Latest news with #TheDavidFrumShow
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
J. D. Vance's Bargain With the Devil
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts On this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a Memorial Day message about corruption and extortion in the Trump White House, including revelations about meme-coin pay-to-play schemes and foreign-financed golf courses. Then David is joined by his Atlantic colleague George Packer to discuss Packer's new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance. They examine Vance's sharp political turn from thoughtful memoirist to contemptuous shape-shifter, and debate whether Vance believes what he says or just knows what power demands. David closes the episode with a reflection on Edward Luce's new biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski and what Brzezinski's legacy says about American power today. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 8 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be George Packer, an Atlantic colleague and author of an incisive new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, 'The Talented Mr. Vance.' At the end of the program, I'm going to discuss a little bit—I have some thoughts about an important new book, a biography of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski by Ed Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times. But first, let me offer some thoughts on the week just passed. I record this discussion on Memorial Day 2025, the day when Americans honor those who have served America to the utmost of human capability by laying down their lives for their country. It seems a fitting occasion to try to address the monstrous display of self-service we have seen in the past days from the Trump administration, this staggeringly corrupt administration—not just the most corrupt administration in American history, but one of the most corrupt administrations in any democratic country ever. Two things just from the week's docket. This past week, President Trump hosted a dinner for more than 200 people who were invited to dinner with the president of the United States because they had purchased souvenir meme coins directly from his company. They paid millions of dollars. Many of them were foreign nationals. We don't know their names, because those have not been disclosed, but they directly bought access to the president of the United States by putting money into the hands of his own company in exchange, really, for nothing because these are just souvenir meme coins. They're not worth anything. And everyone who's invested in them has lost money because they devalue once you've had your access to the president. Maybe you're investing in the hope of continued future access to the president, but they have no function, no purpose, no value. They're just ways for people who want access to buy it, and buy it directly from the president himself and his family and his companies. The same week, The New York Times obtained a copy of a letter from inside the Vietnamese government explaining why they were bending their own laws to make possible a golf course—a Trump golf course—in Vietnam, which the Vietnamese government is largely financing, and for which it's providing land and other services. The letter explained that the golf-course project was, quote, 'receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Trump personally.' Since Donald Trump became president, billions of dollars have flowed from Americans and from people worldwide into his pocket—billions of dollars. And the largest share of those billions of dollars has been from his meme-coin business. Some estimate that the president has more than doubled his net worth just since January, all because of these direct payments to him and, of course, these golf courses that he's opening in the Persian Gulf and in Vietnam, often financed by the host governments looking to achieve Donald Trump's failure. Sorry—looking to achieve his favor. The projects may be failures, but the favor is real. Now, some trying to explain what is happening invoke comparisons from American history: Watergate; Teapot Dome, a great scandal of the 1920s; if you're very historically minded, you may mention the scandals around the Ulysses Grant administration. But all of that falls so far short of the truth, as to create and enter this world of mind-bending alternatives. Donald Trump's corruption cannot be compared to anything in American history. I have an article this week in The Atlantic that goes into some of the details, but just to refresh memory: In the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was trying to place bugs or get some information from inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. He used campaign funds to hire burglars to break into the premises and do their mischief. And then when they were caught, he organized further government funds and—sorry; not government funds, further campaign funds—to try to buy the burglars' silence and to use government power to cover it up. It's a big, big, serious scandal. But Nixon was not doing any of this to enrich himself. He was doing it to compete and win in a presidential election in a way that was beyond the rules. That was illegal but was not motivated by his personal appetite for wealth and position. Teapot Dome, which was a scandal in the 1920s, involved people in the Harding administration—not President Harding himself—accepting bribes to open government oil reserves to private exploration. And the Grant administration was riddled with all kinds of scandals: people cheating on excise taxes on whiskey, speculating on gold and silver and paper money. But again, President Grant, although he was protective of the people in his administration who did these wrong things, he himself was completely uncontaminated, as was, as far as anybody knows, President Harding in Teapot Dome. Nixon was contaminated, but he was not taking money. He was using campaign funds to support his reelection in a dishonest and illegal way. What is happening with Donald Trump cannot be compared. The scale of the self-enrichment—billions of dollars flowing to the president and his family, not just from American donors, which would be shocking enough, but from people all over the world—this can't be compared to anything in American history. It's more like something from a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African state. It is a scale—in terms of the money being diverted to the president, it's on a scale as big as anything the world has seen in the modern era. You might call it bribery. Except there's something about the word bribery that conjures up the image that the bribe taker is kind of passive: A bribe taker is in office doing some function, and then there's a rap on the bribe taker's door, and there's the briber offering a bribe to pervert the bribe taker from the bribe taker's proper, official duty. What's going on in the Trump administration is not so passive as that. It looks like Donald Trump is taking the initiative. The Vietnamese were not urging the Trump family, Please, please, please accept a golf course from us. Donald Trump was squeezing them, as they wrote in writing, in a letter published by The New York Times—Donald Trump was squeezing them—to approve his golf course. It wasn't someone else who said to Donald Trump, Here. Please, take our money. He invented the meme coin—or he and his confederates invented the meme coin—that offered a way for people to seek his favor. And to back all of this up, at the same time as he was selling these meme coins, his administration has undertaken a series of arbitrary and punitive executive actions that threaten people, If you don't get in my good graces, bad things will happen to you. As a law firm, you will be punished in various ways unless you submit to me. As a private university, you'll be subject to personal reactions that we'll single out a university, and we will say you can't have foreign visa holders. He has attacked other kinds of businesses and institutions. He's got this whole tariff schedule that allows him to retaliate against businesses that incur his disfavor. There's one tariff for Apple. There's a different tariff for other people. There's one tariff for businesses in one set of countries, different tariffs in other countries. And the tariffs, of course, can be laid on and alleviated, laid on again, and alleviated according to his personal whim. This isn't bribery. This is extortion. This isn't centering the bribe taker as the target of someone else's action, but as actually the architect and author of the scheme. And what we're seeing here is extortion on a kind of scale, again, unlike anything in American history: billions of dollars from people who are seeking favor, seeking to protect themselves from disfavor, and finding ways—not finding ways, being offered by the president and his family ways to buy the favor of the president and his family. If the president likes you—if you're a candidate for mayor of New York and the president likes you—you get pardoned for your crimes. If you're a candidate for the mayor of New York and the president doesn't like you, he opens an investigation into you. As the president of South Africa said when Donald Trump was lecturing him, 'I wish I had a plane to give you.' Because, of course, if you give the president a plane, there's no limit to what you can get. It's hard for Americans to wrap their minds around the idea that this country is not an example to others—a positive example—that its institutions are not somehow robust, that everything won't be all right. But what we are watching here is an attack on all of those foundational premises of American life. This is a scene not out of American history; it is an orgy of extortion and corruption unlike anything I've ever seen before in this country, and only comparable to things seen in the countries of the world that Donald Trump once called 'shitholes.' Why are shithole country shitholes? Not because they're poor, but because the authorities are not responsive to the people. The authorities are perverted from their duty and use that perversion as an opportunity for self-enrichment and aggression to the detriment of their own societies. It's on this day when we ought to honor everything that is good, we ought, also, to hold the measure in our minds of what is happening that is wrong, and not accept easy excuses and not shrug it off and not allow ourselves to find some kind of consolation, that maybe there's something in the 1870s that is like this. There is nothing in American history that is like this, ever. And if we absorb that knowledge and if we feel it, and if we feel the proper shame and anger, only then will we be in position to take the corrective action that your national duty calls upon you. So much was asked from others on this Memorial Day. That's what's asked from you on this Memorial Day. And now my dialogue with George Packer. But first, a quick break. [] Frum: I'm so glad and grateful to welcome my old, dear friend George Packer to The David Frum Show. George is a writer who braves the darkest and most dangerous places, beginning with his observations as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa in the 1980s. His book The Assassins' Gate is a wise, humane, and chastened account of the American experience in Iraq. It was followed by The Unwinding, which told the story of the Great Recession and its aftermath, jump cutting from the lives of the casualties of the Great Recession to the men and women in the halls of power. George's biography of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, is a subtle, often hilarious, study of great power in the hands of not necessarily quite so great power holders. I've known George since the fall of 1978, when he was the bright, shining star of a freshman seminar at Yale University. I'm proud and grateful now to call him a colleague at The Atlantic. We will discuss today his most recent piece for The Atlantic, a profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, 'The Talented Mr. Vance.' George, welcome to the program. George Packer: David, it's great to be with you, and I'm thrilled that you've got a show of your own, which you've sort of been preparing for all the years I've known you. Frum: Thank you. Let me test a thesis on you. Donald Trump is, perhaps, not that interesting a human being. I mean, obviously, it's a hugely consequential presidency, shocking in its effects on the United States and the world. And understanding why Donald Trump is doing what he's doing, that's important and necessary. But as a person, there doesn't seem to be much in there. He's like some beast, some crocodile: He eats. He dominates. He hurts. He's an adaptive predator, but his interior story is not that interesting. Great villains require more of a backstory, more interiority, more rise and fall. And—let me keep testing this—J. D. Vance has that backstory. You know, the greatest of all literary villains is John Milton's Lucifer, who starts as the brightest of the angels and then has the steepest fall. Maybe there's something kind of Luciferian about J. D. Vance. I mean, he's someone—we know this from his own words—that he knows the difference between right and wrong. He saw Donald Trump as wrong. He became one of the most eloquent critics of the wrongness of Donald Trump. And then when opportunity beckoned, he chose wrong. He chose wrong, fully knowing what he was doing, aware of its consequences. He took a long time. He brooded over the decision, and then he made the choice. It's epic. It's literary. It's Luciferian. And it's more interesting than the crocodile that simply bites children and drags them under the Nile and drowns them for fun. Packer: Lucifer's strong, David. That's a tough one to embrace. But I was with you most of the way, and here's why: You're right about Trump—completely right. Crocodile is the perfect analogy, and Vance is a far more interesting creature because of his life story. He came from nowhere and from a lot of deprivation and abuse. Because of his talent, because he's thrived in so many different environments—whether it was the Marine Corps in Iraq, or Yale Law School, or the world of Silicon Valley investors, or the world of the far-right MAGA politics—he's risen through all of those. And so he is sensitive. He is empathetic. He is capable of self-criticism and self-reflection. Just pick up Hillbilly Elegy and open it anywhere, and you find this voice of someone who you want to talk to and who perhaps could have been a writer, because of that ability to think about himself and the world in ways that are surprising, complex, and, above all, honest. There's none of that skimming and shining the surface a little bit that so many public figures do when they write a book. He was not a public figure when he wrote it, a bit like Barack Obama with Dreams From My Father. He was not a public figure when he wrote that, and it's a far better book than anything Obama has written since then. And I don't expect J. D. Vance to write a better book than Hillbilly Elegy at this point. Where I might disagree, or at least question, the Lucifer thesis a bit is: I am not certain that he knows that he chose wrong. I'm not sure about that. I think he convinced himself, because it's very hard to live with yourself if you know you've chosen wrong. Just day after day, it's hard to live with yourself. I think he convinced himself sometime after 2016—when Hillbilly Elegy became a sensation and Trump won the presidency, he convinced himself—that what his people, the working-class people, especially the white working-class people of the Rust Belt, needed was Trump's policies. And from there, it was another step to Trump's manner, to Trump's rhetoric, to Trump's whole thing. And so I think at some point, he decided, Those Yale Law School people, those FrumForum people, those moderate conservatives have no real interest in my people. And in fact, their policies have hurt them, and so I'm going to go all in with Trump. It just so happened that that coincided with the path to power because it was the only way a Republican was going to rise at that point, was to go along with Trump. So I think he persuaded himself he was doing the right thing, even though he was so blatantly betraying just about everything that he had written in Hillbilly Elegy. Frum: You allude to my own personal history with J. D. Vance in our days together from FrumForum, a website I ran from 2009 to 2012. But before I get to that, let me just pick up on your answer with a reference to the title of your story. The story is called 'The Talented Mr. Vance,' which is a reference to a novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a sociopathic killer who has no interior life at all, who simply adapts himself, sequentially becoming one person after another with nothing on the inside. That play on words in the title, is that supposed to tell us your idea about who J. D. Vance is? Packer: Again, I can't read the book—and even more than that, listen to him talk about the book as he did a lot back in 2016, 2017—without feeling that there is a thoughtful, decent, reflective man inside this sort of unformed, not-quite-there 30-year-old who had suddenly jumped onto the scene. I can't help thinking that he was not a hollow man, that he had gifts—not just the gifts of rhetoric and intellect and appetite for power, which clearly he has and had—but gifts of thought and moral reasoning. And so in that sense, even though that title was very clever—wasn't mine, but I salute whoever came up with it as having put a clever title on the piece, because there is something about Vance that makes you think, Is there anyone there? He seems able to move from A to Z without blinking. Nonetheless, I think maybe compared to the original, there's more there. And that, too, makes him interesting. And I think you mentioned this, maybe—I don't know: There's a Nixonian comparison to be made. There's a comparison to a man who came out of nowhere with a very rough upbringing and a grievance, a sense of having been wronged, who had tremendous talent and intellect, and could have risen to greatness, and then also chose wrong. So of all the figures from our lives, David, that I would analogize him to, it would be Nixon. Frum: George, your reference to J. D. Vance and his attitude toward 'my people' summons to mind a story. I didn't spend a lot of time close-up to President Obama, but I had one occasion to have a close-up view of him when he came as near to losing his cool as I can imagine Barack Obama ever came. We were in a group of writers, and one of the writers arraigned President Obama for not doing enough for Black America. And Obama, he just seemed to tighten up, and he explained, I'm not president of Black America. I'm president of all of America. And he said, in fact, They're all my people. And that's the attitude we hope to see from the leaders of the nation: however the route you took to power, that when you get there, you get this wider view. That doesn't seem to have happened to Vance at all. Packer: Vance does not see himself as the vice president of all Americans, and he behaves as if he's the vice president of MAGA and of, quote, 'his people.' But 'his people' is—I think it's become a very instrumental term for him because anything can be justified in the name of the mistreated working class of America, any policy, any lie—for example, the lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He was called out on that because he had to admit that he had made up the story, or the story had been made up and he had amplified it. But when he was called out, he said, I'll do anything to get the media to pay attention to the suffering of—he didn't put it this way, but—my people. In other words, I can lie. I can justify cutting off aid to Ukraine and anything else you'd like, in the name of where I come from. It reminds me of his speech at the Republican convention, where he made a point—something I've never heard an American politician at that level say—which was: We're really not so much about ideas, or not only about ideas. The great principles of the founding documents were about a home and a place you're willing to defend. And he began to talk about the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where his ancestors are buried, and where he hopes to be buried, and he hopes his kids will be buried. It was a little bit of a disturbing image to me. That's America. So, It's soil. In fact, it's blood and soil. And now we're nowhere near liberal democracy. We're in another place. And so I think however much he believes in that, that is where J. D. Vance has gone. And it makes him not the vice president of America, because to be the vice president of America, you have to believe that those ideas are vital and foundational and for all of us. Instead, it's class war. And he once said, Everything makes sense when you realize that culture war is class war, meaning: All the culture-war issues that he has been using in the last few years to rise in power, he turns into class war against the elites and is therefore, in his own mind, justified in using them. Frum: To what class does he think Peter Thiel and Elon Musk belong? Because he works for them as much or more than he works for anybody in Ohio. Packer: Yeah, he has swapped one set of elites for another, and in that sense, there is a kind of 'Talented Mr. Vance' quality because he had to be, in a sense, civilized by Yale Law School. And he writes about this quite candidly in Hillbilly Elegy, partly with the help of his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Usha. He had to learn the ways of the Ivy League. He had to learn how to use the silverware at a dinner party. He had to learn that when someone asks whether you want white wine, you then have to figure out which kind of white wine you want. All of that took a toll, I think, but he did it brilliantly. Then he abandoned that elite, the meritocratic elite—the Ivy League elite—for a different elite. He swapped one for another. And as you say, David, the new elite that he's part of—and they are an elite—is the elite of the far right who are billionaire tech investors and entrepreneurs and media figures: Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr. Those are his patrons now. Those are his friends. And so it's a bit rich to say, Yeah, we're fighting on behalf of my people against the elites. Frum: Yeah. It's a funny construction of social class when you say that the real elite are people who say, I have read some books, not people who say, I have some billions of dollars. One of the things that makes you the great writer that you are is your wide human sympathy, your ability to go into all kinds of situations and see people, both what they are and what they could be. And that's your genius as a writer. And my limit as a writer is that I don't have that, and I take just darker views of why people do the things they do. So I was present at the creation of Hillbilly Elegy. I met J. D. Vance—I think it was maybe the summer before he started Yale Law School, or the summer after his first year at Yale Law School, and he began submitting articles to my website. We had lunch in Washington, D.C. I got to know him. He came to my house a few times, sometimes with his wife, sometimes not. And I wouldn't say we were exactly friends, but we were friendly. And I thought I knew him, and when the book was in the genesis stage, he originally sounded me out on: What did I think of the idea? And the idea was, he wanted to do a book about practical solutions to the problems of poverty in white, rural America. And this is—the FrumForum website was very technocratic, very solutions oriented. I thought this was a fantastic idea. It's a fantastic idea, and I encouraged him and promoted it and urged him to go forward with it. Along the way, another of his mentors at the time, Amy Chua, said, This book would be even better if you wrote a short, personal introduction describing who you are and how you fit into all these solutions you're about to offer. And then this package fell into the hands of a genius editor, Eric Nelson, who's also the editor of my Trump books. And Eric said, Fine. Let's take those two pages. That's the book. Let's throw away all the rest, because no one's going to read that. And look—from a literary point of view, yes; from a commercial point of view, yes. But you know what, I think? I think he couldn't write the other book. I think he actually didn't have any ideas about what to do for Ohio and rural America, and that he went into the personal end into the story then with the grievances a minor theme, later to the grievances—because when you say, Okay, well how do we get them better internet? If we can't bring jobs to them anymore, maybe we should encourage, you know—find ways that the federal government can help people to move to where the jobs are. People—you know, as our colleague Yoni Applebaum [writes in] his new book out—people move less. But all the things using the mechanics of government and public-private investment to help people. And he came to that point in the project and was just rendered mute because it wasn't the way his mind worked. It wasn't the way his nature was. It wasn't what he was interested in. And so he doesn't want to help his people; he just wants to use his people. Where his heart is—you know, he now claims to be a Christian and a Catholic. But as the holy book that he claims to believe in says, 'Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,' and his treasure is with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, not with the people back in Ohio. Packer: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I wasn't there at the creation, so I didn't have that that moment of revelation that you did when you realized, No, he actually can't write this book, whether it's because he doesn't have the answers or doesn't care enough about the answers, or there are no answers. It's a pretty compelling insight into him. I don't know. I honestly don't know. As I said earlier, David, I think he thinks that tariffs; and mass deportation; and telling the Supreme Court, The Chief Justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it; and deification, as he wants to put it, of the civil service; and all of the destructive (really, the nihilistic) policies that MAGA at least claims to be for—I think he really does believe that those are somehow in the interest of his people. Are they? I don't think so. In fact, I could go through each one of those and say why it's not going to work or it has nothing to do with his people. And the proof of that is: well, look at the bill that is slowly limping its way through Congress. What does that bill have to do with the interests of the son or the daughter of a waitress and a laid-off steel worker? Almost nothing. It has a lot to do with the interests of Elon Musk. And J. D. Vance will say anything at this point to let Donald Trump know, I no longer think you're cultural heroin, as he wrote in The Atlantic. I no longer think you might be America's Hitler, as he wrote in a private message. I think you're the greatest president in history. He has to prove his loyalty every day in order to have a shot at the next level. Because all Trump cares about is loyalty, and even that, he doesn't care all that much about, because he'll certainly cast you aside if you're no longer useful to him. And so he's going to go to bat for every one of these policies, and he's going to do it, in his own mind, in the name of his people because it gives him a sense, I think, of moral purpose, of political destiny. And his trajectory is—it's fascinating. As I wrote in my piece—and I'm getting a bit away, now, from what you just said, but—he has been there at every interesting moment of the American story in the past 25 years. And in a sense, at every step that he has risen, America has declined a little more. His rise coincides with our decline, and in a way is an emblem of our decline. Because why does he say the things he does and has been saying since 2021 or 2020? Because that is what his political movement requires. It requires him not to be, as you said, vice president of all America. It requires him to actually be actively hostile to a lot of America, to target them, to speak ill of whole groups, large groups. So that's in a sense, in order to succeed in the political world, the culture we live in, he had to become the figure that he is. And whether or not there was anything authentic in that conversion, whether or not he is a deeply believing Catholic or has used Catholicism in a way to get bona fides with a certain kind of intellectual, conservative movement. I don't know. I just can't say. Frum: Yeah, let me ask you one more. I mean, in the end, you say in the piece that what we pretend to be is what we become. And there are very few consistent phonies or self-conscious phonies because it's too hard. But to a point about who he is and how real it is, you wrote your own origin story, Blood of the Liberals—and it's a very powerful and beautiful book, and it's about the coming together of, among other things, two different lines of American life, your father's line and your mother's line. Very, very different stories of very different kinds of people, and they produce you. And probably almost every American can say the same thing. You know, On the one hand, I'm this. On the other hand, I'm that. So when Vance gave that 'blood and soil' speech about seven generations of Vances buried in this cemetery and, I hope my kids will be there, the little bell didn't ring. Well, that's true of one side of your children's life. But the other side is not seven generations of Americans. There's seven generations somewhere—everyone has seven generations somewhere—but they came here, they're new, and they're part of the American story too. And do you not honor your wife's place in the American story? And do you dishonor, therefore, half of your children's existence? That only one side of their family story deserves to be told? And if writing the newcomer out of the American story is un-American, there's something even more strange, unfatherly, about writing your children's mother out of your children's life story. Packer: Mm-hmm. So there was a moment when his wife was introducing him at the convention, and she mentioned that she had taught him to make vegetarian Indian cuisine, and there was a sort of gasp or unsettled murmur in the crowd. That did not go over well with the delegates at the Republican convention. What I've read and heard is that his children are being raised with both Catholic and Hindu traditions, that they were