Is Donald Trump over? Can we all now relax and move on to the next thing?

That’s the message from a significant portion of Democratic primary voters. Just as Trump is bored with Iran and the economy and wants to play with monuments and gilding, so too are many Democratic primary voters in Florida and elsewhere bored with Trump and eager to play factional politics instead.

The political statistician Nate Silver summed up the mood on X today: “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0.” Silver then listed stalwart anti-Trumpers who have lost their contests in 2026 and concluded, “People want to move on.”

America is a fast-moving, dynamic country. It’s tough for Americans to stay focused on a single thing, even if that single thing is the threat to American democracy. As the celebrity spokesmodel Heidi Klum tells the audience on Project Runway: “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” This law also apparently applies to Democratic candidates who took serious risks to challenge Trump. The resistance, it seems, is out.

The far left of the Democratic Party has never been as energized as the party’s center about Trump and democracy. A 2017 analysis in The Washington Post suggested that between 6 and 12 percent of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election. With many careful caveats, the analysis observed that these voters exceeded Trump’s margin of victory.

[James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite]

In 2024, likewise, some leaders of the activist left noisily defected from the Harris-Walz ticket. For many of them, opposing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza mattered more than stopping a Trump presidency at home. The effect of this mobilization on the left is hard to measure, but The Nation was quick to insist that the Biden administration’s Gaza policy likely cost the party Michigan, because many Arabs and Muslims swung toward Trump. The article did not seriously consider whether culture politics, such as Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights, influenced socially conservative Arab and Muslim voters, even though the city of Dearborn has long been a locus of anti-gay grassroots politics in the state. The claim that Harris lost to Trump because of Gaza may well be activist self-medication, but this kind of story about the election is telling.

This year, the dulling of anti-Trump impetus on the left is even more visible and consequential. Again and again, primary voters have made choices that subordinate general-election concerns to factional power-seeking. Democratic leaders—the dreaded “Establishment”—have promoted highly plausible candidates for statewide office in North Carolina, Texas, and other suddenly competitive states. But the insurgent left has again and again upset leadership plans with high-risk choices to serve its own factional agenda, putting at risk once-probable Senate victories in Maine, Michigan, and some House seats too.

That agenda seems to argue as follows:

Donald Trump is not that important. His attacks on the rule of law, on free and peaceful elections, on U.S. alliances, on trade and markets—those are all mere symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself. Political energy should be focused on treating the deeper problems of which Trump is a mere passing expression, even at the risk of losing the Senate in 2026 and forfeiting the presidency in 2028. “Winning” with Chuck Schumer–approved candidates is no win at all. Better to risk losing than to “win” on Schumer’s terms.

[Jonathan Chait: There’s nothing democratic about these socialists]

The Democratic left is making a complicated—and quite ironic—internal gamble here. The faction’s efforts to hijack the larger party to their own unpopular causes will work only if they can convince Democratic voters that Trump is not the most important and urgent problem facing Americans. Yet the only reason Democratic centrists would coalesce around the party’s leftist candidates in November is if they believe in the absolute urgency of stopping Trump.

Many of the far-left candidates are aggressively obnoxious from a centrist’s point of view. Centrist Democrats are not socialists, not revolutionaries, and not disposed to blame Zionist conspiracies for every trouble in American life, including police brutality and urban gentrification. Why on earth would centrist Democrats in Michigan vote for a radical leftist who calls most Democrats hypocrites when the other choice on the ballot is a Republican campaigning on reducing housing costs by simplifying the government-approval process?

In Florida last night, Democrats rejected Alex Vindman, the former national-security official who at immense personal and career risk blew the whistle on Trump’s 2019 plot to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into fabricating campaign dirt against Joe Biden. Voters chose instead Angie Nixon, who campaigned as an explicit “socialist” in a state that is home to hundreds of thousands of Cuban American and Venezuelan American refugees from socialism, and who ran alongside anti-Israel figures such as Oliver Larkin and Rashida Tlaib in a state with the nation’s third-biggest Jewish population.  

From a Democratic-centrist point of view, if Trump’s attacks on the rule of law are not a supreme and imperative threat, then a Republican Senate majority led by John Thune is an endurable nuisance. Far-left candidates have a chance in the general election only if Democrats believe that Trump is the supreme and imperative threat.

The remains of the suddenly unfashionable Democratic resistance can only hope that Democrats in Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, and elsewhere will rise above the factional politics and remember in November what, and who, remains the most pressing danger to the nation’s law and democracy.  

“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.

So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.

The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.

[Read: A green light for crooks]

After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.

The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.

For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.

To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.

Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,” Aaron Klein, an expert in banking regulation at the Brookings Institution, explained to me.

By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.

Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law. They have been relieved only of the slight additional chore of filing the same information with the federal government—a chore that lowered their costs of doing business. Those costs are now destined to rise.

[David A. Graham: The evolution of Trump’s corruption]

The purported “deregulation” is, however, a great benefit to tax evaders, drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals hoping to elude scrutiny of their finances. If they can locate a weak or careless or greedy financial institution, they can open accounts with imperfect information—and they now stand a much higher chance of getting away with their deception. The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition estimates that the Treasury’s action reduces the number of enterprises required to report their true ownership from 32.6 million to 11,667.

The Trump administration is the most pro-crime administration in United States history—as long as the crime in question is committed by the president, his family, his donors, or his friends. Klein at Brookings noted that Trump is using anti-money-laundering laws to require notice of remittances to Mexico of as little as $200 (the legal threshold is $10,000) even as his associates, including Paul Manafort, are allowed to keep anonymous bank accounts in Delaware.

Across the federal government, enforcement against rich-people crimes has been crippled or abandoned. Inside the Department of Justice, resources have been redistributed away from white-collar-crime enforcement, and Trump has stopped enforcing laws against bribing foreign officials altogether. Pre-Trump, some three dozen lawyers worked on domestic public integrity at DOJ. That figure has been cut to two. The team that policed lawbreaking in the crypto industry has been disbanded.

The Treasury’s announcement last week is merely the latest Trump gift to crooks, cheats, and traffickers. As his popularity collapses among almost every other demographic, Trump seems to recognize that the criminal-American community is his last and most loyal constituency.

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the Justice Department’s decision to drop its case against the Olympian David Hearn. He argues that the prosecution was baseless from the start and, using the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” thought experiment, explains why future administrations must hold abuses of power accountable if American democracy is to endure.

Then, David is joined by Margaret Hoover, the host of PBS’s Firing Line and the great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover. They discuss the newly renovated Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Hoover’s remarkable life of public service, and why his presidency deserves a more nuanced place in American history.

David ends the episode with a discussion of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré, exploring the evolution of the spy novel and the moral questions at the heart of the genre.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Margaret Hoover, host of the TV program Firing Line, and, very relevantly for today’s discussion, great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover. This week’s book will be The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a classic from 1963 of espionage literature by John le Carré.

But before either the dialogue with Margaret Hoover or the book discussion, I want to open with some thoughts that build from the news that the Department of Justice has at last dropped its indictment of David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian who was absurdly and falsely charged with vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial.

The United States Constitution has a guarantee of a fair trial. The United States Supreme Court has long interpreted this guarantee to mean that when the Department of Justice discovers exculpatory evidence against an accused—that is, evidence that proves that the accused is falsely accused—it must immediately drop the case or at least bring the information to the notice of the defendant. The Department of Justice in this case is claiming that while they indicted David Hearn on July 2, it took them until July 31 to find out that no, the damage at the Reflecting Pool was due to shoddy work by the no-bid contractor selected by President Trump and not by the three-time Olympian canoeist.

Now, you knew from the first instant that the charge was false, and I knew from the first instant that the charge was false, but the Department of Justice wants us to believe that it took them a month to figure it out, that they didn’t have the basis to bring these charges, and they therefore were not acting outside their duty but were behaving perfectly conscientiously in letting somebody hang for a month under a threat of a 10-year prison sentence.

The question for all of us is what are we to do with this information now that we have it? Now, you might say, David Hearn is not one of the worst injustices of the presidency of Donald Trump. He’s walking away from this, and he may be able to recover his legal fees and other costs by some kind of civil action against the U.S. Department of Justice. So it’s not the worst, but in some way it’s the most startling because it was so obviously true that there was nothing here to meet the eye, no basis for this prosecution. And we’re all left to wonder—what do we do with this? With the lawyers who brought the case, with the U.S. Attorney’s office—what do we do?

And I want to suggest a way to think about this. Perhaps you’ve heard of the political-science problem the prisoner’s dilemma. Imagine two people are arrested for a crime and held in separate rooms, unable to communicate. Each is given the same offer. If you betray your partner by testifying against your partner and the partner stays silent, you will go free and your partner gets a heavy sentence, say, 10 years. If you both stay silent, the evidence against you is thin and you each get a light sentence, say, one year. If you each betray the other, you both get a moderate sentence, say, five years each. Each prisoner has to decide without knowing what the other will do. Okay. And now, the problem with this game is while both are hoping to get off scot-free, they end up to get—each of them getting a five-year sentence because they didn’t cooperate.

Now, this is a profound problem in political science, and political science has been wrestling with it. A political scientist named Robert Axelrod proposed to solve the problem once and for all by inviting academics from all over the world to write suggestions that he would model on a computer game. The winner was a Toronto political scientist named Anatol Rapoport, and he designed a solution called tit for tat. And we are getting back to the Trump administration, but this simple story has a lot of richness for what is ahead.

The tit-for-tat program designed by Anatol Rapoport had an almost absurdly simple structure: Cooperate on the first move, and after that, do whatever your opponent did on their previous move. Cooperate if they cooperate; retaliate if they retaliated. Tit for tat won not by beating any individual opponent head-to-head, but by creating incentives for the other opponent—that if you behave wrongly, there will be retaliation, but if you resume cooperation, we’re happy to rejoin you with a cooperation of our own. In a game with two players [who] play round after round against each other, this threat of retaliation from bad conduct and cooperation for good conduct proved extremely powerful.

Now, this I think is very relevant to American politics. We have, right now, a game with multi rounds between two parties, one of which has, over the decade of the Trump experience, but especially since January of 2025, broken every rule of the game, including the rule “you don’t prosecute people who are innocent because the president told you to do it.” Now, there is going to be a lot of impetus, as the power balance in Washington maybe changes in November of 2026, maybe changes in a bigger way in November of 2028, to let bygones be bygones and to let the party that broke the rules get away with it in the name of turning the page and going on to the future.

