of the Society for the Rule of Law. One theme of George Conway's life, if you've been following his career, has been his abhorrence of sexual abuse of power, whether it be Bill Clinton's versus Paula Jones, or Donald Trump's against E. Jean Carroll—and it was George Conway who found E. Jean Carroll, the legal team that won her decisive, multimillion-dollar defamation verdict against Donald Trump. George is now retired from the law, but not from the fight for his beliefs. I personally have followed his career with admiration since the 1980s, when he was president of the Yale Law School chapter of the Federal Society, the national association of conservative lawyers and law students, the same year that I headed the Harvard Law School chapter. George, welcome to the program. It's such a pleasure and honor to have you here. George Conway: Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me, David. Frum: I wanna start off with something that may sound like a little bit of a detour, but I think, although people know a lot about you and have seen you on so many programs, they may not understand that you are one of the best friends Canada has south of the border. Conway: If you put that in writing, I may need it for my asylum application. Frum: (Laughs.) I'll put that in writing. And you have been to places that most Americans have not been. And I just wanna say personally how grateful and honored and touched my wife Danielle and I were that you would come in June to the unveiling of the memorial to our daughter, in Picton, Ontario. But let me ask you: Okay, why Canada? How did that happen? Conway: Well, I grew up as a kid playing hockey, and watching the Bruins playing the Canadiens and New England. And so, you know, Canada was sort of part of the environment. And we made a couple of trips up to Quebec and got our asses kicked playing youth hockey. I mean, watching the Bruins play the Canadiens, and playing the Maple Leafs and so on, I learned the Canadian national anthem. I learned a lot about Canada. And because all my, you know, heroes like Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito—Bobby Orr turned out to be a Trumper, though. So I'm very familiar with the country and following along, and I remember in the '70s, it was a big deal when Quebec wanted to split off. And I've been following them for many, many years. Frum: What is going on with Bobby Orr and Wayne Gretzky and all these other hockey players? Conway: I don't know. I think it's a sports thing. I don't know. I think it's—I can't explain that. I don't know these men well enough. I prefer Dominik Hašek. Frum: So Hašek sounds like a Central European name, maybe Czech or Slovak. So experiences of Russian oppression may have helped to formulate his views. Conway: You would think. Frum: Yeah. Can I ask you about your career in the law? A lot of the people who have stepped forward as prominent critics of Donald Trump have had careers in constitutional law, or civil-liberties law of some kind, or public-ethics law, but you were a real lawyer's lawyer. So talk a little bit about your private practice, the kind of lawyer you were, and just how far away you were from most active politics in your legal career. Conway: I mean, I went to a law firm that was known for takeover defense. I did that because when I was in law school, I went to a Houston law firm where the big case that they were litigating that summer was Pennzoil against Texaco. It was basically a broken merger deal. And I became very, very interested in the facts of the case and very, very interested in this whole world of companies taking each other over and battles for corporate control. What was great about that compared to other kinds of litigation that you could do—and I wanted to be a litigator because I thought that's what lawyers do. I wanna make arguments. I want to write briefs, be brief writer. What was great is that those cases lasted for a very, very slow amount of time. They're kind of like all this current Trump litigation. There's just a lot of things that happen really, really fast. And usually, it gets decided very, very quickly in the Delaware Court of Chancery, for example. And so I found it very, very interesting to do that kind of litigation. So I went to a law firm that, basically, that's what it did. And that's what I practiced for a good chunk of my career. But I also did securities litigation. I did some, you know—I did antitrust investigations involving mergers, a little antitrust investigation, lots of contract litigation. And occasionally, there would be a constitutional-law issue that would pop up here and there. And I think I knew more about that kind of stuff than a lot of New York lawyers. But the bread and butter, as you point out, was this corporate law. And I think the one thing that really carried over from corporate practice or my learning about corporate law to my current existence was: When I wrote that Atlantic piece that you mentioned early on, a good chunk of it was talking about something that was very, very analogous to corporate law, which is that the framers of our Constitution—in fact, it was really the Anglo American tradition—viewed public office as fiduciary positions. And a lot of the principles that developed— Frum: Let me interrupt you because not everyone will understand what that word means. So would you explain what it means? Conway: Yes. Yeah. A fiduciary is basically somebody who is taking care of property or something that belongs to somebody else for them, okay? So for example, you think of a fiduciary, it would be like you're running a trust for your parents or your children, or you're running a corporation—a public corporation that trades on the New York Stock Exchange—and you're the CEO, or you're a member of the board of directors. You are running that company, and taking care of its property, and taking care of its business for the people who own it, which are the shareholders. And by analogy, when you are an officeholder—whether you be a mayor or a governor or a president—you are acting in a fiduciary capacity on behalf of other people. The planes that you fly in if you're president aren't yours. The duties that you have aren't to yourself; they're to the public. You're supposed to be acting in their interest, not your own personal interest. If your interest conflicts with those of the people who you are serving, the people you are serving—their interests take precedence. And you can see the relevance of those principles to Donald Trump, who couldn't—you know, he was about basically the last person you'd want in a fiduciary position of any sort. Would you trust him? Would you make him the trustee for your children? Of course not. Would you trust him with any piece of property of yours? You'd not. And that was sort of the relevance to The Atlantic article, where I was just saying these personality defects, these manifest personality disorders that he has, that are just—you know, you could just check the boxes: He's a narcissistic sociopath by any reasonable definition. Those people can't serve as fiduciaries, because they can't follow rules and they only think of themselves. And that was the point of the article. I was connecting up sort of his psychological disorders with his legal capacity to be president, his legal ability to be president. They basically said the only solution for something, someone as bad as this, who is going to do bad things because he is basically programmed to, is impeachment and removal. Or the alternative will be the fourth section of the 25th Amendment, and that's still the case. Frum: The reason I opened this discussion by coming at this corporate side of your career is: You come from an area of the law—you made your living in an area of the law—which is very technical, a lot of rules. The rules are very complicated, a lot of dotting of i 's and crossing of t 's. And there are many people who become lawyers who find in technicality an escape from morality, that they can say, Well, I'm following the rules. The rules are written down. It's not my job to ask whether these rules are just, and it's not my job to worry too much about whether the outcome is just. I am using this elaborate system of rules for the benefit of my client. And I wonder if that explains why so many, in the especially New York legal world, have been so vulnerable to the pressures we have seen in the second Trump presidency to pay ransom, to yield, that they can rationalize, Well, we're following rules. And you somehow were not crushed. Your moral sense was not crushed by that technicality. Conway: Yeah. I think there's something a little bit different going on there. I don't think it's that people—I think a lot of Americans may feel, Oh, well, if it looks to be legal or people are saying it's legal, then it must be okay if the Trump administration says it's legal. I think there is a lot of hiding behind purported legality. I think that's absolutely the case. I think in the case of lawyers—I think most lawyers have been outraged by the Trump administration. And I think, you know, there's a limit to what people practicing law can do to speak out, because clients don't necessarily like lawyers who are political activists and, you know, doing something other than their own work. But most lawyers have been very, very adamant about the Trump administration and its lawlessness. And I think we saw it very, very recently in the D.C. Bar, which had an election involving Pam Bondi's brother, who tried to challenge somebody to become president of that bar, and he got singularly trounced and embarrassed and humiliated. I think what's going on with the law firms—and I don't think it's gonna happen anymore, because I think law firms have kind of learned their lesson that it is bad to cave to Trump. I think that what has happened was: I think that there's been a backlash in the legal community as the people who settled. I think what happened there, though, has something to do with the takeover practice that I mentioned, which is that the fees that deal firms get are percentages of a transaction. And they're very, very lucrative because today they all require—they all involve companies in the same industry—they require regulatory approval. And I think what happened was: These firms that make a lot of money off of takeovers, acquisitions, mergers, spinoffs, the works were afraid that they would not be able to get their lucrative deals approved by the government, and that's why they caved. It turned out that clients don't like having lawyers that capitulate to the government. If a law firm can't defend itself, it's hard to see how it's going to defend you. And there's been a huge backlash among general counsels, people who hire law firms, against these law firms that caved and a directing business towards some of the law firms, like Perkins Coie, that stood up. So I think the tide has turned there. I think it would not have gotten so bad if Paul, Weiss—the original law firm that first capitulated—had not done so. I think that created a panic that I think was unnecessary. And I think it caused a lot of other law firms to cave or think of caving that would not otherwise have done so. But I think that is over. I think they're—I think the law firms are all geared up to sort of stand their ground, and I think that's a good thing. Frum: Yeah. Well, one of the places where people find refuge from technicality—this is a pet peeve of mine I'm about to confess—which is: A president has done something bad, and cable TV will at that point turn to a lot of former federal prosecutors, who will go on the air to talk about what statute may or may not have been tripped. And the implication is: If a statute hasn't been tripped, if the president hasn't broken some law, then no problem—the president can do it. And one of the—as you said at the very beginning, one of the things we've all discovered from Donald Trump is there are a lot of things that presidents might do that they shouldn't do that turned out not to be illegal, exactly. I mean, there doesn't seem to be a law that says the president can't sell perfume while being president. We just think he shouldn't. And other presidents didn't. And the inhibition to doing it was that the president would think it was wrong or disgraceful or shameful or stupid or silly. But when you say, Where's it written down? And this parade of looking for the laws that Donald Trump has broken—and to be clear, he has broken many—but his defenders will often point out that some of the worst things he's done are not the most illegal. And one of the things that we're all struggling with is: The 30-some counts of felony that Donald Trump has been convicted for were not the worst things he did. And the worst things he did may not trigger any federal statute. And that loss of moral sense that some lawyers have, the flight from morality into legality, has in some ways left us disabled in the face of the Trump presidency. Conway: No, I think you're absolutely right. I think maybe we had—before we even knew each other, we must have had some mind meld going in 1987, when we were president of our respective Yale Federalist Society chapters. It reminds me of something—when I first started coming out and saying stuff, one of the first things I wrote was for The Washington Post, and it was about the Mueller report, and what the Mueller report meant, and what it was about to say, and then what it said. And I made the point that what Mueller described was outright obstruction in Part 2 of the Mueller report. But I also made the point there that that's not even—you know, crime isn't required for impeachment. A crime isn't required to find somebody unfit for office. I said we should expect more of our presidents than they simply not be indictable or criminal. And that's the point you're making. He absolutely—I mean, he embarrasses himself, he embarrasses the country, he embarrasses the office, and he disrespects the office. He has contempt for what his job actually is, which is to enforce the Constitution, enforce the laws, to do right by the country for the people of the country. And he's not capable of doing that. And, you know, he does violate laws. He may not violate laws that are criminal all the time, although he does, he would be—he is doing that, I think, leaving apart the Supreme Court's decision in the immunity case last year. But you know, it goes so far beyond the legal at this point that it's just a disgrace. And I think that one rule ought to be: A president shouldn't be a disgrace. Who knew? Frum: Let's shift the attention, for a minute, from the lawyers to the courts, as you just mentioned. Conway: Yeah. Frum: It sometimes seems to me—and I'm not a practitioner like you, and certainly not an eminent practitioner like you—but the courts are following this rule familiar from children's games: One for him, and one for you. One for him, and one for you. So can masked men put a bag over somebody's head on an American street, shove them into an airplane, fly them to another country without a hearing, and throw them into a dungeon? The courts have said that one—that one's for you. No, no, we can't do that. The next question is: Well, can the president commit crimes? Can he try to overthrow the Constitution and be prosecuted? And the courts said, That's one for him. We give him one. And that there does seem to be this pattern—and maybe it's a coincidence—where every time they deliver a strong anti-Trump decision, they are looking collectively for a way either to escape having to do the next question, and they have often, as we saw with the documents cases. It looked like the entire judicial branch made a decision, Let's just shove this one. We've got an obstructionist judge. Good. Let's give her lots of room, because we want this one delayed. And when it finally comes to us, we want to find a way to evade it. And then we have this complex, multipart balancing test about whether or not the president can violate criminal statutes. Yes or no? We will give you a muddy answer that is completely useless. Conway: Yeah, I agree and disagree with that. And I think it would probably be longer than any podcast to go through it all. I think the federal courts overall have been doing a tremendous job in fighting back. And I can't, you know—with respect to Judge [Aileen] Cannon in the documents case, I mean, that was just sort of beyond. You get a judge like that, it's just, you just—it's not in the genes of the federal system to basically throw somebody off a case (unless they do some, you know—it takes a lot more even than what she did). The immunity case, I disagreed with strongly and I thought was a bad decision, but I don't think it was the work—it wouldn't have prevented his prosecution except because it did so via the calendar, but not in terms of the substance. I don't think the federal courts, as what they are doing now, is giving one for Trump and then giving one for the plaintiffs. Maybe the Supreme Court seems to be doing that a little bit. I mean, for example, we had some great decisions on the Alien Enemies Act cases, where they basically said due process is required, and they kind of spanked the Trump administration in that case that came out of Texas. And then they had this case in Massachusetts, the D. V. D. case, where they inexplicably stayed an injunction where a judge basically said that you have to give people being removed from the country due process as to where they're being removed to, because they could be removed to someplace that they might not survive. So that, there's a little—it does seem maybe that the Supreme Court is doing that a little. We don't know, because they didn't really explain their reasoning in that last decision. But there is something to a possible wisdom there. I'm not justifying what the Supreme Court is doing in any particular case. I like it when they are being tough on administration more than I like it when they are not. But there's a kind of careful game that the Court has to play here. And I hate to be—I'm not really a legal-realist type. I believe in letting the chips fall where they may, in terms of the law. But, you know, there's a lot of writing—like, by Alexander Bickel, a great legal scholar from Yale, who, you know, 60 years ago wrote a book about The Least Dangerous Branch —it was in the '60s, maybe 60 years ago—where he basically pointed out that the Court has to sort of hold itself back. And it was really a reaction to the [Earl] Warren era, where the Court really, I think, got ahead of the country in a lot of ways that we are still paying a little bit of a price for. And what Bickel wrote was: The Court sometimes has to take its time, has to act gradually, and also has to watch its political capital. And the way that it does that is: Sometimes, it won't take a case when it might otherwise take a case. It has discretionary jurisdiction. Or it might see some grounds for ruling that isn't the broadest or most impactful way of ruling. And I do think that in the current environment, the Court does have to pick its spots somewhat carefully because it doesn't have, as Bickel points out—doesn't have armies, doesn't have police. At the end of the day, the courts, from the federal district courts to the Supreme Court of the United States, can only really enforce their orders through either moral suasion or through the auspices of the United States Department of Justice. For example, if somebody violates a court order and is held in contempt, the U.S. Marshals Service system is the organization that goes out and takes somebody and sends them to jail. Well, that's controlled by the Department of Justice, by Pam Bondi and Donald Trump. And who controls the jails? The federal jails? The United States Bureau of Prisons, also a part of the United States Department of Justice—also beholden, also managed and run by Donald Trump and Pam Bondi. So the courts have to be a little bit careful here. They want to save their fire for when it's most required, and I don't think we've reached that stage yet. Now, I'm not justifying what the Court did in a couple of recent decisions that I disagree with, but I do think people need to think about that possibility instead of being so contemptuous to the Court. And I think the other thing that to contextually remember about the courts that goes along with this is: The courts cannot save us, precisely because of the things I