The View from Canada

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Zachary Karabell: What lesson from your time as a speech writer in the White House still guides your thinking today?

David Frum: I would often be taken aside by, well-meaning people who would say, I’ve written a few words that I think it would really help President Bush to say. And I’d read it and it would be all like something from an American president or the West Wing, some Kennedyesque rhetoric, nor I, you then, which this never shall we.

Have you ever read this out loud? Do you know what this would sound like? That’s not how Americans talk. They’ve invented television, they’ve invented the radio, they’ve invented the microphone. You have to talk colloquially and demotically. The point of rhetoric isn’t to be chiseled into marble. It is to talk to people as they actually exist In your time. If you found yourself sounding like Aaron Sorkin, stop, delete, reverse.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, founder of the Progress Network, joined as always by my co-host, Emma Varvaloucas, executive director of the Progress Network. And today we’re gonna talk to somebody who is one of the more deep thinkers and has been a deep doer as well. He has both walked the walk and talked the talk politically.

So who are we gonna talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: All right, today we are talking to David Frum, he’s a renowned political commentator, currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he was also a former speech writer for President George W. Bush. He’s written a couple books about Trump as well. And how could we have a conversation about politics without talking about Trump right now? They are called Trump Apocalypse, and the second one is called Trumpocracy.

You can also listen to David on his own podcast, which is called the David Frum Show. So are we ready to go talk to Mr. Frum.

Zachary Karabell: We are ready.

David Frum, what a pleasure to have you on our show. And I know you’ve just launched your own podcast, so maybe this is a little bit of a, making sure you re, you remember what it’s like to be on the other side of the mic so that you can enhance that for your show going forward. This is kind of like, be on both sides.

I wanna ask, given your background and given that suddenly Canada is unusually in the news, I have to say one of the true surprises amongst many other surprises of the first episodes of the second season of the Trump show has been the sudden starring, unexpected, not just cameo, but repeated guest appearances of Canada in a leading role.

You’ve spent a lot of time in Canada, you are Canadian, you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States. What’s the view from Canada? I mean, separate from what the hell is with Donald Trump as a view from Canada? What is the, the, the feeling of like, ’cause you know, this is also the United States as represented by this current president.

David Frum: Let me start by laying down my Canadian credentials. I, I was born in Canada. I spent my early life in Canada. I am active in, I have a part of a family business that operates in Canada. I own a house in Ontario and spend much of the year there. And probably worth noting here that I own a cemetery plot there where my daughter is buried and where my wife and I will follow. So Canada is is very central to where we are.

We’re also naturalized US citizens, both my wife and I, and we spend the majority of our time in the United States. And I’ve always played at the boundary between two countries. One of the questions that I’ve been asked in 30 years of writing about both Canada and the United States from the United States is Canadians will visit and say, what can we do to pay, get Americans to pay more attention to Canada? And my reply was always count your blessings. The less, less is more.

And I think Canadians have have experienced painfully how bad it is when suddenly there is so much American attention to Canada because it is not friendly. And I know from the American point of view, a lot of this looks like a joke, but from a Canadian point of view, it is profoundly disorienting, laden with feelings of betrayal disillusionment because Canada’s national strategy since the end of the Second World War, has been based on the warmest possible relationship with the United States and across a range of issues that are invisible to most people. Environmental issues, migratory birds, transportation, national security. Canada and the United States are integrated into one defense space, the North American Air Defense command. If there are intruders into Canadian airspace, the the chain of command goes up to Colorado Springs where NORAD command is. So I think the feeling camp is, uh, is like someone you trust and relied upon, has turned on you for in inexplicable reasons.

It’s like a marriage that goes bad suddenly, and the shock and anger are intense and more intense, and I, I can’t remember anything like it.

Emma Varvaloucas: You just likens the relationship to a marriage going bad. Like is the feeling the marriage has gone bad and then maybe after four years we’ll go counseling and work through our issues? Or is it like we’re getting a divorce even after Trump leaves the White House?

David Frum: There’s no divorce because geography doesn’t change, so Canada does have to, but the lessons of the past months will not rapidly be forgotten.

Let me put this in a light, slightly personal terms. So in 1988, Canada fought an election over the issue of entering a bilateral free trade agreement with the United States until this present election just now, it was the most emotional election, certainly of my lifetime. And those of us, I was one who supported the treaty, were challenged by people who had a kind of darker view of the United States. And my side won the debate by saying, you can rely on the Americans to behave in a responsible way. And that, we won that debate and we won future debates in Canada, since the middle 1980s has moved toward ever closer integration with the United States.

In a way, the whole 51st State claim, the thing that makes it so crazy is in so many ways, Canada is a 51st state. If you’re a lawyer practicing law in Chicago and you get relocated to Toronto, if you’re in contract law, it’ll take you a couple of hours to get up to speed. If you’re in criminal law, maybe a little longer if you’re in constitutional law, maybe a little longer than that, but it’s the same legal system, same financial system, basically.

The Bank of banks operate a little differently. You know, the, the, the, these, it’s this integrated reality and all of the, all of us who argued this was for the best. We look like fools and, and I think Canadians will not soon forget that. You know what, the move from the biggest move in logic is from non-existence to existence. So from impossible to possible, so, right? I mean, it’s still exceedingly unlikely that there would be American military aggression against Canada, but Canadians talk about it in a way that a year and a half ago, if you, people would’ve thought you were on drugs. But given that Donald Trump is willing to use, has spoken and said, I’m not taking off the table using military aggression against Denmark, a NATO partner to seize Greenland, a territory of the United States is compelled by treaty to protect. This is a, a new face of America. And you once seen it can’t be unseen.

Zachary Karabell: I don’t know that it would be fair to say you are indeed fools. The people who supported the 1988 integration or NAFTA in 92, 93 are fools in that it’s 36 years. You know, history changes, countries change, things that were eminently reasonable at one moment in time, maybe less so at another moment in time.

But that doesn’t make you retroactively.

David Frum: No. I, I, I said we look like fools. 

Zachary Karabell: No, no, I’m done. I’m, I’m saying, I’m not saying you feel that way. 

David Frum: I don’t, I don’t personally regret it, but I just, I, I’m conscious of how it looks.