The suggestion of the tit-for-tat program is, this is not going to lead to better outcomes. The only way to get back to a stable political situation in the future is for those who broke the rules when it was their turn to pay a price for breaking the rules, so that everyone understands tit for tat. You do this; we do that. You break the rules; you will suffer. There will be consequences. Maybe not perfect consequences—maybe not even exactly justice. Justice is a very hard thing to achieve, but some understanding that the rule-breaking that has been in place since January 2025 comes at a future cost. If that cost is not in some way imposed by those in a position to impose it, the whole system will break down into ever worse spirals of defection, betrayal, violation of norms.

That’s the challenge ahead. I think there are a lot of people, especially on the Democratic left, who think the answer to the Trump problem is to create a better and fairer society so that Donald Trump will never reappear. You know, building a better or fairer society is a big agenda, and it may not work. And who knows what a better and a fairer society is anyway? But saying, For those people who broke rules, clear rules, like, “don’t prosecute the innocent,” there will be consequences. Keep that in mind. It won’t be forgotten. It will be retaliated against, I think that may be the first step on the path to wisdom.

Oh, one last thing. The David Frum Show will be taking a two-week break on August 12 and August 19. No shows on those two days. Resuming thereafter for the later part of August and early September.

And now my dialogue with Margaret Hoover.

[Music]

Frum: Margaret Hoover hosts Firing Line With Margaret Hoover, which she launched on PBS in 2018. I had the honor of appearing on Season 4 of that show alongside my friend Anne Applebaum, as I had appeared on its predecessor program with William Buckley back in the 1990s. Margaret Hoover published her book, American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party, in 2011. In that book, she argued that Republicans should modernize on social and personal issues—wise advice that was not taken. She worked for the George W. Bush administration as associate director of intergovernmental affairs, on Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, and as deputy finance director for Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid. She’s also the great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover and one of the driving forces behind the 20-month renovation and restoration of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, which will reopen its public galleries August 6, the day after this program posts online. And Margaret, welcome.

I want to talk a little bit about that library restoration and your important role in driving it. Now, this may seem to some viewers and listeners a kind of off-the-beaten-path issue, but one of the emerging scandals of the Trump administration is Donald Trump’s break from the presidential-library system fighting a legal battle to reassert, for the first time in half a century, personal presidential ownership of his presidential papers so he can, not the National Archives, but he personally can offer access to them or refuse access according to whether people meet his favor or don’t meet his favor, maybe even according to whether they pay a fee.

I’ll say one more thing about this before talking about Herbert Hoover’s innovations in the system. The modern presidential-library system started with a scandal almost exactly a century ago. President Warren Harding died unexpectedly in the summer of 1923. At the time, he was very popular, but his widow, Florence, the real brains of the operation in the Harding household, knew that tremendous scandals, both financial and sexual, were about to break upon the legacy of Warren Harding. And so she tried to destroy many of his papers. She was not successful. She was thwarted by some of President Harding’s staffers, but she did a lot of damage, and important things were lost to history. And she was able to do that because these records were, at that time, considered presidential private property. The system became public in tranches, and Herbert Hoover is the beginning of the modern presidential-library system.

And Margaret, let’s talk now about what you have done to bring that library back into the modern age and to reassert the example that presidential papers belong to the people of the United States, not to the president himself.

Margaret Hoover: Well, I mean, that’s the entire premise. You’ve summarized it so clearly. And look, there are 16 official presidential libraries in the National Archives and Record Administration. And the reason Herbert Hoover, along with Harry Truman, in conjunction sort of accepted funds for a library from the federal government was particularly because Hoover had felt and always felt that the gifts that were given to him when he was president of the United States and the papers that consisted of the operations of the presidency were the possession of the American people.

Prior to the Presidential Records Act, Hoover had actually collected all of his and had them on display at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a public-policy think tank that he had invented in 1919 at the end of World War I because nobody was collecting the documents from the Treaty of Versailles, and he thought they would be rather important for the future.

But that said, there is this premise that Hoover believed deeply and that every president until now, with perhaps the exception of Nixon, believed that these papers were part—they belonged to the American people because the institution of the presidency is only bestowed on individuals because of the faith of the American people, and thus they belong to the American people.

Frum: Let’s retrace some of this history so we can understand what you have accomplished. So the tradition through the 18th and 19th century and into the 20th was that presidential papers were the private property of the president. And this theory made a kind of intuitive sense in the age of quill pens. I mean, many of the presidential papers were in the president’s own handwriting, or if not his handwriting, the handwriting of secretaries whom he paid for out of his own personal presidential allowance. So the president would say, This work is mine. There aren’t that many papers, because they are written by hand, and I’m taking them back with me, and I will do with them what I will. Now, many donated their papers to the Library of Congress.

Hoover: And many also donated them to universities that they were associated with. Thomas Jefferson’s were at the University of Virginia. George Washington donated his. There’s a long tradition of universities holding these papers. And I do think there was a sense amongst the founding that the papers were part of establishing a precedent for a self-governing republic, and so they ought to be on display. I mean, private matters are private matters, but any matter that the president assumes in the context of his responsibility to the people of the United States and in the context of leading the country—there is a really strong sense of responsibility towards the American people so they could establish precedence. And that has been the case, I think, until the 20th century.

Frum: As you just said, Herbert Hoover was a great collector of papers, not only from the Versailles conference but from his famine-relief work in Belgium and his work in the Russian Revolution. I don’t think people are always aware of the prepresidential career of Herbert Hoover and its extraordinary impact. And one could argue that if Hoover had never become president, he might be an even more famous person than if he did become—

Hoover: There’s no question.

Frum: He would be there with George Marshall among the greatest Americans of the 20th century. So tell us a little bit about Herbert Hoover’s prepresidential career.

Hoover: I would suggest he still is one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. And I think the full story—I think the dust hasn’t settled in terms of history really reckoning with Hoover’s, the scope of Hoover’s full legacy.

Frum: Take the career up to 1928.

Hoover: Well, Herbert Hoover—first of all, his father died when he was six years old. He was a blacksmith in a small frontier town in 1873 in West Branch, ’74, in West Branch, Iowa. His mother was a Quaker minister, which is a bit of an oxymoron because ministers didn’t really exist in the Quaker tradition, except for that she was so powerful of a speaker and an evangelist of the word of God that she went on a speaking circuit in sort of the central part of Iowa.

And his father dies when he’s—

Frum: And she’s a Canadian. She was a Canadian by origin.

Hoover: She was a Canadian! Only David Frum would point that out, and also Herbert Hoover’s wife, Lou Henry Hoover, also is descended from Canadian Quakers. So there is a good representation of Canadians in the Hoover family. (Laughs.) I’m so glad you pointed that out. I would expect nothing less.

The mother died when he was nine, leaving him orphaned after his father had died when he was six. He was sent to live with, actually, Native American Osage tribes in Oklahoma for a period of time, and then ultimately adopted by an estranged uncle in Oregon, who raised him with an incredibly strong Quaker work ethic and not much TLC. And Hoover stumbled upon an opportunity to enroll in a new university that was started by Leland Stanford in California. He was, in fact, the first student to matriculate into Stanford University, because he had to get there early for classes that would then qualify him to be a student there. His formal education stopped when he was 14 and [he] was essentially an autodidact until he got to Stanford.

He graduated with a degree in geology. He met his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, there, who was the first woman to graduate with a degree in the hard sciences from Stanford, but started in the middle of an economic downturn, and so he shoveled ore in a mine for $2 a week in the graveyard shift in the Sierra Nevadas until he had an opportunity to work for an English mining firm to explore properties in Western Australia.

And so in the outback, outback, outback outside of Perth, he happened upon what ultimately became the most productive gold mine for the next 50 to 75 years in Western Australia. It is currently still functioning. It is an open-pit mine that can be seen from the moon.

Anyway, really, his innovations in terms of new technologies in mining and efficiencies that he created brought him under the sort of esteem of his bosses in London, which was the capital of mining finance, and he cabled a marriage proposal to his wife, Lou Henry Hoover. Goes to California, marries her, and they take off to China, where they are then overseeing additional properties by their English investors in China, where they are caught in the beginning of the Boxer Rebellion. Ultimately, they’re part of a group of 137 foreigners who are kicked out of China. They’re the last of the foreign encampments. They’re rescued in a German mail boat and ultimately spend the next decade or so of their lives circumnavigating the globe on steamship, exploring and investing in mining properties all over Southeast Asia, Africa, Russia, literally all over the world.

He ultimately leaves the firms, sets up his own consulting establishment, and publishes his first book, called The Principles of Mining, which is still in print, and becomes this sort of technologist in this new age of, sort of, mining and materials and metallurgy, which really is the new tech of its day.

And the one other thing I would say about this is that he spends so much time on steamships going to these different countries, interacting with the highest level of people in the countries: the leadership, the governance, the monarchies, and also the laborers and the people and everyone in between. He observes—really, this is the turn of the century, and he observes the tide of revolution sweeping the globe and begins to develop philosophies about what kinds of governments are workable, don’t work. He has this practical experiment or observation of political science practically applied, and he notices the wave of isms that are sweeping the globe—Bolshevism, Marxism, Leninism, fascism—and begins to develop a theory about why his life has been possible as an orphan of no means from this frontier town in the West [that] has put him in a place to become a person of enormous influence and self-made wealth at the turn of a century.

And so he is really sort of this extraordinary figure. At 40 years old, he’s Stanford University’s most famous alum. He’s invited onto the board of overseers. And in 1914, when war breaks out in Europe, he’s heading home to Stanford, to California, to ultimately buy a newspaper or do something that is a bit more public-facing and decides instead to stay in Europe and organize famine relief for the country of Belgium, which had been invaded and occupied by the Germans, blockaded by the English, and faced imminent starvation.

Frum: This is the summer of 1914. He’s 40 years old. He’s a rich man. He’s one of the best traveled Americans ever to date at that point. He’s trapped in London by the First World War, and he has an idea—and it needs to be stressed because this idea is now so familiar: No one’s had this idea before—that in a war, it should be possible to deliver some kind of humanitarian relief to hungry civilians. Now, this is a new idea, and there have always been displacements and refugees as long as there has been wars. The idea that you would organize mass feeding of displaced people—no one had ever thought that that was possible, and that’s his first innovation in the realm of public policy. What if we fed people in a war zone? Could that be done? And that’s what he organizes, beginning in the summer of 1914.

Hoover: And when you think about it, because he had been moving materials around the world in the form of ore and coal and gold and minerals, he actually had a network of ships with which to send food around the world.