said. Frum: I was recently on another television program [hosted by] Piers Morgan, who was defending Donald Trump, and one of the points he made is that when there was a court case and Donald Trump lost it and lost it and lost it, on appeal and in multiple courts, eventually he would comply with the law, and doesn't that make him a very, very good boy? And one of the things I think that you're saying here is, among the answers to that question, that the president's projection of the question that he thinks he deserves credit for obeying the law is one of the reasons that the courts are hesitant to enforce the law. Because I don't think past presidents would've had their defenders say, Well, you have to hand it to the president. When there are multiple court orders, he doesn't defy them. But that's not usually a mark in your favor. I say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. He also has to be over 35. He has to not break the law. But with Trump, because you know he's poised to break the law, that has a feedback effect on the courts, where they become more reluctant to enforce the law upon him than they would be on a President Obama or some other president who they knew would comply. Conway: Yeah, I mean, I think that there's truth to that, but I also think he is violating these court orders in numerous respects. I mean, he's not doing it by saying, We will not obey this court order, but they're doing it in other ways. They're doing it by gaslighting the courts, by misleading the courts. We saw this whistleblower letter that was directed at the conduct of Emil Bove in the Department of Justice where, basically, they were not giving federal agencies guidance as to what the courts were telling them not to do. So the agencies would continue to do the things that the courts had prohibited them from doing. That being said, I absolutely agree that Donald Trump is getting credit here for doing what a president is supposed to do, which is to uphold—you know, he's getting credit after violating his oath of office. Finally, at the end of the day, if he does obey a court order, people say, See there? He's doing what he's supposed to do. And it's just that's not how it works. The president is supposed to obey court orders, obey the law, even if there's not a court order out saying that he should obey. Frum: Well, let me give you a very specific example. This is where I wanted to go about the feedback. So even before Donald Trump came on the scene, over the past two or three decades, the federal courts have made it much harder to convict state, local, and federal officeholders of corruption cases. And basically, the line that the courts have been taking is, It's not enough simply to show that the officeholder received a benefit from a person. We need to see that the benefit directly influenced the action. So we need not only the quid and not only the quo. We need the pro. We need to prove the pro, that the quid caused the pro. And we've had, I think, the most involved, important case here that involved a past governor of Virginia, who was acquitted. He had received a lot of benefits, he was convicted, and then the Supreme Court struck it down, saying the governor was not shown to have acted, because of the inducement and be outside of the scope of his official actions. Now, the reason this is so alarming right now is we have a lot of examples of Donald Trump receiving benefits, including, most flamboyantly, a jumbo jet from the government of Qatar that maybe they offered willingly, maybe he extorted. That's a little unclear. But the question is, the Constitution says, look—the president can't accept any gift from anybody without a vote of Congress. But the defense is gonna say, He's not the president. It's going to his library, so-called, and maybe the library will operate as a flying library, a book-extension service. The books come to you by plane, with the president and/or his family aboard on their way to, you know, Rio de Janeiro. But when the Court seemed to have already put so much water in the idea that the president shouldn't take gifts, and especially not from foreigners, but from anybody, how do we hold the president to account when the courts have been changing what the account should be? Conway: Well, I mean, I think there are a couple of things that are getting mixed in together there. I mean, what the courts have been ruling about quid pro quos is in the context of a particular statute, the mail-and-wire-fraud statutes, that even I think have been—I think members of the Court have felt for very long time that is a very amorphous statute and really got out of control, because it was just defined by prosecutors, and it doesn't really say anything about gifts and bribes and whatnot. So they've kind of tried to confine the mail-fraud statute to things that are otherwise illegal. Now, you can debate the merits of that, but it's really up to the Congress to pass laws, to enforce restrictions on what the president can accept. I think the closest statute that could be invoked against Trump—were there a Justice Department able to do that, and were there not this Supreme Court immunity decision out there—would be the gratuity statute. There's basically a law that says that public officeholders cannot accept gifts that are designed to reward them for having carried out their efficient duties in some manner. It doesn't necessarily have to be a quid pro quo. It could be just, Thank you for being a good president. Here's $1 million. That would be a violation of the gratuities law, both by the person who's giving gratuities and by the person who is receiving the gratuity. And there actually could be, I mean—I think there's an argument that it would not be subject to the Supreme Court's immunity decision, but that's another podcast. And then there's the emoluments provisions of the Constitution that both restrict the president from taking—the gratuities statute, it's a criminal law that applies to all federal public officeholders. Emoluments clause is the constitutional provision that applies just to the president, and it applies both to foreign emoluments and domestic emoluments. And there's no clear—I mean, it's not clear how that is enforced. It's not something that you can prosecute. Some people could have standing to challenge it, but it's not something that there can be a criminal prosecution for. I think basically, the problem here has not been the courts. I mean, the problem is that there's nobody to prosecute, you know, the wrongs that are being committed, which would include a violation of gratuity statutes, I believe, or at least an argument of one, or at least something worth investigating. Because Donald Trump is president of the United States, he controls the prosecutorial agenda. He doesn't want to prosecute himself. He wants to prosecute people he doesn't like. And so that's the fundamental problem. And I don't really tag the courts on it. Frum: Do we have a fundamental problem here? And this will be where I end. The United States, because the Constitution is so old, it also includes a lot of ideas that have gone out of fashion in other democracies. And one of the fashions in most democracies is that the people in charge of initiating prosecutions are not political. Whether they're federal or state, they're not elected, and they don't answer to the elected bodies. I remember this was explained to me in Germany, that their equivalent of the head of the criminal division is a civil servant who is promoted through the ranks, who is selected by the minister of justice, formally nominated by the president. The chancellor has nothing to do with it. And the chancellor and the minister of justice are usually from different parties anyway, and if a chancellor of Germany were to suggest to the public prosecutor, Arrest this person; don't arrest this person, the handcuffs would be on the hands of the chancellor, not on the hands— But in the United States, the attorney general is a member of the president's cabinet. That's not how most democracies do things anymore, but the United States is sort of stuck with it. Is there any way to make this work better? Is it—are we just doomed to have political prosecutors forever? Conway: No. Look—at the end of the day, it's about the norms. It's about people doing the right thing. And that's true even if there were a constitutional provision that separated the functions of the attorney general out from the president. I mean, the fundamental problem that we have today is not any particular provision of the Constitution, but the people are failing to abide by its text and by its spirit. And fundamentally, those people who are doing that are the Republicans in Congress. The solution for a president who fails to adhere to his duties, fails to comply with the laws in the Constitution of the United States, fails to faithfully execute them, which is what he swears to do, isn't litigation or prosecution or judges running this department or ordering, you know, 500 federal judges running different pieces of the government because the government is defying the law. It's impeachment removal. And the problem we have here is that too many people in our governmental system are failing to comply with their duties to the country and to the Constitution, and putting their loyalty in one man instead of the law. Frum: This is where I would like to close, a theme that you raised on with your reference to legal realism, a term that will be unfamiliar to some people, but I'll explain it in a moment. I had this similar conversation with Peter Keisler, who I believe is also a friend of yours, who was— Conway: Went to law school together, and we helped form the Society for the Rule of Law together. Frum: And again, we all were members of the Federal Society. We all come from the conservative legal tradition. And the thing we were arguing about back in the '80s at law school was this idea of legal realism. And legal realism is a body of thought that said the law is just a way of predicting what courts will do. It has no independent existence. It's descriptive. What happens is the law. And a lawyer is someone who's good at predicting what will happen—that's it. And our group said, That's not good enough. That's not—the law is more than that. The law is not just what people do; it's also what people should do. And when institutions fail to enforce the law in a right way, you have something meaningful to say about that. And it's not just a political argument, that I like this outcome and don't like that outcome. It's actually a legal outcome. This is not the law. And that may be why so many of us who come from that tradition have found ourselves on the other side of this fight, because what the Trump term challenges to do is say, What is law? What do we mean by it? Does it exist aside of just the cynical explanation of what people do? I know there are a lot of people who will say to you and have said to Keisler, Well, it's so strange. I didn't agree with anything you said 40 years ago. But I like everything you say now. Well, what I say now comes from what I said 40 years ago. George, thank you so much for fighting the good fight. Conway: Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. Frum: I know you pay a heavy personal price for it, so thank you. And I so admire you. I'm so grateful to you for your visit to Ontario, and thank you for joining the podcast today. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks so much to George Conway for joining the program today. I hope you will subscribe or like or indicate your commitment to this program. Let's make this relationship a little bit more lasting. And remember, also, that the best way to support this program and all the work of all of my colleagues is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you'll consider doing that. Thank you so much for joining. See you next week on The David Frum Show. [ Music ] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Atlantic
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's Betrayal of Ukraine
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum opens with a warning: The United States' support for Ukraine is collapsing under Donald Trump's second term—and with it, the global system of peace and security that has protected Americans for decades. David explains what Trump's latest actions reveal about his motivations, and why Ukraine's survival may now depend on the outcome of the 2024 election. Then David is joined by the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now Democratic congressional candidate Bridget Brink, who served under both President Biden and President Trump. They discuss the true stakes of the war, the failure of the Trump administration to develop or execute a coherent Ukraine policy, and why Brink ultimately chose to resign her post. She offers a firsthand account of life in Kyiv during the early days of the full-scale invasion, the dangers facing American diplomats in war zones, and the institutional breakdowns now threatening U.S. foreign policy from within. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I'm speaking to you today from the offices of The Picton Gazette, one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in all of Canada. It's Canada Day week here in Canada, and many of our usual facilities are closed. So I'm very grateful to the editors and publishers of the Gazette for making their offices available to me to record this opening discussion. My guest this week will be Ambassador Bridget Brink, who was appointed by President Biden as ambassador to Ukraine and then served under President Trump until her resignation earlier this year. Ambassador Brink is now running for Congress for the Democratic nomination in Michigan's Seventh District. Our conversation was recorded before she made that announcement. Before I turn to our conversation about Ukraine and the struggle for independence, and about the inconsistent and unfavorable attitude of the Trump administration toward Ukraine that she observed as ambassador, I want to say a few personal words about what is at stake in this Ukrainian cause. The United States has built, since 1945, an extraordinary system of peace and security embracing much of the planet. It is a system from which many countries benefit, but Americans too. That Americans do not need to learn a second language in most cases; that they can travel about the world with a feeling of security; that when they do business, they do business under legal systems that are often inspired by the American example; that when they travel as tourists or students or in any capacity, they can put down a credit card, and if they have a dispute, have that credit card dispute adjudicated, usually under American law—all of those things that we take for granted as we move about a world that is ever more accommodating to the American way of life and to American interests, all of that is one of the prizes for the American investment in global peace and security. Now, that system of peace and security received one of its severest tests when Russia accelerated its attack on Ukraine. The war began in 2014 with the attack on Crimea and the occupation of Crimea. But in February of 2022, Russia made a direct lunge for the capital, Kyiv. The heroism and endurance of Ukrainian soldiers beat back the Russians, and Ukraine has continued to fight for its independence to this day. This is a war not about boundaries, but about Ukraine's sovereign existence. The Russians and President Putin, their dictator, have made it very clear that what they are offended by is that Ukraine imagines it has any right to exist as an independent nation at all. As Putin has told many people, including American interviewers—including pet American interviewers, like Tucker Carlson when Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin—what this war is about from Putin's point of view is that Ukraine is not a country. It's just part of Russia. It has no history. It has no language. It has no literature. It has no right to be any kind of separate people at all. It's little Russia, in his mind, that must be ruled forever by big Russia. The Ukrainians see it otherwise, and they have fought and struggled and died to maintain their national existence. Under President Biden, the president who appointed Ambassador Brink, the United States assisted Ukraine, not as fully as it should. It often seems that President Biden's policy was to say, What does Ukraine need? Give them half, and give it late. Tanks and airplanes and other kinds of assistance always arrived too little amounts and too slow in time to turn the tide of war when the war was ready to be turned, especially in the summer of [20]23. It often seemed that there was a lack of urgency in the Biden administration, that they never took it seriously, that November '24 would be, among other things, a referendum on Ukraine's survival, and that if there was anything that was left undone by the United States as of November '24, there was a real chance that the next administration, which might be Donald Trump's, would turn off the flow of aid and doom Ukraine altogether. If the war was not won by November of 2024, it might never be won at all. But that lack of urgency was a flaw from a generally positive policy. President Biden did seem to understand what was at stake and did want to help, even if it was never in time and never enough. But now, in the Trump presidency, we are in a very different world, a world of outright hostility to Ukraine, where Donald Trump's goal seems to be to pressure Ukraine, sometimes risking Ukrainian lives, sometimes dooming Ukrainian lives, pressure Ukraine to a negotiated form of submission to Russia. I don't know that we have yet or ever will get to the bottom of the reason for Donald Trump's strange attachment to Russia. The why question—it's been speculated about, psychological blackmail, cronyism. It's been speculated about forever. And I have to admit, I sometimes have joined in some of the speculation, but I think always we need to have skepticism about it. We don't know and maybe we'll never know the why of the Trump-Russia attachment. But we can see the what. We can see the thing. We can see that there is something going on here that is way beyond the usual about how Americans feel about foreign dictators—a kind of something that is influencing American policy in ways that are injurious to all kinds of societies, not only Ukraine, and that has biased American policy toward the support of the goals of this aggressive dictatorship in Moscow. Now we find ourselves, really, in a moment of crisis. The United States has demonstrated in Iran that American power can be used. This administration has proven that all those op-eds and think pieces and campaign propaganda about Trump as a dove, as a noninterventionist were nonsense. Trump struck Iran. Right now, there are American Predator drones flying over Mexico. And many in the Trump administration, including the vice president, have talked about using American military force inside Mexico—again, with or without the permission of the Mexican government. They're not noninterventionists. They're not pacifists. They're not doves. What they are are people who are hostile to the Ukrainian cause. The Ukrainian cause is a great cause. It's one that deserves respect and support from Americans, as it has gained and deserves support from America's allies. Ukraine has done so much by itself. It has fought and struggled and defended itself, but it probably cannot win by itself. To win, it needs help. That help was forthcoming—inadequately, but forthcoming—from the Biden administration, and it's been dialed back by the Trump administration. It needs to be a top-of-mind issue in our national discussion today. What can be done to help Ukraine? Why won't Donald Trump do it? How can it be pressured to do it? In that debate, Ambassador Brink has been and will be one of the most important voices, first as a successful and effective ambassador, then as a powerful critic of the administration she served, and now as a candidate for Congress. So in a few moments, my conversation with Ambassador Bridget Brink, but first: a quick break. Frum: Ambassador Bridget Brink, is a career diplomat, a native of Michigan, and a graduate of Kenyon College. Her service to the United States commenced during the Clinton administration. She has