dressed in traditional Indian clothing when he went to India with his family and met with [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi, that, in other words, he hasn't written that out of the story. And he got married in two ceremonies: one Christian, one Hindu. So I don't know that he is unfatherly in that way. I wouldn't say that. But I would say that we don't hear much about it, that a lot of what he says could be taken as a kind of an affront to that other side of his family and his children's family because he has nothing good to say about immigrants. Even legal immigrants, they're just not part of his vision of what makes America great. It's, What makes America great is the soil, the home, the willingness to defend the home, the ability to trace your home back a long, long way. And anyone else—including you and me, David, because we're coastal elites who despise, supposedly, the people buried in that cemetery—we are to be targeted as well. We are to be mocked and written out of the American story. And so it's gotten narrower and narrower, that vision. Until now, it's about as narrow as a grave in an Appalachian cemetery. And it's chilling because, as you said earlier, very wisely, it should be growing with each rise to a new level of power. But that's not his America, and it may not be the America we're in right now, where a politician rises by having an embracing vision of the country. Frum: Let me ask you one last question, then I'll lead the mic to you because I know you have some things you want to say. Is it worthwhile, judging him at all? Are we going through a worthwhile exercise? And let me elaborate: There's a school of political science called functionalism that studies authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany but others too. It says it doesn't matter who these people were, what their backstory was. It only matters what they did, and the way we understand the regime they served is by looking at the regime's actions. And one of the things I notice is—and there's a lot of chaos, of course, in the Trump administration. But as you watch who lost employment after the Signal scandal, who is being purged now from Pete Hegseth's chaotic Department of Defense, what's happening at the State Department, what's happening with the departure of a hundred professionals from the National Security Council—and each of these events has its own complex history and its own explanation, but—the net effect of them has been, as I see it, to disempower the more inherited Republican Party. And the test for that is support for Ukraine. And [the effect is] to empower—I wouldn't call them the Vance faction, because they're not necessarily Vance's particular people, but they're—people who share his view and the Musk view and the Thiel view and the Tucker Carlson view of, America is just another predatory great power with no friends. And there are no moral constraints on American action. And by the way, if the president steals or extorts or takes bribes, that's not a problem from an American foreign-policy point of view. In fact, that's kind of a feature. That's a microcosm of the way the whole country is going to treat the rest of the world. That's the way the administration is going. And, again, Vance doesn't exactly articulate it. I don't know that these are people who are loyal to him. I don't know how much personal say he has in saying, This person leaves the Defense Department, and this person comes in, but add it all up, and it's the administration becoming more Vance-like all the time. And maybe the question of who he is and why he is doesn't matter very much. Maybe we just need to understand what he's doing and what is happening around him. Packer: Well, I was interested in who he is, because I'm interested in human character, but I think if you simply are interested in the present and future of the country, of course, you're right. What matters is what they do and what they are willing to do. That's the thing that frightens me about Vance, is not only what he's doing now—and perhaps he is having a hand in the purging of those internationalist Republicans who are the last of that dying breed in the Trump administration—but what he's willing to do, because he does seem willing to do or say a great deal that you would never have anticipated 10 years ago or even five years ago. And whether or not we should be judging him morally, he is constantly invoking morality in what he does and invoking his Catholicism in what he does. He was in Rome just twice in the last few weeks, the first time as the last foreign leader to see Pope Francis before he died and then one of the first foreign leaders to sit down with Pope Leo. So there's a kind of moral story that he wants to tell, which is the story of the return of the oppressed. And those oppressed are not just any oppressed—they're his oppressed. But [it's] to justify, as I said earlier, almost any policy, any cruelty, any violation of, whether it's the Constitution, the law, or just decency, including sending, first, noncitizens and then possibly citizens to foreign gulags. So that's all of that somehow in the name of making this class of Americans the center of our life. Again, once you've decided that that's your mission, then there really isn't much of a limit, because you have a moral justification in your own mind. And I do think the administration—I mean, Trump, was already there, so it's not as though Vance is pushing Trump in this direction. Vance has aligned himself with this direction and has said essentially to Trump and to the country, In four years, in three years, I will be the reincarnation. I will be the next installment of this brutal, narrow vision of what America is—this bully, great power, this Russia of the West that simply does what's in its interest and has no friends, no allies, and is just looking out for the next deal. And that means that we will be looking at more of it in the indefinite future from the Republican side because Vance is the heir apparent, and there he will allow no daylight between himself and Trump. Frum: There was a saying in the days of the Habsburg monarchy that ruled Austro-Hungarian [empire] from 18th, 19th century, that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a system of despotism mitigated by Schlamperei, which is a Viennese German word that translates as a 'slovenliness,' but funny, desperate, doesn't admit it. So the saving grace of Trump is always the slovenliness, the carelessness—that he has an executive order to cancel the free-trade agreement with South Korea; his top economic aide steals the executive order off his desk before he can sign it, and then he forgets all about it because he's consumed with Shark Week. I mean, it's not a very appealing escape clause, but it did provide some relief, especially in the first term. He was just so chaotic and incompetent and forgetful and didn't have object permanence. There's no slovenliness with J. D. Vance. I mean, now, he has probably less of a connection to the actual vote. For all the talk of 'my people,' they probably like him a lot less than they like Donald Trump. They may do less for him. They may be less likely to turn out for them. But he is an ideologue, and he may be more than a believer. And his people serve as a justification for the ideologue. He's not actually serving them, but he's invoking them to justify what he wants to do. He may be the most ideological person in one of the two top jobs. I'm trying to think of who would be the previous example of someone who was. I mean, Reagan was pretty Reagan ideological— Packer: Reagan. Frum: —but it was tempered by his good nature. Packer: —and long experience and practicality. Yeah, pragmatism. Sure. Yeah, I think that's right. He is an ideologue, and he reads—at least claims; his friends say. You know, in the Marine Corps, they talked about [Christopher] Hitchens and Ayn Rand and even Locke and Hobbes, and before he ditched the classical liberal writers for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and the new right of Patrick Deneen, who he considers a kind of mentor, I think. Yes, he's an ideologue. And what is it that motivates his ideology? I find it hard to describe it in any positive terms. I think it's motivated by the enemies who he hates. What groups are the outgroups? What groups need to be punished because they have somehow betrayed America, whether it's Harvard or Paul, Weiss law firm or the bureaucracy in Washington. And so there is that kind of malignant impulse to hurt, to punish, that seems to drive him more than any shining vision. And that's always been true of Trump at the moments when he is capable of articulating anything. Vance articulates it all the time because he is disciplined and intelligent and hardworking, and actually has thought through who he hates and why he hates them. And that's maybe—what you're saying, it seems, David, is that there's more to worry about in three or four years, even, than there is now. Frum: Well, I don't know that I would say that, because the lack of, I think in the end, the thing that's going to maybe be his great impediment—I don't know what the lord of the world will think about the various patterns of vices in Trump's nature versus Vance's. But the ideologues and intellectuals tend not to go far in American politics. It may be that Trump is successful precisely because of the part of him that is chaotic and the Schlamperei, not the despotism. And when Vance says, I've got my five-year plan for American purification, that's—we are here for the show. This sounds like work. Anyway, your last statement was so powerful. I would almost want to end it there, but let me give you the last word. Is there something that we haven't said here that you'd like to say before we wrap all of this up? Packer: Really, David, just that, for me, it's a deep satisfaction that you and I are sitting here having a really lively, interesting conversation about this man. You and I go back to college. We were rivals. We both were columnists for the school paper, and we probably named each other in our columns. And over the years, we went far apart—right and left—and then maybe came back a bit toward the center, both of us. And I have so many memories of seeing you at different intervals, especially after William F. Buckley [Jr.]'s funeral, when you told me, you know, If it's going to be Palin, I'm not sure I can be for the Republican ticket, which was the first time I'd heard you say anything like it. And you have made a very—I've got to say this—a courageous journey in which you were alone or could have been all alone for long periods of time and lost friends, I'm sure lost homes, institutional homes, lost a kind of identity. And you've made a new one, which is as a truth teller. And what you've been saying today is, I feel, the kind of the sharp, hard edge of someone who's been refined by loss and by this journey into someone who, when you open your mouth, I think truths come out that are pretty painful and that are worth listening to. And so here we are in our 60s, 45 years after we met, still talking, and maybe talking almost as fluently as we did when we were young. So I just want to say thanks for having me on your show. Frum: Well, thank you. No, the memories go very deep. I hope we're talking less fluently, but more worth listening to than we spoke 45 years ago. Packer: Please let that be the case. I do not go back and look at those columns, and I hope you don't either. We need to keep our eyes on the future. Frum: Thank God we lived before the internet. That was our greatest privilege. Packer: Exactly. Frum: George, thank you for making the time today. Packer: Thanks for having me, David. [] Frum: Thanks so much to George Packer for joining me today. George Packer is a colleague of mine at The Atlantic, and if you like George's work and want to support it—if you want to support the work of all of us at The Atlantic, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you'll consider doing so if you don't do so already. And of course, please subscribe to and share this program on whatever platform you like best. Before I wrap up with the concluding thoughts of this program, I need to make a correction of something that was said mistakenly on last week's program, on Episode 7. A listener flagged this error in my discussion with former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Susan Rice referred to Canada, or described Canada, as a participant in the Vietnam War, alongside the United States. Canada was not a combatant in the Vietnam War, as was mistakenly stated. Now, thousands of individual Canadians saw combat in Vietnam as volunteers in the United States armed forces, by some estimates, as many as 40,000. And more than 100 Canadians fell in action in Vietnam, fighting with the United States. But unlike Australia, and unlike Canada's own role in the Korean War, Canada was not a belligerent nation in Vietnam. As we conclude the program, I want to finish with some thoughts about an important new book by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce. The book is a biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under President Carter in the late 1970s. The book is called Zbig: [The Life of] Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet. Now, Zbigniew Brzezinski died in 2017, at the age of 89. His lifelong friend and rival Henry Kissinger, who made it all the way to 100, jokingly said at the end of his life, This is so tragic. He was so full of promise to be cut off so young. That jokey remark sums up a comparison and a contrast that might serve us well to think about in these times. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger were both exiles: Henry Kissinger, a German Jew driven into exile by the Nazis; Brzezinski, an aristocratic Polish family also driven into exile by the Second World War, cut off from their homeland of the Second World War, and then permanently exiled by communism. These exiles from different traditions reached the very highest levels of the American power structure. They both served as national security adviser—Kissinger as secretary of state as well. But they're both very different men with very different outlooks. And it's that contrast that I want to talk about. It's not the whole subject of Edward Luce's book, which takes you all through Brzezinski's fascinating life and deals with many of its most-important challenges in the Carter administration and after. But I want to focus on this one thing: The best book to my mind—the book I like best—about Henry Kissinger is a book by a writer named Barry Gewen called The Inevitability of Tragedy. And it describes Kissinger's worldview being formed by the experience of being driven into exile by his neighbors, the people that he grew up amongst turning against him and his family for no rational reason they could see. And although he found refuge in America, he was never entirely confident that Americans were altogether different from the Germans who had driven him into exile. He was a remarkably pessimistic student of American life and always believed that something could go badly wrong here. And in all of his management of American foreign affairs and all of his advice to presidents, that undercurrent of doubt and despair and anxiety is present. Kissinger was the very opposite of utopian. Sometimes he sold America a little short as a result, and he never took seriously—and in fact, to the extent he took it seriously, he disliked—the concept of the ideals and principles of America being a driving force in how the country could, should, and would act. Brzezinski, as Luce describes him, was very different. Although he, too, started a life of tragedy—lost his country, could never return—he came to believe very much in the promise and ideals of America. Although not idealistic in the way we use that language, he always was optimistic that America could and would prevail. Henry Kissinger saw the Cold War as an enduring problem to manage; Brzezinski thought the United States could and would win. Kissinger doubted that democracy was better than other systems; Brzezinski believed that it would be not only morally better, but actually practically better too. Now, the dialogue between these two men will be with us forever, much like the Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton dialogue. We'll find in future generations sources of truth in both of them, and we'll constantly need to check our instincts, one against the other. Sometimes it'll be Kissinger's pessimism we need to hear; sometimes, Brzezinski's optimism. But at this moment, when the future of the country seems so doubtful, when American power is being used for such bad ends, it's a great moment to rediscover this man who, through all the realism he learned from hard experience, never stopped believing in the possibility of America. He believed that America could and would prevail against enemies, internal and external. I think we need a little of that faith, too, which is why I so enjoyed this book this week. Thank you so much for joining me on The David Frum Show. I'll see you in this place again next week. I hope you'll return. Thank you. [] 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. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
J. D. Vance's Bargain With the Devil
On this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a Memorial Day message about corruption and extortion in the Trump White House, including revelations about meme-coin pay-to-play schemes and foreign-financed golf courses. Then David is joined by his Atlantic colleague George Packer to discuss Packer's new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance. They examine Vance's sharp political turn from thoughtful memoirist to contemptuous shape-shifter, and debate whether Vance believes what he says or just knows what power demands. David closes the episode with a reflection on Edward Luce's new biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski and what Brzezinski's legacy says about American power today. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 8 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be George Packer, an Atlantic colleague and author of an incisive new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, 'The Talented Mr. Vance.' At the end of the program, I'm going to discuss a little bit—I have some thoughts about an important new book, a biography of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski by Ed Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times. But first, let me offer some thoughts on the week just passed. I record this discussion on Memorial Day 2025, the day when Americans honor those who have served America to the utmost of human capability by laying down their lives for their country. It seems a fitting occasion to try to address the monstrous display of self-service we have seen in the past days from the Trump administration, this staggeringly corrupt administration—not just the most corrupt administration in American history, but one of the most corrupt administrations in any democratic country ever. Two things just from the week's docket. This past week, President Trump hosted a dinner for more than 200 people who were invited to dinner with the president of the United States because they had purchased souvenir meme coins directly from his company. They paid millions of dollars. Many of them were foreign nationals. We don't know their names, because those have not been disclosed, but they directly bought access to the president of the United States by putting money into the hands of his own company in exchange, really, for nothing because these are just souvenir meme coins. They're not worth anything. And everyone who's invested in them has lost money because they devalue once you've had your access to the president. Maybe you're investing in the hope of continued future access to the president, but they have no function, no purpose, no value. They're just ways for people who want access to buy it, and buy it directly from the president himself and his family and his companies. The same week, The New York Times obtained a copy of a letter from inside the Vietnamese government explaining why they were bending their own laws to make possible a golf course—a Trump golf course—in Vietnam, which the Vietnamese government is largely financing, and for which it's providing land and other services. The letter explained that the golf-course project was, quote, 'receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Trump personally.' Since Donald Trump became president, billions of dollars have flowed from Americans and from people worldwide into his pocket— billions of dollars. And the largest share of those billions of dollars has been from his meme-coin business. Some estimate that the president has more than doubled his net worth just since January, all because of these direct payments to him and, of course, these golf courses that he's opening in the Persian Gulf and in Vietnam, often financed by the host governments looking to achieve Donald Trump's failure. Sorry—looking to achieve his favor. The projects may be failures, but the favor is real. Now, some trying to explain what is happening invoke comparisons from American history: Watergate; Teapot Dome, a great scandal of the 1920s; if you're very historically minded, you may mention the scandals around the Ulysses Grant administration. But all of that falls so far short of the truth, as to create and enter this world of mind-bending alternatives. Donald Trump's corruption cannot be compared to anything in American history. I have an article this week in The Atlantic that goes into some of the details, but just to refresh memory: In the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was trying to place bugs or get some information from inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. He used campaign funds to hire burglars to break into the premises and do their mischief. And then when they were caught, he organized further government funds and—sorry; not government funds, further campaign funds—to try to buy the burglars' silence and to use government power to cover it up. It's a big, big, serious scandal. But Nixon was not doing any of this to enrich himself. He was doing it to compete and win in a presidential election in a way that was beyond the rules. That was illegal but was not motivated by his personal appetite for wealth and position. Teapot Dome, which was a scandal in the 1920s, involved people in the Harding administration—not President Harding himself—accepting bribes to open government oil reserves to private exploration. And the Grant administration was riddled with all kinds of scandals: people cheating on excise taxes on whiskey, speculating on gold and silver and paper money. But again, President Grant, although he was protective of the people in his administration who did these wrong things, he himself was completely uncontaminated, as was, as far as anybody knows, President Harding in Teapot Dome. Nixon was contaminated, but he was not taking money. He was using campaign funds to support his reelection in a dishonest and illegal way. What is happening with Donald Trump cannot be compared. The scale of the self-enrichment—billions of dollars flowing to the president and his family, not just from American donors, which would be shocking enough, but from people all over the world—this can't be compared to anything in American history. It's more like something from a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African state. It is a scale—in terms of the money being diverted to the president, it's on a scale as big as anything the world has seen in the modern era. You might call it bribery. Except there's something about the word bribery that conjures up the image that the bribe taker is kind of passive: A bribe taker is in office doing some function, and then there's a rap on the bribe taker's door, and there's the briber offering a bribe to pervert the bribe taker from the bribe taker's proper, official duty. What's going on in the Trump administration is not so passive as that. It looks like Donald Trump is taking the initiative. The Vietnamese were not urging the Trump family, Please, please, please accept a golf course from us. Donald Trump was squeezing them, as they wrote in writing, in a letter published by The New York Times —Donald Trump was squeezing them—to approve his golf course. It wasn't someone else who said to Donald Trump, Here. Please, take our money. He invented the meme coin—or he and his confederates invented the meme coin—that offered a way for people to seek his favor. And to back all of this up, at the same time as he was selling these meme coins, his administration has undertaken a series of arbitrary and punitive executive actions that threaten people, If you don't get in my good graces, bad things will happen to you. As a law firm, you will be punished in various ways unless you submit to me. As a private university, you'll be subject to personal reactions that we'll single out a university, and we will say you can't have foreign visa holders. He has attacked other kinds of businesses and institutions. He's got this whole tariff schedule that allows him to retaliate against businesses that incur his disfavor. There's one tariff for Apple. There's a different tariff for other people. There's one tariff for businesses in one set of countries, different tariffs in other countries. And the tariffs, of course, can be laid on and alleviated, laid on again, and alleviated according to his personal whim. This isn't bribery. This is extortion. This isn't centering the bribe taker as the target of someone else's action, but as actually the architect and author of the scheme. And what we're seeing here is extortion on a kind of scale, again, unlike anything in American history: billions of dollars from people who are seeking favor, seeking to protect themselves from disfavor, and finding ways—not finding ways, being offered by the president and his family ways to buy the favor of the president and his family. If the president likes you—if you're a candidate for mayor of New York and the president likes you—you get pardoned for your crimes. If you're a candidate for the mayor of New York and the president doesn't like you, he opens an investigation into you. As the president of South Africa said when Donald Trump was lecturing him, 'I wish I had a plane to give you.' Because, of course, if you give the president a plane, there's no limit to what you can get. It's hard for Americans to wrap their minds around the idea that this country is not an example to others—a positive example—that its institutions are not somehow robust, that everything won't be all right. But what we are watching here is an attack on all of those foundational premises of American life. This is a scene not out of American history; it is an orgy of extortion and corruption unlike anything I've ever seen before in this country, and only comparable to things seen in the countries of the world that Donald Trump once called 'shitholes.' Why are shithole country shitholes? Not because they're poor, but because the authorities are not responsive to the people. The authorities are perverted from their duty and use that perversion as an opportunity for self-enrichment and aggression to the detriment of their own societies. It's on this day when we ought to honor everything that is good, we ought, also, to hold the measure in our minds of what is happening that is wrong, and not accept easy excuses and not shrug it off and not allow ourselves to find some kind of consolation, that maybe there's something in the 1870s that is like this. There is nothing in American history that is like this, ever. And if we absorb that knowledge and if we feel it, and if we feel the proper shame and anger, only then will we be in position to take the corrective action that your national duty calls upon you. So much was asked from others on this Memorial Day. That's what's asked from you on this Memorial Day. And now my dialogue with George Packer. But first, a quick break. [ Music ] Frum: I'm so glad and grateful to welcome my old, dear friend George Packer to The David Frum Show. George is a writer who braves the darkest and most dangerous places, beginning with his observations as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa in the 1980s. His book The Assassins' Gate is a wise, humane, and chastened account of the American experience in Iraq. It was followed by The Unwinding, which told the story of the Great Recession and its aftermath, jump cutting from the lives of the casualties of the Great Recession to the men and women in the halls of power. George's biography of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, is a subtle, often hilarious, study of great power in the hands of not necessarily quite so great power holders. I've known George since the fall of 1978, when he was the bright, shining star of a freshman seminar at Yale University. I'm proud and grateful now to call him a colleague at The Atlantic. We will discuss today his most recent piece for The Atlantic, a profile of Vice President J. D. Vance, 'The Talented Mr. Vance.' George, welcome to the program. George Packer: David, it's great to be with you, and I'm thrilled that you've got a show of your own, which you've sort of been preparing for all the years I've known you. Frum: Thank you. Let me test a thesis on you. Donald Trump is, perhaps, not that interesting a human being. I mean, obviously, it's a hugely consequential presidency, shocking in its effects on the United States and the world. And understanding why Donald Trump is doing what he's doing, that's important and necessary. But as a person, there doesn't seem to be much in there. He's like some beast, some crocodile: He eats. He dominates. He hurts. He's an adaptive predator, but his interior story is not that interesting. Great villains require more of a backstory, more interiority, more rise and fall. And—let me keep testing this—J. D. Vance has that backstory. You know, the greatest of all literary villains is John Milton's Lucifer, who starts as the brightest of the angels and then has the steepest fall. Maybe there's something kind of Luciferian about J. D. Vance. I mean, he's someone—we know this from his own words—that he knows the difference between right and wrong. He saw Donald Trump as wrong. He became one of the most eloquent critics of the wrongness of Donald Trump. And then when opportunity beckoned, he chose wrong. He chose wrong, fully knowing what he was doing, aware of its consequences. He took a long time. He brooded over the decision, and then he made the choice. It's