And so he was actually uniquely positioned as a private citizen. Of course, the U.S. wasn’t in the war yet, so he’s an American living in London, but both sides decide that he can fairly administer food relief in the name of feeding the Belgians. Because remember, the Belgians were occupied by the Germans, and the Germans took no responsibility for feeding the population they occupied. They were happy to let them starve to death, and it would’ve taken six to eight weeks. Belgium didn’t have enough food inside it. It was a postindustrial country. Eighty percent of their food was imported. Because no food could get in, they really were going to starve. This is 8 million Belgians, and then there were, like, 2 million French on the other side of the lines. And they would’ve faced imminent starvation, and Hoover is able to get wheat, corn, flour from all over the world, from Argentina, from the United States. And he creates, essentially, this independent republic of relief. It’s called the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. They have their own ships. They have their own flags. They have their own powers of immunity. They have their own powers to negotiate treaties, and they have their own set of volunteers, and it’s all run by volunteers.

And essentially, they bring all the food into Belgium, unload it into ports, and then volunteers within Belgium distribute it under the watchful eye of the Germans and the watchful eye of the English, who don’t want the Germans to be—they don’t want to be feeding or allowing for the feeding of their enemy army.

So this process—it took about 10 weeks to get under way, and then it lasted until the end of the war. Hoover is the only individual, they say at the Treaty of Versailles—I think John Maynard Keynes said he was the only individual to emerge from the ordeal in Paris with his reputation enhanced.

I mean, it was just this extraordinary sort of endeavor that actually ultimately creates the model for international humanitarian food relief.

Frum: And he then repeats the experiment inside the area of what had been the Russian empire during the Russian Revolution, feeding millions of people in Russia and Ukraine.

Hoover: He becomes so popular that [President Woodrow] Wilson realizes he has to be in his wartime cabinet. And nobody knew if he was a Republican or a Democrat, but he actually, in this post of Wilson’s government, persuades the U.S. Congress to feed Bolshevik Russia because Russians are also about to starve. And so there were U.S. outlays in the budget to feed Communist Russia. [The Russian writer] Maxim Gorky said that he’s the most impactful person in the 20th century at that time. Of course, he’s been completely forgotten in Russia since then. But it was this notion that America could feed her enemies and still sort of win a war, that food wouldn’t be a weapon of war.

And it was also the first time that Hoover, or that the United States, had really deployed humanitarian relief in a way that became legitimate American soft power. Even though it was voluntarily orchestrated at first and then it became part of U.S. policy, this is a charitable American volunteerism turned outward to the world in what becomes this extraordinary display of soft power, and then becomes one of, sort of, the arsenals of our diplomacy in the 20th century.

Frum: Let me add a point here, because one of the things—we’re having a little resurgence of communism in contemporary America—and one of the things communists are very bad at is telling the truth about history. One of the myths that communists and their apologists promote is that the United States and the other countries tried to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle, which would’ve been a good thing to do if it had been done—it was not done—because Russia, under Lenin, became a kind of de facto ally of the Germans, who were still fighting. The Bolshevik Revolution is in the fall of 1917. They become, in 1918, an important source of food and assistance to Germany, still battling the Western Allies. And so the United States and others were suspicious. There were American troops and other troops as well on the territory of the Russian empire. But through all of this, the Americans are feeding Russian people, more and more of them, and this feeding will continue until past the war, into about 1920, correct?

Hoover: That’s right. He did two rounds because there were basically two seasons in which Lenin requisitioned the grain, and so there were two full harvest seasons where they were entirely depleted of foodstuffs, and so Hoover fed them both times.

Hoover writes at this time, eventually, this pamphlet, it’s called American Individualism, from which I riffed my own title, but—which is, and the title is often misunderstood. But he writes about the feeding of the Bolsheviks in that period, that as deadly and bloody as the revolution was, it was important for humanity to see for itself with its own eyes that the idea of Bolshevism and of communism, which is, you know, theoretically a beautiful idea, had proved itself in rivers of blood, and that Hoover believed this was, as horrible as it was, this necessary experiment for humanity to then learn from, because this idea, practically applied, simply doesn’t work. It had proved itself in rivers of blood. And this is Hoover developing his own political philosophy about what made the U.S. of his time so extraordinary and the ideas of these other new nations—nations that had swept off monarchies, czars, old forms of power—flirt with new sort of isms that had ultimately and were ultimately failing before all of our eyes.

They forget that part, the modern communists, I think, and the modern socialists.

Frum: So Hoover then returns to the United States after the Russian Revolution.

Hoover: So he comes back, and he’s so popular, [President Warren] Harding puts him in the Cabinet. Harding wins; Harding puts him in his Cabinet. He has this, like, backwater agency called the Commerce Department, which didn’t really do anything except for it was the beginning of the Roaring ’20s, and he thought, Huh, well, there’s these new frequencies. Perhaps radio; we can grab radio and television. He’s the first person to appear on television. His image is the first image of a face to be transmitted through television waves. Yeah, you can see the television itself at the Hoover Library. So when they tell you that it’s FDR who’s the first president on television, actually, Hoover was the first president on television, but he wasn’t president at the time.

Sorry, there’s always little quibbles with FDR’s legacy.

Frum: Little family pride, yeah.

Hoover: So he standardizes industry, essentially, which allows for a housing boom, which allows—when I say standardizes industry, I mean, we all take for granted that two-by-fours all come in the same dimensions, and we take for granted that bricks are all in the same dimensions, and that screws and nails and nuts and bolts and tires and bedsheets are kings and queens and twins, and eggs come in half dozens and dozens, and milk comes in liters and quarts. All of that happened as Hoover was overseeing the Commerce Department, not because he decided, Here’s how we’re going to do it, but he believed—and this is part of his philosophy of government—that government had an important role in terms of convening industry and convening stakeholders. And so there are parodies of all of the conferences that he hosted in the Commerce Department, because he would invite the farmers and the dairy people and the distributors, all the different players to the table, and exhaustively they would talk and then ultimately decide that, Sure, we’ll do half dozens and dozens of eggs, or whatever it was.

And ultimately, this created an efficiency because of the convening of the government and then the agreement of the stakeholders that allowed for massive booms in every area of industry throughout the 1920s.

Frum: My impression is the most enduring or the most significant thing he did as secretary of commerce was the United States—Louisiana, Texas—were hit by a devastating hurricane in the second [Calvin] Coolidge administration.

Hoover: It was a flood.

Frum: A flood. Okay, my mistake.

Hoover: Nineteen twenty-seven Mississippi River flood.

Frum: Thank you. And just as no one had ever before had the idea that you could feed people in a war zone, no one had ever thought that it might be the responsibility of the federal government to organize aid to victims of a natural disaster, but that was another Hoover innovation.

Hoover: Well, you know, Silent Cal, who was, of course, the, sort of, begrudging president, begrudging of Hoover a bit. Hoover had earned such a huge reputation. He was called the secretary of commerce and the undersecretary of everything else, and it just sort of bothered the president. But the president really didn’t believe there was, to your point, a role in emergency relief. But Hoover, who had really cut his teeth in emergency relief in Europe, thought, Certainly there are things that can be done. Because it was 50 million acres that was flooded, David. So it was the entire Mississippi River Valley all the way down through Missouri, Alabama, Louisiana—the entire portion of the South. I mean, like, a third of the agricultural land in the South—and by the way, it’s a lot of Black Americans who are farming and growing cotton on those lands—essentially are wiped out.

But the thing about a flood is that you know it’s coming. And so what he did is worked with local authorities to move people out of the rising part of the flood days before it would hit. So he would go to the local mayors; he would go to the governors and say, Look, we’re building a tent city over here. You have to take all your things and get out. And sometimes they would agree, and sometimes they wouldn’t, but as soon as word got out that this was happening up the river, people started listening.

And essentially, he organized these massive tent cities—that had vaccines, food, water—that were temporary that people could then live in until they were able to go back and rebuild. And this was the largest, to your point, weather event up until [Hurricane] Katrina. And Hoover basically took charge, but then also deployed this, sort of, spirit of volunteerism. He got the American Red Cross involved in a way the American Red Cross had never been involved at this large of a scale. And through massive telethons and fundraising drives, they didn’t take a cent—there was no congressional money deployed to help in the 1927 Mississippi River flood. It was all voluntary donations distributed through the American Red Cross that helped the country rebuild in that time.

And so Hoover had this very strong philosophy that if you asked Main Street for what you needed, Main Street would deliver tenfold, because there was something about his experience with the American people as opposed to peoples in sort of all over the world, and literally he had been in every other continent except Antarctica, that really felt committed to communities they were part of. And he observed this in the American people. He observed a sort of deep, embedded degree of philanthropy on a local level that he felt could be harnessed in a way unlike anywhere else.

Frum: And again, the papers and all of this must be a massive collection.

Hoover: It is the largest private collection in the United States. One of the largest in the world. And by the way, it now doesn’t just contain the czar’s abdication papers and all of the materials from Russia that, by the way, the Bolsheviks would have destroyed, but it also contains enormously important materials from all over the world that deal with war, revolution, and peace. So we have all of the secret papers from Saddam Hussein’s Baathist secret police; many of the papers from Adolf Hitler’s top-tier, inner-circle cabinet as they litigated the war. We have papers from the Republic of China, from the fleeing parties, the Kuomintang, before they came to Taiwan to establish their own country, papers that for sure would have been destroyed by Mao’s revolutionaries.

And Hoover really became—his organizing principle in his later years was anti-communism because he had taken the lessons to heart, but realized that the world hadn’t. And so these materials are incredibly diverse, long span, and really concentrate on the political history of the 20th century.

Frum: Because Hoover lived to an enormous age.

Hoover: He was 90 years old. So up until the point that Reagan died, he had been the oldest president, and up until the point where Jimmy Carter died, he had had the longest post-presidency. And it’s often commented that Jimmy Carter, who had this long and enormous post-presidency, also very much modeled his post-presidency on Hoover. There had never been a longer post-presidency up until Hoover.

And so there’s this pre-presidency part of Hoover’s life, but then there’s this post-presidency part of Hoover’s life that I’ll just say, you know, we probably don’t have time to get into, but Jared Cohen wrote a very good book called Life After Power that follows different post-presidencies. And his research, academic research, on Hoover’s humanitarian work in his post-presidency, of course: He’s laying the foundation for the Marshall Plan. He’s brought back into public life by Truman two days after Roosevelt dies. He’s just this elder statesman in his post-presidency, reorganizes the federal government.