represented the United States in Uzbekistan, Georgia, and the Slovak Republic. In between, she rose to higher and higher positions and ranks at the State Department and on the National Security Council staff. In February 2022, as Russian columns raced toward Kyiv to capture that Ukrainian capital, and as Russian airborne troops descended on the Kyiv airport, President Biden asked Bridget Brink to serve as his ambassador to Ukraine, an emerging war zone, one of the most dangerous posts in all of U.S. diplomacy. She was formally nominated in April of 2022 and has led the mission until earlier this year. She resigned in 2025 to protest President Trump's persistent refusal to acknowledge Russia's responsibility for the war Putin started. And Ambassador Brink, thank you so much. Welcome to The David Frum Show. Let me ask you to take us back to that moment when you got the nod to serve in this historic role at this historic time. How did that happen? What was that like? Bridget Brink: Well, thanks David. Thanks so much for having me on. Well, I remember it like it was yesterday, but now it was more than three years ago. As you know, or probably know, we have a long process to bring new ambassadors into positions. So I knew for a while, even before the war started, that I was the president's candidate and had to go through the formal confirmation process. And when the war started, I got a call. And I was asked, Are you still interested in this post? Because we think we may have to close the embassy. We don't know where the embassy will be. We don't know what will happen with the war. What's your position? And I remember very distinctly, I said, No, I absolutely am committed. I think this position is more important now than maybe ever, and so keep going. And I also said we need to stay and then go back, and that's what we did. Frum: Yeah, I want to protect us both against the temptation that a lot of Americans have to think that the war started in February of 2022. Brink: Yes. Frum: In fact, it started in 2014. But for a long time, the fighting was localized to certain border regions between Russia—the Ukrainian territory but near Russia. In February of '22, we had an escalation of the war where the capital itself became under siege. So when did you arrive in Kyiv? Brink: I arrived in Kyiv at the end of May—May 29, 2022—and I came in by land. At that time, we were driving, and I came in; I had a chargé [d'affaires] that I was replacing. We hadn't had a confirmed ambassador in Ukraine for over three years. And I remember that very distinctly because it was me and nine other diplomats. That's who returned back to help reestablish and reopen the embassy. And when I got there—of course, embassies, when they close, they're taken down in a way to protect our national security. So areas that are sensitive or things that are sensitive are removed or destroyed. And so when we got to the embassy, we literally had nothing that you could plug into the wall. So if you think about What do you need when you're working? well, you need your computer, and you need your various things that help you do your job, and because of a closure, that did not exist. So this was the unexpected, I'd say, challenge that we had in the first few days and weeks. Because not only were we coming back into a war zone, not only did we not at the time have any air defense (because it was the early part of the war, it was very uncertain)—we also didn't have a functioning, operating embassy. And that, I have to say, was a huge and heavy lift because usually when you reopen an embassy, you reopen it in conditions of peace, not in conditions of war. But here we were, trying to do that in conditions of war. Frum: Where did you sleep and eat? Brink: So in the first three months, I slept in the embassy. So I actually was given a room in the Marine house. So we didn't have Marines at that time. Marines usually protect embassies overseas. Me—and it's a small seven, six or seven rooms—and so I had a room just like everybody else's room in the Marine house, whatever Marines live in. I think it's now called, like, the 'ambassador's room.' And I slept and ate at the embassy. We have a small cafeteria, and I ate there. And, in fact, I didn't want to leave, because after three months, we moved to another location—because we were getting bigger as I pushed very hard to bring more people back. And I didn't want to move, because literally from the time I opened my eyes in the morning until the time I closed them, I was working. And I didn't want to take the time that I needed to do any kind of commuting back and forth to the embassy. And so I think I was the last one to leave the embassy, purely because of that—not because I didn't want to go and normalize, but because I worried it would, like, take precious seconds and minutes off of what we needed to do the job. And as I told everybody, we're working at the speed of war. But finally, I was convinced: Like, no, it's important. It's important that the ambassador move, as an example. And if we were going to help the Ukrainians fight this fight, we needed, also, to give people a little bit of ability to have a little downtime and perform. And that was absolutely correct, and that's what I tried to do. Your first question about Why did I do this job? It's because I believe this was the most important, or at least one of the most important diplomatic jobs on the planet for the United States. And as I think that we, as the United States, should lead and lead with our values and our interests, I was so honored to be asked to do this job. It was like an honor of a lifetime—really, sincerely an honor of a lifetime to do it, even though it was so challenging and hard every single minute of every single day. Brink: I mean, here's the challenge we faced: In the first year that we were there—this is prior to receiving any Patriot systems or other types of advanced American air-defense systems—there literally was not air defense. And so for the first year-plus, I think, that I was there, we were—everyone in the country was, but we were, as the American representation—in a situation where we didn't have the ability to protect people. So when the air alerts went off, we had to make sure that we had everybody in a place that was the most safe possible, and that was underground. So many times we had situations where missiles—or at that time in the first year, it was missiles mostly—missiles would hit really close to wherever we were, and we had shrapnel hit a building, for example, that we were in. I went, actually, with the USAID administrator—this was a bit later, actually, in the war, but—to Odessa. We had a meeting in a building one day, and then it was attacked and bombed the next day and destroyed. And then that was 12 hours or less later. And then, of course, I eventually was able to move into my residence, and we found some shrapnel missile fragments in the yard of the residence. And yeah, so the missiles and then the drones come down everywhere. And then, of course, when air defense is going up to counter that, there's a lot of activity. It's very dynamic in the air, and you gotta be somewhere where you can be protected. Frum: And things fall back to earth. Friendly fire also falls back to Earth. Brink: Eventually everything falls back to earth. Yeah, gravity works. Frum: So you mentioned going to Odessa. Now, I think most people watching this will be aware that Ukraine is a large country. They may not understand how large it is in terms of hours and that there is no air travel. Anytime you went anywhere, you had to go by land, and with all the risks. So tell: How did you move about the country, and what kind of protection did you have as you did? Brink: Well, of course, going in and out of the country—and I did travel in and out of the country a lot to go back to Washington to make the case on the hill or with the administration—to do everything I could to get around the country, I was the biggest proponent to push for ability and permission, because some of this was controlled initially by Washington, to move around the country so that we could do really important jobs to implement the president's policy and the administration's policy. That includes outreach to people, including people that are suffering from the war, but to also oversee and check on weapons and other assistance that we are giving to Ukraine. And third, to provide advice and support in various ways that we do diplomatically or militarily. So we did all of that—most of that—by train, and the reason was it was the most efficient. The Ukrainian train system is amazing. I think they've kept their trains on time throughout the war; the trains were used to evacuate people at the beginning of the war. They're used to transport people. Now they're used to transport many different things, probably. I wouldn't want to go into detail, but they're a very effective part of the war effort. And so I relied on that same thing on the Odessa trip we had, maybe, early on. I think this was in July. Again, this is a very early part of the war, so it was quite—you know, these early moments are really critical to kind of what we do. And I'm a big believer in using American power wisely and using it to shape the environment and shape events and that diplomats are not people who sit back and watch what's going on, but actually shape toward a goal that matches our interests and our values. So in July, we were trying hard to help get—or keep the economy alive, because Ukraine's economy is really dependent on exports. And the world is also dependent on grain to feed people, especially in food-scarce countries. And so Ukrainian grain, we were trying to figure out ways to help get it out. And one of them was through the Black Sea ports. But they had been shut down, effectively, by Russian attacks. And so I worked with the Ukrainians and the UN and the G7 partners, and we came up with an idea to go to Odessa and have a G7—that's the Group of 7; that's the main group that supports Ukraine diplomatically—have a G7 meeting down in Odessa to get this Black Sea Grain Initiative going. It was an agreement that would be with the UN and Russia, so I traveled down there. But it was a very hard decision to make. But we were on our way down, and the train stopped in the middle of the night. And I probably had a group of—I don't know how many—maybe 20 people, including the security people who were traveling with me. And the train stopped, and I could hear my security guy get a call in the next train cabin. I hear him just say, Yes, yes. He comes back to me, and he says, There's a missile directed. It's going to land somewhere near us, somewhere nearby. And we're stopped. And I thought, Okay. And at that point, I hoped and I prayed that my team would be okay, and that that decision had been the right one. And then we waited, and that's all you can do is wait. Fifteen minutes, 20 minutes went by, and the train started again. And then we went down. Frum: Let me ask you about your assessment of the war, as it stands today. We're speaking in the middle of June. At the beginning of June, Ukraine scored one of its most remarkable successes in this war, disabling some number of Russian strategic bombers. I don't know the exact count. You probably do. It's maybe as high as 40. But it's a big war with many factors. Life for the people of Ukraine—the 40 million people who remain in the country—is very difficult. They're trying to operate schools and old-age pensions and hospitals. Give us a sense of both the military and the economic state as of mid-June 2025. Brink: Well, I mean, I think one thing's very clear, is that Putin has figured out that he can show—or pretend, I would say—that he's ready to negotiate while he continues to fight on the ground and to try to gain more territory and change facts and conditions on the ground. I think that's a mistake for us to allow that. I think the situation for the Ukrainians is: The Ukrainians continue to fight. And I think they will continue to fight until they can't in any way, shape, or form. And so I think that in this situation, we face an ongoing, continuing war, and one that risks a greater war by not putting more force and pressure on Putin to come to the table. The Ukrainians did have a very, I'd say, successful attack on Russian military assets last weekend. And I think that that was something that they had—I was not aware of this plan—but that is something they had, I heard, in the planning for a long time. But I just want everyone to remember that this is in defense [that] the Ukrainians hit military assets. The Russians also, in the last week or so, have launched hundreds of drones and missiles across the country of Ukraine that have killed many civilians, including children. And this is happening and has been happening throughout the war. Frum: As I listen to you speak, I hope this comes out the right way, because I don't mean this in any way a disrespectful or querulous point. But I notice you're arguing with a lot of things that you would think no rational person would propose in the first place. You're arguing that Russia is the aggressor, not Ukraine. You are arguing that the defense of this embattled, invaded democracy is something that Americans should care about. You sound a little bit like someone who's been on the receiving end of arguments with the most anti-democratic, anti-social, anti-American people you can possibly imagine over the past number of months. And that is the judo pose in which you are ready to spring into action. Am I hearing the reverberation of six months of discussions against people who would say things like, Well, maybe Ukraine's at fault. Maybe this isn't important? Brink: Well, I mean, of course, you've heard what the administration and what the president's position has been, you know, to be some kind of independent—or, yeah, like, independent mediator. I strongly disagree that that is a position that is good for U.S. interest. In the small sense, and this is really important for Ukraine, it's really vital that we don't allow Putin as an aggressor to just change borders by force, because this sets a terrible precedent here. It sets a terrible precedent in other places around the world. But I think what I want to say is that, more strategically, I think Putin's goals are much bigger. I don't think it's just Ukraine. I think people who think that, Oh, Putin will stop at Ukraine, that's not my experience in 28 years working in this part of the world. Putin doesn't stop unless stopped, unless given clear positioning that we and partners will oppose a specific direction. I believe he's going to keep going. I think it's clear to me that he wants to reverse Ukraine's path toward not just the EU, which is where this all started, but also to NATO, to weaken NATO, to divide Europe, and to weaken the United States. And to me, we need a policy that is strategic in the sense of framing what our actions are to achieve the goal, which I think should be to stop Putin from being successful in this attempt. Frum: But you've spent a lot of time arguing things that one would've thought were settled, like this war is Russia's fault, not Ukraine's fault. Brink: Yes. I mean, the challenge in the current moment—well, maybe two things I would say. One, I think what's at risk now is so much bigger than just Ukraine. I think Ukraine is—I care very deeply. I spent three years of my life in a war zone trying to protect my team but also advance our goals of keeping Ukraine free. But I think even more broadly than that, what's at risk is the peace and prosperity that we have enjoyed for 80 years since World War II—because we have relied on some fundamental principles, including, especially: We, the United States, support democracy and freedom at home and abroad. We, the United States, believe that it's important to work with our friends and allies. We, the United States, think that we need to stop aggressors from achieving their goals and compete with China. I think people don't maybe think about it in this sense, but I think about how undermining some of these principles is risky. It's risky for us. It's risky for our children and future generations because we're taking away some of the foundation of what has built our own prosperity, what has built our own success as a nation. Frum: I suppose where I'm going with this is: Every major conflict, there are many, many choices. They're all very difficult. If the questions weren't difficult, they wouldn't be at your level in the first place. And the way we think the United States government operates is: people of good faith and unquestioned patriotism and commitment to shared values, dealing with hard issues of what's the right way to go, dealing with un terrible uncertainty and lack of information and trying to come to some kind of balance. And certainly, in the first years you were in Ukraine, there were many of those discussions, and my opinion: And a lot of them went the wrong way. The United States was late to give Ukraine the things it needed and the chance to score more-decisive gains in the summer of 2023. Maybe it wasn't ever there, but if it was there, it wasn't seized. But as I listen to you, I hear the reverberations of something that sounds like some kind of cheesy, paranoid Cold War novel—where back home, in Washington, there are important voices that aren't people of good faith, aren't imbued with shared patriotic values, don't stand up for democracy and actually want to see our friends lose, not our friends win. Brink: Well, I think the challenge we have now with—well, what happened with me is pretty simple, is that for 28 years, I felt very strongly that I could and I was able to offer my opinion and my advice about what's the best course for foreign policy. In our business, you sometimes prevail in that effort, and sometimes you don't. And sometimes because I did it for so long and worked in an area that was in a similar area, I had the ability to come back to issues sometimes and then prevail in a different administration. For example, when I worked before in Washington, I was part of the group that helped to give Ukraine—or make a recommendation that the then-President Trump, in the first administration, gave weapons to Ukraine, defensive weapons. Those weapons helped to save Kyiv. But now, coming back in the second administration, here's what happened. Every day I woke up, and I was told I might be fired, so I should be careful what I say and what I do. That's fine in terms of: We all serve at the pleasure of the president. That's the way the system works for ambassadors. But what has happened under an administration with President Trump with such dramatic changes, for example, destroying and changing institutions, like USAID or Department of Education or other institutions, is that what happens with the bureaucracy is: The bureaucracy becomes not a strong advocate of whatever is the recommended approach. What we do as career people is that we make recommendations and then ultimately, of course, it's the leadership—it's the elected leadership and the president—who decides. In my experience in this Trump administration, there was no space to make recommendations if they conflicted with whatever was the, I think, perceived view of the president. That's highly problematic. I can tell you many times during the Biden administration, I am sure I annoyed or aggravated people because I was so persistent, but I felt it was my duty and my job in my views, and I never—of course, I would implement, once a decision was made, whatever was required or decided—but I never felt that I was at risk of being fired or that I would, by annoying people, was going to be problematic for me personally. And I believe sincerely that—even though, again, I'm sure in many times, I thought we should be doing something else; you don't get to win every argument—but what you need is a structured policy approach so that you can make the case, and so you can come to a decision, and so you can know the facts. I need that as ambassador. The president needs that as president, and that's what doesn't exist. Moreover, this fear makes people not want to give their opinion, and so in that period, I said my view was that this is the most important diplomatic job on the planet. I've gotta do it in a way where I'm not fearful. I have to do it in the best way that I can. And then when I