epic. It's literary. It's Luciferian. And it's more interesting than the crocodile that simply bites children and drags them under the Nile and drowns them for fun. Packer: Lucifer's strong, David. That's a tough one to embrace. But I was with you most of the way, and here's why: You're right about Trump—completely right. Crocodile is the perfect analogy, and Vance is a far more interesting creature because of his life story. He came from nowhere and from a lot of deprivation and abuse. Because of his talent, because he's thrived in so many different environments—whether it was the Marine Corps in Iraq, or Yale Law School, or the world of Silicon Valley investors, or the world of the far-right MAGA politics—he's risen through all of those. And so he is sensitive. He is empathetic. He is capable of self-criticism and self-reflection. Just pick up Hillbilly Elegy and open it anywhere, and you find this voice of someone who you want to talk to and who perhaps could have been a writer, because of that ability to think about himself and the world in ways that are surprising, complex, and, above all, honest. There's none of that skimming and shining the surface a little bit that so many public figures do when they write a book. He was not a public figure when he wrote it, a bit like Barack Obama with Dreams From My Father. He was not a public figure when he wrote that, and it's a far better book than anything Obama has written since then. And I don't expect J. D. Vance to write a better book than Hillbilly Elegy at this point. Where I might disagree, or at least question, the Lucifer thesis a bit is: I am not certain that he knows that he chose wrong. I'm not sure about that. I think he convinced himself, because it's very hard to live with yourself if you know you've chosen wrong. Just day after day, it's hard to live with yourself. I think he convinced himself sometime after 2016—when Hillbilly Elegy became a sensation and Trump won the presidency, he convinced himself—that what his people, the working-class people, especially the white working-class people of the Rust Belt, needed was Trump's policies. And from there, it was another step to Trump's manner, to Trump's rhetoric, to Trump's whole thing. And so I think at some point, he decided, Those Yale Law School people, those FrumForum people, those moderate conservatives have no real interest in my people. And in fact, their policies have hurt them, and so I'm going to go all in with Trump. It just so happened that that coincided with the path to power because it was the only way a Republican was going to rise at that point, was to go along with Trump. So I think he persuaded himself he was doing the right thing, even though he was so blatantly betraying just about everything that he had written in Hillbilly Elegy. Frum: You allude to my own personal history with J. D. Vance in our days together from FrumForum, a website I ran from 2009 to 2012. But before I get to that, let me just pick up on your answer with a reference to the title of your story. The story is called 'The Talented Mr. Vance,' which is a reference to a novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a sociopathic killer who has no interior life at all, who simply adapts himself, sequentially becoming one person after another with nothing on the inside. That play on words in the title, is that supposed to tell us your idea about who J. D. Vance is? Packer: Again, I can't read the book—and even more than that, listen to him talk about the book as he did a lot back in 2016, 2017—without feeling that there is a thoughtful, decent, reflective man inside this sort of unformed, not-quite-there 30-year-old who had suddenly jumped onto the scene. I can't help thinking that he was not a hollow man, that he had gifts—not just the gifts of rhetoric and intellect and appetite for power, which clearly he has and had—but gifts of thought and moral reasoning. And so in that sense, even though that title was very clever—wasn't mine, but I salute whoever came up with it as having put a clever title on the piece, because there is something about Vance that makes you think, Is there anyone there? He seems able to move from A to Z without blinking. Nonetheless, I think maybe compared to the original, there's more there. And that, too, makes him interesting. And I think you mentioned this, maybe—I don't know: There's a Nixonian comparison to be made. There's a comparison to a man who came out of nowhere with a very rough upbringing and a grievance, a sense of having been wronged, who had tremendous talent and intellect, and could have risen to greatness, and then also chose wrong. So of all the figures from our lives, David, that I would analogize him to, it would be Nixon. Frum: George, your reference to J. D. Vance and his attitude toward 'my people' summons to mind a story. I didn't spend a lot of time close-up to President Obama, but I had one occasion to have a close-up view of him when he came as near to losing his cool as I can imagine Barack Obama ever came. We were in a group of writers, and one of the writers arraigned President Obama for not doing enough for Black America. And Obama, he just seemed to tighten up, and he explained, I'm not president of Black America. I'm president of all of America. And he said, in fact, They're all my people. And that's the attitude we hope to see from the leaders of the nation: however the route you took to power, that when you get there, you get this wider view. That doesn't seem to have happened to Vance at all. Packer: Vance does not see himself as the vice president of all Americans, and he behaves as if he's the vice president of MAGA and of, quote, 'his people.' But 'his people' is—I think it's become a very instrumental term for him because anything can be justified in the name of the mistreated working class of America, any policy, any lie—for example, the lie about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He was called out on that because he had to admit that he had made up the story, or the story had been made up and he had amplified it. But when he was called out, he said, I'll do anything to get the media to pay attention to the suffering of —he didn't put it this way, but— my people. In other words, I can lie. I can justify cutting off aid to Ukraine and anything else you'd like, in the name of where I come from. It reminds me of his speech at the Republican convention, where he made a point—something I've never heard an American politician at that level say—which was: We're really not so much about ideas, or not only about ideas. The great principles of the founding documents were about a home and a place you're willing to defend. And he began to talk about the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where his ancestors are buried, and where he hopes to be buried, and he hopes his kids will be buried. It was a little bit of a disturbing image to me. That's America. So, It's soil. In fact, it's blood and soil. And now we're nowhere near liberal democracy. We're in another place. And so I think however much he believes in that, that is where J. D. Vance has gone. And it makes him not the vice president of America, because to be the vice president of America, you have to believe that those ideas are vital and foundational and for all of us. Instead, it's class war. And he once said, Everything makes sense when you realize that culture war is class war, meaning: All the culture-war issues that he has been using in the last few years to rise in power, he turns into class war against the elites and is therefore, in his own mind, justified in using them. Frum: To what class does he think Peter Thiel and Elon Musk belong? Because he works for them as much or more than he works for anybody in Ohio. Packer: Yeah, he has swapped one set of elites for another, and in that sense, there is a kind of 'Talented Mr. Vance' quality because he had to be, in a sense, civilized by Yale Law School. And he writes about this quite candidly in Hillbilly Elegy, partly with the help of his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Usha. He had to learn the ways of the Ivy League. He had to learn how to use the silverware at a dinner party. He had to learn that when someone asks whether you want white wine, you then have to figure out which kind of white wine you want. All of that took a toll, I think, but he did it brilliantly. Then he abandoned that elite, the meritocratic elite—the Ivy League elite—for a different elite. He swapped one for another. And as you say, David, the new elite that he's part of—and they are an elite—is the elite of the far right who are billionaire tech investors and entrepreneurs and media figures: Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr. Those are his patrons now. Those are his friends. And so it's a bit rich to say, Yeah, we're fighting on behalf of my people against the elites. Frum: Yeah. It's a funny construction of social class when you say that the real elite are people who say, I have read some books, not people who say, I have some billions of dollars. One of the things that makes you the great writer that you are is your wide human sympathy, your ability to go into all kinds of situations and see people, both what they are and what they could be. And that's your genius as a writer. And my limit as a writer is that I don't have that, and I take just darker views of why people do the things they do. So I was present at the creation of Hillbilly Elegy. I met J. D. Vance—I think it was maybe the summer before he started Yale Law School, or the summer after his first year at Yale Law School, and he began submitting articles to my website. We had lunch in Washington, D.C. I got to know him. He came to my house a few times, sometimes with his wife, sometimes not. And I wouldn't say we were exactly friends, but we were friendly. And I thought I knew him, and when the book was in the genesis stage, he originally sounded me out on: What did I think of the idea? And the idea was, he wanted to do a book about practical solutions to the problems of poverty in white, rural America. And this is—the FrumForum website was very technocratic, very solutions oriented. I thought this was a fantastic idea. It's a fantastic idea, and I encouraged him and promoted it and urged him to go forward with it. Along the way, another of his mentors at the time, Amy Chua, said, This book would be even better if you wrote a short, personal introduction describing who you are and how you fit into all these solutions you're about to offer. And then this package fell into the hands of a genius editor, Eric Nelson, who's also the editor of my Trump books. And Eric said, Fine. Let's take those two pages. That's the book. Let's throw away all the rest, because no one's going to read that. And look—from a literary point of view, yes; from a commercial point of view, yes. But you know what, I think? I think he couldn't write the other book. I think he actually didn't have any ideas about what to do for Ohio and rural America, and that he went into the personal end into the story then with the grievances a minor theme, later to the grievances—because when you say, Okay, well how do we get them better internet? If we can't bring jobs to them anymore, maybe we should encourage, you know—find ways that the federal government can help people to move to where the jobs are. People—you know, as our colleague Yoni Applebaum [writes in] his new book out—people move less. But all the things using the mechanics of government and public-private investment to help people. And he came to that point in the project and was just rendered mute because it wasn't the way his mind worked. It wasn't the way his nature was. It wasn't what he was interested in. And so he doesn't want to help his people; he just wants to use his people. Where his heart is—you know, he now claims to be a Christian and a Catholic. But as the holy book that he claims to believe in says, 'Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,' and his treasure is with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, not with the people back in Ohio. Packer: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I wasn't there at the creation, so I didn't have that that moment of revelation that you did when you realized, No, he actually can't write this book, whether it's because he doesn't have the answers or doesn't care enough about the answers, or there are no answers. It's a pretty compelling insight into him. I don't know. I honestly don't know. As I said earlier, David, I think he thinks that tariffs; and mass deportation; and telling the Supreme Court, The Chief Justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it; and deification, as he wants to put it, of the civil service; and all of the destructive (really, the nihilistic) policies that MAGA at least claims to be for—I think he really does believe that those are somehow in the interest of his people. Are they? I don't think so. In fact, I could go through each one of those and say why it's not going to work or it has nothing to do with his people. And the proof of that is: well, look at the bill that is slowly limping its way through Congress. What does that bill have to do with the interests of the son or the daughter of a waitress and a laid-off steel worker? Almost nothing. It has a lot to do with the interests of Elon Musk. And J. D. Vance will say anything at this point to let Donald Trump know, I no longer think you're cultural heroin, as he wrote in The Atlantic. I no longer think you might be America's Hitler, as he wrote in a private message. I think you're the greatest president in history. He has to prove his loyalty every day in order to have a shot at the next level. Because all Trump cares about is loyalty, and even that, he doesn't care all that much about, because he'll certainly cast you aside if you're no longer useful to him. And so he's going to go to bat for every one of these policies, and he's going to do it, in his own mind, in the name of his people because it gives him a sense, I think, of moral purpose, of political destiny. And his trajectory is—it's fascinating. As I wrote in my piece—and I'm getting a bit away, now, from what you just said, but—he has been there at every interesting moment of the American story in the past 25 years. And in a sense, at every step that he has risen, America has declined a little more. His rise coincides with our decline, and in a way is an emblem of our decline. Because why does he say the things he does and has been saying since 2021 or 2020? Because that is what his political movement requires. It requires him not to be, as you said, vice president of all America. It requires him to actually be actively hostile to a lot of America, to target them, to speak ill of whole groups, large groups. So that's in a sense, in order to succeed in the political world, the culture we live in, he had to become the figure that he is. And whether or not there was anything authentic in that conversion, whether or not he is a deeply believing Catholic or has used Catholicism in a way to get bona fides with a certain kind of intellectual, conservative movement. I don't know. I just can't say. Frum: Yeah, let me ask you one more. I mean, in the end, you say in the piece that what we pretend to be is what we become. And there are very few consistent phonies or self-conscious phonies because it's too hard. But to a point about who he is and how real it is, you wrote your own origin story, Blood of the Liberals —and it's a very powerful and beautiful book, and it's about the coming together of, among other things, two different lines of American life, your father's line and your mother's line. Very, very different stories of very different kinds of people, and they produce you. And probably almost every American can say the same thing. You know, On the one hand, I'm this. On the other hand, I'm that. So when Vance gave that 'blood and soil' speech about seven generations of Vances buried in this cemetery and, I hope my kids will be there, the little bell didn't ring. Well, that's true of one side of your children's life. But the other side is not seven generations of Americans. There's seven generations somewhere—everyone has seven generations somewhere—but they came here, they're new, and they're part of the American story too. And do you not honor your wife's place in the American story? And do you dishonor, therefore, half of your children's existence? That only one side of their family story deserves to be told? And if writing the newcomer out of the American story is un-American, there's something even more strange, unfatherly, about writing your children's mother out of your children's life story. Packer: Mm-hmm. So there was a moment when his wife was introducing him at the convention, and she mentioned that she had taught him to make vegetarian Indian cuisine, and there was a sort of gasp or unsettled murmur in the crowd. That did not go over well with the delegates at the Republican convention. What I've read and heard is that his children are being raised with both Catholic and Hindu traditions, that they were dressed in traditional Indian clothing when he went to India with his family and met with [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi, that, in other words, he hasn't written that out of the story. And he got married in two ceremonies: one Christian, one Hindu. So I don't know that he is unfatherly in that way. I wouldn't say that. But I would say that we don't hear much about it, that a lot of what he says could be taken as a kind of an affront to that other side of his family and his children's family because he has nothing good to say about immigrants. Even legal immigrants, they're just not part of his vision of what makes America great. It's, What makes America great is the soil, the home, the willingness to defend the home, the ability to trace your home back a long, long way. And anyone else—including you and me, David, because we're coastal elites who despise, supposedly, the people buried in that cemetery—we are to be targeted as well. We are to be mocked and written out of the American story. And so it's gotten narrower and narrower, that vision. Until now, it's about as narrow as a grave in an Appalachian cemetery. And it's chilling because, as you said earlier, very wisely, it should be growing with each rise to a new level of power. But that's not his America, and it may not be the America we're in right now, where a politician rises by having an embracing vision of the country. Frum: Let me ask you one last question, then I'll lead the mic to you because I know you have some things you want to say. Is it worthwhile, judging him at all? Are we going through a worthwhile exercise? And let me elaborate: There's a school of political science called functionalism that studies authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany but others too. It says it doesn't matter who these people were, what their backstory was. It only matters what they did, and the way we understand the regime they served is by looking at the regime's actions. And one of the things I notice is—and there's a lot of chaos, of course, in the Trump administration. But as you watch who lost employment after the Signal scandal, who is being purged now from Pete Hegseth's chaotic Department of Defense, what's happening at the State Department, what's happening with the departure of a hundred professionals from the National Security Council—and each of these events has its own complex history and its own explanation, but—the net effect of them has been, as I see it, to disempower the more inherited Republican Party. And the test for that is support for Ukraine. And [the effect is] to empower—I wouldn't call them the Vance faction, because they're not necessarily Vance's particular people, but they're—people who share his view and the Musk view and the Thiel view and the Tucker Carlson view of, America is just another predatory great power with no friends. And there are no moral constraints on American action. And by the way, if the president steals or extorts or takes bribes, that's not a problem from an American foreign-policy point of view. In fact, that's kind of a feature. That's a microcosm of the way the whole country is going to treat the rest of the world. That's the way the administration is going. And, again, Vance doesn't exactly articulate it. I don't know that these are people who are loyal to him. I don't know how much personal say he has in saying, This person leaves the Defense Department, and this person comes in, but add it all up, and it's the administration becoming more Vance-like all the time. And maybe the question of who he is and why he is doesn't matter very much. Maybe we just need to understand what he's doing and what is happening around him. Packer: Well, I was interested in who he is, because I'm interested in human character, but I think if you simply are interested in the present and future of the country, of course, you're right. What matters is what they do and what they are willing to do. That's the thing that frightens me about Vance, is not only what he's doing now—and perhaps he is having a hand in the purging of those internationalist Republicans who are the last of that dying breed in the Trump administration—but what he's willing to do, because he does seem willing to do or say a great deal that you would never have anticipated 10 years ago or even five years ago. And whether or not we should be judging him morally, he is constantly invoking morality in what he does and invoking his Catholicism in what he does. He was in Rome just twice in the last few weeks, the first time as the last foreign leader to see Pope Francis before he died and then one of the first foreign leaders to sit down with Pope Leo. So there's a kind of moral story that he wants to tell, which is the story of the return of the oppressed. And those oppressed are not just any oppressed—they're his oppressed. But [it's] to justify, as I said earlier, almost any policy, any cruelty, any violation of, whether it's the Constitution, the law, or just decency, including sending, first, noncitizens and then possibly citizens to foreign gulags. So that's all of that somehow in the name of making this class of Americans the center of our life. Again, once you've decided that that's your mission, then there really isn't much of a limit, because you have a moral justification in your own mind. And I do think the administration—I mean, Trump, was already there, so it's not as though Vance is pushing Trump in this direction. Vance has aligned himself with this direction and has said essentially to Trump and to the country, In four years, in three years, I will be the reincarnation. I will be the next installment of this brutal, narrow vision of what America is—this bully, great power, this Russia of the West that simply does what's in its interest and has no friends, no allies, and is just looking out for the next deal. And that means that we will be looking at more of it in the indefinite future from the Republican side because Vance is the heir apparent, and there he will allow no daylight between himself and Trump. Frum: There was a saying in the days of the Habsburg monarchy that ruled Austro-Hungarian [empire] from 18th, 19th century, that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a system of despotism mitigated by Schlamperei, which is a Viennese German word that translates as a 'slovenliness,' but funny, desperate, doesn't admit it. So the saving grace of Trump is always the slovenliness, the carelessness—that he has an executive order to cancel the free-trade agreement with South Korea; his top economic aide steals the executive order off his desk before he can sign it, and then he forgets all about it because he's consumed with Shark Week. I mean, it's not a very appealing escape clause, but it did provide some relief, especially in the first term. He was just so chaotic and incompetent and forgetful and didn't have object permanence. There's no slovenliness with J. D. Vance. I mean, now, he has probably less of a connection to the actual vote. For all the talk of 'my people,' they probably like him a lot less than they like Donald Trump. They may do less for him. They may be less likely to turn out for them. But he is an ideologue, and he may be more than a believer. And his people serve as a justification for the ideologue. He's not actually serving them, but he's invoking them to justify what he wants to do. He may be the most ideological person in one of the two top jobs. I'm trying to think of who would be the previous example of someone who was. I mean, Reagan was pretty Reagan ideological— Packer: Reagan. Frum: —but it was tempered by his good nature. Packer: —and long experience and practicality. Yeah, pragmatism. Sure. Yeah, I think that's right. He is an ideologue, and he reads—at least claims; his friends say. You know, in the Marine Corps, they talked about [Christopher] Hitchens and Ayn Rand and even Locke and Hobbes, and before he ditched the classical liberal writers for Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and the new right of Patrick Deneen, who he considers a kind of mentor, I think. Yes, he's an ideologue. And what is it that motivates his ideology? I find it hard to describe it in any positive terms. I think it's motivated by the enemies who he hates. What groups are the outgroups? What groups need to be punished because they have somehow betrayed America, whether it's Harvard or Paul, Weiss law firm or the bureaucracy in Washington. And so there is that kind of malignant impulse to hurt, to punish, that seems to drive him more than any shining vision. And that's always been true of Trump at the moments when he is capable of articulating anything. Vance articulates it all the time because he is disciplined and intelligent and hardworking, and actually has thought through who he hates and why he hates them. And that's maybe—what you're saying, it seems, David, is that there's more to worry about in three or four years, even, than there is now. Frum: Well, I don't know that I would say that, because the lack of, I think in the end, the thing that's going to maybe be his great impediment—I don't know what the lord of the world will think about the various patterns of vices in Trump's nature versus Vance's. But the ideologues and intellectuals tend not to go far in American politics. It may be that Trump is successful precisely because of the part of him that is chaotic and the Schlamperei, not the despotism. And when Vance says, I've got my five-year plan for American purification, that's—we are here for the show. This sounds like work. Anyway, your last statement was so powerful. I would almost want to end it there, but let me give you the last word. Is there something that we haven't said here that you'd like to say before we wrap all of this up? Packer: Really, David, just that, for me, it's a deep satisfaction that you and I are sitting here having a really lively, interesting conversation about this man. You and I go back to college. We were rivals. We both were columnists for the school paper, and we probably named each other in our columns. And over the years, we went far apart—right and left—and then maybe came back a bit toward the center, both of us. And I have so many memories of seeing you at different intervals, especially after William F. Buckley [Jr.]'s funeral, when you told me, you know, If it's going to be Palin, I'm not sure I can be for the Republican ticket, which was the first time I'd heard you say anything like it. And you have made a very—I've got to say this—a courageous journey in which you were alone or could have been all alone for long periods of time and lost friends, I'm sure lost homes, institutional homes, lost a kind of identity. And you've made a new one, which is as a truth teller. And what you've been saying today is, I feel, the kind of the sharp, hard edge of someone who's been refined by loss and by this journey into someone who, when you open your mouth, I think truths come out that are pretty painful and that are worth listening to. And so here we are in our 60s, 45 years after we met, still talking, and maybe talking almost as fluently as we did when we were young. So I just want to say thanks for having me on your show. Frum: Well, thank you. No, the memories go very deep. I hope we're talking less fluently, but more worth listening to than we spoke 45 years ago. Packer: Please let that be the case. I do not go back and look at those columns, and I hope you don't either. We need to keep our eyes on the future. Frum: Thank God we lived before the internet. That was our greatest privilege. Packer: Exactly. Frum: George, thank you for making the time today. Packer: Thanks for having me, David. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks so much to George Packer for joining me today. George Packer is a colleague of mine at The Atlantic, and if you like George's work and want to support it—if you want to support the work of all of us at The Atlantic, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you'll consider doing so if you don't do so already. And of course, please subscribe to and share this program on whatever platform you like best. Before I wrap up with the concluding thoughts of this program, I need to make a correction of something that was said mistakenly on last week's program, on Episode 7. A listener flagged this error in my discussion with former National Security Adviser Susan Rice. Susan Rice referred to Canada, or described Canada, as a participant in the Vietnam War, alongside the United States. Canada was not a combatant in the Vietnam War, as was mistakenly stated. Now, thousands of individual Canadians saw combat in Vietnam as volunteers in the United States armed forces, by some estimates, as many as 40,000. And more than 100 Canadians fell in action in Vietnam, fighting with the United States. But unlike Australia, and unlike Canada's own role in the Korean War, Canada was not a belligerent nation in Vietnam. As we conclude the program, I want to finish with some thoughts about an important new book by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce. The book is a biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under President Carter in the late 1970s. The book is called Zbig: [The Life of] Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet. Now, Zbigniew Brzezinski died in 2017, at the age of 89. His lifelong friend and rival Henry Kissinger, who made it all the way to 100, jokingly said at the end of his life, This is so tragic. He was so full of promise to be cut off so young. That jokey remark sums up a comparison and a contrast that might serve us well to think about in these times. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger were both exiles: Henry Kissinger, a German Jew driven into exile by the Nazis; Brzezinski, an aristocratic Polish family also driven into exile by the Second World War, cut off from their homeland of the Second World War, and then permanently exiled by communism. These exiles from different traditions reached the very highest levels of the American power structure. They both served as national security adviser—Kissinger as secretary of state as well. But they're both very different men with very different outlooks. And it's that contrast that I want to talk about. It's not the whole subject of Edward Luce's book, which takes you all through Brzezinski's fascinating life and deals with many of its most-important challenges in the Carter administration and after. But I want to focus on this one thing: The best book to my mind—the book I like best—about Henry Kissinger is a book by a writer named Barry Gewen called The Inevitability of Tragedy. And it describes Kissinger's worldview being formed by the experience of being driven into exile by his neighbors, the people that he grew up amongst turning against him and his family for no rational reason they could see. And although he found refuge in America, he was never entirely confident that Americans were altogether different from the Germans who had driven him into exile. He was a remarkably pessimistic student of American life and always believed that something could go badly wrong here. And in all of his management of American foreign affairs and all of his advice to presidents, that undercurrent of doubt and despair and anxiety is present. Kissinger was the very opposite of utopian. Sometimes he sold America a little short as a result, and he never took seriously—and in fact, to the extent he took it seriously, he disliked—the concept of the ideals and principles of America being a driving force in how the country could, should, and would act. Brzezinski, as Luce describes him, was very different. Although he, too, started a life of tragedy—lost his country, could never return—he came to believe very much in the promise and ideals of America. Although not idealistic in the way we use that language, he always was optimistic that America could and would prevail. Henry Kissinger saw the Cold War as an enduring problem to manage; Brzezinski thought the United States could and would win. Kissinger doubted that democracy was better than other systems; Brzezinski believed that it would be not only morally better, but actually practically better too. Now, the dialogue between these two men will be with us forever, much like the Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton dialogue. We'll find in future generations sources of truth in both of them, and we'll constantly need to check our instincts, one against the other. Sometimes it'll be Kissinger's pessimism we need to hear; sometimes, Brzezinski's optimism. But at this moment, when the future of the country seems so doubtful, when American power is being used for such bad ends, it's a great moment to rediscover this man who, through all the realism he learned from hard experience, never stopped believing in the possibility of America. He believed that America could and would prevail against enemies, internal and external. I think we need a little of that faith, too, which is why I so enjoyed this book this week. Thank you so much for joining me on The David Frum Show. I'll see you in this place again next week. I hope you'll return. Thank you.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's National-Security Disaster