Frum: He outlives John F. Kennedy.

Hoover: He does outlive John F. Kennedy, sadly. And this is another piece of the narrative that’s wrong, but Hoover and the Kennedys were quite close. Like, you can listen to these YouTubes of John F. Kennedy calling Mr. President to let him know about the Cuban, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis.

So Joe Kennedy was a dear friend of Herbert Hoover’s. There’s actually a still-living research assistant who worked with Herbert Hoover in the Waldorf Astoria when she was in her early 20s. She’s 92 now, 93, and she tells a story of Joe Kennedy calling and thinking, Oh, God, what are you gonna want to do talking to him? And instead, he puts him through. He comes to visit. You know, there’s a very close bond between the Kennedys and the Hoovers, mostly because both of them were exiled by FDR from the Democratic Party for some time. So they bonded in their distaste of FDR, among other things.

Frum: And Truman had the same distaste for FDR, and so did—

Hoover: He did. He did.

Frum: I’m going to double back to the presidency, but I want to—so the library’s founded in what year?

Hoover: 1962. Harry Truman dedicates it in 1962. But Hoover actually acquired his birth cottage, a 200-square-foot cottage, two bedrooms—sorry, two rooms—in which he is born, his brother is born, his sister is born which is right across from the blacksmith shop that his father works in and the Quaker meeting house that his mother ministers in.

And this siting is incredibly important to Hoover because it suggests a degree of possibility and opportunity that he believes his story could happen in nowhere else besides the United States. So this siting is all there in West Branch, Iowa, which was, again, then a town of 600 and now a town of 3,000. It’s on the outskirts of Iowa City, Iowa, where the University of Iowa is. If you happen to be anywhere in the Midwest, it’s a very easy day visit, and it tells the story of Hoover’s life, of somebody who feeds the world, who serves the world, but is ultimately from just a small, humble beginning.

And look, here’s the thing. There are a lot of presidential libraries. Now there are 16 that are part of the National Archives and Records Administration system. They have evolved over time. I mean, it is really Eisenhower, FDR, Truman, and Hoover who begin the process, recognizing that—and Hoover had this innovation. He created a foundation because ultimately he thought private philanthropy would have to sustain the library.

Now, as we have moved forward, it has become abundantly clear that the federal government is not gonna continue to sustain these temples to presidencies. I mean, if you go to the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, it is literally a temple to LBJ’s presidency. And Hoover’s is quite small. It is very humble. It represents his Quaker roots and the humility that he very much felt and embodied.

Every president gets to tell their story the way they want to tell it, and ultimately, there has been this evolving question about to what degree should the taxpayers be on the hook for that? And so, Reagan was really the first to create a massive foundation for his. I mean, he had, like, a $400 million endowment by the time he died. Nancy continued raising to endow that presidential library. And the Bushes, and then the Clintons, and then the Bushes again, and each president has sort of evolved the way they both present their story and the way they fund the continuing operations of their presidential library.

But it is the first four presidential libraries—Eisenhower, FDR, Hoover, and Truman—that really created a template for how these other ones should improve upon it. And for those four presidents, who, if they’re lucky, have completely obsessed descendants who want to continue to tell their story, but most don’t. And it’s a really hard thing to go about and raise money for a presidential library for dead presidents. I mean, the Obamas have billions of dollars and a huge endowment, and they will have the benefit of young daughters to continue to raise money and support the operations for many, many years, as do the Bushes and as do the Clintons.

But when you get down to a great-granddaughter who’s four generations down, who never met the president that she’s obsessed with—not obsessed with,but who quite inspires me. Like, his presence is quite palpable and was quite palpable in my upbringing because it was such a foundational pillar in terms of growing up in the family I grew up in.

But I also am unburdened by a sense of, I don’t know, my identity being tied to it. I’ve really chosen it because I’m quite passionate about Hoover’s legacy. I really want a fair accounting of not just his presidency, but his life in the fullness of his contributions, which we have not yet seen but we continue to near, get closer to every year. And so, it’s a passion project for me. And frankly, it’s, you know, it’s—well, we can get to the presidency, but I think the 800-pound gorilla in the Hoover story is the Depression, and it continues to cast a long shadow. And I continue to believe that as people take more into account what was known about modern macroeconomics in the 1920s and the 1930s and the 1940s, nobody really knew what to do. And Hoover did the best he could, and probably better than anyone else.

Frum: Well, now let’s focus on the part of the story that people think they know and that makes a negative example. So when President Trump explained why he was making the disadvantageous peace he made in the Persian Gulf he said, I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. Because he remembers Herbert Hoover as being associated with—

Hoover: Economic hard times.

Frum: With economic hard times. And America had had a very severe depression in the 1890s, but there weren’t very good records and numbers, so we don’t exactly know whether the 1930s are worse than the 1890s. By the 1930s, we’re beginning to have statistics. We know what the unemployment rate is. And of course, it’s on the edge of living memory.

So tell us your understanding of the presidency and how to-blame Hoover was or wasn’t for the events of the Great Depression. And we may have slightly different views on this question.

Hoover: By the way, and I would love to engage with your views on them, David, because you’re one of the smartest people I know. But also, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and you and I have spoken about this before. And I’ve amended my thinking in some ways, and in other ways, I haven’t.

Hoover, of course, is nine months in. By the way, the book 1929 that Andrew Ross Sorkin just wrote about 1929, about the Great Depression, is a really important contribution to the understanding of the Hoover narrative. Hoover comes to the presidency in March of 1929, and the stock market crashes in October of 1929. So he’s there for roughly less [than] six months. He had this fabulous quote, actually, which was that he was basically swept into the presidency almost unopposed. I mean, five states went against him. It wasn’t that he was unopposed, but, like, he wasn’t unopposed, essentially, on the Republican side, and on the Democratic side, it was a complete landslide.

And Hoover had been made into this kind of Superman because he had fixed the Mississippi River flood. He had done the Belgian relief. He had done European food relief. He had done all these marvelous things. People just thought, like, Of course, he should be the president. He had never been in elective office before. He was the first president, literally, to ascend to the presidency without ever being elected to public office. And he said, My friends have—”

Frum: Or serving in the military.

Hoover: Or serving in the military, exactly. “My friends have made the American people think of me some sort of Superman. They expect the impossible of me, and should there arise in the land of conditions in which the political machinery is unable to cope, I will be the one to suffer.” Like, he knew his reputation was too outsized and too big to meet a moment that a political circumstance couldn’t meet. And the Great Depression, to be very clear, was that moment.

It is the largest economic calamity in the history of the world—the second-largest calamity in the history of the country after the Civil War. And if a quarter of Americans are out of work, that’s, like, way more than a quarter because only men are working. I mean, there’s no downsizing what happened or minimizing how difficult a period that was. What is true is that, and this is the main point—and you and I can disagree on this perhaps—but when we had the global financial crisis in 2008, Ben Bernanke was at the Fed and is largely credited with having used monetary policy to help stave off what could have become a Great Depression, another global Great Depression. And it is Ben Bernanke’s Ph.D. thesis from Princeton that centered entirely on what happened in 1929, ’30, ’31, ’32 to begin to understand and develop alternative theories about what happened, that the collapse of the economy and the banks had as much to do with monetary policy—though it was little understood—as it did with fiscal policy.

And nobody understood really anything about monetary policy. Very few people did. Keynes wasn’t publishing until the 1940s about stimuluses and how to get us out of the war. Ultimately, I think historians and economists now believe that it was World War II that got us out of the [depression], not the New Deal. You know, FDR’s own sort of kitchen cabinet, Ray Mosley in particular, sort of admits to the programs of the New Deal being essentially throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. And so there’s this narrative that maybe Hoover didn’t cause it, or maybe he did, but he sure didn’t do anything about it. And the truth is: Nobody really knew what was happening. What we understand about modern macroeconomics, we understand now because of exhaustive study of that period. And to be clear, the economy bottoms out again in 1937, worse than in 1932. And as you review that, I mean, you simply can’t look at the details and say, Well, the New Deal got us out, if what happened in 1937 rivals 1932.

What you have to say is everybody was trying their best. People were making mistakes. Hoover certainly made mistakes. I mean, conservatives begrudge him for raising taxes when he shouldn’t have, for forcing wages to be lower. He tried to get industry to keep wages even and so sort of tampered with the free markets. Certainly, there are mistakes that were made on Hoover’s side. And yet, it’s hard to use a modern and contemporary context and knowledge to judge him at that time, or even FDR, really.

Frum: Here’s what I think is one of the most important lessons for living politicians from Herbert Hoover’s legacy.

Supposing somebody got into a time machine right now with Ben Bernanke’s thesis and everything that is known about exactly what is the right thing to do, and traveled back to the fall of 1929 and said, “President Hoover, here’s the book from the 21st century of exactly everything you need to do to get everything right, which includes, yeah, a much more stimulative monetary policy. It means getting rid of the tariffs that were—never mind not signing Smoot-Hawley—but getting rid of the tariffs that your Republican predecessors passed in the 1920s, which sustains the completely false and inflated reputation on the right of Harding and Coolidge, who had as much to do with the Depression by their tariff policies as anybody else. Oh, and you have to go off gold when the British do in 1931. Here’s the book.” And Hoover said, “Right, I accept the book. I’ll read the book. I’ll do everything you say.” If he had done everything right, American economic recovery would have begun probably sometime in 1931. And that would’ve been great because you would’ve missed the terrible year 1932. German democracy might’ve been saved. No Hitler, no World War II. But [Hoover] would still have presided over the worst recession in living memory from 1929 to ’31. That’s in the cake already. And he would still have lost the election of 1932, even if he had done everything right.

And one of the things that is hard for a modern politician: Sometimes you can do everything right, and you don’t get a political reward for it because the timing of doing the thing right comes too late to save your particular career.