couldn't, that's why I left. Frum: Can I press you to be more specific? Who had the job of advising you that you might be fired? Brink: Well, I would say this is more the career folks that are literally, I think, pulling their punches and scared. Frum: To whom do you report as ambassador to Ukraine? I mean, ultimately, the secretary of state, but who's your immediate report? To whom do you address your cables when you send them home? Brink: Well, you report to the secretary of state, and you report to your chain of command, which goes through the secretary of state and then to the White House. But your day-to-day interactions are, in many cases, with career officials who are in very senior positions in the department. Frum: Undersecretaries and so on. And so is that the person who would say, You might be fired if you say this thing in your cable? Brink: Oh, it was many people. It was people in Washington. It was people on my team. It was many people. Frum: Did you talk to—I mean, Secretary Rubio, who was once a friend of Ukraine, once an advocate of traditional American leadership, and who seems to be making his own calculations, did he ever communicate to you, You're going too far. You're in danger? Brink: No, he did not. Frum: Wasn't that his job? Brink: Well, I don't know if that was true or not. I think a lot of it, I mean, I heard and respected. I always want to hear divergent views. And I heard that, but it didn't change what I did. I still believed that I had to do it a certain way. And I want to hear when people think—I need my advisers or I need people in Washington to give me a steer on which way to go. And I want to keep—as a person of the career service, you can't step out and have your own policy. You have to keep within the policy lines. But at the same time, it was very hard to have a policy that had been very clear about who's to blame—who's responsible, what's happening on the ground that children are being killed, that people are losing their lives and their homes, and this is happening today, right now—and not be able to speak about that publicly. But it was my job to continue to try. So that didn't deter me from trying to do the job, but it made it—it really underscores to me what worries me. Because having institutions that are strong, they need to execute policy as decided by the president. But you need institutions that can offer advice and guidance so that the president can make the best decision. And that is a structure that exists and has existed in every administration. And some are not so great and some are better, but there's always been the structure. Frum: That's assuming that the president wants to make decisions in the best interest of the country, meaning this country. Sometimes you may have a president who wants to make the decisions in the best interest of some other country, and then you have a real problem. But let me ask you: If there were someone in your shoes but one stage, one train car, back in her career and was considering the next step on the train car, how would you advise that person one train car back to think about service to this president and this administration? You're a person of normal American patriotism. You're being invited to do something for this administration. We've seen how it has sucked the soul out of some of the people who had those, like the secretary of state, once a normal American. How would you advise them to think about whether it's wise or not to serve, or whether they should wait for another moment? Brink: Well, what I've always told people, now and before—because I've had to mentor and lead a lot of younger officers, and I've had myself fantastic mentors and leaders above me who have really shaped me and helped me—is that our job is to give the best advice and to fight very hard to relay that advice in the best way possible to our elected leadership as career people, and that if, at the end of the day, you feel you can't execute the policy that has been decided, you have some options. The first option is: There's lots of places in the world that you can serve, and you can go, probably, find someplace or something that aligns with your own values. You can do that. Second option: You can go into our training cadre, which is really important to train the diplomats of the future. And I think and hope those diplomats will be very active, because I think this is very important. We are the frontline of freedom, as diplomats, in the area of Europe in which I worked. And then the third is you can decide that your conscience doesn't allow you to execute, and you can resign. And I always said it's important to work and do everything possible to serve our country and do the best that you can. But if you come to that point, you have to make that decision. And I believed, and I've always said, you should work as if it's your last day in government and think about everything you do, especially in places that are such high stakes as Ukraine, as if you're not going to have a job tomorrow. It's really hard to do that, but that's my advice. Frum: Let me interrupt you there just to say: What you're describing is a thinking process that one might have had in January of 2025, when it was uncertain what the second Trump administration would look like. In June of 2025, we know exactly what the second Trump administration is going to look like. So if you are someone who's offered to be ambassador to one of the countries that Trump doesn't like or one of the countries that Trump likes a lot, you know what it's going to be. You don't have to do that three-part assessment you just described. You know the answer already. So knowing the answer of what this administration is like, how do you advise then? Because obviously, the business of government has to be carried on. If someone is offered a job as ambassador to Ukraine, how should they think about that? Brink: I think that has to be an individual decision. I think being ambassador is one thing. You're the public face of the policy, and so you really have to make that decision individually. I think for the staff and the younger officers, it's extraordinarily important that we have this career service, and it's extraordinarily important that they serve and provide the knowledge and recommendations and active diplomacy that makes us like the tip of the spear of our government overseas. So I just think that has to be a decision of individuals, and they have to make it with their own conscience. Frum: Well, let me ask you this way: When and if President Trump appoints new people to run Ukraine policy, he's got a special representative who's in charge of negotiating, who seems very in thrall to the Russian point of view, whose son is operating a crypto business that is getting money from God knows who and God knows where. How do we as citizens evaluate the people who are making these policies supposedly in the interest, in name of the United States? Brink: I think it's a mistake not to rely on people with expertise in the area. I think it's a big mistake, especially in Russia. Putin has a larger strategic plan, which is very dangerous to the United States, and we ignore that plan at our peril. And although he operates tactically, so he can be defeated. But I think it requires a very thoughtful, strategic, coordinated approach, and that's something that in the second Trump administration, my challenge had been getting advice to the right person, because there are a number of different people who are working on Ukraine and on Russia policy. And in that bifurcated way, it was very difficult to get advice. And when I asked, How I best relay advice and information? I was told I had to go to a multiple number of people across our government in order to affect the policy because there wasn't, as I said, a policy process, a decision-making process. And my problem was: I was in a war zone. I was really busy. I did not have time to call individual people to try to make the case for a specific policy recommendation. And I think that's something that can still be put in place. But that was and is a big part of the problem. It's the chaos of the policy process, which: I don't know why that's the operating style, but it is not conducive to our ability to execute and implement a strategic foreign policy that deters Russia, sends the right signal to China, and advances American interest for Americans here at home. Frum: So you're saying that it's kind of a secret hierarchy, where, theoretically, the secretary of state is in charge, but, actually, the president of the Kennedy Center is a lot more important than the secretary of state to American foreign policy. And that's not a hypothetical example. That may be a very real one. Brink: I think the challenge I had was that I didn't know who was—I could, of course, talk to some people within the administration who I thought genuinely understood the challenge of Ukraine and how to approach it. I did not sense that there was an ability to inform the president in a way that would help us advance our policy. And that's an untenable position for an ambassador, an ambassador in a war zone, an ambassador has a thousand people to protect and make sure are safe, and that is trying to accomplish one of our top foreign-policy goals. Frum: Let me ask one final question: As you departed from Ukraine, when the Ukrainians in the summer of 2025 look back toward the United States, the country that gave them some if maybe not enough aid at the beginning of the war, what do they see now? And what do they think of Americans? Brink: Well, maybe I'll tell you a story of my last few days, when I was in Ukraine and met with a very senior official. It was one of my last calls. Basically, he showed me what he said had been presented to the Ukrainians as a possible way forward in terms of a peace negotiation. That paper, which I won't go into detail of, included what I would say Putin's wish list of everything that he wants. And he looked at me and he said, You are our closest strategic partner. That's all he said. And I had nothing I could say, because I myself, as someone who dedicated a big part of my life to supporting freedom and democracy in Ukraine and in the wider European space for the benefit of Americans, I had nothing to say either. Frum: They feel that the United States is lost to them. Brink: I don't think they understand. I don't think I understand, or many of us who are experts and long patriots and public servants understand. Frum: Is it that we don't understand, or that we do understand and our hearts can't accept the answer? Brink: I think it's a different administration, and it's a threat to our future, and that's why I've come out. That's why I left. That's why I'm speaking publicly. I think it's bad for America to be where we are. It's not who we are. And I just—we have to be on the right side of history. There are very few pivotal moments in history. And as someone who has now done this for 28 years, I think it's vital that we stand on the right side. Frum: Ambassador Brink, thank you so much for your time today. Good luck with the book. I look forward so much to reading it as you work on it. And good luck to—I know you have some important personal decisions to make and career decisions to make about what comes next for you. And we're all watching those with keen interest, and we all hope that your service to the United States has not ended and that the United States that you believed in has not ended either. Brink: I don't think it has. I'm sure it hasn't. Thank you. Thank you, David. [ Music ] Frum: Thank you so much to Ambassador Bridget Brink for talking to me for this edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks to the editors and publishers of The Picton Gazette for their generous hospitality on this Canada Day week, when so much in Picton is closed. If you are enjoying this podcast, I hope you'll share it with friends, especially this episode, which is so urgent about Ukraine's survival. And I hope you'll like and subscribe, both the video form of the podcast and any audio form that you like and prefer. I look forward to speaking to you next week for another episode of 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.
Atlantic
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Why Do Billionaires Go Crazy?
The Atlantic 's David Frum opens this episode of The David Frum Show with a statement about Trump's Iran strikes. The strikes fulfilled commitments of past presidents, who have long maintained that the U.S. would not allow an Iranian nuclear bomb. David also makes the point that Trump, who has already abused peacetime powers, is now a wartime president, a role that will allow him to wield even larger powers—and do even greater damage. Then David is joined by the author and editor Tina Brown for a conversation about the disorienting effects of extreme wealth. They discuss how billionaires often become detached from reality, how philanthropy is used to consolidate image and influence, and how Brown's personal experience with Donald Trump shaped her understanding of his ego and evolution. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show, in an America that suddenly finds itself at war in the Middle East under the leadership of President Trump. My guest today is Tina Brown, the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, author of the Fresh Hell Substack. I recorded this dialogue with Tina Brown before the outbreak of hostilities. We're going to continue with it because I think it says a lot of important things by Tina about the political culture of the United States today. But I am recording on the Monday morning after the strikes. I'm in a different location, obviously, as you'll see from the location I was in when I recorded the dialogue with Tina. And of course, we're in a different world, a world in which the United States has struck Iran with air power and which calls for some new thinking and some new approaches. For many Americans, nothing much has changed politically. They opposed Donald Trump before the war, and they oppose Donald Trump now that he's led the country into a war. For those of us on the center right or on the Never Trump side, things are a little bit more complicated. Among the reasons that me and people like me opposed Donald Trump was not just—along with our many, many coalition partners spreading across the American spectrum—his disdain for democracy, his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, his authoritarianism, his corruption. We also had very particular political concerns. The thing that led me and people like me to the political right in the first place was our belief in American global leadership—leadership of willing partners and allies, leadership based on respect, leadership based on mutual benefit, leadership based on commerce and trade. Donald Trump rejected all of those ideas. His vision is one of an America isolated and alone, an America that dominates, an America that may be feared but is not respected and certainly is not liked or trusted, because he's not liked or trusted. And through his first term and the opening months of the second, that logic prevailed. But by striking the Iranian nuclear program, in support of Israel at war in defense of itself, Donald Trump did something that is more or less in line with what a President McCain might have done or a President Romney might have done—the kind of action that, had it been done by a President McCain or a President Romney, me and people like me would've supported. And so we are in a kind of quandary today: A president whom we fear and reject, and whom we see as a threat to American democracy, has this one time done something in line with established Republican values, established conservative principles, established principles of American global leadership, rather than in defiance and rejection of them. So what do we do and how do we think about that? Do we forget that this president is unworthy and untrustworthy? Or do we discard our past principles about what America's role in the world should be, and object to this latest act, which we would've supported had it been done by another president, reject it because it was done by a president we reject? So this is the dilemma. So let me just tell you—not to give advice to anybody—about how I think about this. I've written a little bit about this for The Atlantic, but I'm going to talk more about it today. Donald Trump remains a dangerous and unacceptable leader of the United States, an enemy of democracy and an enemy of America's role in the world, and he's now leading the country into war. Now, we hope that this war will be brief and decisive. We hope that the strike on the Iranian facilities will be one and done, the facilities will be destroyed, the nuclear program will be terminated (as every president since Bill Clinton has wanted to terminate the Iranian nuclear program), it will be done in a decisive and relatively cost-free way, and that things will now return to the usual programming. But we have to be ready for the possibility that these hopes do not come to pass. That, in fact, Donald Trump has opened his way into a new chapter in American history, that the Iranians will retaliate, that the situation will become more and more unsettled—the Iranians will retaliate not only with conventional military means, or not only with missiles and barrages, but also by a campaign of global terrorism against American interests and other interests in the United States and around the world, and that we are at the beginning of something, not the end of something. I don't predict that, but the mind has to be prepared for it. That is a real possibility. Donald Trump may have converted himself into a wartime president for a long time to come. And if the powers that Donald Trump has asserted in peacetime were unprecedented, en large, think of what he will do during war. In peacetime, he said that people illegally present in the United States, or those who looked like they might be illegally present, they had no due-process rights. People around him have been itching to say that American citizens and American permanent residents don't have due-process rights either. And in wartime they can maybe make that stick. They have attempted to suppress the free-speech rights of people they don't like, and of institutions they don't like, and of universities they don't like. Well, in wartime, they may have more ambition against free-speech-like rights of people they don't like. We've seen Donald Trump use bits and pieces of past presidential emergency powers to create a whole tariff system that raises billions of dollars of revenue without Congress, as not an emergency measure but as a permanent measure of presidential one-man revenue without reference to Congress. And in wartime, those powers get bigger still. And again, he'll have larger powers to raise revenue without Congress. So a presidency that was dangerous before becomes more dangerous still. But the war that he's begun was necessary, and the things he did were the things that a normal president would've done. So we have to find ways to keep true to both our principles about American leadership—and when I say 'we,' I mean people who think like me and me, and this is advice also to myself—without abating one bit our wariness of the kind of president Donald Trump is. Donald Trump always wants personal thanks. He's always demanding that people say 'thank you' to him. And for those of us who support the action against the Iranian nuclear facilities, he wants thanks from us: Thank you, President Trump. So let me just give him what he wants for a second. Thank you, President Trump, for once in your misbegotten presidency doing a right thing, even if you did it in a high-handed and irresponsible way. I mean, the idea that you would brief the Republican leaders of House and Senate and not the Democratic leaders of House and Senate, as any president before you he would've done, that's just oafish and churlish and rude and insulting and gratuitous because the suggestion here is: We can't trust Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to keep a secret that we trust Mike Johnson and John Thune to keep. Really? Really? That's what you want to say as you lead a united country into a conflict, where you're going to be coming back maybe for supplemental appropriations, and where the work is done by Americans of all points