Zachary Karabell: Right. No, I, I guess I’m saying, you know, even that is kind of a mistake of like, things do change. Like there’s no such thing as total stasis, particularly in international relations. There is fluidity of borders, you know, state borders shift, like, so the idea that something is gonna be true in perpetuity, I mean, we would hope that peace is true in perpetuity, but as we observe from human history, you know, even that seems unlikely, if not, something to strive for.

David Frum: We record this in the week that is the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, which Donald Trump and his “look at me” way has said we should both regard as the day of triumphalism and also triumphalism in which Donald Trump should get his share of the credit because you know, yeah, Patton and Eisenhower and Roosevelt, they were all important.

But, but what, what’s really important is that until now there hasn’t been a leader who’s boasted enough about this. And so this is to your point about how things look different. In May of 1945, there was not an American who alive, who believed that things were over, because everyone, except for the handful of people, were a party to the atomic secret, expected the war would last at least another year, would involve many, many more American casualties, and there would have to be something probably like an invasion of the home islands of Japan, which would be much bloodier as Germany laid down its arms.

In May of 1945, the battle was raging on Okinawa that would claim 50,000 American killed and wounded, one of the bloodiest battles in, of the war one, Certainly I think the bloodiest battle of the Pacific campaign. But from our point of view, what we can see now is that that. Those events in May 45 were not, were the end of something that the war in Europe, but also the beginning of a chapter of peace and reconciliation and American leadership and global institutions.

And you say things come to an end, that in the Trump era is something that looks like it’s coming to an end and it just, it’s heartbreaking for those of us who have believed in that order. It’s also challenging because we shouldn’t give up without a fight. We need to get it back, but there’s no denying that we have taken a real detour from the proudest path of American history since 1945 onto the most shameful.

Emma Varvaloucas: One of the surprising things that has, that has happened since Trump was elected was the election of Mark Carney in Canada. Now, we also have a big landslide in Australia. People are dubbing this, you know, like the, the Trump effect sort of, we had this anti incumbent wave after the pandemic and how it seems we were having an anti-Trump wave. Can you explain a little bit about how the Canadians got there? I mean, Trudeau was so unpopular, you know, towards the end of his, his term, and then suddenly they were like, no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do the lives again. So what, what happened?

David Frum: So Justin Trudeau is Prime Minister for 10 years, from 2015 to 2025. He came to power at a time and Canadians remembered the Great Recession. It was still very fresh. The Great Recession of 2008, 2009, Canada came outta the great recession of 2008, 2009, the most successful of the G7 countries. It was the first to return to pre-crisis levels of employment and output, both in 2010 and 11, Canadian incumbents did very well because they could run on. People would just look and say, whatever you’re doing, it’s obviously much better than what’s happening in the United States. So keep at it. We’re rewarding you.

Justin Trudeau then took those feelings of trust and authority that had been earned during the after response to the Great Recession, quite the opposite of the feeling in the United States, and he used them to do a lot of things that were very adventurous and that failed. And Canadian, the Canadian economy underperformed for the 10 years and, and particularly it underperformed in terms of productivity growth that began to lag very farther and farther and farther behind American productivity growth. So Trudeau’s response to that was to say, okay, our economy is failing to produce more output per person. What if we import a lot more people to goose the output that way? So we won’t produce any more per person, but we’ll have more people so our economy will be bigger. And so Canada already had very high levels of immigration and he effectively doubled the levels of immigration over the very high.

And Canada’s a very opening and hospitable country, but there are limits everywhere, especially when you have no plan to build more housing. One of the ways that Canada’s different from the United States is there are not so many job markets. There’s no Canadian equivalent of Denver. There is Vancouver, there’s Toronto, there’s Calgary, there’s Ottawa, there’s maybe Kitchen or Waterloo. That’s about it for places where the major job growth occurs and housing in those places is in, in Vancouver, because of the mountains in the ocean. Difficult to add more in Toronto. Toronto’s choking on traffic. Ottawa and Calgary are a little easier, but still the price of housing went wild.

And so it was that the catch up of the economy’s not performing the government’s strategy for economic failure. More immigration is driving up housing prices we’re done with this. And so going into the 2025 election cycle, Trudeau was, as you say, massively rejected. He was, his party was 20 plus points behind the polls. The Liberal party of Canada is not like the Democratic Party of the United States. It the most purposeful seeker after power of any political organization in the democratic world. Democrats lose elections over abstract points over all, all the time. Liberals don’t. They say, You don’t like what we’re doing, fine. We’ll do the opposite. Because what really matters is printing contracts and patronage. And we’re not, we’re not about those so-called ideas. We’re about holding onto power. And so they junk Trudeau brought in Mark Carney, who is as unlike Trudeau as it’s possible for two human beings to be unlike. Meanwhile, the Trump threat materialized, and then Canadians realized that they were, the phrase has been used, this wasn’t an election, it was a job interview.

Canada’s two big parties, liberals and conservatives, and a number of little parties, left wing NDP, regional Bloc Québécois, also Green Party. And the tendency over the past generation has been for the two big parties to shrink and the fringe parties to grow. In this election, the vote consolidated in the two big parties to an extent and sought not seen since the 1950s. I think the two, the two of them won to be between the more than 80% of the vote, which hasn’t been seen since, since the 1950s. And then it became very much a personal question of which of the two leaders, Canadians were ready for capital C, Conservative policies. But they took, they interviewed the two leaders and decided that Carney was the person who they thought was better suited to go eyeball to eyeball with Trump. And so he reversed a 20 plus point deficit and won a pretty decisive victory.

Zachary Karabell: This is a good segue ’cause I wanna ask you a bit about your own intellectual, political ideological journey. You were kind of came to whatever prominence you had as a centrist Republican and were very much in that world I think that’s fair to say in in the US separate from what you were within the Canadian context, and have over the past 10 years, either because you’ve changed or the spectrum has changed, are much more what people would think of as a centrist Democrat. I’m not saying that’s a fair characterization, I’m just saying given the nature of the spectrum today, now it may be like Irving Kristol, famous 20th century neo-conservative intellectual, founded The National Interest was one once asked how he explained his own intellectual journey from being nearly a Trotskyite in the thirties to kind of a liberal Democrat in the forties to a conservative Democrat sixties to a Republican in the eighties. And he just b, blithely remarked, you know, I was right then and I’m right now.