Hoover: That’s certainly true. I think the economy actually was getting better in 1931. At least there were some signs that it was getting better in 1931. There were also,—Andrew Ross Sorkin actually documents very clearly in his book that the biggest story in The New York Times in, at the end of 1929 was not the stock-market crash, it was Admiral Byrd’s discovery of the North Pole. Nobody realized sort of that there was going to be this cataclysmic effect. But what also did happen, and I think this is where Hoover really failed in his presidency and departed from his previous habits and patterns. Something happened with Hoover, and I’ve heard this both from his biographers and from my father, and from my grandmother when she was alive: Hoover had been masterful at managing his image in the press, really, throughout his entire career. I mean, from the time he was in Western Australia, he was getting coverage of the successful mining operations in Australia; all through the good press he got through World War I—you know, the only man to emerge from the ordeal in Paris with his reputation enhanced. All through the Commerce Department years, he had very strong relationships with the media, the press, with reporters, journalists, and many people who helped tell his story or tell the story of what he was doing. And something happened in the presidency where he—and this is what my father has told me, but it is complemented by a biographer’s accounts—is that he believed suddenly that the American presidency was such a revered position that his ambition should no longer drive the efforts to shape how it was seen. And so he stopped engaging in a robust communications effort. He just stopped. Like, he didn’t talk to the press. I mean, he would do press conferences or whatever, but he just didn’t do all the sort of reputational management stuff that he had previously done. And so nobody was telling his side of the story. And, you know, perhaps, perhaps he might have done better in 1932 had he bothered to care for his reputation.

Frum: In my view, for whatever is worth, the key moment, because this is where you have to deal with the speak bluntly about this, the Wall Street Journal version of history. So the Wall Street Journal version of history is that what Hoover got wrong was raising taxes in 1931.

And you say, Okay, why did he do that? Why did he raise taxes in 1931? And the answer is because the budget deficit was growing, and had the budget deficit continued to grow, the United States would’ve been put in a position, as Britain was, where it could not stay on the gold standard. And Hoover chose preserving the dollars linked to gold.

Now, The Wall Street Journal won’t talk about this because they believe in putting the United States back on the gold standard, and the idea that the gold standard and the tariffs are the villains of the Depression is a story they can sort of accept, but sort of can’t.

So he’s confronted in 1931: If you continue to run deficits, you will be forced off gold like Britain, and that will be a calamity. It won’t. It’s the solution. But you had to be a very unusual person or a very desperate person in 1931 to understand that being forced off gold was the solution, not the problem. And so he said, “I can’t be forced off—”

Hoover: Especially as a mining engineer.

Frum: Yeah. “We can’t be forced off gold, therefore we have to raise taxes in the middle of a depression to keep the link to the gold standard.” No one understood that.

Hoover: I think you’re right. I mean, I think The Wall Street Journal’s version of history has changed a little bit over time. It used to blame it entirely on Smoot-Hawley. Smoot-Hawley of course was the, the tariff acts that everybody implored Hoover not to sign; that he really didn’t want to sign but he signed because he was trying to work with the Congress. But you know, everybody says that was definitive, but global trade was what, less than 3 percent of GDP at the time?

Frum: Also Smoot-Hawley comes too late. People don’t know, and this is very relevant to where we are today. The United States at the end of World War I went back to high tariffs, choked off European exports, forced Europe into debt, made the monetary situation unstable, made the gold standard untenable in any kind of shock. And Coolidge and Harding are villains in the story, but in the Wall Street Journal version of history, they’re heroes. And so we have to blame the Hoover tariff, not the Harding and Coolidge tariffs, and above all, never, never, never the gold standard, which for some crazy reason they keep on promoting into the 21st century.

Hoover: Hoover had a quote later on. He said, “Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellect and economic power by which I created a worldwide depression all by myself.”

Frum: Yes. I want to say one last thing as we head toward the end here about one of his great contributions, and it’s a contribution that is really under immense threat now, and this is, I think, quite an urgent problem.

So, as you said, because of the New Deal and the war, the United States creates this jumble of regulatory agencies in the 1930s and ’40s with very weak and mysterious constitutional basis, very murky limits on their powers, and that operate outside the constitutional system. And Hoover was one of the people who was really alarmed by this. And President Truman then gave him the mission—and when I say “the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946,” I can feel eyes glaze over—but this is like, along with the Bill of Rights, this is maybe the most important law that you, it’s certainly the most important law you’ve never heard of, and it’s the one that is under direct attack now by the Trump administration. Talk a little bit about his contribution to bringing these agencies back under constitutional review after World War II.

Hoover: Well, so I mean, one of the things that—another piece of the history is as soon as FDR is inaugurated, Hoover is alarmed by the New Deal, and he writes a book called The Challenge to Liberty. The Challenge to Liberty might be among Hoover’s least-read books, but again, like in the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, eyes glaze over at roll. This is Hoover’s description of how the exploding of these federal agencies is going to impede and impose upon individual liberty. And so he calls it—he actually has his own word for it—he calls it “regimentation.”

And what he ultimately does when Truman brings him back in to feed the world after World War II and help establish the foundation of the Marshall Plan, he also, both through Truman and then through Eisenhower, is asked to assemble a review of how the executive branch and the federal government work. And he has essentially this huge committee, a congressionally mandated committee, that reviews the executive agencies, reviews their authority, and then makes recommendations to Congress, of which 80 to 90 percent of them are passed into law that are intended to bring efficiencies and accountability to the federal government that had exploded previously.

And then Eisenhower brings him back in. So this is called the Hoover Commission. I mean, it had its own title, but it is known as the Hoover Commission: the first Hoover Commission and then the second Hoover Commission. And one of the things Hoover was known for was his ability to operate massively scaled operations in a highly efficient way. And so it was this idea of bringing his abilities at efficiencies to the federal government.

Frum: And this is maybe the point of alarm to end on. So the Trump administration is arguing that every administrative agency is a pure expression of the will of the president. The president can give an order to the Food and Drug Administration, to the Federal Trade Commission, to any agency—even the Federal Reserve—and they have to carry it out just as much as if they are a member of the military. That his order is absolute and plenary over the entire administrative aspect of the government.

And this was a vision that Americans had in the 1930s and ’40s, from which they retreated in fear and terror and corrected very much under Hoover’s leadership with laws that said the administrative apparatus of the federal government must be bound by law. It is not a pure expression of the president’s will. And every day we’re having battles with the Trump administration of, is it presidential will that governs the country? Or is it the law? And you can feel the ghost of Herbert Hoover reminding us of his achievements after his presidency.

Hoover: I think that’s right because the point is that one can have professionals in the federal government that are intended to execute the operations of the executive branch and the federal government despite the person who is in the office. And if you don’t, then what you’re doing is reverting to a 19th-century system of spoils, where political appointees are rewarded for their loyalty and placed in positions of power where they can take advantage of the trust placed in the president by the American people to their own ends. This is not the sort of fair administration of the government that is to serve all of us as equally as possible. And it is true, and it’s an affront, actually, on the notion that the government is there to operate very specific tasks on behalf of all of us who need it rather equally rather than through privilege or patronage or association with power.

Frum: Margaret, thank you so—I know, speaking of family, you have taken time away from your family on holiday to join me today, and I’m very grateful for that. I hope anyone who hears your voice and is anywhere in the vicinity of the great state of Iowa will make a special trip to see what you have accomplished with the renewal of the Herbert Hoover library. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Hoover: You’re so kind to have me, David. It is a great privilege and honor to be on with you.

Frum: Bye-bye.

Hoover: Bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Margaret Hoover for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a classic of espionage literature, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published in 1963 by John le Carré. John le Carré being a pseudonym for an English writer named David Cornwell, who had served as an officer in the English intelligence system in the 1950s.

The novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a kind of a reply to the success of the James Bond novels. James Bond, written by Ian Fleming, offered a very glamorized view of the life of a spy, full of excitement and danger, lavish expense accounts, and beautiful women. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a much grimmer reality of betrayal and mutual betrayal.

I won’t summarize the plot. It’s very complicated and very exciting, and if you haven’t read it before, I urge you to read it now, and I will not dim your enjoyment of this very morally complicated novel. I want to talk instead about the evolution of the spy novel as a form, how it came about that this form was developed in the 20th century, and why we associate it so much with British writers especially.

There are American spy thrillers, but they tend to emphasize either technology or, like Robert Ludlum’s novels, a hero who is so powerful, so tough, so indestructible that he himself is more like Batman or Spider-Man or Superman than he is like a human secret agent. The British tradition—Len Deighton, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré—emphasizes even very human people. Even James Bond, at least in the novels, does not have superpowers. If you shoot him, he will die.

Why this particular attraction of British writers to the creation of this particular form? What is it about the spy novel that made it such an important form in the 20th century? Now, I’ve been thinking about this as I wrestle with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I see two great themes in these books and others like them. The first is that spy novels are novels ultimately about bureaucracy. There’s a person in a government office doing a government job; dealing with expense accounts, which figure large in the work of John le Carré; dealing with all the drabness and meanness of government offices, especially in the pinched years after World War II; and trying to achieve things for their fellow countrymen against the background of this bureaucracy. And it’s difficult, and it raises very complicated moral choices.

At one point, the British protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is confronted by an East German counterpart who asks him, Why do you do it? What do you believe in? And he’s a little taken aback by the question. The real answer is a kind of personal commitment, a personal vendetta, but under the circumstances of the question, he can’t answer. And the East German spy goes on to explain he’s a Marxist. He thinks it’s perfectly valid to sacrifice one human life for the benefit of humanity or other human lives for the benefit of the collective. But Britain is nominally a Christian society, where each life is sacred in itself. How do they justify sacrificing one life to save others? And that is the kind of moral dilemma of a bureaucratic system of the one versus the mass that I think haunted the generation that came through the Second World War and the early part of the Cold War where they saw good people being sacrificed as individuals for some idea of the benefit of many others, and not quite able to answer what that benefit was and not being quite so sure that benefit was really there.

The second theme that struck me as I pondered this is: Spy fiction is fiction about people who are secretly powerful. And not the American version. Again, it’s about machines or superheroes. But the British novels are about people who look humdrum, ordinary, but who, in fact, have these giant bureaucracies at their back.

And this fantasy of secret power is something that seems especially appealing to a society like Great Britain that had been so powerful and was watching its power ebb through the 20th century and being displaced by a power with which they had some friendly relationship—the United States—but also some relationship of envy.

I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that those American writers who, in my opinion, do excel at the spy fiction form—not, again, in the superhero, Robert Ludlum way—are Alan Furst, Daniel Silva, are both Jewish and are therefore, in their own way, marginal people in the way just as the British are marginal to American power, Furst and Silva have experiences that are at the margin of their own society.

Spy fiction at its best can be morally challenging in a way that few other forms really are. The particular moral dilemma in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—and again, no plot spoilers here; if you haven’t read it, I recommend it—is a really heart-rending one because the moral calculus that you see that is revealed by the end of the novel makes a kind of sense—a brutal sense, but a kind of sense. But the human costs of this calculus are extreme and painful, and we are made to feel them and not allowed to escape them. That’s something that it’s easy to dismiss as you simply read the news and read about espionage as a product of something that reveals information, and not see that behind all of these stories, there are real human beings whose lives are compromised in one way or another.