of view, all races, all backgrounds. It's kind of a small point, but the fact that the secretary of defense couldn't remember that there was a woman who was piloting one of the B-2s, and referred only to 'our boys.' What's the need for that kind of gratuitous insult? But we don't want to lose sight of either of the truths that it is necessary to shut down the Iranian nuclear program and that American leadership is welcome, and the truth that the president exercising this leadership is a dangerous figure. We'll have to be able to keep track of both, and that's complicated. But politics is sometimes complicated. And that's going to be a challenge for me because, like all of us, I get into the flow of discussion. I can get heated. I can overstate things. I can say things one way too much or one way too little the other way. We are in a situation of conflict. The conflict was necessary. The leadership is unreliable, untrustworthy, and dangerous. And there is now an ever-present and probably growing danger that the leadership of the United States will use this conflict to expand their powers to do illegitimate things in illegitimate ways. And as much as we mistrusted them before, we must mistrust them even more now. How do you support all of this out? I often cite a parable—or a fairy story—that was written by the American writer James Thurber. And because I don't want to trust my memory as to how exactly James Thurber said it, I printed it out this morning. It's quite short, so I'm going to read it. And I think it's a lesson that applies to a lot of us in our politics. It's the story of a bear who could take it or leave it alone, and here's how it goes. It's just a couple of paragraphs: In the woods of the Far West there once lived a brown bear who could take it or let it alone. He would go into a bar where they sold mead, a fermented drink made of honey, and he would have just two drinks. Then he would put some money on the bar and say, 'See what the bears in the back room will have,' and he would go home. But finally he took to drinking by himself most of the day. He would reel home at night, kick over the umbrella stand, knock down the bridge lamps, and ram his elbows through the windows. Then he would collapse on the floor and lie there until he went to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened. At length the bear saw the error of his ways and began to reform. In the end he became a famous teetotaler and a persistent temperance lecturer. He would tell everybody that came to his house about the awful effects of drink, and he would boast about how strong and well he had become since he gave up touching the stuff. To demonstrate this, he would stand on his head and on his hands and he would turn cartwheels in the house, kicking over the umbrella stand, knocking down the bridge lamps, and ramming his elbows through the windows. Then he would lie down on the floor, tired by his healthful exercise, and go to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened. Moral: You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward. So that's the moral we all face. We don't want to fall flat on our face, and we don't want to lean over too far backwards. We don't want to let our mistrust of Trump—if those of you who are on the Never Trump and conservative side, on the American leadership side, on the belief in free trade and American military power and the leadership of global alliances—you don't want to let your mistrust of Donald Trump lead you to reject this very necessary shutdown of the Iranian nuclear program, a program that was aimed at extinguishing the state of Israel and committing Act II of the attempted genocide of the Jews that Hitler tried in the 1940s. You don't want to be led there, but neither do you want to be led by your 'thank you, President Trump' attitude to overlooking how dangerous the situation now is, how he will abuse wartime powers in a way that will amplify and extend the abuse of the powers that he's been doing, and that he will try to create an atmosphere in this country of hostility to rights and due process and free speech even worse than that which just prevailed in the first half of this year, in the beginning of his presidency. We face two dangers, and we have to confront both. It's not going be too easy. But I'm now going to forget—I don't want to jumble this quote—but as somebody wise once said, it's not an easy duty being an American. It just got a little bit harder after Donald Trump's actions in Iran. So I will now open our dialogue with Tina Brown. I want to make—I have two other bits of housekeeping to take up. As I said, I'm recording in the conference room of the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario. Thank you to the Royal Hotel for their hospitality. The interview was conducted in my usual recording studio at home in Washington, D.C. I also want to mention two things leftover from last week's podcast with Karim Sadjadpour, when we talked about Iran and Iran's culture. I referenced Karim's book, but I gracelessly omitted to mention his title. For those of you who'd like to understand better what is going on inside Iran, Karim's book is Reading Khamenei, named for the supreme leader of Iran, and it is the most insightful thing I've ever read about the political ideology, the religious beliefs of the supreme leader of Iran. And that may be a useful thing. Take a look at now: Reading Khamenei, by Karim Sadjadpour. And I also want to correct a mistake I made in last week's podcast, where I referenced chess as a Persian invention. So I'm corrected by those who know this history better than I do, that chess originated in India and then spread westward via Persia to the Arab world and from there on onto Europe, all in the Middle Ages. So it's an Indian invention spread by the Persians, not a Persian invention. And I thank those who corrected me on that. We are in for some difficult times. I'm hoping you'll find this conversation with Tina Brown a kind of diversion and tonic in these difficult times. There will be more difficult things to talk about on future episodes of The David Frum Show. But now my dialogue with Tina Brown, recorded before the strikes on Iran by President Trump. [ Music ] Frum: What a pleasure to be joined today by Tina Brown, who has led one of the most storied careers in journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Her talent was identified early and rapidly as an undergraduate at Oxford. She was given the job of reviving the moribund Tattler magazine and turning it into the prototype of the great glossy magazines we knew and loved in the 1980s and 1990s. From there, she resurrected the defunct title of Vanity Fair and made it into, again, the true American institution it has remained. She hauled The New Yorker into the modern age, adding—this is gonna be a little bit of a shock for those of you who remember the old magazine—she added photographs to The New Yorker, among many other innovations. That, at the time, was regarded as somewhere between blasphemy and heresy, but she survived it and made The New Yorker, brought it into the modern age. And then she invented Talk magazine, one of the great journalistic innovations of the early 2000s. From there, she created the Daily Beast website, which flourishes, and where I worked for her—a story that I'll tell in a minute. She founded the Women in the World conference series; wrote six books, including the Vanity Fair Diaries, which I reviewed in The Atlantic; and now she is the author and editor of the Fresh Hell Substack with almost 40,000 subscribers, including my wife and my mother-in-law, both of whom swear by it. They swap it back and forth by email. It is such a great pleasure to welcome you, Tina, and I have to begin by telling a story of the management secrets of Tina Brown. This is a story you have probably forgotten, but I remember vividly how I was hired. And there's a story there that I think goes into the book Management Secrets of Tina Brown that I think the world needs to know. So I had been running for three years a website called Frum Forum, and it had a lot of impact—one of our contributors went on to be vice president of the United States—but it wasn't very financially stable, and it was becoming more and more at work. And I was reaching that kind of breakdown point. And just at the moment when I said, 'I have to change my life,' I got an email, an invitation to lunch with the legendary Tina Brown. And at lunch, she offered me a job at Daily Beast / Newsweek, and she said, Name your price. So I went home and thought about this and decided to take the job. It offered an exit from an intolerable situation, and I thought about, sort of, what I thought my service was worth. I added a little premium to what I thought my service was worth, and I called back and said, I'm delighted to accept, and the figure I propose is X. And Tina, you then said, Would you consider Y? Y being $10,000 a year more than X. Tina Brown: Oh God. (Laughs.) Frum: I was stunned. I was stunned. I was so floored by this. And I said, Sure. But what I did not understand was that by accepting Y instead of X, what I'd set myself up for was, at that point, anytime Tina Brown called me at 4 in the morning to say I need 2,000 words by 7 in the morning— (Laughs.) Brown: (Laughs.) Of course, it was a complete ploy. I had your nuts in a jar, David. Frum: (Laughs.) But it worked. And I recommended to people that you just top it up a little bit, and then you can ask for anything. And they will do it. Tina, the question I wanted to ask you was prompted by an essay you wrote in your brilliant newsletter, where you talked about the secret of the plane. And it struck me—and maybe this was always true; maybe we only know about it because of social media—but so many of the leading figures in American business today, the billionaires at the top of so many institutions, seem to be clinically crazy. And you had a theory that explained what was going wrong with them. Brown: Well, I believe, strongly, that it all starts with the private plane, and it goes from there, okay? Frum: (Laughs.) Brown: I mean, you have to have flown on a private plane to understand that and be kind of empathetic to it. I have actually flown on a couple of very wealthy friends' private planes, and once you've experienced that buttery leather, that sinking into that seat, that running to the tarmac, like, No, it's going to wait for you. There's no such thing as not getting your plane. It waits for you. And it takes off when you are good and ready. And then the steward comes around and gives you what he knows you like, and it goes on like this until you land, sleepily, not even wearing a seatbelt half the time. You land at some gorgeous place. Out of it, you step into a sort of beast of a motorcade kind of car and get whisked to the boat or wherever it is that you are going. These experiences sort of change you for life, and you think, There is no one that I wouldn't bribe, betray, sleep with to be freed from the armpit of mass transit. I mean, this is the thing. So once they've experienced this, they can never go back. And it gets more and more important to them. I mean, their families all want to be on it. They want to take their friends to the guest villas on it. It sort of starts to dominate the life. So this, of course, makes corporate executives, for a start—that is always a major part of the negotiation in their raises. So whatever bonus they get, the major thing they have to have is, And I also get to have the private plane, not just a couple of times a year to go to a conference but whenever I want this private plane, with whoever I want on this private plane, and also that I can use it during my vacations. And it goes on and on and on. So finally, this private plane is dominating everything. A major [mergers and acquisitions] negotiator said to me that one of the things that happens in mergers is the thing that will allow—you know, there's two CEOs. One of them has to go. It's easy to get rid of the one who wants to go if you allow them to deal with, quote, 'the social issues,' it's known as. And the social issues is: You get the plane whenever you like. You can step down. You won't be CEO, but you get use of the plane. So that, I think, is one of the beginnings of it all. And then of course, with presidents—ex-presidents—the first thing they have to think about is, when you had Air Force One, I mean, that's the ultimate private plane. So they start thinking about six months before they go, Who's gonna fly me private? I mean, and actually, I would argue that the people who made the cut on Obama's, you know, ill-fated 60th birthday party, when he suddenly found he had to cut the list, it's worth looking at that list and seeing how many of them could provide the Obamas with wheels—wings, rather—because that has become a major factor in the Obamas' life. Obama won't even kind of cross the road without a private plane at this point. It just takes over. Frum: I'm not going to use names, because it seems invidious. Also, there's some litigation risk. But we have seen this, if you follow social-media platforms, happening in real time, where people start off being the usual kind of CEO with CEO attitudes, the usual kind of rich man with rich man attitudes. And then—maybe it was COVID, maybe something like that—between 2020 and 2025, a lot of people who didn't seem especially crazy before have descended into paranoid madness. And one of the things I was really struck by—you had this moving recent review, evocation, of your friend Barry Diller's book, and he seems to have been immune to this disease. We can name him as one of the people who's, like, on the other side of this. There's something about him that he seemed to remain levelheaded and morally centered at a time when so many people in his class and category have gone off the rails. Is there some secret there we can learn about why billionaires go crazy? Brown: Well, I mean, I think in Barry's case, first of all, he has a very strong, sort of ironic sense of humor. Secondly, I think he's always felt something of an outsider, because as we know, as he's now revealed to the world—everyone knew before, but now he's revealed it personally—that he was gay. And that was not something he'd come out about but kind of changed, I think, his outlook a bit to the world, and the sense that he always felt a little bit on the outside, so that he never quite became as complacent as people do when they're superrich. And I think, thirdly, because he's always done the work. He loves the work itself. I think that most of these kind of high-flying billionaires, as soon as they can kind of extricate themselves from the actual work—the sort of nitty-gritty, grungy process of making a buck, as it were—and that's when they really start to lose it. Barry's always liked the actual work of making films, making deals. He actually likes the work. I think it keeps him grounded. That is my theory. I think, obviously, we saw someone like a Warren Buffet. He never lost his sense of sanity. I think what's really made them all crazy recently is the numbers, the size of these digital fortunes. There was a huge amount of, I think, wealth envy. Always—there's always been wealth envy. I think, actually, journalists are particularly afflicted by wealth envy because they spend so much time in the company of and reporting on people with so much more money than they have. Now, of course, journalists are now basically walking around with tin cups, seeing if they can get a few bucks here and there, so they feel, particularly, rage at how much better off everybody is. But I think with, say, bankers, for instance—they always had, you know, massive amounts of money. Earlier in the century, there were people with $1 billion and people with $40-million-a-year bonuses and so on. But these digital fortunes, of the likes of Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg and all of them, are in such a different level. They make everybody feel impoverished. So now they're all completely obsessed. I mean, $1 billion is no longer a sort of an attainment. It's got to be double-digit billions to feel that you are remotely in that class with those people. Frum: Well, I have a thought to cheer up the journalists, because one of the things we have learned from this age of social media is: When people have tired, wearied of the work that Barry Diller is doing—when they've made unimaginable amounts of money; when they are truly permanently, generationally rich; when they're so rich that their great-grandchildren will be still among the richest people in America—when they get there and can do anything, what do they want to do? They want a shitpost on Twitter. (Laughs.) That's what they want to do. And if you're a journalist, wait a minute—this angry billionaire who has 175,000 followers, he looks at your 525,000 followers and says, That guy, he's the problem. And it was all symbolized by Elon Musk's blue-check-mark revolution, that he destroyed Twitter because he was so mad that people who were correspondents for The New York Times or Washington Post had blue check marks, and his billionaire friends who were check-posting away to their 12,000 neo-Nazi followers didn't have blue check marks, and he wrecked Twitter, wasted $40-plus billion all to make a revolution of the blue check marks. Brown: Yeah. I think they're also obsessed with profile too. I mean, people always want what they haven't got, so it's not enough just to be an obscure billionaire, you know? You also want to have a podcast that someone listens to. I mean, they put out their own YouTube interview things and, like, their Christmas-card list listens to it, if you know what I mean. I mean, it's nothing; nobody listens. And that is, for them, I think, a very galling thing. Of course, it's even more so when they think about going into politics, because, as we saw with Mike Bloomberg—bam! If you are a billionaire who goes into politics, all of a sudden, you are grounded with a total sort of jolt because people are finally telling you what they think about you, right? I mean, nobody ever tells you what you think about them if they're really, really rich. I did actually ask a billionaire friend of mine—who I like very much, who's actually very smart, very sort of low-key, whatever—I just said to him, How did money change you? Because I'm rather obsessed with this moment. Like, what is the pivot moment when they lose it, when a person who is a very hardworking, driven guy turns into this other creature. And I said to him, What was the tip? What was the thing that really changed—money changed for you? And he said, It wasn't that money changed me. It changed them. He said, It changed the way people responded to me, and that was the difference. It's like, Now everyone I meet wants something from me, and I know that the conversation is really concealing what they really want from me, which is something, which is not just my conversation, my company, my whatever. It's, I really want you to give me money for my charity, my this, my that; get me a job. So I think that makes them feel extremely insecure, and that makes them only want to mix with one another too. Frum: Yeah, so you have this phenomena where, Yeah, I've worked hard; I've done these things. I mean, it's nice if they have real achievements delivering real goods and services. This is where Jeff Bezos is a kind of different cat from some of the others. I mean, the world really is a better place because of Jeff Bezos. I'm not sure the world is a better place because of Mark Zuckerberg, and I'm pretty sure that the world is a— Brown: Oh, my God, no. Frum: And I'm pretty sure the world is a worst place because of all the crypto billionaires. Brown: Yeah, without doubt. Frum: So there are actual social negatives, unlike Bezos. Unlike people like the people who built iron and steel. But then they arrive at the point where they say, I've got some thoughts about Ukraine. I've got some thoughts about the origin of the COVID virus. I've got some thoughts about how universities should be run. And most people listen, and they think, You're full of shit. You don't know anything. Brown: Yes, but they don't tell them that. They don't tell them that. Frum: Your thoughts are worthless. You got a C in grade 10 chemistry; don't tell us where the COVID vaccine virus came from. You can't