Do you feel that your views have shifted dramatically or is it something that the spectrum has shifted so radically and you’ve kind of stayed the same?

David Frum: I’m not sure I’m worth that much introspection, but to the extent that it’s interesting to anybody.

Zachary Karabell: We’re all worth a little bit of introspection, David.

David Frum: I think both. So I think what happens, um in, to anybody in politics is you start off believing something’s very intensely. I. And then other things come along as part of a package deal that you say, I think that this about subject X, therefore I probably am going to think that about subject Y.

But there’s subjects you think harder about and subjects you think less hard about. Partly ’cause of the times dictate what what questions are at at the fore. You know, we all used to have a lot of opinions about nuclear arms control between the United States and the Soviet Union, and relatively few of us have intense opinions about nuclear arms control anymore.

Is the question just as, less pressing? There are ways I have not changed. I’ve always been a believer in market economies at home and abroad. Free trade is a system I’ve always believed in collective security under American leadership, I’ve always understood free trade is essential to a collective security regime. I’ve always hated dictatorships and I’ve taken them very personally. I’m I’m, I’m the product of a lot of my own personal background on that, and I, I won’t go into that, take time on that. But what I ended up doing was because of the nature of the politics of the time, ended up. Aligning myself with and to a great degree, accepting not to, without thinking very hard about a lot of more socially conservative or even socially reactionary positions, because I thought, well, the socially conservative social, even socially reactionary people are the key allies in standing up to the Soviet Union, then let’s give them some of what they want.

So where the times changes, a lot of things, things are constantly reoriented, and what you discover is, I hated the Soviet Union because it was a system that destroyed human dignity and freedom, but other people hated the Soviet Union because they regarded as de Christianizing and anti-Christianizing. If the repression of human freedom was done in the name of Christianity, then it would be okay. And that didn’t seem a very important distinction in 1985. It’s a very important distinction in 2025. And so one way I think that I’ve, I have changed is I’ve become much more worried. I’ve become much more aware of the where social reactionary people are not my allies.

Let me give you a very concrete example from the latest news. When Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Bessent defend their collapsing tariff regime by saying, how many dolls do little girls need? How many colored pencils do little girls need? What I notice in a way that I probably wouldn’t have done 20 years ago is, isn’t it interesting they’re picking on little girls? Because you know what else uses a lot of foreign components, outboard motors, everything in an outboard mo, an outboard, they’re made in the United States, but they’re assembled it of Chinese components. Would Donald Trump ever say, do Americans need to own their own boats? Which are also a luxury, maybe more than dolls and pencils, but he wouldn’t because that’s a male indulgence and a male luxury.

So what has not changed is my belief in free trade as not just efficient, but also a, a way to secure peace and cohesion among the democracies. I still believe that passionately, maybe even more passionately, but what I would not have noticed 20 years ago is when someone’s move against free trade is driven by an appeal to unspoken dislike, and contempt for women. And now I notice it.

Emma Varvaloucas: Where did that, that line of thinking originate for you personally? I mean, I feel like that’s something that people would associate less with that just Democrats and more with progressive Democrats. It’s certainly something that I’m sympathetic to, but I do wonder like where that line began to be drawn for you in terms of understanding Trump’s rhetoric about trade as being based in contempt for women, which is something that you could extrapolate to a lot of different things about Trump, right?

David Frum: Once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing it. So when you listen to. People and J.D. Vance is a more intellectual and more intelligent version of Donald Trump. What’s so special about manufacturing jobs? Why is it better? Especially if you know anything about what manufacturing used to be and how dangerous and unpleasant most manufacturer, and people imagine it as it’s like all UAW jobs at $65 an hour with three weeks holiday. And, but, but not everyone was in the UAW, a lot of manufacturing was textiles and, you know, and, and components. A lot of it was real, was minimum wage. Very dangerous. You did not want to, and even within the auto plant, you did not want to be the person pushing a cart with the big vat of poisonous paint that could tip over at any time. Those jobs were really unpleasant and progress has robotized or eliminated many of those jobs. So why are manufacturing jobs so great? When people have a choice, they choose not to have them. Why? Why? Why is it a project of the state to promote manufacturing at the expense of other productive economic activity?

And when you listen to a J.D. Vance, they conjure a vision of the domestic arrangement that it facilitates because manufacturing work is often physically demanding and dangerous, it draws men more than women. A society that pays manufacturing jobs more than other jobs is one that will pay men more than women. And if you’re real concerned, I notice a lot of the people, a lot of the, sort of the more eggheady people in the J.D. Vance orbit, they’re not so concerned about the economy. What they’re concerned about is restoring male leadership within the married household. Men, when they think about not the jobs they want for themselves, obviously they, they write articles for magazines, but the jobs they want for other people, they realize that the, the manufacturing economy of the 1950s un, supported a domestic economy that is, they look on with nostalgia.

And so if you are, as you become more and more confronting their economic ideas, you know, this isn’t, there, there are people go on tv. There, there, there’s now a, I won’t name them, but they’re a wave of talkers who are suddenly appearing because it’s very hard to find people to defend the Trump tariffs who, who both understand economics and are people of good character. So you’re, you’re forced either to find people of bad character or people who don’t understand economics and, and when you see they’re suddenly all over television, why are they there? What is motivating them? And you realize it’s a reactionary social agenda. That’s what they care about and that, that’s why they get drawn into the defense of these otherwise idiotic and indefensible tariff policies.

Zachary Karabell: Well, you could come up with a rational and reasonable defense of tariff policies if it were twined with aggressive domestic hyperspending to reindustrialize or. 

David Frum: No, no, no, no, no. That’s, that’s the point. So.

Zachary Karabell: I’m, wait, I’m not saying that’s a good idea. I’m just saying. 

David Frum: No, it can’t. 

Zachary Karabell: We’re gonna spend $2 trillion.