Thank you so much for watching The David Frum Show this week. As I mentioned, we are taking two weeks holiday, August 12 and August 19, or a two-week break. We will be working, but we will not necessarily be producing video content in that period. We will resume in the later part of August and early September. Thank you for watching The David Frum Show. Please, as always, if you can, share and subscribe [to] the show so others find out about it. And as ever, the best way to support the work of this program is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That supports me and all of my colleagues. Again, thank you. See you soon on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.

Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.

In the face of right-wing resistance, the United States fully vaccinated only about 66 percent of the population by the end of April 2022. Had the U.S. achieved full vaccination within the first 16 months that the shots were available—as was materially feasible—the death rate from COVID could have been cut in half, according to some estimates, and more than 300,000 lives could have been saved.

If you are hunting for a COVID villain or villains, then, there are many beckoning targets. Investigate the crooks who promoted quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for profit or plain crackpot mania. Investigate the sources and pathways of anti-vaccine disinformation. Investigate the pattern and funding of Russian support for anti-vaccine disinformation by following the map already provided by the U.S. State Department’s work on the subject. Investigate the response by U.S. public-health agencies, including the CDC, to better prepare for the next pandemic.

But the present Congress is investigating none of that. Instead, a Senate committee has fixed on Anthony Fauci, the physician and pandemic-era chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Senate obtained his diary—reportedly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claims to have found it on a government server—and then, outrageously and gratuitously, published 1,100 pages of it for the world to see.

[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]

Regarding the many accusations and insinuations hurled at Fauci, the first thing to be said is this: Even if any of them were true, none would have made the slightest difference to the immediate and urgent problem—what to do to save lives from a deadly new virus.

Senator Rand Paul and others want Americans to believe that Fauci was aware of the possibility that the coronavirus was intentionally created in a Chinese lab, even as he insisted in public comments that the virus had a natural origin. He may not have been forthcoming; the scientific verdict remains uncertain. But whatever its origin, the virus really killed people. The U.S. scientific community’s first and supreme job was to protect people. It did. Scientists discovered and developed the COVID vaccines that brought the pandemic to an end. It’s the anti-vaxxers, not the scientific community, who should stand indicted in the light of 2026.

Did scientists, including Fauci, sometimes speak with excessive certainty about the extent of their knowledge in the early weeks of the pandemic? Perhaps. That seems a lesser offense, however, than the president putting American lives at risk by consciously telling lies for personal advantage.

When the pandemic struck, President Trump’s immediate concern was that it might depress the stock market. Trump had started a trade war with China in February 2018. That trade war tumbled U.S. capital markets; at the end of that year, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. stock indexes had suffered their steepest annual drop since the global economic crisis of 2008. Trump’s priority in 2019 was to negotiate a face-saving exit from his failing trade war. That December, Trump unveiled a “Phase One” deal —but markets remained nervous and skeptical. When reports spread about a lethal outbreak in China, Trump appointed himself chief international cheerleader for the Chinese government. CNN counted 37 separate compliments by Trump to Chinese leaders in the opening months of 2020. That February 7, for example, Trump tweeted: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.” Nothing must interrupt Trump’s hopes for a trade deal that would boost the stock market and thus—he assumed—get him reelected in 2020.

As it became apparent that the virus had escaped China and reached the United States, Trump minimized the danger—although in private conversations with the reporter Bob Woodward, the president revealed that he expected a mass-casualty catastrophe for the United States as early as February 2020. He admitted to Woodward that his deception was intentional: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” In early March that year, Trump resisted allowing passengers to disembark from a virus-stricken cruise ship because once the people were on U.S. soil, their cases would augment the number of recorded infections. He said he would rather not let them off, because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Trump allies made it explicit that to recognize the danger of COVID was to commit a thought-crime against Trump. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on February 24, 2020: “Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus.” He continued, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Trump declared at a White House event at the end of the month that the virus would soon disappear on its own. (Trump reasserted his prediction of spontaneous disappearance repeatedly through the spring and early summer of 2020.) In early March, Trump dismissed COVID as far less deadly than the common flu.

As infections and deaths surged in March and April, two imperatives gripped the MAGA world. The first was to fix blame for the mounting disaster on an external hate object. Far-right websites introduced claims that COVID had originated as a Chinese “bioweapon” in January. By late February, the bioweapon language spread among Republican members of Congress. On March 16, Trump tried to rebrand the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.”

But “blame China” took MAGA only so far. If China was to blame, whether because of malice or accident, then Trump looked all the greater a fool for having courted China so hard through 2019 and into 2020. And “blame China” did not offer any exit from the shock that was killing Americans, had shut down the U.S. economy, and was threatening to defeat Trump in November.

Thus, the second imperative: Find a fast-and-easy miracle cure. The first candidate was an antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, touted on Fox News nearly 300 times in March and April—and cautiously endorsed by Trump at a press conference on March 19. When hydroxychloroquine flopped, it was replaced as the great right-wing hope by a deworming drug, ivermectin. After the podcaster Joe Rogan contracted COVID in the fall of 2021, he told his fans that ivermectin, vitamins, and other home remedies had cured him.

Trump lost the presidency and—after the failure of his attempted coup d’état—left office in January 2021. By then, vaccines had been developed. Now two new imperatives gripped right-wing America.

The first was to sabotage COVID recovery to do to Joe Biden’s new presidency what someone (but who?) had done to Trump’s. The second was to profit financially and politically from the reservoir of COVID paranoia that had accumulated on the American right.

If the vaccine rollout could be stalled or thwarted altogether, the Biden presidency would be blighted. At the same time, influencers and Republican politicians bidding for followers could use vaccine hesitancy to their personal and career advantage.

The arc of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID response is illustrative. DeSantis began as a highly responsible actor on vaccines. Through the first half of 2021, he promoted vaccination in his state. He argued—correctly, in hindsight—that the state could combine a vaccination program with the abolition of lockdown mandates and an early return to in-person classroom teaching. Florida children went back to school in August 2020—and soon were outperforming their peers in Democrat-governed states that deferred to teacher-union wishes to postpone classroom reopenings.

Sometime over the course of 2021, however, DeSantis seemed to have decided that he could exploit COVID conspiracy thinking to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In September 2021, DeSantis appointed the vaccine opponent Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Although DeSantis prudently accepted the first-round COVID vaccination in spring 2021, he turned evasive when asked months later whether he had taken the recommended booster. “I’m not going to let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.” DeSantis never quite repudiated his past support for vaccination. But he aligned himself with the ever wilder ideas of vaccination adversaries. In December 2022, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to investigate harms allegedly caused by COVID vaccines.

[Read: What Anthony Fauci didn’t say]

The gathering anti-vaccination movement battened on anti-Semitism, racism, and general looniness. Viral TikTok campaigns in the fall of 2021 promoted the label “pure blood,” implicitly associating unvaccinated status with white-nationalist identity. Republican officeholders generally refrained from endorsing these more extreme fantasies. But Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among others, still traffics in the false claim that thousands of people have died because of injuries from COVID vaccines.

This is the route that has brought Fauci to the Senate hearing.

Democrats and liberals have their own post-COVID soul-searching to do. Blue states kept schools closed too long. They showed hypocrisy when they pivoted from demanding lockdowns in the spring of 2020 to welcoming mass George Floyd protests in the summer. Their analysis of lockdowns may have underweighted harms, especially to small businesses and otherwise healthy schoolchildren. Continued masking after the advent of vaccines could have enabled anti-social and even criminal behavior. The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 exploited the genuine need for post-pandemic recovery to pass lavish spending bills that probably accelerated inflation. Americans should, as best as they can, delve deep into the exact degree of Chinese-government culpability for the coronavirus—not because it makes (or would have made) any actionable difference to the COVID response, but because it may serve as guidance for future dealings with China. The fullest obtainable history of COVID will reveal much that Americans need to know about the truthfulness, competence, and danger of the Chinese regime.

Fauci may have misjudged, mishandled, or misstated many particulars. He was a scientist and bureaucrat unaccustomed to—and dazzled by—celebrity. History will judge his actions with more dispassion than the present day can or will. One thing that people should keep in mind, however, is that Fauci was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s shameful and deadly dereliction of duty. Trump’s record of dishonesty, callousness, and selfishness during the pandemic is a documented reality. The imputations against Fauci are mostly fantasies.

No mistakes by blue America or by the scientific community begin to compare with the brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans—and the betrayal of their own cruelly deceived supporters—that disgraced MAGA and the broader right wing in the pandemic years. Their consciences should be heavy. They seek now to transfer their own burden of guilt onto Fauci. The reckoning is a lie. The transfer is a fraud.

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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to President Trump’s latest round of tariffs and explains why he believes they are weakening America’s economy and its alliances.

Then, David is joined by his Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait for a wide-ranging discussion on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whether presidents should be funny, the growing attacks on Barack Obama’s legacy, and the battle in Michigan between moderates and the progressive left that could shape the Democratic Party’s future.

Finally, David closes the show with a discussion of Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed and the Bronze Age collapse.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: You are kind of an immoderate centrist. You’re ready to—you have centrist views, but you’re ready to brawl. But do you see, as you look at the Democratic Party, that there’s something about the moderate—they will not fight back? And therefore, they’re abdicating by default to people who are going to end up empowering Trump. And whoever Trump’s successor is, probably J. D. Vance, and all that J. D. Vance means for the future of American democracy.

Chait: Absolutely. Look, it’s, it’s an old problem, right? The definition of a liberal is someone who’s too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves, without doing anything to change, for generations.

[Music]

David Frum: Welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait, and we’ll be talking about Obama’s legacy and what it means for the future of American politics. The book this week will be 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline, a study of the end of the Bronze Age.

But before either my dialogue with Jonathan Chait or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on the most recent rounds of tariff announcements by President Trump. Last Friday, President Trump announced his latest tariffs to go into effect. He targeted 60 economies. I say “60 economies,” because one of the 60 targeted was Taiwan, which is not regarded by the United States as a country but only as an economy. So, 60 economies including Taiwan; 59 countries plus Taiwan.

The ostensible basis of this new round of tariff increases was to combat forced labor. President Trump used a provision in American law that allows the president power to impose tariffs on countries that use forced or slave labor, and he said: That’s it. In order to fight forced or slave labor, these 60 economies, including Taiwan, are going to be targeted by a new round of tariff increases.