possibly—even if you're right, it's just a lucky guess. You have no thoughts worth hearing on Ukraine. Your thoughts are negatively worth hearing. And they get angry: Why don't people listen to me, and what's the point of all this money if I can't get people to listen attentively and respectfully to my stupid views? Brown: But you know what? The only other thing that just really makes me nuts, actually, is if I just feel that these billionaires have no respect, essentially, for what we do, for instance. They have no respect for it, and in the same way that Trump has absolutely no respect for what people do in these agencies or in these—it's like they just have no respect for it. They have respect for someone who may be an absolute sort of fool but who has $150 million, which he then makes into $1 billion, but they have no respect for someone who understands science or health or who writes great sentences or whatever. Journalists are really at the—and writers—are at the bottom of the pyramid in terms of having any respect from the digital fortunes in Silicon Valley, as far as I can see. Frum: I don't care whether they respect me or not. I don't care what their opinions are—my feelings are hard to hurt. But what happens with a lot of these people—Trump is an example of this—is you've got the world's leading expert on gravity in front of you, and maybe he's not a billionaire, so you don't respect him, and you lift a bowling ball over your head and say, I'm about to drop this bowling ball, and watch it float over my head. Brown: (Laughs.) Frum: And the world's leading expert on gravity says, That's not what's going to happen. Release that bowling ball. It is going to fall on your head and inflict brain damage. Nonsense, you don't have a billion dollars. Your opinion is not worth hearing. Watch me hoist this bowling ball. And that is what Trump has been doing on tariffs. That's what his henchmen have been doing on vaccines. I mean, this administration, one of the enduring consequences of the Trump administration is they have paused research on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's at a time when we're about to make huge breakthroughs, I'm told by people who do know what they're talking about. Huge breakthroughs in these areas. And look—from the point of view of 80 years from now, no one 80 years from now will care whether the cure comes in 2030 or 2040. But if you're one of the people who is fated to develop the condition between 2030 and 2040, it's going to matter a lot to you that Trump shoved off the discovery of the cure by eight years or a decade. Brown: Well, I think it might actually be affecting us in 80 years, only because you lose a whole generation of talent. I know that scientists, particularly, are feeling this, that these people who've now just been scattered to the winds, you don't just get them back. You don't just blow a whistle and say, Okay, Trump era is over. Come back. Reassemble. To sort of really crater these institutions, it's really hard to rebuild them. I mean, any of us have seen that with anything, even in the entertainment industry. If you completely trash HBO, you know what I mean? It's like, that was a crown jewel of television, and to reassemble this amazing cadre of people that was, like, one person at a time, one person at a time. This person who was a foil to this person, this person who really balanced that person. It's a very delicate calibration when you build a talent empire, as it were, and I think it's very hard to bring it back. Frum: You may get back the person at the peak of his or her career who's migrated to the University of British Columbia or gone to France. Brown: Right. Frum: You may be able to summon them back, but the person who is today 23 or 24, just finishing a star undergraduate in biology and is deciding where should they apply their talent? Should they apply them to pure research, or should they go and work, make a better antihistamine for a big pharmaceutical company? Not that making a better antihistamine is not a valid way to spend your life, and it certainly pays more. But the purpose of government funding was to say, In addition to antihistamines, we also need cures for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and here's a very satisfying, maybe not as lucrative, but very satisfying and fulfilling career with enormous recognition at the peak, should you succeed. And those people will make different choices. I want ask you—slightly different topic. You were there in the days when—I remember this from the Vanity Fair Diaries —when Donald Trump was fun, speaking of people who have changed. And Danielle and I had—my wife, Danielle, and I had—a brief experience. She sat beside him at a dinner in 2006, just before The Apprentice, and described him as a lot of fun. I mean, kind of a creep and a jerk, but a lot of fun. Where did we lose that? What did we do to forfeit fun Donald Trump? Brown: Well, I mean, look—he was this big brash, kind of, like, caricature New Yorker. Gold towers, big. I mean, first time I met him was at a lunch that his wife, Ivana at the time, had given. It was some kind of her seasonal holiday lunch. And I was next to Trump. We had a person in between each other—like, he had a boring partner for lunch, and I had a boring partner—so we ended up sort of talking across at each other. And he was going like, Oh, you know, I went to the opera. You know, Ivana dragged me to the opera last night. I mean, never again. Pavarotti, who cares? You know, It was five hours. And he made me laugh. It was funny. He was saying the things—which he's always been good at—that people think but don't say, right? Trashing the opening of the Met with Pavarotti, some might not want to do that in that circle of people, but he didn't care, and he was sort of shouting across the table. So he was entertaining. But things began to change, I think, with him, first of all, the first time the finances started to go south, when he had his first bankruptcy. I mean, our coverage, which, until then, had been of this funny, glitzy—like one of those magazine pieces about the life and times of Donald Trump, with the gold interior decoration, and the parties and all the rest. And we assigned Marie Brenner to go do a piece about him at that moment of bankruptcy, and she wrote a very tough piece, and she actually had the wonderful detail that keeps getting brought out even now, which is that he had a copy of Hitler's speeches. And he hated the piece—absolutely hated it. And we were all at this dinner at Tavern on the Green, and she was sitting there in an evening dress, and as he passed by behind her, she felt something cold happening. And she turned around, and Donald Trump had emptied a glass of wine down her back. Okay, so that was a moment when you saw how incredibly, outrageously vindictive he could be when crossed, and he gave her this terrible look. I do actually think that the real darkness set in—and people have said it before—but I was there that evening, and I saw I saw it when Obama roasted him at the famous White House correspondents' dinner just before he really decided to run. I was sitting behind Trump that evening, behind his table, and I saw his neck go from pale salmon to sort of flaming magenta in his absolute fury. And I think that what really angered him was not just this elite cool, effing—you know, Obama, like, bringing him down—but just this room full of what, as he saw it, the liberal media, all laughing. All laughing at him, you know? And with Obama. And I think he went back to his hotel, and I think he just pounded the pillows and he went, I mean, bananas, I'm sure, that night. Because he has such a wound in him, from God knows what—hideous potty training and parental abuse. But there's a real wound in Trump when it comes to humiliation. I mean, he is so fragile when it comes to that sense of being humiliated, which perhaps came from school. I mean, he went off to that military school, and maybe he was constantly bullied. Who knows? I don't think we've really got to the bottom of, as it were, the real rosebud of Trump's huge vulnerability to any kind of criticism and how he goes into a crouch position if he sees anything coming at him that he views as disrespect. And I think that's sort of really when he went really seriously dark, and he's got darker and darker because he essentially then needed to find his tribe once and for all. And that tribe was people who felt like him, who felt humiliated. And that was obviously the MAGA genesis. Those people who had been humiliated, they felt, by the elite who were constantly condescending to them. I think they're not wrong. And once he'd found his tribe, I think that he saw the actual political opening to exploit that tribe, as he has gone on to do ever since. Frum: Well, the world changed around him. I mean, Donald Trump has been running for president since 1987. Brown: Yeah. Frum: He seriously explored running in 1988. He took out those big ads in all the newspapers about how we were being ripped off by foreigners. He thought very hard about it in the year 2000. In 2011, people forget this, but he was going into the 2012 cycle for a brief moment—not such a brief moment, a few weeks—the front-runner ahead of Mitt Romney, the man who eventually prevailed. And I think it was in that cycle that he went with the birther lie, and that's what provoked Obama's derision. But it wasn't that he hadn't been thinking about it to that point. Brown: Right. Frum: He didn't think about it very hard. Brown: No. He had. Frum: Then he decided against the 2012 cycle. He didn't decide it against facing an incumbent, and then entered in 2015. And the world was ready for him. Again, what we forget about that 2015 cycle—he declares in, I think, June of 2015. By mid-July, he's in first place—July of 2015. And although all the wise people, including me, said, This can't last. This is too crazy. He's too absurd, he stayed in first place through the whole race, except for one brief period in the late fall of 2015, when Ben Carson was briefly in first place (was also not a very plausible choice either). But there was no point in the 2015–2016 cycle when the leadership of the party was not in the hands of someone who, a generation ago, had been regarded as laughably unfit to lead a party into a presidential election. Brown: Absolutely. But I think some of that, as well, is the complete switch into the entertainment culture that America now is, right? Of which he played a big role, in a sense, with The Apprentice. But I think in those years, America became more and more addicted, if you like, to the reality shows—the Kardashians, all of this kind of celebration of glitz that he represented. You know, I remember when his first kind of Republican convention, when we'd had Hillary Clinton: amazing, every star in the world. It was an incredibly sort of glamorous [Democratic] convention. And his kind of convention was such a—he couldn't even get any big stars to perform, and so on, and it looked like it was this kind of hokey, pathetic, Republican convention. But the Trump plane lands, and streaming across the tarmac is the Trump family with him. And there they all are with their long, blonde hair and him with his red tie and their plane saying Trump. And I just thought, Oh my God. He's going win, because in a sense, they were like what everybody wanted to be in that moment. I mean, Hillary Clinton's fans sort of thought that every woman wanted to be essentially like a Hillary Clinton, you know, hardworking. No, a lot of women want to sit by the pool in dark glasses, like Melania. I think more women want to be like Melania than they probably did want to be like Hillary Clinton. That's what they're looking to be. I mean, if you're lucky, you get that money, and you have that plane, and you have a husband who's got big shoulders and a red tie. And the whole thing was just such a kind of fantastic sort of stereotype of a certain kind of aspiration. And it was very powerful to see actually. Frum: It's like a nightmare version of a kind of star power. Like, to many, it's repelling. You were the great student of American star power, and you've written very vividly about what it felt like when even pre-presidential Bill Clinton entered a room, that you suddenly knew that someone was in the room. Do you, as you look around the world today, see in the realm of politics, people in the nonincumbent sphere who have that kind of light-up-the-room star power. Brown: I mean, the only one I think who's got any real charisma actually is a woman. And that's Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny. Frum: She's constitutionally ineligible, unfortunately. Brown: Well, unfortunately she is, but oh my God. I interviewed her in London, in May, and I really didn't feel I'd met anybody that charismatic since Princess Diana. I mean, she's like this column of alabaster, with this fire-and-ice kind of feel, that she's both warm and absolutely sort of sensual in one level and yet also fiercely steely in others, and dressed in this incredible pale, sort of dark blue designer suit. She's 5'11". I mean, my God, she's absolutely extraordinary. But no, the idea that she will become president of Russia is very, very remote. In terms of the others, as it were, I haven't seen anyone. I was quite a fan of Macron, but ever since his wife slugged him in the face, his kind of charisma has diminished, as far as I'm concerned. (Laughs.) We haven't really seen any star power. I guess Justin Trudeau at a certain point did have it, but now, again, he just feels like, so yesterday's man. He couldn't maintain it. Frum: In this country, anyone that you see that makes your Spidey sense tingle? Brown: I mean, I haven't seen it really. Actually, I was watching the rather good, actually, CNN documentary about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. And I was looking at it and thinking, Oh, Admiral McRaven, why did you never run for office? He is somebody who—he is now a little too old, I think, but talk about charisma. I mean, the guy—and you see him in his white dress suit, and he's got this baritone voice, but he's got this incredible, steady, noble, masculine, but not horrible macho, which is quite different from masculine attributes. So I'd love to see somebody like him. But I don't see that, unless there's a sort of Admiral McRaven sort of brewing in some place that we don't really know. I think Wes Moore is very charismatic, but I fear maybe too lightweight. It's not enough to have just the magnetism. However, if I had to choose magnetism over, Oh, he's brilliant behind closed doors, but unfortunately, he is not great, forget about it, as far as I'm concerned, because this is an entertainment culture. So if you can't get up there and get that room magnetized, just don't even consider it. Like, go to work at the Brookings. Just get out of my face, is what I feel. Frum: Well, there's also the problem, as we've learned from the Biden experience, when people say of someone, Oh, he's brilliant behind closed doors, two things may be true: One is he's genuinely brilliant behind closed doors and it doesn't show in public, and the other is he's surrounded by people who lie about him. Brown: (Laughs.) Well, that's completely, absolutely true. But think about it. I mean, they always—they said it about so many people, though. Like, it's funny about Mitt Romney: When you get him off stage, they'll say. Or Al Gore, He was so different. He wasn't stiff at all off stage. You know what, it is too bad. I mean, what we're all looking at is you on stage, pal. And if you don't have it, don't run. Frum: Well, we all watched the Mitt Romney documentary and saw how winning and charming he indeed could be in private. But there's a problem, which is: We have this bias that the private self is the true self, and the public self is a construction. But if you're seeking a public career, your public self is a true self. So, you know, it may be that some of these people around Trump are inwardly conscientious, decent people, which is lovely for their families and loved ones and those who rely on them personally. But if in your public role, if you behaved in an unethical way, if you lie in public, then from a public perspective, that's who you are, not the person in private. That's just a matter of interest to your intimates. Brown: Yeah, I think that's so true. But I mean, I also do think, though, the performative stuff, you've really got to now be very good at it, indeed. I mean, better than you ever—I mean, obviously, we've known ever since the sort of JFK–Nixon debate how important it is to be able to be good on television. But now you've got to be good in every way. You've got to be good at all of it. You have to have that sort of wit that can really genuinely write your own tweets, as it were, because that's the voice that people believe in. It's not going to feel true if it's being written by some sort of campaign aide. You have to be able to do it. I mean, actually, to go back to Alexei Navalny again. Talk about a charismatic leader. He had these incredible performative skills, and he was able to use social media, deployed video. He was a multi-platform, gifted user of the media, essentially. And that's what I'm sort of looking for. It's almost like I feel we could teach him about geopolitics. You can have an adviser on the side who tells you that, but you've got to be able to sell it to somebody. Frum: Well, also, one more thing: He was a genuine hero. And that is something you can't synthesize, right? Maybe you can teach someone to be charismatic, but you can't teach someone to be brave and to be great. I'm going to end, actually, with—that reminds me of something I want to say about the Tina Brown school of management at the end, which is: I remember one of your sayings about training journalists, and you said, I can teach you to write a lede. I can teach you to write an ending. I can teach you how to edit, but I can't teach you to see. Brown: Right. Frum: And I have thought—I have thought about the sentence a thousand times. I'm sure it's more than that. And whenever I see young journalists and I'm trying to give them advice, I quote that and just say, You either see things or you don't see things, and if you don't see them, you're never going to learn. Brown: Right. Frum: And look—accounting is a stable, well-regarded-for, respected profession. You don't have to do what we do, because not only is there no money, but there's, in fact, no glamor. (Laughs.) Frum: Tina, thank you so much. It has been one of the joys and honors of my life to know you. Brown: Thank you. Such fun. Frum: Thanks for joining the program. Brown: Loved catching up with you. Thank you, David. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks so much to Tina Brown for joining me today—recorded, as I said, before the strikes on Iran by President Trump. If you appreciated this conversation, I hope you will consider supporting our work by subscribing to The Atlantic, which is the best way to support my work and that of my colleagues at The Atlantic and America's most important magazine, more important than ever. I hope you will consider joining us there. Thank you to my friends at the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario, for allowing me the hospitality of their board room here. And thanks to all of you. I hope you will like the podcast, subscribe to it, share it in any way you can. And one more personal note: You may have noticed that here in Picton, as in the studio in Washington, over my shoulder, there are always flowers. Those are thanks to my wife, Danielle. Danielle Crittenden Frum, who grows them, cuts them, and arranges them. She's done that again for me today, and I'm so grateful to her for that, as I am to you for joining this and, I hope, future episodes of The David Frum Show, brought to you by The Atlantic. [ Music ] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. I also, before we sign off, have to make a correction, an error I made in the last podcast. I referred to Secretary of Defense Esper, who served in the first Trump term—, I referred to him by, gave him his first name as Michael. It is in fact, Mark, and I regret that mistake and I correct it here. And thanks, thanks to all who brought it to my attention.
Atlantic
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
What Comes Next for Iran?