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts In this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a response to a listener's question about working-class wages, unpacking the economic storylines that have shaped American politics over the last 40 years. In his answer, David challenges the idea that grievance politics are always rooted in material decline. David is then joined by Ambassador Susan Rice for a sweeping conversation on the disintegration of national-security processes under Trump. They discuss the implications of 'Signalgate,' the absence of a full-time national security adviser, and the staggering national-security risks posed by a $400 million jet gifted by Qatar. Rice offers a sobering look at what the breakdown of structure and accountability means for America's alliances, adversaries, and the rule of law. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 7 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Ambassador Susan Rice. Susan Rice represented the United States at the United Nations during the first Obama administration. She was national security adviser to President Obama, and then director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Joe Biden. [] Frum: Before my conversation with Ambassador Rice, I want to open the show by doing something a little different. I've often taken questions at the end of the show. This time I'm going to take a question—just one—at the top of the show and try to answer it here because I think this question is so important, such a key in the lock to all of our contemporary debates. It comes from a young viewer named Joe, in Florida, who's a friend of our family's, and he asks, 'Given that working-class wages have been in decline for 40 years, especially for men, why would you expect anyone to sympathize with the idea of the American system, with free trade? Why wouldn't they back Donald Trump, given the pressure they're under?' The reason this question is so important is because it reflects an attitude that many liberal-minded people have, which is: Where you see a grievance, where you see behavior that is self-harming or harmful to others, there has to be some rational cause behind it, some material cause behind it—that when people do something destructive or self-harming, they're acting out some understandable, cognizable grievance they've got that somebody could do something about. And if only we could meet that rational, material basis of their grievance, we could turn things around and put us all on a better path. That's the idea you hear from many Democratic candidates or would-be candidates for 2028: Let's hear what people are saying and find some way to meet these grievances. And I do not want to dismiss that. A lot of politics is about the rational. But what reactionary and fascist forces have always understood is there's plenty of irrationalism in the human being, and that's a real resource. And sometimes when you have a grievance, it expresses itself in ways that sound like material grievance, but it's really not. So let me take on this point about 40 years of decline, take it apart and see whether a better understanding can put us somewhere. Now, when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America, they use certain numbers and not other numbers. Depending on the numbers you use, you get a very different story. And unfortunately, we often choose the story we want and then choose the numbers that fit the story, rather than the other way around. So when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America for 40 years—which takes us back to 1985—they look at a series called hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers, or even hourly wages for nonsupervisory production workers. That's manufacturing, people who get a paycheck that is measured by the hour and who answer to some kind of supervisor. And if you look at those numbers, you see they rise basically pretty steeply for the 40 years from 1945 to the early 1980s. Then they flatten out or even go into a little bit of a decline in the 1980s. They jump up a little bit in the 1990s. Then they're hit by the Great Recession, and they go down again and only pick up after about 2015. So that is a story of stagnation, decline, some improvement in the '90s, some improvement in the 2010s, but basically not a very happy or healthy picture from 1985 forward for that kind of worker. The problem with looking at those numbers is that those numbers describe fewer and fewer people in America. And they describe—even for those people—less and less of those people's lives. Here's a different number. If you remember that a lot of the way that people get an income in modern America is not just from their job, but also from various kinds of government benefits—the earned-income tax credit, the child support from the government of various kinds—and if you also remember that fewer and fewer of us work as nonsupervisory hourly workers, especially nonsupervisory hourly production workers. If you just look at what happens to American households (now, households can be as few as one person)—that is, Americans who live in some independent domicile of some kind, whether it's one person, a single worker, whether it's two people, whether it's a whole family; any one of those things can be a household—what you see is that in 1985, the median American household (that is, we're not averaging in Bill Gates; we're just taking the American in the middle) that household made about $60,000 present-day dollars, and 40 years later, in 2025, that household made about $80,000. And it wasn't all from work. Some of it was from government benefits. But clearly, a big jump from $60,000 to $80,000. Now, it's not as steep a jump as they made from 1945 to 1985. If you look at the 40 years immediately after World War II, the median did better than it did in the 40 years after World War II, from 1985 to the present. But I'm not sure you can really rationally compare those things. Remember, if you were starting in 1945, you're missing that that same person or family or group had the experience of World War II and the depression. There had been a lot of bad times before then, and there's a big catch-up that happened in the 40 years after 1945. There's also something else that was different in the 40 years after 1945. In 1945, about 17 percent of Americans still lived on the farm. You get big gains in efficiency when you move people from farms to cities. America did it in the '50s. Many European countries did it in the '50s and '60s. The Chinese, of course, have done it since 1990. And you get a big surge in productivity. You get a big surge in household wealth. But, of course, you can only do it once. It's not a commute. You move from farm to city. That's it. You're in the city. You're not going back to the farm. And further moves into the city—when you move from factory to office—you don't get the same bump that you get when you move from factory to farm. So the idea that '45 to '85 was the norm, and '85 to 2025 has been some kind of sad falling off, mistakes a lot of what happened in 1945. And also, it overlooks: Yeah, it's good to be going up, but you need to remember, America in 1945 was quite a poor place by today's standards, and even in 1985, it was not as affluent a country as it is now. In 1945, about a third of American households lacked indoor plumbing. In 1985, only about 70 percent of American households had air conditioning, whereas now, virtually everybody does. So when you're making those first steps, it's easier. The technology of indoor plumbing exists. You move people from farm to city—they get the indoor plumbing; they get a big jump in their standard of living. It's a little harder once they're already in the cities. So Problem 1 is what we're measuring. If we look at all forms of income and not just the wages of a particular group of people, you see a bigger rise in incomes. And if you understand that something special happened between '45 and '85 that probably couldn't have been reproduced between '85 and 2025, no matter what, maybe you feel a little less angry about it. But the second thing, when we're trying honestly to evaluate how Americans are doing, you have to ask the question, What does your money buy? In a modern technological society, a lot of your improvements in standard of living show up not as increases in wages but as improvements in the quality of the products you get—in other words, as a decline of prices. So 2025, 1985—we both have cars, but the 1985 car is likely to kill you in circumstances where the 2025 car will keep you alive. They're the same object. They may cost the same amount of money. But the car that doesn't kill you is clearly a huge improvement over the car that does. In the same way, there were color TVs in 1985, but they were not flat. You couldn't put them in every room of your house. And they showed many, many fewer different kinds of programs. That while we can do a kind of food basket, we should remember that in 2025, more fresh fruits and vegetables are available to more people in more months of the year than were the case in 1985. In 1985, for most people, vegetables meant canned or frozen. In 2025, vegetables, for a lot of people in a lot of places a lot of the year, can mean fresh, and that's a big improvement in quality. It's a little hard to capture with a price signal, but that really is meaningful. In the same way, how do we measure the improvement in well-being that comes when you want to write a letter to a friend or loved one, [and] you no longer have to handwrite it or type it, fold it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, walk into the post office, and drop it in a box, but you can hit send instantly on a text message or some other instantaneous form of communication. In 1985, there are no mobile phones. We were only five years away from paying a lot of money for long distance. So incomes went up more than the sad story tells us. What those incomes can buy has improved dramatically. There's one other thing that we really lose sight of here, which is: When we use these averages and say, The average American was this in 2025, and the average American was that in 1985, we need to remember, we're not talking about a stable population of people. In 1985, there were about 107 million Americans in the workforce. In 2025, there were 170—107 to 170 million in the workforce, bigger workforce. But almost all of that growth—not quite all, but almost all of that growth—is the product of immigration. Almost all the growth in the American workforce over the past 40 years has been either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. Now, it's a very contentious question. I'm not going to discuss here all the merits of the immigration question, all the costs, all the benefits. But very clearly, immigration is a benefit to the immigrant themselves, and it's a benefit in almost all cases to the children of the immigrant. When I say the average American had this in 1985, and the average American had that in 2025, and then I focus specifically on one household, which is the household of immigrants and their children, should I be comparing them to the Americans of 1985? Or should I be comparing them to what was their choice, their lot in life? Which is: If they hadn't moved to the United States and maybe made the aggregate statistics a little worse, they'd be living in Mexico or Guatemala or the Philippines or wherever the family came from. And maybe you should compare them not to what they have in 2025, not to what other Americans had in 1985, but to what people back in the Philippines or Mexico or Guatemala had in 1985, and then they look dramatically better off. And we can say, Okay, if this family of immigrants who are the cause of the growth of the workforce is so much better off, and if also all the people whose parents and grandparents are already here, if they're better off because their wages have gone up and because their money buys more, and if what we're measuring here is an impact on the aggregate statistics caused by the inflow of a lot of immigrants—whatever you think about immigration, it's kind of strange to describe this as people becoming materially worse off. And a lot of the situation that my friend Joe describes is kind of a statistical illusion. If you could spend 10 minutes back in 1985—I promise you, I was there—I promise you, you'd be shocked. You'd be shocked by all the things, all the conveniences, all the luxuries you take for granted. You'd be surprised at how much better the food is, how much cleaner the air is, how much less acidic the lakes are. In every way, you are so much better off. But it's often hard to capture. And statistics often give us a false image of reality that is used by people who want to sell a case, but not to actually tell you what really happened. And the reason why this is also misleading and dangerous is two points. The first is: Again, it makes our problems look too easy. It makes it seem like, well, if only we could find out what was—we could solve deindustrialization or meet whatever economic grievance that we hear cited as a cause of the Trump vote, we could make the Trump problem go away. But then we're faced with things like the fact that Trumpism exists in every country, in every place, regardless of that country's particular economic history. There are Trump-like movements in Germany and France. There are Trump-like movements in South Korea. This seems to be something going on in the modern world and has some deeper causes—in sexuality, in mass culture, and just the resistance of the human mind to orderly, liberal progress. There's parts of it that people just don't find that very satisfying, don't find it very exciting. They want more. Also, ordinary liberal progress, while it may meet our demand for prosperity, it may not meet our demand for status, and it may not meet our demand to subordinate others whose status we think needs to be lower, as well as to make ours higher. So I worry it disarms us in the face of a real challenge. The second thing is: It also empowers some people who have agendas of their own, of a kind that aren't helpful either. There are a lot of people on the left wing of the Democratic Party for whom Trump was a kind of godsend. They have long wanted to do a kind of more economic, planned economy. They wanted to do more protectionism. And Trump then became a justification. And the text to read on this is a speech given by former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in 2018. Great respect for Jake Sullivan; this is not any kind of personal criticism of him. But he gave a speech called, if I remember right, 'a foreign policy for the middle class' that cited Trump's success as a reason that the United States needed to have a much more planned economy and a much more protectionist economy. And indeed, if President Trump was the most protectionist president since World War II, President Biden was the second-most. Biden did not repeal very many of the Trump tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump term, and he didn't reopen the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was the real answer to the problem of how we integrate China peacefully into the world trading system. Biden, in many ways, was quite continuous with Trump on trade, and he was because there are people in the Democratic Party who wanted to be, and because they used a misreading of what the Trump experience was as a justification for things they wanted to do anyway. And the result was that we got some disappointing results during the Biden years. Trade is a convenient target for a lot of people, and there are a lot of statistical papers. There's a paper by a man named Autor, A-U-T-O-R, called 'The China Shock'—I think it's by group; Autor's not the only author—that shows that areas in the United States that were exposed to a lot of trade competition from China did worse than areas that were not. They didn't say those areas got poor. They just said if you compare an area that was hard hit by Chinese imports to an area that wasn't, the area that wasn't grew faster than the area that was. But they don't prove whether that area that was hard hit shrank or whether it just grew more slowly. There's a lot of gaps there. The paper is used to prove many things beyond what it actually proves, even assuming it's accurate. And it's not trade that explains the many other problems in American life. It's not trade that explains why Americans find it harder to get married. People in every country—every developed country—find it harder to get married. It's not trade that explains why we see more gun violence, more substance abuse. Those things seem to have deeper causes. But trade is something we do with foreigners. And if you're trying to come up with an explanation of the problems of American life that leave Americans out of it—that don't call on anybody in America to do anything different from what they've done before—trade allows you to say, It's the foreigners that are to blame. It's an easy way to think. It's an attractive way to think. But it's not a helpful way to think. I don't want to gainsay everything in the argument I've just made here. I mean, obviously, working-class wages have been under pressure, and they may be under more pressure in the future as artificial intelligence and robotics advance. But if you think about what we could practically do for people under the situation, I would say, You know what they need first and foremost? Universal health insurance. That's got nothing to do with trade. And you can be a protectionist society, as the United States now is, thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Biden before, and not have universal health insurance. And you can be a free-trade society, like Denmark, and have universal health insurance. That's maybe the first thing that people would want if they were thinking, How do we make the life of a person at the average in American life better, especially for their children? But it's an appealing answer, and it's got a lot of interest groups lined up in it. But I think what we need to do as we confront Trump is confront the irrational. It exists in ourselves, as well as in other people. I'm not just making a finger-pointing exercise. Confront the irrational. We respond to violence. We respond to hate. We respond to intimidation. We respond to the desire to make ourselves more by making other people less. It's not nice to think about those things, but the fact that they're not nice doesn't make them less powerful. Trump is a successor to many dark movements in the human past that have occurred when trade was going up, when trade was going down, when industry was booming, when industry was shrinking. Prosperity makes everything easier. But prosperity does not make the irrational go away. So while we should certainly work for prosperity, and while we should certainly think very hard about how we improve the condition of the median American, the American at the center—after all, it's a democracy; we're running the whole country for that person—they are the judge and jury and how we're doing. And if they're not happy, well, they're the ultimate boss. But we shouldn't be pulled into false arguments against international trade, and we shouldn't believe a false story about the promise of America and accept the idea that there was some magical time when America was great, and now we have, sadly, fallen off. In every way you can measure, America is a better place today than it was 40 years ago. And if it isn't as much better as we would like, well, the future is open. We can do more to make it better, faster for more people. But it is better. It was better. You have to believe in your country, and you have to not give an inch to those who defame the country in order to maximize their own power and their own cruelty. Now my conversation with Ambassador Susan Rice. But first, a quick break. [] Frum: I'm delighted and honored to be joined today by Ambassador Susan Rice, a name that is famous in the United States and around the world. For deeper perspective, I strongly recommend her autobiography, Tough Love, which describes a multigenerational family commitment to ardent love of learning and public service. There's a personal connection that the ambassador and I have that I won't go into here, but that she describes, very movingly, in the book. She was educated at Stanford, then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, after which she began a meteoric ascent through the American national-security system, serving first President [Bill] Clinton and then President [Barack] Obama, rising to be ambassador to the UN National Security Council, national security adviser, and then under President Biden, switching to the domestic-policy shop, where she ran his domestic-policy council. So, Ambassador Rice, thank you so, so much for joining us. I want to start by mentioning that as you and I speak, the United States doesn't have a national security adviser. So how big a gap is that, and what can we learn from this crazy Signal scandal that means that the national security adviser's out, and the secretary of defense is very likely on his way out? Susan Rice: Well, David, it's great to be with you, and congratulations on the show. You know, we have Marco Rubio playing four simultaneous roles: secretary of state, national security adviser, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development—what's left of it, which is very little—and as the acting national archivist. Having had at least one of those jobs, the job of national security adviser, I can tell you it is a 24/7, relentless, incredibly intense job, done correctly. Your role is not only to brief and advise the president but, very importantly, to manage the National Security Council staff of over 300 professionals and to coordinate the Cabinet-level national-security Principals Committee, which should be carefully assessing and exploring the most significant national-security challenges of the day, weighing options, making recommendations to the president, and ensuring that the decisions that the president makes are being implemented. No human, however competent—let alone Marco Rubio, who's barely been in the role of secretary of state for four months—can do all of those jobs, or even two of those jobs, effectively. So when you say there's no national security adviser, what you're saying is that this is a job that is a more-than-full-time job being done, if at all, on a very part-time basis. I can't imagine what that must be like for the national-security staffers, those that are left, that are true professionals who come from the various agencies and are working very hard on behalf of the American people to have no leader. [It's] not clear if the deputy national security adviser is there for long and if so, what role he's playing. I don't know if Marco Rubio is sitting in the White House or at the State Department or in the National Archives or wherever, but he's got a big job, and he's got now four big jobs, and for a president who doesn't like process and doesn't like the rigor that national-security decision making is typically conducted with. Frum: Well, when I said we don't have the national security adviser, yes, as you say, Rubio has the title, as he has the title of national archivist, but those jobs are not being done. They are, in fact, for all practical purposes vacant. I've sometimes had the opportunity to interview national security advisers and secretaries of state, and one of the questions I always ask them, or I try to, is, How do you spend your time? And there's a huge difference, because at 300 people at the National Security Council staff, that's a significant number of people, but it's not a major bureaucracy the way the Department of State is. The secretary of state has to worry about personnel matters in a way that a national security adviser does less. The national security adviser is the first point of contact for every national emergency the United States faces. The secretary of state should be taking somewhat longer views, doing some planning work, as well as responding to emergencies. They're very different, and as you say, Henry Kissinger tried it, but that was more an act of bureaucratic imperialism. Rice: And at a time when things were much less demanding and complex. And by the way, he failed at it. (Laughs.) So now we'll see how Marco Rubio does. The other thing, David, to mention about the difference between the jobs is, you know, the secretary of state is supposed to travel and do a great deal of personal diplomacy all over the world. You cannot do that effectively and man the fort at the White House, where the national security adviser's job is really properly a more inward-facing role. Frum: Especially if, as so often happens, different parts of the foreign-policy apparatus are in disagreement: So State says one thing. Defense says something else. Other agencies say a third thing. The national security adviser is supposed to help the president broker those disputes by saying, I'm here to represent the president and no agency. And if you're there representing an agency, too, how does any decision get made? Rice: That's part of the challenge. The national security adviser is meant to be an honest broker. He or she ultimately gets to make a recommendation to the president as to the appropriate course, but taking into account—and fairly and accurately without spin—representing the views of the other national-security Cabinet members. So there's a conflict of interest inherent in those two roles being occupied by one individual. Frum: I want to ask you about the scandal that may have laid low Mike Waltz, although there may be other reasons. There was this very strange person. Laura—what was her name? Loomer? Rice: Laura Loomer. Frum: She has some unusual kind of influence or hold on the president, and she recommended that he get rid of a lot of people in the national-security apparatus. Maybe that's part of what's going on. There may be some fight over Iran policy. That may be what's going on. Trump may have remembered that Mike Waltz had a previous history as a congressman, where he was not as infatuated with Donald Trump as Donald Trump would wish him to be. There may be many other issues. But how do you read the Signalgate scandal? It's often true that senior national-security people don't use the means that they're supposed to use. They're just too inconvenient. It's not just Hillary Clinton. Colin Powell, many others have sought shortcuts or some more convenient method of communication. How do you understand what happened and how serious it was? Rice: I think, David, it's extremely serious. This wasn't a case of somebody sending an email point to point or using texts for scheduling. This was a case where the most sophisticated and complicated deliberations among the national-security team did not take place in places they should have: in the White House Situation Room around a table for several hours, probably on