The grounds given for the tariffs are not really very plausible. There is no or barely any factual showing that all of these 60 were engaged in some way in forced labor. The United States, after all, is not completely clean on this question either, and there’s no graduation of the tariff to the alleged cause. There’s no saying: Such-and-such country has more forced labor or more openness to forced labor, such-and-such has less; therefore they have different tariff rates. No. It’s just—we accuse these 60 economies, we target them with tariffs, and we’re doing this even though our own hands are not clean. The United States economy is open in many ways to forced labor.

Pretty obviously, what is going on here is that Trump is looking for some legal basis to reinstate the tariffs that he has had struck down in the past. President Trump originally used an emergency economic authority from the 1970s. The Supreme Court told him he couldn’t do it. Then he fell back on a temporary provision that allowed him to impose tariffs for a period of time, I think 150 days, and that time has run out. So now he’s looking for what he can get.

As the president returns again and again and again to imposing tariffs on the world, a question has to be asked: What on earth could any Trump supporter imagine the president is possibly doing that is, in any way, in the American national interest? The emotional basis, the argumentative basis, the intellectual basis for tariffs is that we are supposedly reindustrializing the United States. But since Donald Trump has become president, manufacturing jobs in the United States have declined by the tens of thousands, probably somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 net manufacturing jobs fewer as I record in the summer of 2026 than when Donald Trump became president at the beginning of 2025.

Because other sectors other employment sectors are continuing to grow, especially health care, this loss of a net 100,000 manufacturing jobs means that manufacturing as a share of nonfarm payrolls has now dipped below 8 percent, which is the lowest level that manufacturing has had in American employment since figures began. Maybe it was lower in 1776 than it is now, but since good figures began, this is the lowest. It’s a record. So obviously, it’s not working. And it’s not just jobs that are being lost. Manufacturing output and manufacturing investment also seem to be in decline. This is a little harder to calculate because there’s a huge capital-investment boom going on because of artificial-intelligence data centers. A lot of money is being committed to these data centers, and the question is: To what extent does this get counted as manufacturing investment and whatnot? But private economists who have tried to separate out seem to be in some kind of agreement that, at best, manufacturing investment is flat in the Trump year and a half, maybe down a little bit, because of the problem of the Trump tariffs.

The thing I wish I could pound into the head of tariff supporters is that every tariffed item is not only a product that you sell to consumers; it’s also an input into something else. When you impose tariffs on goods, you make not just things more expensive for American consumers—you make things more expensive for the American companies that buy those things and put them into other things. It’s a house-that-Jack-built problem. Every time you make an input more expensive, you make the ultimate product more expensive and make the final American product that much less competitive on world markets. And the result is: You can’t compete, so you sell less, so you invest less, so you employ less.

A large part of the attraction of tariffs to Donald Trump seems to be that they appeal to his desire for dominance. His perception of the world is divided into subjects and into enemies, and if you’re not a subject, then you’re an enemy. And if you’re an enemy, then there are no rules. And if you’re a subject, for that matter, there aren’t any rules either. That everything is an expression of will and ego, and all economics is a matter of I win, you lose, and if I don’t feel I’m winning, then I must be losing.

This has become the signature political and economic philosophy of an entire political party under Donald Trump. The party that used to stand for markets and enterprise, the Republican Party, the party of Reagan and Romney. We’re on a bad track here, and these latest tariffs mark another bad milestone on that bad track. We need to get off this, and we need to start creating in freedom and with rules.

That doesn’t mean that we pretend that China is not a problem. China is a problem, and there’s forced labor in China. And China is a rule-breaker and steals intellectual property. You need a China-specific solution to the problem of trade, not a solution that destroys the whole apparatus of trade with all of America’s friends and, increasingly, former friends.

The United States is now bound in a grinding and frustrating war with Iran. It needs all the friends it can get. The idea that it is waging economic aggression on all of its partners and then acting baffled and befuddled that these partners don’t help out on the Iran problem—a war that the United States started and that it did not have to start and that now it can’t get out of—that just, again, seems to be another bad milestone on another bad path.

The way out of all of America’s problems—it’s not the whole solution, but it’s the beginning of a solution—is to return to the path of free and fair trade with friendly-minded nations, bracketing China as a special problem, and otherwise dropping tariffs to the lowest rates possible and returning to the days when the United States negotiated agreements with its friends to trade in freedom and prosperity with mutual benefit and understanding that true trade makes all those who participate in it better off.

And now my dialogue with Jonathan Chait.

[Music]

Frum: Jonathan Chait has dedicated 30 years as one of this country’s sharpest, wittiest, and most ornery advocates for liberalism, first at The New Republic, then at New York magazine, and since 2024 at The Atlantic. It’s a remarkable career made more impressive by the fact that journalism was always his second choice of avocation, adopted only after the involuntary abandonment of his true ambition: head coach of the University of Michigan football team.

Jonathan Chait is the author of Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. And Jonathan is a continuing reminder that liberalism doesn’t have to be apologetic or bashful about itself. Jonathan, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, David.

Frum: Okay, so we have a number of things to talk about today. I want to start—I know this is a topic that’s maybe a little more interesting to me than to you—but to start by looking back at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that was recorded on Saturday night, just a few days before you and I record. This has always been a kind of troublesome event from a point of view of Washington journalism. There are big advantages to being close to politicians, and big hazards as well. So I know you worked at the glory days of The New Republic when there was a lot of intimacy between The New Republic and the politicians it liked. How do you think about events like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner? And do you think about them differently in the age of Trump from the way you thought about them before?

Chait: I was always very skeptical of these events. I went to one to see what it was like, but I felt like if you go to more than one, then you’re no longer going anthropologically; you’re actually part of the thing. And I didn’t want to be part of the thing, because I think it’s a little bit gross. Part of it, just mechanically, is journalistic outlets using themselves as intermediaries for their advertisers to give them access to politicians and to celebrities. The celebrities come because they get some cachet for being at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The politicians get access to donors and to celebrities and to journalists. And I feel like it’s cozy for everyone, but I don’t think it’s really good for the journalism profession at all, and never has been.

In the Trump era, people have started to question it more than they have, but I feel like The New York Times was correct 20-some years ago to pull out of the event, and I wish everyone else would too.

Frum: Trump has changed the ritual in one very noticeable way—which was, in the past, the president’s speech always followed a strict form. Which was a series of gentle jibes at the press, somewhat tougher jibes at himself, occasional jibes at political opponents. That was handled with extreme care. Obama did them more than others, but that was always a little dangerous to do because it sort of violated the treaty of the evening. Followed, of course, by the moment at the end where the politician switches from humor to seriousness and pays tribute to the important role of the press, and everyone likes hearing him say it, whatever the politician may think in the recesses of the politician’s heart.

Trump just goes on pure aggression, pure attack. And that may make it easier for journalists to disavow or disconnect themselves from something that was troublesome before.

Chait: I think that’s right. What was the most revealing joke he made was actually a decent joke, at least on paper. His delivery was horrible, because he can’t deliver written text. But he made a joke about how he’s basically taken control of CBS News, how he effectuated regime change there and installed Bari Weiss. And that’s actually pretty chilling, right? I mean, that’s the [Viktor] Orbán playbook that we were all warning about in action, and he’s just boasting about it to the faces of the journalists.

Frum: It’s also, by the way, self-defeating in a way that Trump’s speeches are often not very strategic. But if it were true that Bari Weiss was the person you had installed at CBS, that is the last joke in the world that a president should make, because it only detracts from the effectiveness of your supposed ally. Which I, again, I don’t think she is. But if she were, it detracts from your effectiveness. It undercuts her. It puts her in an untenable situation. Why would you say such a thing? Trump doesn’t seem always to think those things through

Chait: Well, he doesn’t think them through. But I think at some level he’s acting from some instinct to dominate and to make everyone acknowledge the domination, right? He doesn’t work with any subtlety. He actually has to tell people what he’s done and force them to wear the hat on their head.

We may not want to go down this path of debating what’s happened at CBS, but I think it’s pretty clear that Trump believes he has done this at CBS. Now, whether Bari Weiss thinks that’s what she’s doing is a different question.

Frum: I think you make a very shrewd point. Which is that Trump, even when he would do better to allow dignity to people whom he thinks of as allies—he can’t do it. He has to humiliate; he has to dominate. He has to actually take his friend’s head and dump it in the bucket of shit, and pull the friend’s head out again and say, See, my friend is now covered in shit thanks to me. That’s the kind of guy I am, and this is the kind of low-grade character my friend is.

Chait: That’s right. That’s right. I mean, bending the knee is a metaphor people often use, but there’s a visual strikingness to it, right? I mean, an actual sign of submission is what he requires of people who submit to him.

David Frum: Now, let me pivot here to the Barack Obama first White House correspondent dinners, and then his presidency. When I wrote speeches for President [George] W. Bush, I occasionally tried to introduce jokes into them. I have this especially vivid memory of writing a joke that—I’m now going to forget what the joke is, unfortunately. But I remember thinking it was quite good, and putting it into a speech, and having the joke be struck by [senior adviser] Karl Rove personally. And when I went to Karl Rove to complain and say the joke was funny, Rove said—and I thought this was very wise—he said, The joke was funny. That’s why I killed it. It was too funny. Presidents shouldn’t be that funny.

And one of the things that was very striking when Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was he was that funny. He said the thing you couldn’t believe a president had said. They were often hilarious, but often sometimes too funny. Did you have qualms about that?

Chait: No, I don’t. I think there’s a belief that some people have that humor and insight and dignity are in tension with each other, and I’ve just never thought that. I’ve always thought of humor as an aspect of intelligence. When someone can say something funny, to me that’s a sign that they have some insight that they’re able to express into the world. And I’ve never objected to any figure of any persuasion being funny. [Senator] Ted Cruz, with whom I disagree on almost everything, can often be very, very funny, and I appreciate that about him. I think we need more of it.

Frum: Well, let me quote the Obama joke that made me most uncomfortable, but that was very funny.

So I believe this was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner just after he had been reelected in 2012, and he was taking a bit of a victory lap, and he mentioned that one particular donor, I think it was Sheldon Adelson, had spent the then-astonishing sum of $100 million to defeat him. And Obama, sort of exulting that it hadn’t worked, said: If he felt that strongly about it, why didn’t he just offer the $100 million to me and ask me to leave politics altogether? I’m not saying I would’ve done it, but I would’ve thought about it. And that was really funny, but it’s—

Chait: It’s a great joke.