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum urges an end to wishful thinking about Iran, and a focus instead on the regime's threatening words and murderous actions. Then David is joined by the Carnegie Endowment scholar Karim Sadjadpour for an urgent conversation about the internal decay of Iran's theocracy. They discuss the survival instincts of Supreme Leader Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, the regime's obsession with martyrdom and repression, the true cost of the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions, and the disconnect between the revolutionary slogans of the state and the aspirations of Iranian society. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I had a slightly different plan for the podcast this week, but the startling news of the Israeli airstrike on Iran beginning on the night of Friday, the 13th, upended plans. And so I've had to improvise something. And I want to thank our friends here at the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario, for making their boardroom space available to me. I will be speaking today to Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the closest study we have on the thought of the supreme leader of Iran. But before I speak to him, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts of my own about the situation unfolding. These are not thoughts on the military situation; I am no kind of military expert in any way. We're recording 36 hours in advance, so the situation may well be changed. We know a lot about the internal politics of Israel because it's such an open society. We know a little bit less about the politics of the society on the receiving end of the Israeli exchange, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that's what I'm going to talk about with Karim: How is all this affecting the Iranians? What can we expect? What can we hope for? And before we get to that dialogue, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts. Now, I am in no way any kind of Iran expert or even amateur. I don't speak the language. I've never been to the country. I once had an opportunity to go; I was invited by an international businessman who was closely connected to one of the leading families in the clerical regime, and he wanted to invite me to come in and meet some of the figures. This was at a time in my life when I had a kind of outsized notoriety as a figure in Iran politics because I ghostwrote a speech for President George W. Bush that became important. And I got credited or blamed or demonized as that figure. And I said, I would love to go. I'd be really interested to come in. How confident are you that I'll be able to leave on time, and not 10 years later? And he assured me he was really, on the whole, quite confident. And that was not good enough, and so I declined to make the trip. I didn't want to end up chained to a radiator for the next decade. But here are the preliminary thoughts I want to offer. American policy to Iran, as long as I've been paying attention to it, has veered back and forth between two competing ideas or hopes about what Iran might be. One of them has been the hope that cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran is at hand. We heard a lot of that hope just after the 9/11 attacks, where some diplomats like Ryan Crocker, who was then, I think, ambassador—to I forget where; he was a special diplomat—said he had worked out a deal with the Iranians to help in Afghanistan. The Obama administration had vast hopes of cooperation with the Islamic Republic. And those hopes always come to grief because, it turns out, the people who have staged regular marches chanting 'Death to America' are not actually all that interested in cooperating with the United States. And the hopes that repeatedly appear—we saw them in 2009, when President Obama declined to help the Green Revolution in Iran, and in 2015, when he tried to reach a diplomatic agreement with Iran to constrain its nuclear-weapons force—those hopes come a cropper. But there's another hope that also has been disappointed again and again, and that is the hope that we're on the verge of some kind of transformational breakthrough—regime change in Iran. Repressive regimes can be very powerful, and especially those that come to power not by a coup but by a kind of mass revolution that brought the Islamic regime to Iran in 1979. They have staying power. It doesn't mean they're going to be here forever. Every one of those regimes sooner or later collapses, and perhaps collapse will come this week or next month or next year. Who knows? But it is a dangerous thing to put too much stock in. I think there's a real chance that when the Islamic regime in Iran changes, it may not change to something much nicer than what's there now. It may change into a more traditional authoritarian regime that gives up some of its more ambitious hopes in order to consolidate power. That's what happened to Cuba after Fidel Castro. The Castro regime is still there; it's just not a revolutionary regime anymore. It's a criminal regime, but it keeps power by being less aggressive toward the world around it. It could also be a terrible bloodbath. We have, I think, a distorted idea of revolution from the happy experience of the revolutions in the northern part of Central Europe in 1989. The crowds come out. The leaders run away. The flags are waved. The people cheer. And a transition that is more or less peaceful begins. Revolutions against terrible regimes can often be terribly bloody. Terrible regimes inflict a terrible blood price on their society. And there's a lot of payback that may be coming. The regime change in Iran may turn out to be a very, very bloody business, and a very protracted business that doesn't end soon. All of this is speculative—guesswork, really. I think the thing we ought to be thinking about, and this is the thing I think that the Israelis have in mind, is not the future of Iran—not what will happen inside Iran, not guesswork about the transformation—but attention careful to the capabilities of that regime joined to its expressed intentions. We know that Iran had capabilities that were almost on the verge of nuclear breakout. And, of course, it expresses its intentions in every way we can see and hear, not just by its chants of 'Death to America,' 'Death to Israel,' but by its backing for terrorist regimes, terrorist groupings all over the planet. And not just in the region—Iran still has the blood on its hands from attacks in Argentina on the Jewish community center there; they killed dozens and dozens of people in two separate attacks in the early 1990s. Iran has attempted terror operations in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. We know their intentions. We know their capabilities. That's the thing we have to focus on, and not our hopes or our fears, or our imaginings, or our beliefs, or our opinions, or our guesses about the way of the future. I'll be talking more about that in this dialogue. I want to say one last thing, which is: Conflict is a reality of human existence. It's a terrible reality. It's a reality. And we have to be prepared and meet for it, and we have to sometimes anticipate it and try to avert the worst by acting more decisively in the present. But those necessary actions are not any kind of enthusiasm for conflict. No one wants to see conflict. No one wants to see human suffering. But it doesn't go away because you choose not to believe it or postpone it later for other people to deal with after you. This problem of the Iranian nuclear weapon has been postponed for a long time. I think we've now reached the point where it can be postponed no longer. And I think we all have to hope for a decisive resolution, as rapid a resolution as possible. It's past the point of a peaceful resolution. But it can still be a stable and successful resolution—stable and successful not just for the people who are threatened by the Iranian nuclear weapon, but by the millions of Iranians who are oppressed and taxed and stolen from in order to fund the weapon that they don't want and that will do them no good. Iran is the center of a great and historic civilization. Persia has been the great cultural exporter of the whole central Asian region, from Istanbul to Delhi. For hundreds of years, if you had a new poem, a new recipe, a new way of dressing, probably it originated in Persian; it came out to you. The game of chess is Persia's gift to the world—one of its many—along with a great poetic tradition. This is a society that has been cut off from its birthright and that has been cut off from its future, from its capability to contribute to humanity. Perhaps we will live to see that potential realized and that great connection to its great past revived. In any case, we can hope. I turn now to my conversation with my friend Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you all for watching. [ Music ] Frum: I'm joined today by Karim Sadjadpour, who is one of the most sought-after experts in all of Washington on the topic of the internal development of Iran, the author of a 2009 book about Iran's supreme leader that is a classic that is much consulted in the field, son of the Iranian diaspora, a native of the great state of Michigan. I'm delighted to welcome Karim to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Karim Sadjadpour: It's wonderful to be with you, David. Thanks for inviting me. Frum: Let's first state that we are recording this on the morning of Monday after the opening of the air war by Israel inside Iran. There will be a little bit of a lag between the time we record and time that this posts. So there may be some events that we're unaware of. Forgive us for that. I don't think we're going to talk much about the strictly military events. Those are amply covered by people closer to the scene. I want to talk more about the situation inside Iran. Let's begin first by recalling your book about the supreme leader. What kind of man do you take him for? He was more vigorous, obviously, when you wrote about him. What's the mentality of the leadership in Iran? Sadjadpour: Well, I'm sure you remember that wonderful book by Eric Hoffer that came out in the '50s called The True Believer, and Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei is a true believer. He's someone who is now the 'last of the Mohicans.' He is the last of the first-generation revolutionaries, the revolutionaries from 1979, and he's someone who is committed to the principles of the revolution. In fact, we call them hardliners. They call themselves principleists, and that means, as I said, they're loyal to the principles of the revolution. And what are those principles? I think at this point, you can distill it to three big ideas: 'Death to America,' 'Death to Israel,' and the mandatory hijab—the veiling of women, which Ayatollah Khamenei called the flag of the Islamic Revolution. And so Khamenei is committed to those principles, and he has internalized some of the thoughts of the great philosophers like Tocqueville and Machiavelli, which is that the greatest danger for any bad government is when it tries to reform itself. He took the lessons of Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet Union to heart, and said that didn't prolong the shelf life of the Soviet Union; it hastened its collapse. And for that reason, he's, on one hand, a very earnest believer in these revolutionary principles, but he also believes that if he were to change those principles, it would actually hasten the Islamic Republic's collapse. So he's now 86 years old. He's not going to change his worldview. But the final thing I'd say here, David, is that Khamenei is arguably the longest-serving autocrat in the world, right? He came to power as president in the early '80s He has been supreme leader since 1989. So if my math is correct, that's about 36 years he's been supreme leader. He hasn't left the country since 1989. And I'll just say, you know, in conclusion, you don't get to be the longest-serving autocrat in the world if you're a gambler. So he has very good survival instincts. And, you know, as Hannah Arendt once said many years ago, even 'the most radical revolutionary [will become] a conservative the day after the revolution,' because you suddenly have something you want to preserve. So he's, up until now, had good survival instincts, and we'll see, you know, how he gets himself out of what's probably been the greatest bind in his political career. Frum: Well, one of the great gambles that this regime has taken is the gamble on a nuclear program. Becoming a nuclear state is a very hazardous undertaking. A lot can go wrong on the way there. Once you're there, like Pakistan, you get the ability to commit terrorism without fear of consequence or, like Russia, the ability to commit aggression without fear of consequence. But on the way there, you can end up like—remember the Argentine dictators had a nuclear program in the '90s, and that led to the collapse of their regime? The South African apartheid regime had a nuclear-weapons program. Collapse of regime. A lot of people become much more interested in collapsing your regime if you are on the way to a nuclear program. So you have this terrible zone of danger, and the Iranians seem now to be in that zone of danger. In your assessment, which do they care about more as preservationists: preserving the nuclear program or preserving the regime? Can those be separated? Sadjadpour: I think they can, in that what's obviously paramount for them is their own survival. And we should emphasize that if you contrast this regime to the previous government in Iran—the monarchy, the shah—that was a government which had a very close relationship with the United States, with the West. Many of its political and military elite had studied overseas. And so when things got bad for that government, many of them could remake their lives in Los Angeles or London or Bethesda. Whereas this Iranian regime is deeply isolated, one of the only friends they had was the Syrian government, which collapsed last fall. So for that reason, they have these survival instincts, and they've shown themselves able to make tactical compromises, including in the nuclear domain, when their survival is at stake. Now, the challenge that he has, Ayatollah Khamenei, is he's now in this situation in which the parameters are: If he feels that if he doesn't retaliate—if he doesn't show any strength—he loses his face. And he loses face not only externally, but also internally. And every dictator wants to be feared by its own population. So if he doesn't respond strongly, he loses face. If he responds too strongly, he could lose his head. And so he's in these very tight parameters at the moment, and he's long believed that if you compromise under threat and you compromise under pressure, that doesn't alleviate the pressure—it actually signals that the pressure is working and invites even more of it. And so that's why I say he's in a very difficult bind these days. Frum: Is this how they see it? I mean, they look like they've been completely—they look like fools. They look penetrated. They look helpless. They look defensive. They look as unintimidating as possible. That's a dangerous way for a dictatorship to look. And their enemies look effortlessly superior over them. And the regime also seems to be projecting a lot of fear, because there's this question of: Can the Israelis do anything about the nuclear installation under that big mountain? But everyone seems to take for granted that the United States could, if it would. And all the Iranians can do is hope that the Americans choose not to. They have no levers of power against the United States. Their retaliatory terror weapon, Hezbollah, has been taken from their hands, and although we're told there are hunter-killer teams prepositioned all over the Western world, after the last few days, those kinds of claims of Iranian fearsomeness look a lot less credible than they used to do. How does that redound on a dictatorship like this, where you just look like—you look defeated? Sadjadpour: So you're right that if we look in virtually every realm—militarily, intelligence, financially, technologically, diplomatically—Iran is outmatched in every sense by Israel. There was a very good piece in [Monday's] Wall Street Journal about how Israel has established total air dominance over Iran. And so there's no doubt that in this head-to-head conflict, Iran is going to lose. The question is: What comes next once the dust starts to settle? I think for the Israelis, they want two outcomes from this war. They want to significantly degrade and set back Iran's nuclear program. As you alluded to, the big question mark will be: What happens to that deep underground facility in Fordo, and do the Israelis have the wherewithal to damage it badly, or would that require Donald Trump's intervention? That's one big question. But the other big question as the Israelis have also defined it is that: How does this impact the stability of the Iranian regime? And how does this impact the future of the supreme leader? We've had so much discussion in the United States about President Biden's cognitive and physical abilities during his presidency. I mean, in Iran, you have an 86-year-old supreme leader, as we talked about, Khamenei, whose only education was in the seminaries of Qom seven decades ago now. He doesn't have the wherewithal to be leading this very high-tech, military, financial, technological war. But what happens to his leadership, and what is likely to happen to the system? There's a possibility that it could transition into a system, a government whose organizing principle is no longer the revolutionary ideology of 1979, but the national interests of Iran. That certainly is a possibility, but there's also a danger, David, as you alluded to earlier, that you could have some more aggressive military commanders come to power who also take the same lesson you did, which is that the regimes which didn't have nuclear weapons—[Muammar] Qaddafi's Libya, [Saddam Hussein's] Iraq, Ukraine when it gave up its nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union—they all were vulnerable to external intervention. Whereas regimes like North Korea, which had the nuclear weapons, provided themselves a cloak of immunity. So Israel, no doubt they've tactically—this war, they will prevail. The question is, strategically, six months to a year from now, what is this due to the nature of the regime and the nuclear program? Frum: So we hear the phrase regime change a lot. I think to those of us of a certain age, that conjures up memories of 1989, where at least in the northern part of Central Europe—East Germany, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics—the process was bloodless. The crowds came into the streets, the leaders resigned or went away, and there was a rapid transition to a Western-oriented system, and everybody 20 years later is much more prosperous. And you have some nostalgic extremists, but really, these are successful societies. So that's the model of regime change that I think we all want to imagine. But of course, revolutions tend to be, usually, much bloodier affairs. And even in Eastern Europe, there was the case of Romania, where hundreds died. So Iran must be riddled. When you think about the number of people who have been prisoners, the number of women who have been abused, the number of families that have lost loved ones to the Revolutionary Forces—when that regime's power breaks, you could be looking at a very, very bloody confrontation, where maybe there isn't a transition of power. Maybe there's just bloodshed for a long time, until some Napoleon Bonaparte figure emerges at the top. Sadjadpour: So there's a piece that I'm preparing for Foreign Affairs for later in the year about Iran's potential—five potential futures for Iran. And they do vary dramatically, right? There's the bloodless-coup option. There's something that could be more violent. The challenge we have at the moment is: You have a regime which has very limited popular support. I would put it at, at most, perhaps 20 percent, most likely lower than that. Let's say 15 percent of society. Just to take a step back for a second, this is a regime which is not only politically authoritarian, but it's also an economic basket case and socially authoritarian. So they not only—you know, a lot of places they're just dictatorships, but you're allowed to pursue economic advancement or you're allowed to at least watch what you want, or drink what you want, or eat what you want. This is a regime which—it polices your private activities, as well. So it has very few redeeming qualities. But the challenge is that they may not have much in terms of the breadth of their support. But they do, up until now—their support does have some depth, meaning that the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia have shown themselves willing to go out and continue to kill and die for the cause. And there was a book which came out about a decade ago, which was based off of an article in the Journal of Democracy, which I believe it was called ' The Durability of Revolutionary Regimes,' and essentially made the argument that revolutionary governments—meaning those authoritarian regimes that are borne out of a revolution, whether it was the Soviet Union, Cuba—tend to be more durable than just your run-of-the-mill dictatorship because there is an organizing principle that helps the security forces cohere. You're not just killing and staying in power to enrich one man and his family. And so that's a big question. You know, because you have a society—as I said, perhaps 80, 85 percent of society—that is opposed to the