multiple occasions, to weigh the question of whether, how, when, and with what preparation the United States was going to launch attacks on the Houthi militants in Yemen. This is one of the most important kinds of decisions that the national-security principals make, or they make a recommendation to the president after a lot of assessment and analysis. And these guys did it, you know, with emojis and shorthand on Signal. So the first problem, before you get to how they communicated, is the extent to which they communicated and deliberated, which was de minimis. And the question of the use of force and putting American men and women in uniform in harm's way is one of the most significant types of decisions that gets made, and it deserves thoughtful and thorough consideration. That didn't happen. Secondly, you're using a commercial application, Signal, which is not encrypted to the same degree that classified U.S. government systems are. And they were inherently discussing classified information. Whether and when to engage in military operations is, by definition, classified. The details—the operational details—that Pete Hegseth put into the chat were extraordinarily sensitive and highly classified. Then you had J. D. Vance weighing in on even the question of whether there should be such military strikes. And frankly, that's the discussion that should be happening around the Situation Room table. The reason it's so dangerous is not only that they give scant and superficial consideration to such important issues, but it's because we know that our most sophisticated adversaries—and indeed, some of our allies—can hack into personal phones and into Signal and learn in advance what we are planning. And if the Chinese had done that, or the Russians, and handed it off to the Houthis or to the Iranians to give to the Houthis, or if the Iranians had done it—they have highly sophisticated capabilities—that could have meant that our operational security was compromised and that our pilots and others engaged in the operations were at direct risk. It was incredibly reckless and incredibly dangerous behavior. And they seemed to do it, David, as a matter of course. I mean, now we're learning that there are multiple regular Signal chats between and among the national-security principals. The last photograph that a journalist captured of Mike Waltz's phone right before he was fired showed that he was sitting in the Cabinet room, in a Cabinet meeting—where, by the way, you're not supposed to have your phones; you're supposed to leave them outside in a secure container—using Signal to communicate with the vice president and other senior officials, Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, it's ridiculous. Frum: You know, as we talk about this, I'm very conscious that a lot of people will say, Signalgate, that that was when, like, Louis XIV ruled France, or maybe Pontius Pilate was in charge of Judea. Rice: (Laughs.) Frum: That was a long, long—that was, like, 18 scandals back. Rice: (Laughs.) How many Scaramuccis? Frum: Right now, the new scandal is the Emirate of Qatar has offered the president of the United States his own personal jet to take away with him after he leaves office. One of the trademark—I don't know whether it's a strength or a weakness or both—features of this Trump administration has been, you pile scandal on top of scandal on top of scandal, and no one can keep track of them. And it does seem like if you're going to do one bad thing, you might as well do a hundred, because the average survival rate seems to go up. I ask you this because you were at the center, or you were sort of caught up in a decade ago, scandal politics—in retrospect, a kind of contrived-looking scandal—but looking back on that and comparing it to Trump 1 and Trump 2, do you think there are things that this administration knows about scandal politics that other administrations have not known? Rice: Well, that's a great question, David. I mean, I think first of all, the Trump administration—Trump 1, but in particular, Trump 2—just doesn't give a goddamn about what they say or what they do. Trump 1 was characterized by nonstop lying. That is certainly the case in Trump 2, but combined with a sense of impunity and complete lack of accountability to the American people, to the truth, to the Constitution, to anything. And so they lie and gaslight on a daily basis. And it's so extreme that I think the media has a difficult time keeping up, though credit to the many that are trying. The opposition—the Democrats—can't make a storyline stick. Signalgate should be as big a national-security scandal as any we've seen in decades. It is that bad. And it's been in multiple iterations. Now Pete Hegseth, we've learned, shared the same operational details on a Signal chat with his family members, which is ridiculous. They have no need to know. And it goes on and on, and yet they flood the zone with so much crap on a daily basis—so many lies, so much obfuscation, so much gaslighting—that their BS just overwhelms people's capacity to absorb it. And obviously, they know that, and that's part of their, as you suggest, their modus operandi. Frum: I have a private theory that I developed during the first Trump campaign, back in 2016. I remember seeing a poll at the time that asked Americans what they thought of the two candidates: Hillary Clinton and President Trump—or Donald Trump, as he then was. And this was not a good poll for Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton beat him—she's more intelligent, more knowledgeable, cares about people like you. She won in every single category that the poll asked. I forget every question, but these were the important questions that you would want in a leader of the nation. But there was one category where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and that was honesty. You think, like, Well, that's weird because he lies all the time. And I thought about this a lot, and I realized that, of course, politicians have a way of speaking that sounds dishonest. The question is, Did you eat the last piece of pie? And the politician who ate the last piece of pie doesn't want to say yes, because they might get in trouble. Doesn't want to say no, because that's an outright lie. So they haver, they equivocate, they temporize, they put things in context, and they talk like a politician. They equivocate. You know, that we have to put pie eating into a larger context, that certainly, among those in the vicinity—I was one of those in the vicinity of the refrigerator at the time that the pie was eaten, but I do not have direct personal knowledge of exactly the consumption pattern. Donald Trump would just look you in the eye and say, Nope, I didn't, when he did. And because— Rice: Or he'd say, No, I didn't eat the pie. You ate the pie. Frum: You ate the pie. And so because he will flatly lie, he doesn't equivocate. He doesn't temporize. He doesn't haver. He just flat out lies. If you don't know the facts or if you're ready to believe him, he sounds honest. Whereas the person tiptoeing around the question, Did you eat the last piece of pie? they sound like a crook. Rice: I think there's something to that, David. I do. But, you know, I think the broader point is that this Trump administration has no interest in, no pretense of, no commitment to doing anything that doesn't suit their interests at the time, whether legal, illegal, truthful, untruthful, moral, immoral. And you started this discussion with something that I think really deserves careful scrutiny and outrage: The notion that a president of the United States would accept a $400 million 747 from a foreign government—any foreign government, much less the Qataris, whose loyalties and interests only occasionally, to put it kindly, align with ours—is truly outrageous. And it's not just the corruption this represents, which is massive and mind-boggling. It's the national-security consequences. Air Force One is a flying, secure environment. It is as secure and classified as the White House Situation Room. If a foreign government has built or overseen the production of an aircraft and then hands it off to the United States, the first thing is we have no idea of knowing what kinds of listening or other devices they've put in it. Secondly, to accept a gift of that sort and then to keep it for your personal benefit after you leave office is giving a foreign government a huge amount of influence over the president of the United States and the United States of America, and leaves us susceptible not just to all forms of espionage that the Qataris could potentially conduct, but leaves us vulnerable to exploitation by the Qataris or those acting in concert with the Qataris. And Qatar is close to Hamas. Qatar has got a sort of funky relationship with Iran. It just blows the mind that we would put ourselves in that kind of vulnerable posture vis-à-vis the Qataris, much less any other foreign government. And the fact that, you know, yeah, there's outrage, but Republicans are like, There's nothing to see here. No problem. Trump says, You're stupid to turn down any gift. We have laws, and the Constitution itself is black-and-white clear that the president of the United States cannot, without Congress's approval, accept a gift of any significance from a foreign government. Frum: Yeah, it's not only that this is clearly illegal, whatever Pam Bondi may say—who was herself a foreign agent for the Qataris. It's clearly illegal. It's also, if you go back and read The Federalist Papers, the receiving of a large gift from a foreign potentate is their definition, their paradigmatic example, of what counts as an impeachable offense. This is the one thing that they are most frightened that the president will do—take payoffs from foreign rulers, especially foreign monarchs. And the idea that—it's like birthright citizenship that Trump also denies. There are a lot of things in the Constitution that are murky. What process is due? Well, argue. You know, we'll never settle that question. Your Fifth Amendment: You're not to have property taken without just compensation. What's just compensation? We can argue about that. But if you're born on American soil, are you a citizen unless you're the child of a diplomat? Yes. Clearly, no question about that. And can the president take a present from a foreign king? No. How is this question even on the president's desk? This would normally be something, you would think, that the ambassador to Qatar would say, Your highness, what a wonderful, magnificent gesture. But all things considered, if you just would get one of those beautiful cards, send the president a handmade card saying how much you like him. He'll like that a lot more than this jet, which, of course, you understand, he cannot even consider accepting. Rice: It's just insane. And it's indicative of what you were describing, which is a 'flood the zone with crap' strategy that overwhelms the public, the media, the courts, everything. But this is blatantly illegal, blatantly unconstitutional, and a supreme act of unprecedented corruption. Frum: Can you take us on a little tour in putting on your national security adviser cap from a while ago? Take us on a little tour of how much damage has been done to America's alliances, to its position in the world, to the respect in which adversaries hold it over the past few months of extraordinary, unprecedented activity. Just—we can't do everything, but what in your mind are the things that people most need to know, but what is different today than was the case in the fall of 2024? Rice: Well, David, so much damage has been done, and it's very hard to see how it's reparable in any reasonable length of time, even with a new president and a new administration. The most important thing that's been lost is the trust of our allies in American commitments, in America's loyalty and solidarity with our allies, and the ability to believe that we will do what we say. And when you lose that trust, particularly among your allies, you can't get that back. When you think about Canada—a country you know well, I know well—Canada has shared with the United States the longest peaceful border in the world. We are democracies that share values and history. Canada has fought and died alongside the United States in war after war after war, from the Second World War to Vietnam to Afghanistan. They have bled and died with us. And like our other NATO allies, the only time that our Article 5 mutual-defense commitment that we make among the NATO allies has ever been invoked, as you know, was after 9/11, when the allies came to our defense and served with us for years and years and years in Afghanistan to try to defeat al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts. So we also have the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, which serves both countries enormously well. And Donald Trump woke up one morning and decided arbitrarily to cripple the Canadian economy—Mexican too, to the extent he can, and Europe—through completely arbitrary tariffs that do very little for us, do a lot of harm for Canada, and weaken our supply-chain connectivity as we should be working together to deal with countries that pose a real threat in certain strategic sectors, like China. Instead, Trump imposes tariffs designed to bring the Canadian economy to its knees and speaks repeatedly in terms of turning Canada into the 51st state, which, as you know and I hope all the listeners know, is not only never going to happen but is incredibly offensive to every Canadian, and has done more to unite Canada—Anglophone, Francophone, First Nations—than anything in a long time. So it's really—it's horribly damaging. And I talk to Canadian friends. I'm sure you talk to friends and family. And they're pissed off, and they don't understand why their good friend and best friend would do this to them. And it's not just about Trump. I mean, they're just pissed off at the United States broadly. They're not traveling here in the way they used to. They're not buying American products the way they used to. And this is not going to go away just because they've elected Mark Carney, and he's determined to stand up for Canada's interest. This is long-term damage, as I'm sure you would agree. Frum: Let me ask you about adversaries, because among Trump supporters is a view that because Trump is so crude, so obnoxious, so overbearing, so insulting, he must impress the Chinese—no end. They must look at him and say, There is one rough, tough guy whom we better not fool around with, and, you know, Obama was so polite, and George W. Bush was so affable, we don't respect them. But we can respect this guy, and that the world now fears to cross Donald Trump. What is your assessment of what the adversaries think? Rice: China's laughing, okay? China plays a long game. They understand that in a trade war with the United States, in many ways, they have the upper hand. Why? In large part because they're not a democracy. And they can withstand economic pain, blame it on the United States, and their people will eat it. That's not going to work here in the United States. And plus, China is looking at the damage that we are doing to economies around Asia and seeing an opportunity for them to fill a vacuum in a bilateral trade relationship that we've left. Moreover, China played Trump's game with him, and he said—Trump said—We're going to tariff you this amount. And China said, Okay, I'll call you and raise you. And they went back and forth until it got to a crazy level. But the Chinese are not backing down, and the Chinese, moreover, are saying, Beyond the trade realm, we've got a whole bunch of non-trade things we can do to make your life miserable, Donald Trump. And that's when they went after rare earths and a whole bunch of other important products, commodities, that we depend on that China only can provide. So they go to the negotiating table. You can see the Trump administration sweating as the impacts on prices and supply chains and small businesses and the stock market begin to mount, with inflation looking to increase substantially. So they create a pretext and go to the negotiating table with the Chinese. And basically, without getting any concessions that are in the realm of what Trump suggested he wanted when he started this trade war—whether it be on fentanyl or whether it be on manufacturing or anything else—they've negotiated a face-saving climbdown for 90 days. It basically takes us back to the status quo ante. We got nothing for all this disruption. So the Chinese understand that Trump's not a tough guy. Trump is somebody who is a bully, and bullies understand other bullies, and they back down when people stand up to them. That's the message I believe the Chinese have taken away. The Russians—you want to talk about adversaries—a completely different story. Guess how much tariffs Trump imposed on Russia? Zero. Why? Why? Russia is playing Trump in a very different way on Ukraine, on many other things, but they understand that, for whatever reason, Trump bows down to Putin, tiptoes around him, and sells out our allies and Ukraine and anybody else to benefit Putin. Frum: Well, this is where I wanted to build to as our second-to-last question. Can Ukraine survive Trump? Can it stay on the battlefield, or is he going to break it and betray it in a way that all the Ukrainian patriotism and courage and sacrifice will not be able to overcome? Rice: Well, it's an interesting question because if Trump were to decide that he's cutting off intelligence support on a sustained basis, cutting off military assistance, doing nothing with the frozen assets, leaving Ukraine to the mercy of the Russians and what the Europeans can do without us, I think it's bleak for Ukraine. Not impossible, but bleak. And the degree to which the Europeans—who already, as you know, have contributed more to Ukraine in dollar terms, militarily and economically, than the United States—but if they step up even more, can that suffice? I think [it's] tough to be confident in that. So, you know, I think that the real question is: Will Putin overplay his hand? And he's obviously holding out for not only the great deal that the Trump administration unilaterally proposed to him—which would require the Ukrainians to give up vast quantities of their territory more than the Russians currently occupy; foreign recognition of Crimea as Russian, which is insane; not to mention, no NATO membership and no U.S. security guarantees. That's a ridiculously favorable set of terms for Putin, and he's sitting back there saying it's not enough. And if at some point, the Trump administration determines that Putin's humiliation of Donald Trump is untenable, then maybe that changes the Trump calculus and Ukraine has a bit more of a lifeline. Frum: Presidents build policy systems around their own personal natures. President Franklin Roosevelt liked creative chaos. President Eisenhower liked orderly, tidy systems. Some presidents like to see arguments battled out in front of them. Some presidents want the battle to happen before the president is in the room and wants to have a consensus among the advisers. Some people want the discussion, want to hear all the reasons behind the conclusion. Some people just say, Cut to the chase. Tell me what you all think. And you've dealt with different presidents who have their own different styles, and I'm sure you have opinions about which work better, and of course, in the end, it has to work for the particular person. But imagine the Trump administration as kind of a silhouette. Take the president out of the picture. Look at the reactions of the people around, of the way you would as a senior staffer and say, If you just knew about the process he's got, the process that has grown up around him, what would you say about this presidency, based on your observation from domestic- and national-security councils? Rice: Well, David, obviously I'm not in the White House, and it's not always easy from the outside to make these kinds of judgments. But it really appears to me that 99 percent of the time there is no process. The process is, as you hear many of the Cabinet officials and those closest to the president say all the time, Donald Trump will decide this. So it seems like everything, small and large—even though sometimes when convenient, he denies any knowledge of issues—is a Trump decision. And it's not clear that anything like the structure or the rigor that you would find in normal administrations exists in this context. Do people write him memos? Does he make decisions on paper, as is the custom and the Presidential Records Act anticipates and requires? Do people sit around the table in the White House Situation Room and discuss and debate options and make recommendations to the president? Does a president ever chair the National Security Council principals, or does he simply make his own decisions? It's been recently reported, David, that the president of the United States, who's been in office well over a hundred days now, has only received the presidential daily briefing—the most important, highly classified daily intelligence briefing—some 12 times, some 12 days of his hundred-plus days in office. What is he doing if he is not reading the PDB? And I hate to say this—you could say it about the airplane; you could say it about Signalgate; you could say it about so many different things—but if any other president had refused or opted not to receive the presidential daily briefing from the intelligence community on a regular basis, it would be a huge, huge scandal with massive investigations in Congress and huge speculation that the president is not playing with a full deck. That's a key part of the job. So there is no process, as far as I can tell. Frum: For those who've never seen one, can you just give some indication of what's the difference between the presidential daily brief and, say, the morning news on FOX TV? Which is better? Rice: (Laughs.) I don't watch Fox morning news, so just to be clear, although I've seen snippets of it. Frum: What kinds of things does he not know if he's not listening or reading to the brief? Rice: What he does not know is what our intelligence community has been able to collect and analyze and assess through all the various means that we have of intelligence collection and provide to the president that information and analysis that he would otherwise not have. I don't want to get into any level of description of what is in a PDB, but trust me—it's very different from Fox News. It's different from The New York Times and from even The Economist, because we have sources and methods of collection and analysis that far exceed what is often available through what we call 'open sources.' Frum: You can see administrations develop trajectories. You can see at the beginning, often, where it's going and where, if it goes wrong, how it might go wrong. If you look ahead just to the end of 2025, what are the dangers that you see that we seem to be navigating toward rather than away from? Rice: Well, I mean, there are many dangers, as we've discussed, of process, of care with the most sensitive information that is available. We've talked about allies and adversaries—adversaries taking advantage of us, allies losing trust in us. All of that, obviously, matters enormously. The lack of truthfulness—trustworthiness, whether domestically or internationally—the gaslighting. But I am also extremely worried that the president and those around him are so dismissive of any degree of law or accountability, even to the Constitution, that we could soon potentially see them outright, blatantly, and unapologetically defying court orders, including orders from the Supreme Court. And this blatantly illegal threat to suspend habeas corpus and, perhaps with it, implement some version of martial law based on a completely false pretext is something that I think is not far-fetched. I wish it were, and one we have to be very, very vigilant about. Frum: They've built bureaucracies that are getting in the habit of breaking the law, and when you build a weapon, the weapon tends to go off. Rice: Well, look—that would be a nuclear weapon going off in the heart of our constitutional republic. And whether you voted for Donald Trump or not, whether you support Donald Trump or not, poll after poll shows that Americans want and expect their president to adhere to court orders, to respect the Constitution and the rule of law. And all of us, regardless of party affiliation, regardless of how we voted, have an obligation to insist and demand that the president and his administration abide by the rule of law in the Constitution, and when they don't, that they pay for it in the way that we hold our leaders accountable, which is at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. Frum: Ambassador Rice, thank you so much for your time. Rice: Thank you, David. [] Frum: I'm so grateful to Ambassador Susan Rice for joining me today. Thank you, too, for joining. I hope you'll share the program with your friends, subscribe to it, or share it on whatever platform you follow us on. And I hope you'll consider subscribing to The Atlantic. That's what you can do immediately to support the work of this program and so much other content that you get from The Atlantic. Please subscribe. Please follow us. Please share the content. Thank you for joining. I'll see you next week. [] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's National-Security Disaster
In this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a response to a listener's question about working-class wages, unpacking the economic storylines that have shaped American politics over the last 40 years. In his answer, David challenges the idea that grievance politics are always rooted in material decline. David is then joined by Ambassador Susan Rice for a sweeping conversation on the disintegration of national-security processes under Trump. They discuss the implications of 'Signalgate,' the absence of a full-time national security adviser, and the staggering national-security risks posed by a $400 million jet gifted by Qatar. Rice offers a sobering look at what the breakdown of structure and accountability means for America's alliances, adversaries, and the rule of law. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 7 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Ambassador Susan Rice. Susan Rice represented the United States at the United Nations during the first Obama administration. She was national security adviser to President Obama, and then director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Joe Biden. [ Music ] Frum: Before my conversation with Ambassador Rice, I want to open the show by doing something a little different. I've often taken questions at the end of the show. This time I'm going to take a question—just one—at the top of the show and try to answer it here because I think this question is so important, such a key in the lock to all of our contemporary debates. It comes from a young viewer named Joe, in Florida, who's a friend of our family's, and he asks, 'Given that working-class wages have been in decline for 40 years, especially for men, why would you expect anyone to sympathize with the idea of the American system, with free trade? Why wouldn't they back Donald Trump, given the pressure they're under?' The reason this question is so important is because it reflects an attitude that many liberal-minded people have, which is: Where you see a grievance, where you see behavior that is self-harming or harmful to others, there has to be some rational cause behind it, some material cause behind it—that when people do something destructive or self-harming, they're acting out some understandable, cognizable grievance they've got that somebody could do something about. And if only we could meet that rational, material basis of their grievance, we could turn things around and put us all on a better path. That's the idea you hear from many Democratic candidates or would-be candidates for 2028: Let's hear what people are saying and find some way to meet these grievances. And I do not want to dismiss that. A lot of politics is about the rational. But what reactionary and fascist forces have always understood is there's plenty of irrationalism in the human being, and that's a real resource. And sometimes when you have a grievance, it expresses itself in ways that sound like material grievance, but it's really not. So let me take on this point about 40 years of decline, take it apart and see whether a better understanding can put us somewhere. Now, when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America, they use certain numbers and not other numbers. Depending on the numbers you use, you get a very different story. And unfortunately, we often choose the story we want and then choose the numbers that fit the story, rather than the other way around. So when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America for 40 years—which takes us back to 1985—they look at a series called hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers, or even hourly wages for nonsupervisory production workers. That's manufacturing, people who get a paycheck that is measured by the hour and who answer to some kind of supervisor. And if you look at those numbers, you see they rise basically pretty steeply for the 40 years from 1945 to the early 1980s. Then they flatten out or even go into a little bit of a decline in the 1980s. They jump up a little bit in the 1990s. Then they're hit by the Great Recession, and they go down again and only pick up after about 2015. So that is a story of stagnation, decline, some improvement in the '90s, some improvement in the 2010s, but basically not a very happy or healthy picture from 1985 forward for that kind of worker. The problem with looking at those numbers is that those numbers describe fewer and fewer people in America. And they describe—even for those people—less and less of those people's lives. Here's a different number. If you remember that a lot of the way that people get an income in modern America is not just from their job, but also from various kinds of government benefits—the earned-income tax credit, the child support from the government of various kinds—and if you also remember that fewer and fewer of us work as nonsupervisory hourly workers, especially nonsupervisory hourly production workers. If you just look at what happens to American households (now, households can be as few as one person)—that is, Americans who live in some independent domicile of some kind, whether it's one person, a single worker, whether it's two people, whether it's a whole family; any one of those things can be a household—what you see is that in 1985, the median American household (that is, we're not averaging in Bill Gates; we're just taking the American in the middle) that household made about $60,000 present-day dollars, and 40 years later, in 2025, that household made about $80,000. And it wasn't all from work. Some of it was from government benefits. But clearly, a big jump from $60,000 to $80,000. Now, it's not as steep a jump as they made from 1945 to 1985. If you look at the 40 years immediately after World War II, the median did better than it did in the 40 years after World War II, from 1985 to the present. But I'm not sure you can really rationally compare those things. Remember, if you were starting in 1945, you're missing that that same person or family or group had the experience of World War II and the depression. There had been a lot of bad times before then, and there's a big catch-up that happened in the 40 years after 1945. There's also something else that was different in the 40 years after 1945. In 1945, about 17 percent of Americans still lived on the farm. You get big gains in efficiency when you move people from farms to cities. America did it in the '50s. Many European countries did it in the '50s and '60s. The Chinese, of course, have done it since 1990. And you get a big surge in productivity. You get a big surge in household wealth. But, of course, you can only do it once. It's not a commute. You move from farm to city. That's it. You're in the city. You're not going back to the farm. And further moves into the city—when you move from factory to office—you don't get the same bump that you get when you move from factory to farm. So the idea that '45 to '85 was the norm, and '85 to 2025 has been some kind of sad falling off, mistakes a lot of what happened in 1945. And also, it overlooks: Yeah, it's good to be going up, but you need to remember, America in 1945 was quite a poor place by today's standards, and even in 1985, it was not as affluent a country as it is now. In 1945, about a third of American households lacked indoor plumbing. In 1985, only about 70 percent of American households had air conditioning, whereas now, virtually everybody does. So when you're making those first steps, it's easier. The technology of indoor plumbing exists. You move people from farm to city—they get the indoor plumbing; they get a big jump in their standard of living. It's a little harder once they're already in the cities. So Problem 1 is what we're measuring. If we look at all forms of income and not just the wages of a particular group of people, you see a bigger rise in incomes. And if you understand that something special happened between '45 and '85 that probably couldn't have been reproduced between '85 and 2025, no matter what, maybe you feel a little less angry about it. But the second thing, when we're trying honestly to evaluate how Americans are doing, you have to ask the question, What does your money buy? In a modern technological society, a lot of your improvements in standard of living show up not as increases in wages but as improvements in the quality of the products you get—in other words, as a decline of prices. So 2025, 1985—we both have cars, but the 1985 car is likely to kill you in circumstances where the 2025 car will keep you alive. They're the same object. They may cost the same amount of money. But the car that doesn't kill you is clearly a huge improvement over the car that does. In the same way, there were color TVs in 1985, but they were not flat. You couldn't put them in every room of your house. And they showed many, many fewer different kinds of programs. That while we can do a kind of food basket, we should remember that in 2025, more fresh fruits and vegetables are available to more people in more months of the year than were the case in 1985. In 1985, for most people, vegetables meant canned or frozen. In 2025, vegetables, for a lot of people in a lot of places a lot of the year, can mean fresh, and that's a big improvement in quality. It's a little hard to capture with a price signal, but that really is meaningful. In the same way, how do we measure the improvement in well-being that comes when you want to write a letter to a friend or loved one, [and] you no longer have to handwrite it or type it, fold it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, walk into the post office, and drop it in a box, but you can hit send instantly on a text message or some other instantaneous form of communication. In 1985, there are no mobile phones. We were only five years away from paying a lot of money for long distance. So incomes went up more than the sad story tells us. What those incomes can buy has improved dramatically. There's one other thing that we really lose sight of here, which is: When we use these averages and say, The average American was this in 2025, and the average American was that in 1985, we need to remember, we're not talking about a stable population of people. In 1985, there were about 107 million Americans in the workforce. In 2025, there were 170—107 to 170 million in the workforce, bigger workforce. But almost all of that growth—not quite all, but almost all of that growth—is the product of immigration. Almost all the growth in the American workforce over the past 40 years has been either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. Now, it's a very contentious question. I'm not going to discuss here all the merits of the immigration question, all the costs, all the benefits. But very clearly, immigration is a benefit to the immigrant themselves, and it's a benefit in almost all cases to the children of the immigrant. When I say the average American had this in 1985, and the average American had that in 2025, and then I focus specifically on one household, which is the household of immigrants and their children, should I be comparing them to the Americans of 1985? Or should I be comparing them to what was their choice, their lot in life? Which is: If they hadn't moved to the United States and maybe made the aggregate statistics a little worse, they'd be living in Mexico or Guatemala or the Philippines or wherever the family came from. And maybe you should compare them not to what they have in 2025, not to what other Americans had in 1985, but to what people back in the Philippines or Mexico or Guatemala had in 1985, and then they look dramatically better off. And we can say, Okay, if this family of immigrants who are the cause of the growth of the workforce is so much better off, and if also all the people whose parents and grandparents are already here, if they're better off because their wages have gone up and because their money buys more, and if what we're measuring here is an impact on the aggregate statistics caused by the inflow of a lot of immigrants—whatever you think about immigration, it's kind of strange to describe this as people becoming materially worse off. And a lot of the situation that my friend Joe describes is kind of a statistical illusion. If you could spend 10 minutes back in 1985—I promise you, I was there—I promise you, you'd be shocked. You'd be shocked by all the things, all the conveniences, all the luxuries you take for granted. You'd be surprised at how much better the food is, how much cleaner the air is, how much less acidic the lakes are. In every way, you are so much better off. But it's often hard to capture. And statistics often give us a false image of reality that is used by people who want to sell a case, but not to actually tell you what really happened. And the reason why this is also misleading and dangerous is two points. The first is: Again, it makes our problems look too easy. It makes it seem like, well, if only we could find out what was—we could solve deindustrialization or meet whatever economic grievance that we hear cited as a cause of the Trump vote, we could make the Trump problem go away. But then we're faced with things like the fact that Trumpism exists in every country, in every place, regardless of that country's particular economic history. There are Trump-like movements in Germany and France. There are Trump-like movements in South Korea. This seems to be something going on in the modern world and has some deeper causes—in sexuality, in mass culture, and just the resistance of the human mind to orderly, liberal progress. There's parts of it that people just don't find that very satisfying, don't find it very exciting. They want more. Also, ordinary liberal progress, while it may meet our demand for prosperity, it may not meet our demand for status, and it may not meet our demand to subordinate others whose status we think needs to be lower, as well as to make ours higher. So I worry it disarms us in the face of a real challenge. The second thing is: It also empowers some people who have agendas of their own, of a kind that aren't helpful either. There are a lot of people on the left wing of the Democratic Party for whom Trump was a kind of godsend. They have long wanted to do a kind of more economic, planned economy. They wanted to do more protectionism. And Trump then became a justification. And the text to read on this is a speech given by former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in 2018. Great respect for Jake Sullivan; this is not any kind of personal criticism of him. But he gave a speech called, if I remember right, 'a foreign policy for the middle class' that cited Trump's success as a reason that the United States needed to have a much more planned economy and a much more protectionist economy. And indeed, if President Trump was the most protectionist president since World War II, President Biden was the second-most. Biden did not repeal very many of the Trump tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump term, and he didn't reopen the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was the real answer to the problem of how we integrate China peacefully into the world trading system. Biden, in many ways, was quite continuous with Trump on trade, and he was because there are people in the Democratic Party who wanted to be, and because they used a misreading of what the Trump experience was as a justification for things they wanted to do anyway. And the result was that we got some disappointing results during the Biden years. Trade is a convenient target for a lot of people, and there are a lot of statistical papers. There's a paper by a man named Autor, A - U - T - O - R, called 'The China Shock'—I think it's by group; Autor's not the only author—that shows that areas in the United States that were exposed to a lot of trade competition from China did worse than areas that were not. They didn't say those areas got poor. They just said if you compare an area that was hard hit by Chinese imports to an area that wasn't, the area that wasn't grew faster than the area that was. But they don't prove whether that area that was hard hit shrank or whether it just grew more slowly. There's a lot of gaps there. The paper is used to prove many things beyond what it actually proves, even assuming it's accurate. And it's not trade that explains the many other problems in American life. It's not trade that explains why Americans find it harder to get married. People in every country—every developed country—find it harder to get married. It's not trade that explains why we see more gun violence, more substance abuse. Those things seem to have deeper causes. But trade is something we do with foreigners. And if you're trying to come up with an explanation of the problems of American life that leave Americans out of it—that don't call on anybody in America to do anything different from what they've done before—trade allows you to say, It's the foreigners that are to blame. It's an easy way to think. It's an attractive way to think. But it's not a helpful way to think. I don't want to gainsay everything in the argument I've just made here. I mean, obviously, working-class wages have been under pressure, and they may be under more pressure in the future as artificial intelligence and robotics advance. But if you think about what we could practically do for people under the situation, I would say, You know what they need first and foremost? Universal health insurance. That's got nothing to do with trade. And you can be a protectionist society, as the United States now is, thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Biden before, and not have universal health insurance. And you can be a free-trade society, like Denmark, and have universal health insurance. That's maybe the first thing that people would want if they were thinking, How do we make the life of a person at the average in American life better, especially for their children? But it's an appealing answer, and it's got a lot of interest groups lined up in it. But I think what we need to do as we confront Trump is confront the irrational. It exists in ourselves, as well as in other people. I'm not just making a finger-pointing exercise. Confront the irrational. We respond to violence. We respond to hate. We respond to intimidation. We respond to the desire to make ourselves more by making other people less. It's not nice to think about those things, but the fact that they're not nice doesn't make them less powerful. Trump is a successor to many dark movements in the human past that have occurred when trade was going up, when trade was going down, when industry was booming, when industry was shrinking. Prosperity makes everything easier. But prosperity does not make the irrational go away. So while we should certainly work for prosperity, and while we should certainly think very hard about how we improve the condition of the median American, the American at the center—after all, it's a democracy; we're running the whole country for that person—they are the judge and jury and how we're doing. And if they're not happy, well, they're the ultimate boss. But we shouldn't be pulled into false arguments against international trade, and we shouldn't believe a false story about the promise of America and accept the idea that there was some magical time when America was great, and now we have, sadly, fallen off. In every way you can measure, America is a better place today than it was 40 years ago. And if it isn't as much better as we would like, well, the future is open. We can do more to make it better, faster for more people. But it is better. It was better. You have to believe in your country, and you have to not give an inch to those who defame the country in order to maximize their own power and their own cruelty. Now my conversation with Ambassador Susan Rice. But first, a quick break. [ Music ] Frum: I'm delighted and honored to be joined today by Ambassador Susan Rice, a name that is famous in the United States and around the world. For deeper perspective, I strongly recommend her autobiography, Tough Love, which describes a multigenerational family commitment to ardent love of learning and public service. There's a personal connection that the ambassador and I have that I won't go into here, but that she describes, very movingly, in the book. She was educated at Stanford, then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, after which she began a meteoric ascent through the American national-security system, serving first President [Bill] Clinton and then President [Barack] Obama, rising to be ambassador to the UN National Security Council, national security adviser, and then under President Biden, switching to the domestic-policy shop, where she ran his domestic-policy council. So, Ambassador Rice, thank you so, so much for joining us. I want to start by mentioning that as you and I speak, the United States doesn't have a national security adviser. So how big a gap is that, and what can we learn from this crazy Signal scandal that means that the national security adviser's out, and the secretary of defense is very likely on his way out? Susan Rice: Well, David, it's great to be with you, and congratulations on the show. You know, we have Marco Rubio playing four simultaneous roles: secretary of state, national security adviser, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development—what's left of it, which is very little—and as the acting national archivist. Having had at least one of those jobs, the job of national security adviser, I can tell you it is a 24/7, relentless, incredibly intense job, done correctly. Your role is not only to brief and advise the president but, very importantly, to manage the National Security Council staff of over 300 professionals and to coordinate the Cabinet-level national-security Principals Committee, which should be carefully assessing and exploring the most significant national-security challenges of the day, weighing options, making recommendations to the president, and ensuring that the decisions that the president makes are being implemented. No human, however competent—let alone Marco Rubio, who's barely been in the role of secretary of state for four months—can do all of those jobs, or even two of those jobs, effectively. So when you say there's no national security adviser, what you're saying is that this is a job that is a more-than-full-time job being done, if at all, on a very part-time basis. I can't imagine what that must be like for the national-security staffers, those that are left, that are true professionals who come from the various agencies and are working very hard on behalf of the American people to have no leader. [It's] not clear if the deputy national security adviser is there for long and if so, what role he's playing. I don't know if Marco Rubio is sitting in the White House or at the State Department or in the National Archives or wherever, but he's got a big job, and he's got now four big jobs, and for a president who doesn't like process and doesn't like the rigor that national-security decision making is typically conducted with. Frum: Well, when I said we don't have the national security adviser, yes, as you say, Rubio has the title, as he has the title of national archivist, but those jobs are not being done. They are, in fact, for all practical purposes vacant. I've sometimes had the opportunity to interview national security advisers and secretaries of state, and one of the questions I always ask them, or I try to, is, How do you spend your time? And there's a huge difference, because at 300 people at the National Security Council staff, that's a significant number of people, but it's not a major bureaucracy the way the Department of State is. The secretary of state has to worry about personnel matters in a way that a national security adviser does less. The national security adviser is the first point of contact for every national emergency the United States faces. The secretary of state should be taking somewhat longer views, doing some planning work, as well as responding to emergencies. They're very different, and as you say, Henry Kissinger tried it, but that was more an act of bureaucratic imperialism. Rice: And at a time when things were much less demanding and complex. And by the way, he failed at it. (Laughs.) So now we'll see how Marco Rubio does. The other thing, David, to mention about the difference between the jobs is, you know, the secretary of state is supposed to travel and do a great deal of personal diplomacy all over the world. You cannot do that effectively and man the fort at the White House, where the national security adviser's job is really properly a more inward-facing role. Frum: Especially if, as so often happens, different parts of the foreign-policy apparatus are in disagreement: So State says one thing. Defense says something else. Other agencies say a third thing. The national security adviser is supposed to help the president broker those disputes by saying, I'm here to represent the president and no agency. And if you're there representing an agency, too, how does any decision get made? Rice: That's part of the challenge. The national security adviser is meant to be an honest broker. He or she ultimately gets to make a recommendation to the president as to the appropriate course, but taking into account—and fairly and accurately without spin—representing the views of the other national-security Cabinet members. So there's a conflict of interest inherent in those two roles being occupied by one individual. Frum: I want to ask you about the scandal that may have laid low Mike Waltz, although there may be other reasons. There was this very strange person. Laura—what was her name? Loomer? Rice: Laura Loomer. Frum: She has some unusual kind of influence or hold on the president, and she recommended that he get rid of a lot of people in the national-security apparatus. Maybe that's part of what's going on. There may be some fight over Iran policy. That may be what's going on. Trump may have remembered that Mike Waltz had a previous history as a congressman, where he was not as infatuated with Donald Trump as Donald Trump would wish him to be. There may be many other issues. But how do you read the Signalgate scandal? It's often true that senior national-security people don't use the means that they're supposed to use. They're just too inconvenient. It's not just Hillary Clinton. Colin Powell, many others have sought shortcuts or some more convenient method of communication. How do you understand what happened and how serious it was? Rice: I think, David, it's extremely serious. This wasn't a case of somebody sending an email point to point or using texts for scheduling. This was a case where the most sophisticated and complicated deliberations among the national-security team did not take place in places they should have: in the White House Situation Room around a table for several hours, probably on multiple occasions, to weigh the question of whether, how, when, and with what preparation the United States was going to launch attacks on the Houthi militants in Yemen. This is one of the most important kinds of decisions that the national-security principals make, or they make a recommendation to the president after a lot of assessment and analysis. And these guys did it, you know, with emojis and shorthand on Signal. So the first problem, before you get to how they communicated, is the extent to which they communicated and deliberated, which was de minimis. And the question of the use of force and putting American men and women in uniform in harm's way is one of the most significant types of decisions that gets made, and it deserves thoughtful and thorough consideration. That didn't happen. Secondly, you're using a commercial application, Signal, which is not encrypted to the same degree that classified U.S. government systems are. And they were inherently discussing classified information. Whether and when to engage in military operations is, by definition, classified. The details—the operational details—that Pete Hegseth put into the chat were extraordinarily sensitive and highly classified. Then you had J. D. Vance weighing in on even the question of whether there should be such military strikes. And frankly, that's the discussion that should be happening around the Situation Room table. The reason it's so dangerous is not only that they give scant and superficial consideration to such important issues, but it's because we know that our most sophisticated adversaries—and indeed, some of our allies—can hack into personal phones and into Signal and learn in advance what we are planning. And if the Chinese had done that, or the Russians, and handed it off to the Houthis or to the Iranians to give to the Houthis, or if the Iranians had done it—they have highly sophisticated capabilities—that could have meant that our operational security was compromised and that our pilots and others engaged in the operations were at direct risk. It was incredibly reckless and incredibly dangerous behavior. And they seemed to do it, David, as a matter of course. I mean, now we're learning that there are multiple regular Signal chats between and among the national-security principals. The last photograph that a journalist captured of Mike Waltz's phone right before he was fired showed that he was sitting in the Cabinet room, in a Cabinet meeting—where, by the way, you're not supposed to have your phones; you're supposed to leave them outside in a secure container—using Signal to communicate with the vice president and other senior officials, Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, it's ridiculous. Frum: You know, as we talk about this, I'm very conscious that a lot of people will say, Signalgate, that that was when, like, Louis XIV ruled France, or maybe Pontius Pilate was in charge of Judea. Frum: That was a long, long—that was, like, 18 scandals back. Rice: (Laughs.) How many Scaramuccis? Frum: Right now, the new scandal is the Emirate of Qatar has offered the president of the United States his own personal jet to take away with him after he leaves office. One of the trademark—I don't know whether it's a strength or a weakness or both—features of this Trump administration has been, you pile scandal on top of scandal on top of scandal, and no one can keep track of them. And it does seem like if you're going to do one bad thing, you might as well do a hundred, because the average survival rate seems to go up. I ask you this because you were at the center, or you were sort of caught up in a decade ago, scandal politics—in retrospect, a kind of contrived-looking scandal—but looking back on that and comparing it to Trump 1 and Trump 2, do you think there are things that this administration knows about scandal politics that other administrations have not known? Rice: Well, that's a great question, David. I mean, I think first of all, the Trump administration—Trump 1, but in particular, Trump 2—just doesn't give a goddamn about what they say or what they do. Trump 1 was characterized by nonstop lying. That is certainly the case in Trump 2, but combined with a sense of impunity and complete lack of accountability to the American people, to the truth, to the Constitution, to anything. And so they lie and gaslight on a daily basis. And it's so extreme that I think the media has a difficult time keeping up, though credit to the many that are trying. The opposition—the Democrats—can't make a storyline stick. Signalgate should be as big a national-security scandal as any we've seen in decades. It is that bad. And it's been in multiple iterations. Now Pete Hegseth, we've learned, shared the same operational details on a Signal chat with his family members, which is ridiculous. They have no need to know. And it goes on and on, and yet they flood the zone with so much crap on a daily basis—so many lies, so much obfuscation, so much gaslighting—that their BS just overwhelms people's capacity to absorb it. And obviously, they know that, and that's part of their, as you suggest, their modus operandi. Frum: I have a private theory that I developed during the first Trump campaign, back in 2016. I remember seeing a poll at the time that asked Americans what they thought of the two candidates: Hillary Clinton and President Trump—or Donald Trump, as he then was. And this was not a good poll for Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton beat him—she's more intelligent, more knowledgeable, cares about people like you. She won in every single category that the poll asked. I forget every question, but these were the important questions that you would want in a leader of the nation. But there was one category where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and that was honesty. You think, like, Well, that's weird because he lies all the time. And I thought about this a lot, and I realized that, of course, politicians have a way of speaking that sounds dishonest. The question is, Did you eat the last piece of pie? And the politician who ate the last piece of pie doesn't want to say yes, because they might get in trouble. Doesn't want to say no, because that's an outright lie. So they haver, they equivocate, they temporize, they put things in context, and they talk like a politician. They equivocate. You know, that we have to put pie eating into a larger context, that certainly, among those in the vicinity—I was one of those in the vicinity of the refrigerator at the time that the pie was eaten, but I do not have direct personal knowledge of exactly the consumption pattern. Donald Trump would just look you in the eye and say, Nope, I didn't, when he did. And because— Rice: Or he'd say, No, I didn't eat the pie. You ate the pie. Frum: You ate the pie. And so because he will flatly lie, he doesn't equivocate. He doesn't temporize. He doesn't haver. He just flat out lies. If you don't know the facts or if you're ready to believe him, he sounds honest. Whereas the person tiptoeing around the question, Did you eat the last piece of pie? they sound like a crook. Rice: I think there's something to that, David. I do. But, you know, I think the broader point is that this Trump administration has no interest in, no pretense of, no commitment to doing anything that doesn't suit their interests at the time, whether legal, illegal, truthful, untruthful, moral, immoral. And you started this discussion with something that I think really deserves careful scrutiny and outrage: The notion that a president of the United States would accept a $400 million 747 from a foreign government—any foreign government, much less the Qataris, whose loyalties and interests only occasionally, to put it kindly, align with ours—is truly outrageous. And it's not just the corruption this represents, which is massive and mind-boggling. It's the national-security consequences. Air Force One is a flying, secure environment. It is as secure and classified as the White House Situation Room. If a foreign government has built or overseen the production of an aircraft and then hands it off to the United States, the first thing is we have no idea of knowing what kinds of listening or other devices they've put in it. Secondly, to accept a gift of that sort and then to keep it for your personal benefit after you leave office is giving a foreign government a huge amount of influence over the president of the United States and the United States of America, and leaves us susceptible not just to all forms of espionage that the Qataris could potentially conduct, but leaves us vulnerable to exploitation by the Qataris or those acting in concert with the Qataris. And Qatar is close to Hamas. Qatar has got a sort of funky relationship with Iran. It just blows the mind that we would put ourselves in that kind of vulnerable posture vis-à-vis the Qataris, much less any other foreign government. And the fact that, you know, yeah, there's outrage, but Republicans are