David Frum: It can’t work. Okay. Stop, stop, stop, stop. The thing you have to understand before you understand anything about this is the reason America has a trade deficit is because it has a fiscal deficit that if, when, when, when the United States government borrows a lot of money, it creates a lot of financial instruments denominated in dollars that go out into the world. And when you send those, those, those instruments out into the world, when you, they flow through to effect the value of the currency and the, and the, and the, and the way business is done inside the United States. The fiscal deficit drives the trade deficit. So it, it, it is like saying, you know, I’m, it is like running the air conditioning and opening the windows on a hot Arizona day to do both at the same time.

You if the, the, the, the policy that would make, if you want, if your job was rein industrialize America, you have to shrink the deficit if the fiscal deficit while controlling the trade deficit and accept by the way, the impoverishment of the population. ’cause there’s no way, because the tariffs are attacks on the working part of the population, and they also make everyday goods more expensive.

So the policy is fiscal, fiscal austerity. It’s, it’s what you would do during a war, fiscal austerity, downwardly, mobile burden, flow of burden, taxation in order to make the economy more on target. That’s, that’s if you’re gonna be literate about it, that’s what, and that, and that’s the thing that no one will tell you what this means.

We are going to put the United States essentially on a war footing, to fight a war, not just against China, but against the whole world.

Zachary Karabell: My essential point was you could construct a strategic policy whereby tariffs made sense within that autarkic end game. But it would be a radical remaking of society a la a wartime economy. It would be more of a command and control state driven kind of a Chinese economy, but in a way that the Chinese don’t even do, ’cause they’re much more decentralized than we think, in a way that where there is zero buy-in and no one’s even talking about it. So, I mean, it’s a hypothetical universe. It’s not a real universe.

David Frum: You’re going to need capital controls too.

Zachary Karabell: Right, because otherwise people are gonna yank all their money from treasuries. 

David Frum: Yeah, so yeah. So yeah, what you’re doing is, I mean, the, the thing that is so crazy about this is you have all these tech bros who, the only book they’ve ever read is Atlas Shrugged. And they always, they always believe they’re the heroes of Atlas Shrugged and they’re building an economy that is the economy of the villains in Atlas Shrugged.

I mean, it is a com as you say, if there was ever a time when you could imagine a free market within the boundaries of the United States and a controlled market at the border of the United States, that time has long since passed. One reason that why, what, what Trump is doing is so if he continues with it, and he may, by the time the show is posted, by the way, already have done this, because I think the way the exit he’s looking for is he’s gonna get some piece of paper with the word trade agreement with India on the headlines and, and then say, see, I won. Now I get to cancel most of this.

In the days of past tariffs, in the days of, say, Smoot-Hawley and the, the, the Depression Era, shipping costs were very, very high compared to what they are now. And so the United States was already a much more isolated economy just because the, the, the fact of distance and the things had to, goods had to move in ways that were quite expensive. The United States is now, because of cheap shipping, much more integrated in the global economy. So these tariffs are much more of a shock both to the United States and the rest of the world than anything could have been in 1930.

Emma Varvaloucas: So David, I wanted to talk a little bit about like the moment that we’re in. Some people think that, you know, democracy’s not precipice, Zachary’s a little bit more calm about it. Do you think that Americans are kind of needing the moment?

David Frum: I was born in 1960, came of age in the 1970s, and the story about democracy and especially American democracy, that a person of my cohort was racist with this. A very imperfect story. A lot of shameful incidents in the past. I. But it’s basically a story of progress and triumph of the abolitionists of this, the spread of political and economic rights of the integration of women, of the Civil Rights Act.

And, and so things get better and better and, but not in an unease, not in an easy way. There are a lot of crises along the way, but the path is up, up, up, and up with only occasional steps downward. And that was a story that was very specific to my time. Now looking at it today, you say, you know what? There’s another way to take those same facts and tell a different story, which is, there are a lot of periods where things went into reverse. You know, there there many of the states a af, after the Declaration of Independence of the writing of the Constitution. The northern states all abolish slavery. I mean, every state in the country, I believe, except for Rhode Island, I think, no, not, no, except I, I think no Rhode Island Center. I just, I think every, every colony had slavery in the 18th century. But in the two or three decades after the adoption of the federal constitution, the northern states all, all abolish it. And if you were alive in 1825, you would think the United States is on the path toward a peaceful and gradual resolution of the slavery question. And instead things go backwards and, and ultimately the slavery question is resolved, not peacefully, but by the most terrible war in the nation’s history, and then resolved in a very inconclusive way. And it doesn’t, it’s not fully resolved until a century later.

The experience of today makes me question that. The question, when you say, what is the moment, the moment changes not only the present but the past. The way you understand the American past and a lot of the darker things that used to be said about the American past looked like the exceptions, the deviations, the detours, the occasional retreats. Those now look much more like central thoroughfares and the whole path of progress, which I would’ve assumed as a young person, was the main thoroughfare, that looks much more tangled and prone to interruption than it does. To anticipate what Zach may be about to say, the future is obviously very, it’s what we make it. There’s nothing to be predicted. The assumption, of course the 2026 elections will be free and fair, I think needs to be. I, I hope they will be. I think we should work very hard to ensure they will be, but there are a lot of people who don’t want them to be, and they’re not powerless.

Zachary Karabell: So I’m really glad we’re on this topic because while Emma is correct that a lot of what I write and speak about does have a lesser degree of alarm about our moment, part of that is actually grounded in a greater degree of alarm about our past. And what I mean by that is, is, is my sense of, if not optimism, again, optimism is not, or at least our definition of optimism, is not like things are gonna be fine.

It’s simply that we don’t know and they, they certainly could be. There’s a lot that we can do in the present to make them fine, and there’s a lot we can do in the present to make them worse, is exactly what you just articulated about the degree to which those darker stories and negative stories have tended to be folded into a narrative of, Yes, but we overcame, yes, there was progress, in a way that at any given moment in the past was much more on a nice edge of contingency and possibility.

So like Watergate, we get to talk about as the moment where the system rose up and called out corruption and abuse of power. And we then moved on more rigorously democratic or more rigorously a nation of laws than we were before. But of course, in 1972, Nixon gets reelected. Spiro Agnew, who himself was, was removed from office for totally unrelated Watergate things, meaning there was a lot of corruption, a lot of stuff going on. And there had been under Johnson, and it kind of could have gone either way, even in the Watergate hearings until the very last minute. You know, there are things that had happened. If you’ve been around in 68 or 70 or 72, even though we now look back and go, this was a moment of kind of democratic effluorescence and people were on the streets and they were protesting, it’s also true there were setting off bombs and you know, we didn’t know if, if the country was gonna come apart in some sort of low level civil war.