regime, but at the moment, they're unarmed. They're unorganized. They're leaderless, and I say this to their credit, not to the detriment: It's a regime which believes in martyrdom, but a society which doesn't believe in martyrdom. We're trying to separate mosque and state, not join it, which is distinct from a lot of the Arab opposition movements. And so in some ways, the portrait I'm painting, David, is: I see light at the end of the tunnel in Iran, but there's no tunnel at the moment, you know, for people to get from where they are to where they want to go. Frum: Is there gonna be any, do you think—or do you expect any kind of rally around the flag effect, which is: We hated the regime, but now the Israelis are bombing us, so we rally to our leaders because at least they're ours? Sadjadpour: I don't think so. I think what tends to happen in these situations is that people's existing political disposition is simply accentuated. So if prior to this Israeli bombing, you were a supporter of the regime, a defender of the regime, and you blame everything on America and Israel, you obviously have much more ammunition to hold those views. And if prior to this, you were an opponent, a critic of the regime, and say that this is a regime which has never prioritized the security and well-being of the Iranian people, there's far more evidence to continue to support that view. But how that plays out in practical terms—up until now, what we've seen is that those supporters of the regime are willing to go out into the streets and show off that support, whereas the opponents of the regime, whenever they've done that, they've been brutalized. And so that dynamic hasn't yet changed. Frum: We see these clips circulating on social media of Iranian soccer fans booing any mention of Palestine, of people amending their paths so they do not step on the flag of the United States when it's painted on the sidewalk. So those obviously have great currency in our world. It's we want to believe is going on. Are we kidding ourselves, or is there some fondness or attachment or fantasy about the outside world? Sadjadpour: No, I think that's right that, after having lived under a repressive theocracy for 46 years, it's a society which is desperate to be part of the outside world and to have—I think people recognize that Iran will never fulfill its enormous potential as long as its national slogan is 'Death to America, and death to Israel.' That's not a winning slogan. So I think that's right. People are patriotic, they're prideful, and I think they recognize that, prior to the revolution, when Iran did have a good relationship with the United States, the country's status was so much better. So I don't think we're being delusional about the nature of Iranian society. But this is, as I said, kind of a lesson I've repeatedly come to see, which is that leadership is so important. And there's a huge popular demand for change in Iran, but we haven't yet seen a supply of an opposition leadership, which can, as I said, lead people from where they are now to where they want to go. Frum: Why did the regime want an atomic bomb or a nuclear bomb so, so badly? We tend to take it for granted. It's an obvious thing. You're trying to terrorize the neighbors—of course, you want a nuclear weapon. But it's very risky to go from here to there. And it is the nuclear weapon that involved them with a conflict with Israel, whereas without a nuclear weapon, they could easily dominate all of their Arab neighbors, and Afghanistan to the east. Why did they make this choice? It was made a long time ago, and it's been persisted in, in the face of tremendous difficulties—sabotage in both the United States and Israel. Why bother? Why not concentrate on building up the strength of your Hezbollah arm, for example, and having a less-confrontational approach that would allow you to maximize your power in a more endearing way? Sadjadpour: So their nuclear program has really been, now, a six-decade odyssey. Obviously, it was started during the time of the shah, and after the revolution, the revolutionaries shut down the program. They said pursuing a nuclear program is un-Islamic. And at that time, if you recall, Chernobyl had happened, Three Mile Island. And so nuclear power was out of vogue. It was after the— Frum: But under the shah, it was a civilian nuclear program. Sadjadpour: Well, even under the shah, it was a program in which I think they were hedging. It was obviously cloaked in a civilian guise. Even the shah himself, I think, wanted to keep his options open. But during the time of the shah, they had access to elite technology. It was American companies that were providing Iran that technology. Obviously, things shut down. The revolutionaries shut it down. And after the Iran-Iraq war, when they realized it was a country which was largely friendless, very few allies, they started to restart the program. Then in the late '80s, the Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan provided them some of the intelligence to try to build it. But I think the challenge they've always had is that, as you said, it's such a deeply unpopular regime, and it actually has been for quite a long time that there's been so many, not only Iranian civilians, but also regime insiders who have been willing to collaborate with, whether it's U.S. intelligence, Israeli intelligence, to out elements of the program. And they've always—certainly in the last decade, since the program was exposed to the public in the early 2000s, just before the Iraq War—they've tried to maintain this facade that it's a nuclear-energy program, right? The reality is that this is a program which has cost the nation—if you want to measure it, both in terms of sunk costs, but also ancillary costs and opportunity costs in terms of sanctions and lost oil revenue—the price tag is, I think a conservative estimate, at least $500 billion, considering how much oil revenue and oil production Iran has lost. And that's for a program which barely provides just over 1 percent of Iran's energy needs. And it hasn't provided a deterrent either. So it's really been a colossal failure to have spent this much time and money on a nuclear program which neither provides you energy nor deterrence. But just on this point, David, it's possible that a conclusion that some of the Revolutionary Guard commanders are reaching is not that Iran shouldn't have pursued a nuclear program, but it may be possible the conclusion they may draw is that they shouldn't have pursued the program so deliberately, that instead of this marathon approach of inching towards nuclear-weapons capability, they should have tried to sprint out and done what North Korea has done, which they have this cloak of immunity. Frum: The sprint out? Is that going to be a feasible thing? You quote this program—it's not exactly a positive program—'Death to America, death to Israel' it, it sounds pretty negative. But 'Death to America' is just a slogan and a fantasy. 'Death to Israel' is something that you can imagine, actually, a nuclear-armed Iran could achieve. And since the Israelis are not going to agree to be done to death, the slogan 'Death to Israel' means: War with Israel before we become a nuclear power. I mean, chess was invented in Iran. If you play the chess moves out three— Well, we tell them we want a nuclear weapon in order to murder all of them. We start developing a nuclear weapon. They've got one already. They've got a better air force. We don't. What's going to happen here? How did they not see that the logic of this was: They get hit very hard by a temporarily superior enemy before they can achieve the thing that can realize their fantasy of annihilation? Sadjadpour: Well, I always remember something you told me over lunch, David. It was almost 20 years ago now. You probably don't remember, but you said, You can enrich uranium, and you can call for Israel to be wiped off the map, but you can't do both at the same time. Frum: (Laughs.) Sadjadpour: And that proved to be prophetic, your words there. And, you know, one thing I want to emphasize is that we really need to distinguish between the ideological objectives of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the national interests of Iran, which in my view are two totally separate things that are at odds with one another, right? Because from the perspective of the national interests of Iran, Israel and Iran actually have complimentary state interests, right? Israel is a technological power. Iran is an energy power. That was a source of great cooperation prior to the revolution. There's a millennia, you know, thousands of years of history there of a Persian-Jewish affinity. Iran, to this day—although it's dwindling—their Jewish community has one of the longest continuously inhabited Jewish communities in the world. So this ethos of 'Death to Israel' does not reflect the national interests of Iran. And obviously, 'Death to America'—any state which is trying to advance the national interest in security of its people, the last thing you want to do is gratuitously pick a fight with the world's greatest economy and superpower. So you're right to say that this was always going to be a losing game if you're the Islamic Republic. But as I said, going back to what was said earlier, starting with Ayatollah Khomeini and then Ayatollah Khamenei, their worldview has always been driven by revolutionary principles, not the national interests of Iran. Frum: Well, the national interest—and this is maybe a point that Americans don't appreciate enough—is Iran is the center of a great cultural zone and a long, continuous cultural tradition. It's like the France of Asia. It's the place where the food was invented. It's the place where the poetry was invented. It was the place where the fashions were invented. If you were an important person anywhere from Istanbul to Delhi, your idea of a luxurious, elegant life was probably based on an idea that started in what is now Iran. And that zone stretches into what is now Afghanistan, stretches into what is now Uzbekistan, stretches into what is now Russian central Asia, stretches of course into what is now Iraq, stretches a little bit into what is now Syria. But only at very maximum moments had ever come to touch the Mediterranean. It was always looking in the other way, and that's the zone of the great Persian language and all its many affiliates. And you would think that a sort of a Persian Iran would be looking north and east, not westward. And this religious fervor that has gripped this regime also seems to be not, again, consistent with the long-standing religious traditions of Shiite Iran, which were never all that interested in going all the way to the Mediterranean. Sadjadpour: Yeah, I'm a big believer—who said the quote that all history is biography? And Kissinger has observed that before he was in government, he didn't think that the individual mattered that much in history. After he served in government, he reached the exact opposite conclusion, which is that the individual shaped history. And in the case of Iran, we're still living in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. He was the one that essentially invented this ideology. The Islamic Republic was an essay that he wrote in exile in Najaf in 1970. And when you go back to Khomeini's writings, he was someone who—it's not an exaggeration to say—he was deeply anti-Semitic. He was obsessed with Israel, and when he talked about Israel, it wasn't just about Israelis. He would talk very—you know, at that time, I think now the modern Iranian officials have realized that they shouldn't use that language, and they use Zionists —but he didn't do that then. And so that's obviously profoundly shaped the character of the Islamic Republic. And you're absolutely right that if you look at where Iran has invested its political and financial capital over the last four or five decades—Lebanese Hezbollah they've spent billions; Hamas; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Houthis in Yemen; Shia militias in Iraq; and Iran's axis, what they call their axis of resistance. It was essentially five failing or failed states. And now that we're on the topic, David, I remember in around 2008, I was at one of these track-two diplomacy conferences in Europe, and I was seated next to a senior Iranian official, and I asked him after this dinner, I said, Think of all the money that Islamic Republic has spent over the decades on Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad. At that time, it was billions. Since then, it has spent tens of billions. Think of all the—how Iran could have spent that money on sending abroad and educating these Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites and how much better off those societies would be now. Even vis-a-vis Israel, you could say you're educating these folks and advancing them economically. And I'll never forget his response. He looked at me and he said, Well, what good would that have done for Iran? And I said, What do you mean? He said, Do you think, had we sent these people abroad to become doctors and lawyers and engineers, that they're going to want to come back and fight for Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? No. They're going to remain professionals. And so it just kind of occurred to me what a cynical strategy Iran has had for the Middle East. And I kind of think of the region as: There's two kinds of actors in this region. There's those who aspire to be falcons and those who are vultures, right? You have some countries that they're in the business of trying to build things, you know? They want soaring societies, cities, economies. And then you have Iran and its proxies, and they're not in the business of building. They're in the business of destroying, and they prey on the misery of others. The problem, though, is that—this was my big takeaway from a Fulbright I did; I spent a year in Lebanon in the early 2000s, in Beirut—that it takes decades to build things, and it takes weeks to destroy them. And so that, unfortunately, that strategy, that resistance strategy, has proven effective up until now—I should say, it did until last November, last fall. Frum: Last thought on this: It does seem like there's a strange convergence between people in the region and people in the West. The people in the region say, We don't care what happens to us so long as we can blame it on somebody else. And the people in the West will say, So long as we can find someone, some reason to blame things on ourselves, we don't care what happens to the people in question, and that there's this craving for blame and accusation that becomes a motor that just crushes the lives of potentially productive others. It is an interesting exercise to go to the World Bank or IMF site and look at the chart of Iranian growth through the 1970s, and say, If this had continued, where would Iran be today? And by my crude math, it'd be a country as wealthy as Portugal or Spain. Sadjadpour: Yeah, what a lot of Iranians will tell you is that if you look at GDP in around 1978, '77—just a year or so before the revolution—Iran, Turkey, and South Korea were at the same level. And what's happened five decades after just shows you all the difference that vision and leadership makes. And so I say this is a regime which aspires to be like North Korea, and you have a society which aspires to be like South Korea. Frum: Yeah. Well, one more of those comparisons of this: As people are marking the extraordinary achievements of Poland this year, the point is made that in 1990, Poland was as poor as Iran, and today Poland is as rich as Japan. But another way to put that is: In 1990, Iran was as rich as Poland was then—why couldn't Iran be as rich as Poland is now if they'd made other kinds of choices? But the implications of this are very unsettling for a lot of people because the answer is: Well, the correct answer to your economic-development strategy is to align with the United States, open your markets, have free markets, have capitalism, get out of the military-ambition business. And there are a lot of people, and not just the Iranian leadership, but a lot say that that's not the path. We don't want to admit that the neoliberals were right. Sadjadpour: Well, I think the other thing, David, is that, on one hand, I say that this is a regime whose priority is not the national interests of Iran. So they're not interested in advancing people's economic well-being and security, but at the same time, they're deeply interested in staying in power. David, you were friends with Christopher Hitchens, as well, right? Frum: Indeed, I was, and he was once a judge at an Iranian film festival. He was able to get into Iran, which is kind of amazing. They must have made some clerical error or something. Sadjadpour: Yeah, he had a deep interest in Iran, and so he used to have these salon dinners at his home in Kalorama. And one night—I was living close to him at that time, and he kindly invited me and—one of the guests that evening was the actor Sean Penn. Sean Penn was, at that time, very interested in Iran and had just made a visit to Iran himself. And he asked me a pretty simple question, which is, Why does the United States have this problem with Iran? Why don't we just normalize relations with Iran? And I said, That's not a unilateral choice that we can make. I agree. It's in the U.S. national interest to normalize relations, but you can't force a regime which needs you as an adversary to normalize. And he said something which always stayed with me. He had just come from Havana. And he said, Fidel always jokes that if America were to remove the embargo, he would do something provocative the next day to get it reinstated, because he understood that his power is best preserved in this closed bubble. And that very much is true about the current leaders of the Islamic Republic, which is that they fear normalization with the United States, in some ways more than they fear continued cold war with the United States, because they understand that if you crack open Iran to the forces of international capitalism and civil society, it's much more difficult to preserve the rule of a theocracy, who's led by a guy who thinks he is the Prophet Muhammad's representative on Earth. That's not a winning model. And so they thrive in isolation. Frum: And isolation may be what they're going to get. Last question, and then I will thank you for your time: How optimistic should Americans be about their ability to have any influence on the outcomes in Iran? Sadjadpour: You know, it's an important question, and invariably what we've seen in the Middle East over the last two decades is that our ability to shape outcomes in the region is somewhat limited. I would say that there are more things that we could be doing right now which we're not doing. I'll give you one example. So one of the things that President Trump did in his first weeks in office is they shut down Voice of America. And you could argue, Voice of America is not that relevant in a lot of other contexts, but in the Iranian context, it still was able to reach many tens of millions of Iranians. And it's true: The product needed to be updated and reformed to be made for a great television network. But that's one way in which it is a huge tool we have in our toolkit. The regime was obsessed with Voice of America. And rather than at least getting some concessions from them for shutting it down, we did it for free. I think they've now realized that this was a mistake and we need this communication tool with the Iranians. And so we've somewhat backed some of those employees. But I think the biggest impact we can have is in terms of media and communication, because one of the other things that the regime tends to do during times of crisis is to shut off the internet. They want to prevent people from communicating with the outside world. And so that's actually a technology, frankly, which—you know, Starlink and Elon Musk, that would be a very important factor in inhibiting the regime's ability to shut down communications between Iranians, and between Iranians and the outside world. So there are things we can do, but ultimately, the future of Iran is going to be decided inside Iran. Frum: Well, as I often express, speaking on the internet, on Twitter, one of my great hopes in life is to someday embark on an art and archeology tour of the wonders of Persian civilization. I hope I'll live to see that and that it will be possible in an open Iran to rediscover firsthand, with one's own eyes, not just in a museum but in the place, the extraordinary achievements of this amazing civilization that has self-darkened itself so unnecessarily and with such loss, not just for the people of Iran-Persia, but for the world. Thank you so much for joining us today. What a pleasure to have you. Bye-bye. Sadjadpour: Thank you, David. It's great to be with you. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks to Karim Sadjadpour for joining on such short notice. I appreciate his scholarly and his personal insights into these urgent questions that we're discussing about Iran and peace in the region. Thanks to our friends at the Royal Hotel here in Picton, Ontario, for making space available to us. If you enjoy the program, I hope you'll share it, subscribe, and like, but make others aware of it too. That really strengthens our ability to bring content to you. And the best support you can give this program is to subscribe to The Atlantic, where you will see my work and that of so many of my friends and colleagues who work so hard to achieve information that is, as the saying goes, 'of no party or clique.' Thank you for watching. 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.