like, There's nothing to see here. No problem. Trump says, You're stupid to turn down any gift. We have laws, and the Constitution itself is black-and-white clear that the president of the United States cannot, without Congress's approval, accept a gift of any significance from a foreign government. Frum: Yeah, it's not only that this is clearly illegal, whatever Pam Bondi may say—who was herself a foreign agent for the Qataris. It's clearly illegal. It's also, if you go back and read The Federalist Papers, the receiving of a large gift from a foreign potentate is their definition, their paradigmatic example, of what counts as an impeachable offense. This is the one thing that they are most frightened that the president will do—take payoffs from foreign rulers, especially foreign monarchs. And the idea that—it's like birthright citizenship that Trump also denies. There are a lot of things in the Constitution that are murky. What process is due? Well, argue. You know, we'll never settle that question. Your Fifth Amendment: You're not to have property taken without just compensation. What's just compensation? We can argue about that. But if you're born on American soil, are you a citizen unless you're the child of a diplomat? Yes. Clearly, no question about that. And can the president take a present from a foreign king? No. How is this question even on the president's desk? This would normally be something, you would think, that the ambassador to Qatar would say, Your highness, what a wonderful, magnificent gesture. But all things considered, if you just would get one of those beautiful cards, send the president a handmade card saying how much you like him. He'll like that a lot more than this jet, which, of course, you understand, he cannot even consider accepting. Rice: It's just insane. And it's indicative of what you were describing, which is a 'flood the zone with crap' strategy that overwhelms the public, the media, the courts, everything. But this is blatantly illegal, blatantly unconstitutional, and a supreme act of unprecedented corruption. Frum: Can you take us on a little tour in putting on your national security adviser cap from a while ago? Take us on a little tour of how much damage has been done to America's alliances, to its position in the world, to the respect in which adversaries hold it over the past few months of extraordinary, unprecedented activity. Just—we can't do everything, but what in your mind are the things that people most need to know, but what is different today than was the case in the fall of 2024? Rice: Well, David, so much damage has been done, and it's very hard to see how it's reparable in any reasonable length of time, even with a new president and a new administration. The most important thing that's been lost is the trust of our allies in American commitments, in America's loyalty and solidarity with our allies, and the ability to believe that we will do what we say. And when you lose that trust, particularly among your allies, you can't get that back. When you think about Canada—a country you know well, I know well—Canada has shared with the United States the longest peaceful border in the world. We are democracies that share values and history. Canada has fought and died alongside the United States in war after war after war, from the Second World War to Vietnam to Afghanistan. They have bled and died with us. And like our other NATO allies, the only time that our Article 5 mutual-defense commitment that we make among the NATO allies has ever been invoked, as you know, was after 9/11, when the allies came to our defense and served with us for years and years and years in Afghanistan to try to defeat al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts. So we also have the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, which serves both countries enormously well. And Donald Trump woke up one morning and decided arbitrarily to cripple the Canadian economy—Mexican too, to the extent he can, and Europe—through completely arbitrary tariffs that do very little for us, do a lot of harm for Canada, and weaken our supply-chain connectivity as we should be working together to deal with countries that pose a real threat in certain strategic sectors, like China. Instead, Trump imposes tariffs designed to bring the Canadian economy to its knees and speaks repeatedly in terms of turning Canada into the 51st state, which, as you know and I hope all the listeners know, is not only never going to happen but is incredibly offensive to every Canadian, and has done more to unite Canada—Anglophone, Francophone, First Nations—than anything in a long time. So it's really—it's horribly damaging. And I talk to Canadian friends. I'm sure you talk to friends and family. And they're pissed off, and they don't understand why their good friend and best friend would do this to them. And it's not just about Trump. I mean, they're just pissed off at the United States broadly. They're not traveling here in the way they used to. They're not buying American products the way they used to. And this is not going to go away just because they've elected Mark Carney, and he's determined to stand up for Canada's interest. This is long-term damage, as I'm sure you would agree. Frum: Let me ask you about adversaries, because among Trump supporters is a view that because Trump is so crude, so obnoxious, so overbearing, so insulting, he must impress the Chinese—no end. They must look at him and say, There is one rough, tough guy whom we better not fool around with, and, you know, Obama was so polite, and George W. Bush was so affable, we don't respect them. But we can respect this guy, and that the world now fears to cross Donald Trump. What is your assessment of what the adversaries think? Rice: China's laughing, okay? China plays a long game. They understand that in a trade war with the United States, in many ways, they have the upper hand. Why? In large part because they're not a democracy. And they can withstand economic pain, blame it on the United States, and their people will eat it. That's not going to work here in the United States. And plus, China is looking at the damage that we are doing to economies around Asia and seeing an opportunity for them to fill a vacuum in a bilateral trade relationship that we've left. Moreover, China played Trump's game with him, and he said—Trump said— We're going to tariff you this amount. And China said, Okay, I'll call you and raise you. And they went back and forth until it got to a crazy level. But the Chinese are not backing down, and the Chinese, moreover, are saying, Beyond the trade realm, we've got a whole bunch of non-trade things we can do to make your life miserable, Donald Trump. And that's when they went after rare earths and a whole bunch of other important products, commodities, that we depend on that China only can provide. So they go to the negotiating table. You can see the Trump administration sweating as the impacts on prices and supply chains and small businesses and the stock market begin to mount, with inflation looking to increase substantially. So they create a pretext and go to the negotiating table with the Chinese. And basically, without getting any concessions that are in the realm of what Trump suggested he wanted when he started this trade war—whether it be on fentanyl or whether it be on manufacturing or anything else—they've negotiated a face-saving climbdown for 90 days. It basically takes us back to the status quo ante. We got nothing for all this disruption. So the Chinese understand that Trump's not a tough guy. Trump is somebody who is a bully, and bullies understand other bullies, and they back down when people stand up to them. That's the message I believe the Chinese have taken away. The Russians—you want to talk about adversaries—a completely different story. Guess how much tariffs Trump imposed on Russia? Zero. Why? Why? Russia is playing Trump in a very different way on Ukraine, on many other things, but they understand that, for whatever reason, Trump bows down to Putin, tiptoes around him, and sells out our allies and Ukraine and anybody else to benefit Putin. Frum: Well, this is where I wanted to build to as our second-to-last question. Can Ukraine survive Trump? Can it stay on the battlefield, or is he going to break it and betray it in a way that all the Ukrainian patriotism and courage and sacrifice will not be able to overcome? Rice: Well, it's an interesting question because if Trump were to decide that he's cutting off intelligence support on a sustained basis, cutting off military assistance, doing nothing with the frozen assets, leaving Ukraine to the mercy of the Russians and what the Europeans can do without us, I think it's bleak for Ukraine. Not impossible, but bleak. And the degree to which the Europeans—who already, as you know, have contributed more to Ukraine in dollar terms, militarily and economically, than the United States—but if they step up even more, can that suffice? I think [it's] tough to be confident in that. So, you know, I think that the real question is: Will Putin overplay his hand? And he's obviously holding out for not only the great deal that the Trump administration unilaterally proposed to him—which would require the Ukrainians to give up vast quantities of their territory more than the Russians currently occupy; foreign recognition of Crimea as Russian, which is insane; not to mention, no NATO membership and no U.S. security guarantees. That's a ridiculously favorable set of terms for Putin, and he's sitting back there saying it's not enough. And if at some point, the Trump administration determines that Putin's humiliation of Donald Trump is untenable, then maybe that changes the Trump calculus and Ukraine has a bit more of a lifeline. Frum: Presidents build policy systems around their own personal natures. President Franklin Roosevelt liked creative chaos. President Eisenhower liked orderly, tidy systems. Some presidents like to see arguments battled out in front of them. Some presidents want the battle to happen before the president is in the room and wants to have a consensus among the advisers. Some people want the discussion, want to hear all the reasons behind the conclusion. Some people just say, Cut to the chase. Tell me what you all think. And you've dealt with different presidents who have their own different styles, and I'm sure you have opinions about which work better, and of course, in the end, it has to work for the particular person. But imagine the Trump administration as kind of a silhouette. Take the president out of the picture. Look at the reactions of the people around, of the way you would as a senior staffer and say, If you just knew about the process he's got, the process that has grown up around him, what would you say about this presidency, based on your observation from domestic- and national-security councils? Rice: Well, David, obviously I'm not in the White House, and it's not always easy from the outside to make these kinds of judgments. But it really appears to me that 99 percent of the time there is no process. The process is, as you hear many of the Cabinet officials and those closest to the president say all the time, Donald Trump will decide this. So it seems like everything, small and large—even though sometimes when convenient, he denies any knowledge of issues—is a Trump decision. And it's not clear that anything like the structure or the rigor that you would find in normal administrations exists in this context. Do people write him memos? Does he make decisions on paper, as is the custom and the Presidential Records Act anticipates and requires? Do people sit around the table in the White House Situation Room and discuss and debate options and make recommendations to the president? Does a president ever chair the National Security Council principals, or does he simply make his own decisions? It's been recently reported, David, that the president of the United States, who's been in office well over a hundred days now, has only received the presidential daily briefing—the most important, highly classified daily intelligence briefing—some 12 times, some 12 days of his hundred-plus days in office. What is he doing if he is not reading the PDB? And I hate to say this—you could say it about the airplane; you could say it about Signalgate; you could say it about so many different things—but if any other president had refused or opted not to receive the presidential daily briefing from the intelligence community on a regular basis, it would be a huge, huge scandal with massive investigations in Congress and huge speculation that the president is not playing with a full deck. That's a key part of the job. So there is no process, as far as I can tell. Frum: For those who've never seen one, can you just give some indication of what's the difference between the presidential daily brief and, say, the morning news on FOX TV? Which is better? Rice: (Laughs.) I don't watch Fox morning news, so just to be clear, although I've seen snippets of it. Frum: What kinds of things does he not know if he's not listening or reading to the brief? Rice: What he does not know is what our intelligence community has been able to collect and analyze and assess through all the various means that we have of intelligence collection and provide to the president that information and analysis that he would otherwise not have. I don't want to get into any level of description of what is in a PDB, but trust me—it's very different from Fox News. It's different from The New York Times and from even The Economist, because we have sources and methods of collection and analysis that far exceed what is often available through what we call 'open sources.' Frum: You can see administrations develop trajectories. You can see at the beginning, often, where it's going and where, if it goes wrong, how it might go wrong. If you look ahead just to the end of 2025, what are the dangers that you see that we seem to be navigating toward rather than away from? Rice: Well, I mean, there are many dangers, as we've discussed, of process, of care with the most sensitive information that is available. We've talked about allies and adversaries—adversaries taking advantage of us, allies losing trust in us. All of that, obviously, matters enormously. The lack of truthfulness—trustworthiness, whether domestically or internationally—the gaslighting. But I am also extremely worried that the president and those around him are so dismissive of any degree of law or accountability, even to the Constitution, that we could soon potentially see them outright, blatantly, and unapologetically defying court orders, including orders from the Supreme Court. And this blatantly illegal threat to suspend habeas corpus and, perhaps with it, implement some version of martial law based on a completely false pretext is something that I think is not far-fetched. I wish it were, and one we have to be very, very vigilant about. Frum: They've built bureaucracies that are getting in the habit of breaking the law, and when you build a weapon, the weapon tends to go off. Rice: Well, look—that would be a nuclear weapon going off in the heart of our constitutional republic. And whether you voted for Donald Trump or not, whether you support Donald Trump or not, poll after poll shows that Americans want and expect their president to adhere to court orders, to respect the Constitution and the rule of law. And all of us, regardless of party affiliation, regardless of how we voted, have an obligation to insist and demand that the president and his administration abide by the rule of law in the Constitution, and when they don't, that they pay for it in the way that we hold our leaders accountable, which is at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. Frum: Ambassador Rice, thank you so much for your time. Rice: Thank you, David. [ Music ] Frum: I'm so grateful to Ambassador Susan Rice for joining me today. Thank you, too, for joining. I hope you'll share the program with your friends, subscribe to it, or share it on whatever platform you follow us on. And I hope you'll consider subscribing to The Atlantic. That's what you can do immediately to support the work of this program and so much other content that you get from The Atlantic. Please subscribe. Please follow us. Please share the content. Thank you for joining. I'll see you next week. [ Music ] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Week of Manufactured Trump Victories
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic's David Frum breaks down what he calls 'the week of the four scams'—a stunning display of misinformation and corruption from President Donald Trump involving fake trade deals, manipulated markets, and even a personal jet from Qatar. David is then joined by Indian Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Committee on External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor to examine the recent India-Pakistan cease-fire and just how much (or little) credit the Trump administration can fairly claim for brokering peace. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 6 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. At the very beginning of the first Trump presidency, back in 2017, I posted on Twitter the following thought: 'Regular reminder that Donald Trump's core competency is not dealmaking with powerful counter-parties. It is duping gullible victims.' That warning has seldom been more needed than it has been needed in the past days, which I call the week of the four scams. Over these past few days, Donald Trump has taken credit or introduced one after another piece of outrageous fiction, which he is presenting to the world as some tremendous achievement. And we need to be warned against it and to protect ourselves against it. Now, the first of the scams will supply the matter of my main conversation on the program today. That is Donald Trump's attempt to take credit for the India-Pakistan cease-fire. The India-Pakistan cease-fire is a real event. It actually happened. But Donald Trump's role in it was negligible, to say the least, as you'll hear when I speak to my guest today, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, who is chairman of the External Affairs Committee in the Indian Parliament and one of that country's leading voices for liberal and humane values. But now let's talk, in the interval, about the three scams that took place here on the home front. Two of them are the so-called trade deals that Trump has taken credit for: one with Britain, one with China. Now, these aren't deals in any traditional sense of the word. A trade agreement must be approved by Congress. It's a treaty. These are executive announcements, PR, press releases, concepts, plans, projects, noise. They don't amount to anything. Today, in May, American tariffs are dramatically higher than they were the day before Donald Trump took office. And the effort to make them scale up and to scale down is just a distraction, the way the dealer in a three-card monte game keeps up a line of pattern so that you don't notice that you are being deceived and robbed. The fourth of the scams is Donald Trump's project to accept from the Emirate of Qatar the personal gift of a jet—a jet plane—that would accrue to him personally during his time as president and that would then be kept by him and by his heirs, through the guise of the Trump Library and casino and fast-food restaurant, or whatever he calls it, but nothing that is going to be like any kind of charity. And it looks like the plane will keep operating and be available to him and to his family for use afterwards. It is the most astonishing act of brazen corruption in the history of the American presidency—in the history of many post-Soviet presidencies. I mean, it's un-American. It can't be compared to anything that has ever happened in American history. And it comes on top of the flow of funds to Donald Trump from all over the world via these strange meme coins that he keeps issuing, that someone is buying for no obvious business reason but as a way to direct funds to the pockets of the president. Let's talk a little bit more about these two trade deals because there's going to be an enormous attempt to make them seem real. You know, in a three-card-monte game, and as well as the dealer, there are often people in the crowd who are there to back up the dealer stories, to nudge people away from the tables if they look too closely and to entrap victims. And a lot of the pro-Trump media plays the role of these kinds of ropers and bumpers, as they're called. But those even in the independent media, we're not really very good at saying, This thing the president said, it doesn't mean anything. All that is happening here is the construction of a new apparatus of taxation that is imposed by the president at the president's discretion, that can be exempted by the president to people who give them favors or in exchange for various kinds of benefits—all of which is to shift the burden of taxation of the country from those best positioned to pay to those least positioned to pay. Swirling around all of this commotion, all of this noise, is massive amounts of insider trading. We have had volatility unlike anything seen in financial markets since the great crisis of 2008–09, and people who study the markets notice a lot of short selling and a lot of rapid buying just before the president makes major moves, as if important market players have been tipped off and are making bets in the trillions on which they're reaping profits in the hundreds of billions. It is just an astonishing thing that is happening. Meanwhile, the central act is the movement of taxation—because tariffs are taxes—from those best positioned to pay to those leased positioned to pay. A tariff is a tax on goods. It is a tax that falls on the consumer of those goods, and it is a tax on the consumer of anything that has any kind of imported component in it. Now, maybe a way to think about this is: Imagine a poor family eating a meal at home. Their table is tariffed. Their chairs are tariffed. The plates are tariffed. The knives and forks are tariffed. If they're having a frugal meal of pasta or spaghetti, the Canadian wheat that probably is the major ingredient in that pasta—that's tariffed too. Now imagine a wealthier family enjoying a meal in a restaurant, perhaps to celebrate the enormous reduction in their taxes that they're going to get as a result of the Trump tax deal. Now, their tables and their chairs and so forth, the knives and forks—they might be tariffed too, although they probably come from Europe rather than China, so they'll be tariffed at a lower rate. The most important cost in a restaurant meal is not the plate, not the chair, not the table, not the knife and fork, not even the food. The most important expenses are the wages of the chef, the wages of the server, and the rent on the space in which the restaurant is located. None of those things are tariffed. They are services, not goods, and so they escape the tax entirely. Richer people tend to spend more of their income on services than they do on goods. Poorer people spend more on goods than on services. And richer people, of course, can save and invest more of their income, and that escapes tariffs entirely. And the more of the income you spend on the services, the less you pay in tariffs. The working man's car, that's tariffed; the rich man's chauffeur, not tariffed. The poor girl's dolls, of which she's allowed so few by the Trump administration—those are tariffed. When the rich family hires a nanny to play dolls with the girls, the nanny salary is not tariffed. Towels are tariffed. Membership in a swimming club, where you use the towel, that's not tariffed. The doorknob is tariffed, but the doorman on Fifth Avenue: no tariff on him. It is very important when you listen to the Donald Trump show to keep your eye not on the game, but on the players and what they're about. And this jet story, this jet scam, is maybe the most revealing thing of all. It is just beyond shameful that such an offer would even get two minutes of consideration. Look—foreign governments, authoritarian governments, especially those like Qatar, which have these bad ties to Hamas and Iran and which are trying to buy favor in the United States, they're always approaching people. There's a whole apparatus of distance to keep things like that away from the president. The president doesn't normally say no. The president normally never even learns that the offer was made in the first place. But in this case, there are no guardrails and no protections. And so in our fourth scam, the offer comes to the president, and the president wants to say yes. Now, he may ultimately not be able to say yes. The gift of a jet to the president of the United States personally from a foreign Emirate, that may be too much even for Trump's usual apologists. But look how far we've come. Look how low we've sunk. It's a shame. It's a scandal. And the test for all of us is whether we can keep our eye on the main thing and to keep being shocked by things that are shocking. And now my discussion with Dr. Shashi Tharoor. But first a quick break. [] Frum: A terrorist outrage in Kashmir killed some 25 Indians on April 22. India and Pakistan have since mutually retaliated one upon the other. As we record this dialogue on the morning of Sunday, May 11, in Washington—the evening of Sunday, May 11, in the subcontinent—a cease-fire has taken hold. To discuss the very distressing and worrying events in the subcontinent, I'm very proud and pleased to be joined by Dr. Sashi Tharoor. To say Shashi Tharoor is an author and a member of the Indian Parliament is accurate so far as it goes but inadequate to the reality. His books have been massive sellers in India and the United Kingdom, and have had a great influence on all debate about Indian politics. He himself occupies a very important place as a politician that goes beyond the merely parliamentary. In a country where politics has for a long time been drifting in sectarian and authoritarian directions, Dr. Tharoor's public advocacy and political work elevate him as one of India's preeminent voices for secular and liberal politics. A graduate of the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, here in the United States, Dr. Tharoor spent much of his early career working in international organizations. He rose to be undersecretary general of the United Nations. In 2009, he was entered into Indian electoral politics and was elected to Parliament. He has been reelected three subsequent times, for a total of four—an unbroken career of success. He now heads the Parliamentary Committee on [External] Affairs in the Indian Parliament. Thank you so much for joining us today at this time of tension. Maybe you can begin by talking about the cease-fire. A cease-fire has taken hold. The Trump administration claims a lot of credit for brokering it. Do they deserve that credit? Shashi Tharoor: We were all a bit puzzled by President Trump's posts on Truth Social and on X, because India has historically been allergic to mediation. It doesn't believe it needs it, and it's unlikely to have invited mediation in a formal sense. On the other hand, it's true that the U.S. administration—in particular, Secretary of State and now also National Security Advisor Marco Rubio and, to some degree, Vice President Vance—have been speaking to Indian officials, as indeed, Indian officials have acknowledged. The foreign minister's tweets will tell us about these calls. But it's one thing for the Indian foreign minister to say to the Americans, Look—if the Pakistanis do this, we will do that. Or if they hit us, we are going to hit them harder back, and quite another for the foreign minister to say, Would you mind relaying this message to the Pakistanis? India would never do the latter. They would do the former, and I think what happened then, perhaps, is that Rubio then called the Pakistanis and said, Look—I've been talking to the Indians, and this is what they're saying, so you might want to take this into account. And would you not like to move in a different direction? That kind of thing. The initial Trump announcement gave the impression that the Americans and Indians and Pakistanis have been pulling an all-nighter, discussing everything jointly. That simply hasn't happened. And I think that's a misrepresentation of what role the U.S. played. But I certainly don't want to sound ungrateful for anybody who is willing to pull the Pakistanis down off the escalatory ladder that they had climbed onto. There was a terrorist outrage in India. India chose to react in a very careful, calculated, calibrated, and precise way only against terrorist infrastructure. It didn't strike any Pakistani military installations or any civilian nor governmental installations, and basically signaled, Look—we are only after terrorists, and we did this strike at 1:30 in the morning so there wouldn't be too many civilians about. We want to avoid all collateral damage. It was a very responsible strike that the Indians conducted. The Pakistanis chose to react with unnecessary escalation. They shelled very heavily civilian and occupied civilian inhabited areas of India, killing 22 civilians and hospitalizing a further 59 in the district of Poonch in Kashmir. And frankly, India had to respond—and did—very, very strongly. And when India responded, it also attacked places it had so far kept off limits. It hit Pakistani air bases, for example, very hard. Pakistan has, because there are no terrorist infrastructure in India to attack—Pakistan was assaulting Indian cities where ordinary human beings live. And that was simply unacceptable. We were able to use our air-defense shield to stop that, but we hit the Pakistanis hard where it hurt. Now, this escalation was leading nowhere for nobody. As far as India was concerned, they delivered their message to the terrorists. They were willing to stop. As far as Pakistan was concerned, they didn't know when to say that their honor was satisfied. And if the U.S. helped them to step off that ladder, the U.S. gave them an excuse to climb down off it, so much the better, because India had no interest in a prolonged war. What was very clear from the manner of the Indian strike to begin with, David, was that India was trying to signal from the very start: This is not the opening salvo in a long conflict. This is just a one-off retaliation to a terror attack, period. Nothing else. It's Pakistan that was taking it in the wrong direction, and I'm glad that stopped right now. Frum: Well, let me ask you more about this American mediation. You'll remember that in 2001 there [was], again, another outrage against