And that there are these darker episodes that we’ve tended to kind of, if not sweep under the rug. There is a peculiar American narrative of look how triumphantly wonderful we are and how we have overcome. That’s the whole, you know, the whole chant of the civil rights movement, we will overcome and biblical.

So I, I guess I’m, I’m, I’m supporting what you’re saying by saying, look, these moments and the first season of the Trump show as well should have and should alert Americans to the complexity of our story rather than the simplicity of the triumphant narrative story that we’ve told.

And then we’ve largely also told the world.

David Frum: The question is what does one do? Not just what does one think, and I, I’ve written this a lot. I wrote this a lot during the first Trump presidency, that the sunny American confidence that things will work out is the greatest obstacle to the truth of the belief that things won’t work out. And I think maybe the inspiration here is, is the story of the book of Jonah. And Jonah, of course, everyone remembers that he swallowed by a whale, but people forget why was he in the whale?

So God comes to Jonah and says, I need you to go to preach to the city of Nineveh and call them to repent. And Jonah says, God, I know you. What’s gonna happen is this, I’m gonna go to Nineveh, I’m gonna call them to repent and otherwise they’ll be destroyed and consumed and they will repent and you won’t be destroyed and consumed. And I, my credibility will be gone. I’ll look like just another false prophet. So because I know I’m a true prophet and because I know you will relent, I’m not doing this, find yourself another boy. And that, and then he flees and that’s how he gets swallowed by a whale. And indeed, that’s exactly what happens, that Jonah goes to Nineveh calls on ’em to repent and the people do repent and God call cancels it. No. And if, as far as the citizens of Nineveh were concerned, Jonah was a false prophet.

But of course the point of the story is the nemesis was waiting. If they hadn’t, if Jonah hadn’t gone, if they hadn’t listened to Jonah, Nineveh would’ve been consumed. And the the point is that the fact that your calls of danger avert the danger that you are calling about doesn’t mean that the danger wasn’t real or the calls are untrue. You have you, Jonah has to go to Nineveh or else Nineveh will be consumed.

And so I think that’s where we are now, that there are things happening in the second term that are so much more dangerous than even in the first. And Trump is playing this game much more victory or death than he’s playing the first game. Trump’s economic policies are leading to very rapid and worsening economic outcomes.

Now if you are a typical watcher of typical American politics, you say, I, while this obvious how this story goes, that Trump will be handed a major defeat in the 2026 midterms. He’ll lose the house for sure and possibly the Senate. They’ll then set up all kinds of investigations and all of his crypto enterprises will be investigated and it will be revealed who did he get all, how much money did he get and who did he get it from? And he may well go to prison for all of that, and the system will work.

You think, doesn’t Trump know that? Doesn’t Trump know that too? How can he allow, how can he allow the 26 elections to go freely and fairly when he sees what the outcome is? He has to be thinking every day. He’s either totally separated from reality, which I don’t think he is, or maybe he is, or he has to realize that he’s in tremendous danger. He’s got a kind of wily cunning, a survivor’s gift. He will, won’t he take action to head, head this off?

So I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion and I think it can be stopped. I think we can protect those elections, but no one should have, no one should act on the assumption that there’s no danger to those elections because there is.

Emma Varvaloucas: As an ordinary American, it’s like, what do you do other than like show up to vote and hope that your vote counts?

David Frum: You count on people in positions of power, and to a considerable extent, that did happen in the first Trump term, at least, not perfectly, but there were people who did behave in conscientious ways and did mitigate some of the worst outcomes. I. And the story goes, I don’t know if this is literally a true story, but Gary Cohn, who’s then the head of the National Economic Council hearing that Trump was about to sign a bill canceling the US South Korea free trade agreement, walking into Trump’s office, snatching the order off his desk, and hiding it, counting on Trump not to remember that it was there. I, again, I’ve, I trouble believing that story is literally true, but I, I think it’s, it tells you something. And Mattis and, and John Kelly, so Trump has very deftly recruited an administration where you’re surrounded by much less robust people the second time and many more bad people. And the the good people or the people who seem good are obviously much weaker and more timid than the people in the first term.

So there is less check and just many more things are are happening. The degree of Trump’s self enrichment is on a scale that staggers anything in the first term. In the first term, he was, you know, charging the secret services stay at his hotels, which is super improper, but now he’s opened up this meme coin business where he is taking vast amounts of money from all unknown people all over the planet on a scale that dwarfs anything that happened in the first term. He never, in the first term, proposed going to war against a fellow NATO country. He talked about canceling nato, but the idea that we’re gonna attack Denmark and conquer its territory. That was not something they even talked about in the first term. The, the Canada things are, are different. There do seem to be more enablers and less restraint.

What can the ordinary person do? Be an effective citizen. Stay informed. Keep track of this stuff, as depressing as it is. I notice how often JD Vance says, don’t treat politics as important. The people who want to bully and dominate and exploit you, want you not to pay attention to what their actions are. So that, that’s your warning right there. Pay attention and then be ready to vote, yes. And, and vote intelligently and, and don’t be distracted by side issues.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think you said in the beginning, before we started recording the main interview that you wished Americans would pay attention to more of the things that are important and less of things that are exciting.

David Frum: Social media exists to get you revved up over fragments of video. You are never supposed to ask, What happened in the three minutes before this video? What happened in the three minutes after this video? Who took this video? Why did they do it? How does it happen to exist?

The kind, you should, we should regard videos. video as, not as windows into reality, but as artifacts that have been manufactured for a purpose. Before we get inflamed by a particular video, we ought to really examine how did this object come to be? How did I come to know about it? Who did that, and why?

Zachary Karabell: So on this question again is what, what does one do? There is still the reality that 70 plus million people voted for Republicans and, and Trump. Even now, I mean it, his approval ratings are kind of comparable to what they were for most of the first season of the Trump show. So let’s say 40 to 42% of Americans claim to support, have a favorable view of Trump, and let’s say like 30% of ’em have a really, really favorable view of Trump.