India. [Former Secretary of State] Colin Powell personally inserted himself and worked very hard, deployed a lot of threats, actually, against the Pakistanis to bring about a cease-fire in 2008 after the terror attack in Mumbai, another outrage on Indian soil. [Former Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice was in person in the subcontinent and flew back and forth. That's what American mediation has looked like in the past, from our point of view. And not to make this story about the United States when it's a story about the people of the subcontinent, but it does look like the Trump administration showed up, took credit for something that had already happened, and now its main interest seems to be not a structure of peace but scoring some Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Donald Trump. Tharoor: (Laughs.) Oh, you said it, David. I didn't, and I probably would be unwise to say very much along those lines myself. I will say that mediation is possibly the wrong word. Mediation implies a request by both parties to be involved. In the two examples you gave, and a third example—the 1999 Kargil conflict, when President Clinton summoned the prime minister of Pakistan to Washington and told him to lay off, which he did—all those three cases were essentially the U.S. putting pressure on the Pakistanis, who in every case were in the wrong. They were the perpetrators of terror. They were the perpetrators of violence. And in the case of Kargil, they were the ones who had led an invasion of Indian territory. So in all those cases, the U.S. was telling one side. I would say that in this particular instance, in as much as there was any strong American messaging coming, it was almost certainly directed principally to the Pakistanis, because India at no stage wanted to prolong a war. See, India, David, is a status-quo power. It is a country that basically would be very happy to be left alone. There's nothing Pakistan has that we want. We would be very happy to focus on our own growth, our own development, the well-being and prosperity of our own people. We are a high-tech economy, moving in that direction. We are trying to find a way forward in the 21st century. We are already the world's fifth-largest economy in dollar terms, and in purchasing-power-parity terms are third-largest. So that's where our ambitions and aspirations are. We don't want to get bogged down into a meaningless war with a bunch of Islamist fanatics whose lust for our territory is what motivates them. When you are a status-quo power, what you want to do is to just continue with the way things are. Next door to us, unfortunately, is a revisionist power—a power that is not happy with the existing states of regional geopolitics and wants to upend it, and that's what the Pakistanis, sadly, are. So they couldn't do it by conventional means. They kept losing formal wars against us. So from 1989 onwards, having learned an unfortunate lesson from the success of the mujahideen against the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, from Pakistani soil, the Pakistanis decided to turn that technique against us. And they started unleashing mujahideen by various names and various terror organizations, front organizations, into Indian territory to wreak havoc against innocent Indian civilians. They've been doing that since 1989. This is year 36 of Pakistani terrorism. You can understand that we really have lost patience with this. Frum: One last question about the American role, because when you line up—and I should have mentioned—in 1999, 2001, 2008 and you see the pattern of the American involvement there, and then you contrast it with the pattern of American involvement in 2025, it does really look like the United States is a receding power in the world that mattered much more a quarter century ago than it does now, and that the Trump administration seems to want the accolades that it would get domestically from the assertion of great power status. But actually, it has given away that status, and maybe by its own neglect, maybe by some objective reality. Tharoor: Yeah, and there was some slightly confused messaging also coming out of all of this that the first statements of Mr. Trump were that, Oh, these Indians and Pakistanis have been fighting for thousands of years, which is slightly odd because Pakistan has only existed for 77 years as a country. So they haven't fought anybody for a century, let alone centuries or thousands of years. Then we had Mr. Vance saying, Oh, we have no business in this fight. Let them sort it out themselves. And then suddenly, within a day or two of these remarks, the same two people are taking credit for the cease-fire. I'm at a bit of a loss, frankly, about what they did. Certainly, there is no independent confirmation from the Indian side of any successful or serious negotiating effort by the U.S. here. It's possible that they did this with the Pakistanis, and we might learn more from the U.S.—there's always stories coming out in the U.S. media from reliable sources in Washington as to what exactly America did with Pakistan. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. But for now, I am at a bit of a loss, to answer your question, David. But the desire for accolades without too much of effort is a human foible, isn't it? It's something which too many people tend to want to do. Frum: It runs stronger in some human beings than in others. In a few, it's the overwhelming passion of life. Let me ask you: You alluded, I think, a little bit to what will be your answer to this question, but why is it so hard to reach an enduring peace in the subcontinent? The one smidgen of truth in Donald Trump's post about a thousand years is: For a thousand years, Hindu majority and Muslim majority—Hindu-ruled and Muslim-ruled—states have coexisted peacefully and successfully in the subcontinent. Why can't they do so now? Tharoor: Well, I mean, that's the irony of all of this. I mean, it's utter nonsense to imply that there is a thousand-year battle between Hindus and Muslims. On the contrary, every great Hindu king had Muslim soldiers and generals on his side. Every great Muslim king had Hindu generals and soldiers on his side. And the two communities have coexisted ever since the advent of Islam on the Indian subcontinent, which was within a century after the birth of the prophets. Indeed, in my own state of Kerala, Islam came peacefully through traders and merchants bringing it as news from the Arab world rather than coming as some sort of foreign conquest. So there's been a long and complicated history. But it's not all been hostile. The British during the colonial regime chose a very deliberate and deliberately militant policy of 'divide and rule,' where they actively fomented a distinctive Muslim identity as distinct from, a separate from a Hindu identity in order to prevent the two uniting against the British, as they had done in the revolt of 1857, when Hindus and Muslims alike rose up in arms against British rule. It was ruthlessly suppressed. The British butchered 150,000 civilians in Delhi alone in putting down that revolt. And then they adopted a conscious policy of divide and rule. Divide and rule meant that when the Indian National Congress was established as a representative body of Indian nationalists—in those days, very decorous Indian nationalist agitation for rights and political rights in India against the British—the British actually paid to establish a rival Muslim organization, called the Muslim League, in order to undermine the Indian National Congress. Finally, partition happened. Pakistan was carved out of the stooped shoulders of India by the departing British in 1947. And ever since, it has had to justify its existence as a separate country by an increasingly belligerent Islamism. This is why Pakistan was not only the source of these horrific attacks, such as the 26/11 attack, to which you alluded to—the butchery of 166 innocent people in Mumbai in 2008, all the earlier attacks on the Indian Parliament, the invasion of Kargil, and so on—but Pakistan was also the place that sheltered and protected Osama bin Laden for many years, until, as you know, he was found living in a safe house right near a Pakistani army encampment. This is Pakistan's history. It is a country that has, unfortunately, armed, trained, equipped, guided, and directed terrorism from its soil for decades as an instrument of state policy. It is a malcontented state that wants territory that India controls and that it can't have. It is a bigoted state that believes that all Muslims belong to it, so that the first loyalty of Muslims, even in India, should be to Pakistan, which—I'm sorry—is never going to be the case. It was very striking that one of the daily briefings that were being done by the Indian military featured an Indian woman colonel who was a Muslim. It was a very powerful message that India stood united. It was not about Hindu, Muslim. It was all about India standing united against terror. Pakistan doesn't understand that, because their state is built on a totally different set of premises. It's also, to paraphrase Voltaire on Prussia, a situation where India is a state that has an army; Pakistan is an army that has a state. And that army really controls the state, runs the state, controls the largest share of that country's GDP and governmental budget—larger than any army of any country in the world controls of its GDP and national budget. So for the army to continue its disproportionate dominance of Pakistan, it needs to be able to have enough external demons, in addition to the demons it has nurtured in its own backyard, in order to be able to point to the fact that it is the sole savior of its people. It's a very, very sad and pathetic story. The Osama bin Laden story was merely the tip of a very, very large mountain, I'm afraid, of this kind of thing. Hillary Clinton, rather memorably, said as secretary of state, when Pakistan tried to plead victim about its own terrorist problems with a group called the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, initially created by Pakistan, but which has deemed Pakistan to be insufficiently Islamist to its taste and that has turned out to be attacking Pakistan's military and political institutions—Hillary Clinton said, Well, if you nurture vipers in your backyard, some of them would turn around and bite you. And I think that was absolutely the right metaphor. That's what Pakistan has done. Vipers in your backyard is really a case of—to mix up the animals—the chickens coming home to roost in Pakistan. Very sad story, but that's the problem we are living with next-door to us. Frum: Pakistan is ideologically committed to the conflict, for reasons you described, but the wealth gap between India and Pakistan has been growing and growing and growing. Presumably, the power gap follows, although India has historically had difficulty turning wealth into power, for reasons you may want to explain. At some point, you would say, However ideologically committed you are to this conflict, it's not working, so peace becomes your logical outcome. But in the subcontinent, as indeed in the Israeli conflict with the various anti-Israel rejectionist groups around Israel, the logic of power that political scientists would predict doesn't seem to work. Why does it not work between Pakistan and India, where they say, You know what? We've just lost too many times. Tharoor: Yeah, but you've left out a very important force, unfortunately, in this equation, and that is China. China is sitting on our northern borders, nibbling away at our land. They have a long-standing frontier dispute with India. And Pakistan has been reduced to a client state of China over the years. China's single-largest project under its Belt and Road Initiative is a massive highway through Pakistan called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is of inestimable economic value to China because goods coming from the Suez Canal and from the Gulf countries can now be offloaded at the Port of Gwadar—in the southwestern tip of Pakistan, in Pakistan's Balochistan Province—and transported on this Chinese-built highway all the way directly into western China. Whereas in the past, and right up to then, these goods had to go all the way around India, through the Strait of Malacca, into the South China Sea, be offloaded in ports like Guangzhou, in southeastern China, and then transported laboriously overland all the way across to western China. They save 90 percent of the cost and 95 percent of the time by just being able to use Pakistan as a conduit for their goods into western China. So China has a huge interest in keeping Pakistan safe and secure and an obedient vessel state, which Pakistan is, indeed, happy to be. And China also has its own problems with India, which it would dearly like to cut down to size as a potential geopolitical rival in the area. So when you talk about the power gap between India and Pakistan, the difficulty we have is: We have two fronts we need to be worried about. We have a Pakistan front and a China front. And cumulatively, I'm sorry to say, we are not in a position, most unfortunately, to fight a two-front war. So we have a very complicated mix of diplomatic, military, and geopolitical calculations to make every time Pakistan triggers a problem with us. We've got to make sure we hit Pakistan hard so that they learn a lesson, but we also have to make sure we don't go to such a point that China feels obliged to come directly to Pakistan's rescue. The overwhelming majority of Pakistani weaponry—which means, I believe, as high as 90-odd percent of Pakistani weaponry—comes from China. That includes China's latest 4.5 generation J-10[C] fighter aircraft, their PL-15 missiles, and various other kinds of ammunition. So India's problem is that it is essentially having to juggle a number of geopolitical, diplomatic, as well as military considerations when it reacts to Pakistani provocations. We want to send the terrorists a message. We want to hit back whenever Pakistan hits us, but we don't want to get to a situation where we might end up, quite frankly, provoking a more direct Chinese involvement, because India is not particularly keen on entering into a two-front war with both Pakistan and China. So it's a complication. When you look at the power asymmetry, as you mentioned, you are not just comparing India and Pakistan; you're comparing India against both Pakistan and China, and then the comparison doesn't look that good for India. Frum: But as China has colonized Pakistan in this way over the past generation, a succession of American presidents—starting with Bill Clinton, developing very rapidly under George W. Bush (the president for whom I worked), under President Obama a little maybe less energetically—have sought to build an American-Indian partnership that is closer and closer. And there are a lot of difficulties in the way of this, but there has been effort very much on the U.S. side, a little more doubt on the Indian side. President Trump has just slammed India with a whole new set of punitive tariffs, undercutting all the fine things that he and his vice president say about India. How would you assess the state of that U.S.-India partnership so founded by Bill Clinton and nurtured by W. Bush and President Obama. Tharoor: Well, you know, and even in the first Trump administration, it was going fine. I mean, I would've said that, in many ways, the India-U.S. relationship was above partisan politics, that it certainly transcends the political divide within India, and appeared to have transcended the political divide of the U.S.—because both Bush and Clinton, both Obama and Trump 1.0 all supported a very close relationship. But everything has become very confused in Trump 2.0. There have been the tariffs, which certainly have hurt India quite significantly. There have been the very, very stringent policies with regard to immigration—including legal immigration, H-1B visas, spouse reunions, and so on—which tends disproportionately to hit Indian techies who provide a lot of IT services in the U.S. and who obviously want their families to join them and so on, who are going to find that challenging. But even more, Mr. Trump's statement yesterday and today has been very troubling because it de facto handed Pakistan a victory that Pakistan has not earned. By choosing unnecessarily to imply an equivalence between India and Pakistan, it was equating the victim and the perpetrator. By speaking in terms of getting the two to sit down together and talk to end their thousands of years of conflict, apart from the fact that it hasn't been thousands of years, there is a fact that we are certainly not going to give Pakistan the satisfaction of earning negotiating rights at the point of a gun. We are not going to talk to the Pakistanis after what they have done to us by killing innocent civilians. And I'm sorry—if that's what Mr. Trump wants, he's not going to get it. Thirdly, he has given the Pakistanis the victory of re-internationalizing the Kashmir dispute, which had been off the international agenda for quite some time, and he has done India the grave disservice of re-hyphenating India and Pakistan in the American imagination, which had been de-hyphenated since the days of Clinton. You will notice, David, that since the days of President Clinton, no American president has actually visited both countries on the same trip. They have very deliberately sent a signal that India is a country you deal with in its own right. It's not something we twin with Pakistan in the American imagination. Sadly, Mr. Trump's post has done all of these four things, and I think it shows that he has not yet been rather well briefed. What's striking is that he has named a proposed assistant secretary of state for South Asia who is a very knowledgeable scholar about South Asia and about India, and who is himself partly of Indian American origin, and who would, I believe, know far better than to say the kinds of things that President Trump has said on Truth Social—which are, in that sense, an embarrassment to the last quarter century of American policy. It has really upended all of these fundamental assumptions of the U.S.-India relationship. Frum: Now, let me ask you a question about—speaking about Indian in its own right—about Indian domestic politics. The political tradition from which you come and, indeed, your life's work has been to speak for India as a nonsectarian state, a state of Muslim and Sikh and other minorities. And I will note here for those who—you will know this history, but—many forget that the Indian army that liberated Bangladesh in 1971 was led by a Jewish officer, which is a detail that is often forgotten. Tharoor: Yeah. Not led; it was more complicated. We had—the army was commanded by a Parsi Zoroastrian, the tiny minority. The general officer commanding the Eastern command, the forces that marched into Bangladesh, was a Sikh. The vice chief of the air staff was a Muslim. And the major general who was helicoptered into Dakar to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani army at the end of that war was Jewish. Major General J. F. R. Jacob was a friend of mine, a remarkable gentleman, now no longer with us. But that was India, David. That's what India is all about. It's just a country of such immense diversity that it really is a microcosm of all that's fine about pluralism as a social construct. Frum: That said, over the past decade and a half, India has emigrated away from that tradition to a great extent. And you see a rise of sectarian and authoritarian politics in India. And I don't say this to cast aspersions. We have seen it in the United States. Why should you be any different from the rest of the world? But it has become to the point where people sometimes fear India becoming a Hindu Pakistan—chauvinist, sectarian, authoritarian. How worried should we be? How strong are the forces of opposition to the tendency? And the last question—maybe we can break this into a separate part: How is this affecting the way the authoritarian and sectarian elements in the United States think about India? Tharoor: Okay, so first of all, as far as India's concerned: I mean, this is a battle we fight daily on our own soil. And I have been—I hope I'm acknowledged as—being a very strong voice against sectarian tendencies in our politics. I believe strongly and passionately that every Indian has the same rights as every other Indian and that their religion, their language, their ethnicity, their color, the region or the state they come from have absolutely no bearing on their rights as an Indian and their contributions to this great country. And in many ways, my notion of Indianness is comparable to most Americans' idea of civic nationalism in America, where you all belong and you're sheltered by this collective identity. You can be Jewish. You can be—whatever—Californian. You could be Hungarian speaking, whatever. But you are who you are because being American makes it possible. And it's the same for us in India. And you can be a good Muslim, a good Gujarati, and a good Indian all at once because that Indianness is what protects your ability to be all of that. And I fought for that idea, and I will do so till my last breath. But having said that, when it comes to something like a conflict with Pakistan, it's very interesting how quickly some of these divisions in our internal domestic politics disappear. And as I mentioned to you, the striking sight in the daily briefings of an Indian woman military officer who is a Muslim sent a very powerful message, both at home and abroad: This is who we are. That's not who we are, not the guys across the border with their sectarian bigotry. And to my mind, that was actually a very welcome reminder. The second paradox, David, is that this government—despite the fact that it has presided over some of the worst tendencies of bigotry and encouraged intolerance within Indian society—has actually been a remarkably good government when it comes to strengthening India's relations with the Arab and Muslim world. It's quite astonishing to see, for example, the closeness of India's relations with Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. and Egypt, all of which have never been better. And it's striking that's happening on the watch of a government that domestically has been rightly criticized for some of its statements and actions with regard to the Muslim minority. So there is hope yet. I do believe that we are going through a certain churn in our politics. You are quite right that it's reminiscent in many ways of what we're seeing around the world—the same degree of xenophobia and rejection of the 'people not like us' kind of thing that you've seen in the U.S., in Brexit in Britain, in Hungary, in Erdoğan's Turkey, and so on. Right across the world, there've been a lot of these tendencies, and we're seeing it rising in many parts of liberal Western Europe with the rise of AfD in Germany or the equivalent party in Austria. There have been suddenly elements given a free reign to say, We are more authentic representatives of the country than these people who worship foreign gods and speak foreign tongues. And that sort of thing, I'm afraid, is what has also been rising in India. But I do believe that liberal, pluralistic, humane values have not been snuffed out. We are going to continue to keep them aloft in my country. Frum: Well, you'll remember the Howdy Modi event in Houston, Texas, where in Trump's first term— Tharoor: Right. Frum: —where he gave a very personal greeting to Prime Minister Modi, of a kind that previous American presidents have tried absolutely to subordinate—to say, This is not a personal relationship. It's: Bush Clinton doesn't matter; whoever is the head of government in India doesn't matter. This is a national, nation-to-nation, people-to-people relationship. But there do seem to be elements in the Trump administration (the vice president is one) that—I don't want to overstate this, but—seem to be indicating that a more Hindu, chauvinist India is what they want, just the way they want to see neo-Nazis or neofascists prevail in many European countries. And I know you're speaking to an American audience, and you want to preserve national unity, but can you talk a little bit about, from an American point of view: Are they right that the United States would be better off with a more Hindu, chauvinist India? Tharoor: Look—I don't think the U.S. would be better off with one or the other kind of group in India. I think that the U.S.—this particular administration—may be equally comfortable with people of that persuasion. Whereas arguably, someone like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would not have been comfortable with a more explicitly sectarian Indian government. In fact, Obama made a famous speech in Delhi calling for greater religious tolerance at a time when Mr. Modi's government was still pretty new. So there is a difference, yes, in your domestic politics between a more liberal government and a government that considers itself more conservative. But ultimately, I still would like to believe, David, that this relationship is above and beyond that—that if tomorrow, a more liberal Indian dispensation came to power, that there would still be enough forces in America that would want to preserve a good relationship with it. One factor, undoubtedly, is the extraordinary influence of the Indian American diaspora. It's now 3.4 million strong, which is, oh, a good 1 percent of your population, heading a little above 1 percent. And these are people with a tremendous contribution being made to America. They have the largest single median income of any ethnic group, higher than Japanese Americans, higher than white Americans. They're making significant contributions in a number of cutting-edge sectors. They're technologists. They're computer geeks. They're doctors and medical people. They're bio-technologists. They do all sorts of things in fields that America values. They've not only done all of that—they've also got involved in your politics. There are Indian Americans among top fundraisers going back to George Bush Sr., whose leading fundraiser was an Indian American dentist in Florida. You've had Indian Americans on the campaign trail. You've had Indian Americans getting elected to office. Nikki Haley is an Indian American. Bobby Jindal is an Indian American. And of course, there will be more. There are half a dozen people of Indian origin in the U.S. Congress right now, today—six of them. So you're looking at a community that's not only made a valuable contribution to America but that is visible, is active, is engaged in your social and political life, and therefore cannot be ignored. By extension, the country they came from and still in many cases care about cannot be ignored. Just as, you know, Jewish Americans have an impact on America's policy towards Israel, I expect Indian Americans to continue to have an impact on America's policy towards India. And I believe that will be the case, whoever forms the government in India. I may be wrong, David. We'll find out the hard way. But as of now, the changing complexion of Indian politics may not make such a difference to the U.S. attitude to India, because there are now more and more sort of permanent structural factors sustaining that relationship, including the presence and role of the Indian diaspora in America. Frum: Will the cease-fire hold? Tharoor: I think so, yes. I don't really think that Pakistan has much to gain from starting a new misadventure, because India has been able to demonstrate that they can hit very hard. They've destroyed the runway in a major air base, called the Rahim Yar Khan Air Base, and have severely damaged another air base, the Air Marshal Nur Khan Air Base, which is right next to Pakistani military headquarters GHQ Rawalpindi, not far from the capital of the country. So I think it's been a sobering wake up to the Pakistanis that this is not an adversary you want to monkey around with. Now, did they achieve their goals? Partially, yes. And Mr. Trump's statement would be cause of rejoicing in Islamabad, that, Look—we are back on the map with the U.S. They're treating us as the equal of the Indians. So they might feel that, Look—we pulled off something very good by doing what we did. I don't think they would see a reason now to get back again to the battlefield and possibly risk further defeat and further opprobrium. They would actually feel they've actually pulled off something here. So I think not, and as far as India's concerned, India has never been the belligerent, has no interest, whatever, in initiating conflict, and ideally wants to be left alone by Pakistan to get on with its own business and focus on its economy. So for all these reasons, I believe the cease-fire could hold, can hold, should be holding. But it's not even 24 hours yet. And in fact, on the first day of the cease-fire—which in our time zone, it's yesterday evening—I'm afraid the Pakistanis violated it in three places by sending missiles across to Indian cities, hitting civilian targets, homes, and cars. We were able to stop many of those missiles, but we did take a few blows. And we hit back, as well, in retaliation. So the message is very clear, David. If the Pakistanis can't curb their hot heads and if they fire at us, we will fire back, and we will fire back very hard. But if they are able to curb their worst instincts and behave and actually hold their fire, we have no intention whatsoever of initiating any action. We would like the peace to hold, and we'd like to get on with our lives. Frum: Thank you so much for making the time for us today. Tharoor: Thank you, David. Really good speaking to you. [] Frum: Thanks to Dr. Tharoor for joining me on the program. Because of the substance and length of our discussion today, we'll omit the viewer-question part of the program this week. I hope you will send questions for next week's programs to producer@ and I hope you'll join us again next week for the next episode of The David From Show. Remember, if you like what you hear at the on The David Frum Show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the Atlantic at That's And please like, subscribe, rate, review, share it any way you can, the content of this program, if you enjoy it and find it a value. We are already past in our first five episodes 1.5 million views and downloads on video and audio platforms. We hope to keep growing. We need your help to do that. So please rate, review, like, subscribe, share in any way you can, and subscribe to The Atlantic at Thank you. I'm David Frum. See you next week. [] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