It’s still unclear to me, regardless of the high pitch of the Democrats and kind of our cohort, that there is a plurality of Americans who would support fascism in any of its flavors or autocracy in any of its flavors. Now, there may be some who would accept a kind of a hungry like political corruption and control that does not radically impinge on most people’s daily lives in the sense of control without the patent of control at a, at a live level without fear. Right?

A population that is somewhat controlled, but not with fear. I, there’s probably enough Americans, although again, probably not a plurality, let alone a majority who would support that if they felt other things were being achieved. Okay, so what, like what do you do with that? I mean, we can scream, people can scream who hate Trump about fascism, authoritarianism, Nazism, all of it. And you’re still left with the, okay, what is, what are those labels do? Are they supposed to make us more urgent? There’s plenty of people who are radically urgent about upholding the rule of law in, in multiple ways, in multiple parts of the country, state level, local level, federal level. Doesn’t seem like there is any lack of that going on. Right?

There’s a whole series of trade tariff cases that are coming up this month, it is unlikely that one of them is not gonna enjoin some of the tariffs, even if the tariffs fail, that might be politically problematic. It might be better if the tariffs fail politically and economically before they’re enjoined judicially.

But I guess again, the, the question is, do you believe that there really is a sufficient element of the population that would in fact be supportive of what most of those who oppose Trump, full stop, fear he and and his cohort want?

David Frum: In 1992, there were a series of debates between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot. At the third debate, there was a famous moment the, I feel your pain moment where a woman stood up, older, obviously not very well educated, obviously quite nervous on being on TV in front of all these Americans for the one and only time of her life. And she asked, I would like, she asked, I would like each of the candidates explain how they have personally been affected by the deficit.

To make a long story short, Bill Clinton, this is the moment where Bill Clinton said, I will answer your question, but first I want you to tell me how you have been affected by the deficit. And as she explained, it became clear she didn’t mean the deficit, she meant the recession that was also underway at the time. Politics wasn’t her first language and she’d gotten the two terms mixed up. Or maybe she never understood the difference in the first place. And the one of the lessons I take from, uh, many lessons of political communication I take from that story is sometimes you have to hear what, what is the question, but also what is the question behind the question?

So back to what you just said. Behind your question is an assumption that if very large numbers of Americans don’t agree with me, that should some way, in some way, shape how I feel or act or think. So I am a member of a religious tradition that has never more numbered, more than a single percentile point of the population surrounded by hostile neighbors. And if we had let the idea that if so many of our neighbors believe something, it must be true, affect our thinking, I wouldn’t exist. I wouldn’t be a member of the tradition to which I belong. So I’m just not gonna, I’m not influenced by that. It’s an interesting question. Why do so many people think so this way? I think there’s something hardwired in the human brain. The authoritarianism is probably part of the constitution of the human brain. There’s a line in Hemingway’s novel for whom, the bell tolls, where the American in Spain is asked, are there fascists in your country? And he replies, There are many who are fascists, they just don’t know it yet. And I think that that one of the things we’ve all learned is America, America is not different from the rest of the human species. The tendencies that we see in other countries and other times, they exist here, and it’s always a close contest between the forces of liberality and the forces of authoritarianism.

It’s ne, it’s never easy because in many ways the ideas of liberalism are, they’re like the ideas of free trade. Someone has described free trade as the triumph of pure reason over common sense, that there, there’re things that we think we see. It requires a lot of reasoning, power to understand that what your eyes are telling you is not actually what’s happening anymore than the earth goes, than the sun goes around the earth. So yeah, there are a lot of authoritarian personalities out there, and they are excited. They’re excited by brutality and violence. The Romans put bums in seats every day for 500 years to watch people hack each other to pieces in the Colosseum.

I don’t know how the game will go. I just know what, what we’re called upon to do.

Emma Varvaloucas: This reminds me a lot of somebody I know in Greece. David, I usually live in Greece, I’m in the States right now, but we were talking about Hungary, and he said, I don’t understand that Viktor Orbán has been in power for so long that people must be very happy with him and he must be doing a very good job because how else could he have held all the power for so long? Right?

David Frum: This guy is, this is a Greek?

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s a Greek. Yeah, he’s Greek. 

David Frum: Does he know any Greek history?

Emma Varvaloucas: For context, I mean he has probably a sixth grade education, so I don’t know about his well of history.

David Frum: Greece was run by dictators as recently as 1967 to 74. The ancient texts are full of examples of people who held power even though they did a bad job and most people didn’t like them. You know, the assiduities, Herodotus. I think one of the things we are rediscovering is a lot of the ideas that people give easy ascent to are actually pretty radical. I mean, the idea that women are the equal of men, is a radical, you’ll really take it seriously. It’s a very destabilizing idea, the idea that all human lives have worth, very radical idea. Most, most societies have explicitly rejected it, and many soci, and sorry, many societies have explicitly rejected it, and most societies implicitly rejected it. The government should not manipulate the economy and should let the market govern. That’s a radical idea. These are all and, and we’re discovering their full radical potential at a moment where they’re being contested in American history in a way they haven’t been contested or at least so openly contested for such a long time.

Zachary Karabell: So I think the pushback I have to the analogy of Jews and a Middle East in a sea of Muslims is that those don’t exist in one polity. I mean, obviously there are 2 million Israeli Arabs.

David Frum: was I was thinking of Jews in a sea of Christians in Europe actually.

Zachary Karabell: Okay, so either way, it’s the same, the same thing pertains. What is true in the United States is we are at least notionally in one collective rather than a series of tribal collectives.

And we do vote collectively so, and in order to win an election, There has to be some degree of argument that that speaks to what people are voting for. So it’s not as dismissible, I feel, even if it’s completely wrong, because you have to win elections, right? We are if, if we are in a system where elections have to be won, the way they’re won is figuring out what voters want or what they need or how to speak to them that makes them think that what they want and need will be satisfied by voting for person X rather than person Y.

While there are almost certainly X number of people, not an inconsiderable number for whom no argument can be made or should be made to try to win their votes. I mean, if you’re like, burn, baby burn, or I wanna ship all the immigrants into maximum security prisons, if you’re on the other side of that coin, it is unlikely you’re gonna make an argument that will sway them.

But there’s a whole lot of other people who like voted for Trump. I mean, I, there was a whole interview I saw in February where, you know, a woman, 26-year-old woman in an urban area voted for Trump because she thought he was gonna make IVF free, and that was her one issue, right?

David Frum: Do I agree that we should elect that? You should think about what people want when you organize your electoral strategy. Of course, that’s not my job. I don’t contest elections, but for sure, you know, I, I don’t know how so many Democratic local officials ever got the idea that shoplifting should be decriminalized.

That was crazy, and I’ve written a lot about immigration and the need to have a more restrained immigration policy. When you think about how mechanically will it come about if the elections are allowed to proceed, that you stop Trump, I, I, I’m gonna probably agree with you on most of that.

If the question is, however, what do I think about that woman? Do I respect her? No. No, I don’t. Because she had, she had a duty not to be so uninformed. It’s, it is, it is not society’s fault that she made no effort to find out what Trump really stood for and what he would really do. That’s her fault. And if she’s the victim of that fault, I mean, I’m sorry for her victimhood. But you, you did sort of invite this upon yourself, and when people say, say things like, people will say often things, no one explained this to me as a voter. The theory of democracy is that voters are, are, they are. No. The, the practice of democracy understands that voters aren’t gonna make much of an effort. And so when to the practitioners, I would say you, if I were talking here, you need to understand that most people, you need to understand that half the people in the country cannot name the vice president. That’s the first thing you need to know about American politics. Half the people in the country cannot name the vice president. So start from that. And work out, build your pines accordingly.

But to the people who don’t know the name of the vice president, do I say, you know, you’re doing, good job. You’re a great American. It was someone’s job to knock on your door and and tell you who the vice president is. No, I mean, in fact, people should do the, people do have to do that. It will be someone’s job, but are you off the hook?

I also think something about this about people were uninformed. My late father took the family on many trips to Europe in the days of handwritten cafe bills. And he would always carefully scrutinize the cafe handwritten bill, and he had a funny line. After the 83rd and 98th edication of this happened, he said, you know, you would think if they were just bad at math, that half the mistakes would be in my favor.

Okay, so I notice that when people believe things that aren’t true, it’s, they’re not just the victim. They are co-authors. They, they choose to believe things. These are not always innocent mistakes. So, when Trump tells you, just to go back to the tariff example, the the tariff is paid by foreigners. It allow, the tariff will allow us to finance the entire domestic policy of the United States by putting the bill on others. Now, that’s not true, but why would, if it were true, well, what kind of truth would it be? We can finance our retirement system by laying tribute on foreigners that isn’t that wrong? Even if it were, if it worked, wouldn’t that be bad? It doesn’t, and, and because it’s bad, that’s why your first clue that it’s not gonna work.

But there is something where the people who believe these things, why did the woman choose to believe that about Donald Trump? Was that truly an innocent mistake? Or did she want something for nothing and therefore was ready to believe the person who offered her something for nothing?

And the con always works by preying on the bad feelings of the, of the victimized person, the desire for something for nothing, or someone at something, at someone else’s expense. So, I agree with you from the political practitioner’s point of view, understanding you’re not gonna beat Donald Trump by talking about democracy. I don’t know how Kamala Harris ever got that idea in her head, the tariffs and the economic ruin that may be once they’re experienced, that may be a powerful argument.

There are other things that were more powerful arguments and, and in fact, the way you beat Donald Trump is by making him look more like a conventional Republican who wants to cut taxes for the rich and squeeze benefits for the poor. But that’s not why it’s important to beat Donald Trump and the people who are under those illusions, I’m allowed to think about them, what I think about them.

Emma Varvaloucas: Maybe she wanted something for nothing, but maybe she had serious infertility issues, and IVF is insanely expensive. You know, like there is, there’s a bit of like a, there are certain people that can pay for IVF and there’s certain people where it would be very difficult to pay for IVF. There’s that aspect as well.

David Frum: Right. And, and then, and then she said, this person has been president before who did nothing about IVF for four years and whose party is on record as supporting the Human Life Amendment as they did again in the, in the platform of 2024, which will make IVF impossible. And this person who’s never made an explicit guarantee, I will make IVF free, just as I will do great by the I I’m going to choose to believe this person in the faiths of all available, not only evidence, but experience.

Again, I, I feel, I, yes she had a genuine problem. She had a genuine problem. But is she a victim of society that she succumbeded to this false promise? She’s a victim. I suppose, yes, in some degree, but did she have any responsibility to be an informed person? To think, to think before casting your vote, to make some effort to cast it in an informed way?

Again, political professionals, we all have work on the understanding. No, they won’t do those things. They’re not informed and they’ll make no effort. So that’s, as a practitioner, that’s what you have to know. But do we chatting here on this, do we have to say, yeah, that, that, you know. We salute her. She’s, she’s blameless, she’s a victim. And by the way, because there’s so many people like her, we should therefore dial back our criticisms of the thing Donald Trump is doing ’cause we don’t wanna sound like we’re being too tough on so many of our fellow Americans who are doing bad things.

Zachary Karabell: So as a, as a valedictorian question here, I wanna ask you, given that you’ve been in various worlds of media for decades, what you make of, sort of the current media landscape and also what one does about the current media landscape? Clearly you write for The Atlantic, there’s a, there’s a kind of an established media, which The Atlantic is I think part of, and then there are all these other emerging forms, whether it’s Instagram as news forms, or TikTok as a news form, or Barstool Sports as a news form, or Call Her Daddy as a news form, or Lex Fridman or The Bulwark, you know, that is this just revolving doors, you know, musical chairs, is it, is it actually a different landscape?

David Frum: You anticipated my answer with your, your very well phrased question. There is a tendency among people of a certain age and certain place in society to assume the media are those companies that were important in 1972, CBS, the New York Times. If you weren’t important in 1972, you’re not the media. And those who rail against the media often mean the companies that were important in 1972. I don’t think there’s got any getting away from it. The most important media company in America by far is TikTok. And Google is probably the second most. And New York, New York Times maybe just scrapes into the top 10. None of the old networks do. Anybody.

And anyway, the whole distinction between media, non-media is fading. If you have one of these and everybody does, you hold in your hand more instantaneous communication power than Walter Cronkite ever had. You’re the media if you own one of these things and everything you choose to amplify. You are a consumer. Yes, but you’re also a co-producer. So the future is one in which the media non-media distinction is becoming increasingly obsolete. We’re all participants and co-authors of the reality we inhabit.

Zachary Karabell: Well on that note that we are all, both the consumers of and the makers of our own content, which is absolutely true, and I think it’s a vital point to understand how we’re functioning socially and politically. Not just a an observation, but actually it, it is shaping this climate.

The one thing for me that also, and, and maybe you can give a valedictory thought about this, that gives me a degree of hope about the American present and future, is the noise. I think that one of the real death knells of a democratic or open society is the silencing of views. And the only exception I can think of that is India remains a fragmented, problematic, open democracy, but, but very compromised, but certainly not authoritarian the way some of these other societies.

But I do think that the noise in American society, the sheer level of debate, that is as yet untouched and unsalable is our ballast and and is the preserver of most of what people fear is in jeopardy.

David Frum: Think like a pessimist. Act like an optimist. Anticipate the worst. Dare as if the best were achievable.

Zachary Karabell: I will support that. I’d love to have this, continue this conversation. I think everyone should listen to David’s podcast. He’s one of the more, as I think you’ve gleaned from this conversation, thoughtful, acute, soulful, reflective individuals. We can all benefit from more of that and we can all benefit from more of David Frum.

So I want to thank you for the conversation today.

David Frum: Thank you so much. It’s very kind.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you David.

So I feel like we covered quite a lot of ground there. It’s nice to get the, the view from Canada, although depressing to confirm the view that the Canadians are really disgusted with us.

Zachary Karabell: More telling one was just the degree to which, look, trust, people have been saying this for years, right? Reputations are hard to build and easy to lose. Trust is hard to gain and easy to sacrifice.

So there’s a degree to which if you’re hanging out with your best friend and you’re like laughing and toasting, and then they just turn around and punch you in the face, that’s gonna leave a lasting impression, no matter, you could have been friends with ’em for 20 years, guaranteed every time. Subsequently, you’re gonna have a moment of like, okay, what’s gonna happen here? So in that sense, these, there’s no going back from this, regardless of whether Trump fades, there will be the visceral, lasting memory of that act or of that tendency and the awareness of we can’t rely on this going forward, that, that that could happen again.

And that’s done, right? There’s no, there’s no easy walking back from that.

Emma Varvaloucas: Trust takes time to rebuild. Right. Even, even if we have a, an administration in the future that want to rebuild it, I certainly don’t think we should expect to be asking anything from our northern neighbors anytime soon. Although to, to David’s point, if your friend did punch you in the face and they did also happen to be your neighbor, you’re going to have to deal with them no matter what.

Zachary Karabell: There’s all these great French movies about two neighbors fighting, you know, living together and fighting for like centuries.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Neither of them, neither of them would move and them would budge and so you kind of go in and out of periods of cold distrust or civility punctuated by moments of intense acrimony.

Hopefully that will not be the US Canada future, that it will be much more, one of this will have been a, a blip rather than a new groove. I guess we will only know that subsequently. But again, these are, these are inputs that should matter, right? The United States might be powerful and rich. But even the most rich, powerful person, collective individ, individual, cannot be an island. As much as people want to be an island, they wanna be impregnable, they wanna be inviable, they wanna be untouchable, and like, that’s just not realistic in a world where you actually do have neighbors and you do actually need other people. I think that’s, to me, the, one of the hardest moments in America right now is this illusion of autarky or this illusion, which we talked about with David a bit, this illusion that you can just go it alone.

And there is certainly a degree to which the United States because of resources and size and affluence, has a greater ability to indeed go it alone, but not as David pointed out, without great internal costs like we could, but we’ll be poor, we’ll be more culturally and economically impoverished and, and we will live in a world that actually most people don’t wanna live in. Even if we could.

To me is one of the harder moments is the illusion of we could just do this all ourselves, screw our friends, neighbors, and enemies, and be even more affluent in the future and more secure. 

I don’t think those things can, can coexist.

Emma Varvaloucas: No, but Americans will learn that. I mean, that’s, it’s one thing to be said, you know? Vis-a-vis our conversation about voters being informed or not informed, like, yes, I agree that everybody has a responsibility to be informed, but at the end of the day, a lot of people will not have a strong opinion on issues that are not affecting their life directly.

And if we are an position where their lives are directly being affected, they see the, the fruit that was born from these various economic decisions and maybe other decisions about our allies, like then we will learn one way or another, I do think.

Zachary Karabell: Just wish we weren’t gonna learn it the hard way,

Emma Varvaloucas: Right? Yeah. Well, sometimes you have to learn it the hard way, I guess.

Zachary Karabell: I just mean in a, in a wishful thinking scenario, I would’ve liked this to be a lesson that was internalized before it had been tested. But again, you’re right, it’s not always clear. You can do that with without feeling the fire. Like you can tell a little kid, don’t put your hand over a flame ’cause you’ll get burned.

Usually what happens is someone puts their hand at least near a flame and gets a little bit burned and maybe, maybe that’s the best case scenario that we get a little bit burned as opposed to like third degree burns.

Emma Varvaloucas: Uh, wow. We shall see.

Zachary Karabell: We shall. Alright, on that note. I wanna thank you all for your time today for listening to what I thought was a really illuminating and enlightening conversation with David Frum, again, encourage you all to go check out his podcast as well as his writings at The Atlantic. I wanna thank the Podglomerate for producing What Could Go Right?

I encourage everybody to go sign up for the What Could Go Right newsletter at theprogressnetwork.org. And thank you Emma for co-hosting and all of you for listening. And we will be back with you next week. And in the meantime, please also tune in.

Can you really use the word “tune in” for podcasts? It’s kind of an old radio thing, but we’re just gonna use it anyway to our shorter form, The Progress Report, where we look at some of the news of the week, pointing in a more constructive direction that you almost certainly would’ve missed in the daily diet of negative news. So there you go.