Frum: It’s a great joke, but why is it a great joke? So, there’s a theory that humor is how we adjust discomfort. It’s how we deal with the taboo and discuss the taboo in a way that’s socially acceptable.

And so the taboo there is, yeah, politicians could bribe rich people. We’ve reached a degree of wealth in American society where a rich man could say: You know, I don’t like your views. Here’s $10 million. Go to an island. I want you never to be heard from again. And there are politicians who might say, Satchel full of money, airplane ticket in hand, off I go. And when you joke about it, you remind people of that reality. Which we all know, but it’s a little uncomfortable to face.

Chait: Or that we’re still banning bribery—at the time, we were still banning bribery. We no longer are banning bribery anymore. But you can spend $100 million. So there’s this last barrier against a rich man’s influence that we can’t cross. So he can go all this way, but he can’t just take the most direct possible route to his ambition.

Frum: So you wrote this book about Obama at the very end of the Obama presidency. Trump came to office. You attracted a lot of attack for the book, because how could you say Obama was effective when he was immediately followed by Trump? You spent a lot of the 2010s defending Obama from critics on the right who said he was a communist and a Kenyan, or a Kenyan communist, or a communist Kenyan. Now the attacks seem to come from the left. I know you’re not a person of tender sensibility, but how do you deal with this?

Chait: You know, it is interesting, and I have reflected on this, because I would say 75 to 80 percent of the argument I make in the book is against those critics on the right, and maybe 20 percent is against the criticisms of the left. And there were criticisms from the left of Obama at the time, but they were just much, much less important.

And what’s interesting in retrospect, as you sort of indicated, is that the conservative critiques have mostly been forgotten, dropped altogether. They’ve just moved on to other things to anger them at the moment. Whereas the left-wing criticisms have survived. They’ve just been repeated over and over again and have established themselves as kind of official histories of that era and are widely believed, even if they weren’t widely believed at the time. And it’s really been fascinating, and I don’t quite have a full handle on how that happened other than just the sheer power of repetition at the time.

In other words, to listen to people talk about Obama now, you would think that Obama was just leaving on the table all these left-wing victories he could have been taking because he was just such a neoliberal shill. That he, out of cussedness, just hated Medicare for All and loved Wall Street.

But at the time, he was seen as a socialist. And it wasn’t just by the Republican Party. The mainstream media was portraying him as a radical. Let me just give you one example—and there are many examples of this—but the kind of official history we have now of the stimulus is that Obama held down the size of the stimulus because he didn’t want to spend more money on stimulus, because he was worried about the deficit. The truth is that Obama, rightly or wrongly, was trying a strategy to get the maximum stimulus sum he thought he could get out of Congress. And Obama was being seen at the time as being completely irresponsible in pursuing stimulus. The New York Times was treating the deficit as the big crisis and the economic crisis as a secondary problem. It was treating his attempt to stimulate the economy in the face of these deficits as perverse. It was basically running stories saying: We are looking at $100 trillion dollar deficits down the road, and nonetheless, Barack Obama wants to spend even more money. Which is such a hard sell. That was the mainstream narrative that he was fighting against, and the whole context in which he was operating has been completely forgotten.

Frum: Well, we were there. And it is true that Obama’s first job as president was saving the banking system and the larger American free-enterprise economy. And maybe he didn’t love that job, but that was the job that history gave him, and that’s what he did.

I have a very unusual view on this, which is I actually think that the period from October 2008 to March of 2009—the Bush-Obama transition—is actually one of the finest hours in the history of U.S. government and the finest hours in the history of the presidency. And a remarkable testimony to two men of different backgrounds working together on a common enterprise in ways that were very generous.

And the one I think about the most was one of the questions that George W. Bush faced in the fall of 2008 was: Should he save General Motors or not? And there were two obvious choices. One was save General Motors, and do it, and then your predecessor would have to live with it. And the other was, kill General Motors, and then your predecessor would have to live with it. And Bush instead made the decision, save them for 90 days, or prob—well, I would forget the exact number of days, but save them for enough of a period that your successor would have full autonomy to decide for himself whether to save General Motors or not. And indeed, we didn’t have a Great Depression, and we didn’t have the collapse of democratic systems all over the world, and we didn’t have a collapse of world communism, er, world capitalism. We didn’t have global communism. I think of those as good things.

Chait: And do you remember the phrase that conservatives applied to the bailout of GM? Gangster. Gangster government was the most common one. Gangster government. This was them indicating that he had gone beyond—they’d already called him a socialist. Now he had gone so far beyond socialism they needed an even viler epithet to describe what he was doing. That these dangerous methods he would use to leverage control of the private sector and basically put us on the road toward communism and improper uses of government power.

Frum: I remember very vividly a conversation I had sometime in the spring of 2009 with a group of young, I think they were Koch fellows or some kind of group funded by conservative projects. And I was much more in the conservative world in those days than I am now, although well on my way out because of this. I remember talking to this group of four or five young people, and they were explaining that if it had been up to them, they would’ve allowed the banks to liquidate themselves.

So I said, Let’s play that out. And I walked them through—I won’t take time here to do it—but, what happens if you allow a bank liquidation? And that means all kinds of people who had good assets suddenly find they don’t have liquidity sufficient to cover their assets. So even though the assets are perfectly fine, they have to be liquidated hastily to raise capital. And you have this accelerating crisis through the whole economy, which is the story of 1931, ’33. But I played it out for them in very vivid terms. And I remember one of them, as I described this nightmare scenario, getting quite ashen and saying: Well, I guess it’s a good thing we weren’t in power then, because our ideas wouldn’t have worked in an emergency.

Chait: Right.

Frum: Well, if your ideas don’t work in an emergency—all the ideas work in nonemergency. (Laughs.) Everything works when it’s not an emergency. The test of your ideas: Does it work when it is an emergency?

Chait: No; I’ve always been taken by that comment because what it’s saying is that our ideas are just a theological commitment. More of an aspiration and not something that you can actually trust to work in the real world. But nonetheless, that we should be guided by them for theological reasons and not for practical ones.

Frum: One of the legacies of that Obama experience was—so the Obama stimulus was about $800 billion, if I remember correctly. About half of it in the form of immediate cash relief and about half of it in the form of spending, which was a big number at the time.

In the Democratic world, that experience was remembered as: Obama didn’t do enough. And so Biden, who was confronting not a deflationary crisis the way Obama was, but an inflationary crisis, he spent much more and ran even bigger deficits—well, maybe they weren’t bigger deficits to the economy, because the government’s revenue hadn’t collapsed as much. But he ran very big deficits. And of course, this time the voices of conventional wisdom were correct; that Biden was spending too much, and he had overlearned the Obama experience that Obama had handled successfully and Biden handled less successfully.

Chait: Obama understood that he needed to stimulate the economy more. I mean, as soon as he got the stimulus, he tried to get more stimulus. He got every dollar he could get out of Congress. You could make an argument that he could have gotten more if he tried different methods, but he was trying to get—he understood, first of all, the recession was deeper than they grasped at the time they passed the stimulus. So they calculated the size of the hole, and they figured out, Okay, so how close to filling up the hole can we get? And then it turns out the hole was even deeper than they thought. So then, they immediately were trying to get more money, and they did get more money. They got more tax credits; they pulled out more stimulus here and there. But they did not get enough stimulus, and the recovery was too slow. And that was the main lesson, that they needed to not repeat that mistake. But the problem is they just erred in the opposite direction under Biden.

Frum: So the left theory of the Obama presidency is: Obama didn’t do enough, and therefore the working class got mad, and they voted for Trump, and it’s Obama’s fault.

Chait: I mean, you can explain Trump’s victory through normal political arguments. You don’t need to summon this crisis of capitalism that produced Trump. It’s hard to win a third consecutive term for any party.

Hillary Clinton was a less talented politician than Obama. She was challenged from the left by Bernie Sanders, and her response to that challenge was for herself to move leftward still. So the candidate who ran in 2016 under difficult conditions for any candidate was not running as Obama’s third term. But she was running significantly to the left of Obama’s third term with less political skills.

Obama left office with a 60 percent approval rating. Obama, had he been able to run for president for a third time, would’ve wiped the floor with Donald Trump. There’s just no reason to believe that Donald Trump was a repudiation of Obama, who was and is very popular, and far more popular than Trump.

Frum: I have a really brain-dead theory of what happened that ignores all the personalities and so on.

Which: This is my theory of how Obama led to Trump. The economy returns to precrisis levels of output and employment in 2014. Pre the crisis of 2007, ’08. So we’re back at 2014 to where we were in 2007, although the growth trajectory is lower. At that point, respectable opinion says: Right; Obama’s been running these big deficits. This could lead to inflation if unchecked. Now is the time for the Federal Reserve to tighten interest rates. And that was not a crazy decision. That’s a very conventional, normal decision. The crisis is over. I mean, we’re back to where we were. Tighten now.

And it turns out the economy was still, in 2014, not healthy yet. And when you tightened in 2014, instead of saying, Okay, the growth continues, as it did when you tightened in the middle ’80s, instead what happened is: The employment growth slows. And so you have very not-recessionary conditions in 2015, 2016, but disappointing conditions. People do not feel continuing improvement, and they weren’t just grateful to be pulled from the sea to the shore. They wanted to resume the normal, you know, trajectory from the shore. And that didn’t happen. And so the incumbent party lost, and then the Federal Reserve recognized its mistake, loosened in 2016, and the economy accelerated in 2017, 2018, 2019. We had three good years before the COVID pandemic.

Chait: Right. They thought we were at capacity. There was a debate about: Are we at capacity? Are we about to hit the point of accelerating inflation in 2014? And we weren’t, and we found that out in Trump’s first term that there was actually plenty of slack left in the labor market, plenty of room to grow.

You’re right. That was an important moment. And that could well have made the difference, because the 2016 election was so close. Just a little bit more growth in those last two [years] could have made the difference. A lot of things could have made the difference.

But I would just point out in the overall macro-situation, Obama was popular. Obama’s popularity was not the problem. I mean, if he was even more popular, it would’ve helped more, but he was overall popular.

Frum: Now in 2026, we have this attack on Obama from the left. He’s now become quite a demon figure. And explain to me—what is the left case in 2026 against Obama? Why is Obama now bad?

Chait: Well, the main thing that they will say that Obama did badly was bailing out the banks in 2008. Obama’s 2008 bank bailout—

Frum: 2009. 2009.

Chait: No, no, no; 2008. Now, of course, the bank bailout did occur in 2008.

Frum: Yeah.

Chait: But Obama did not become president ’til 2009. But when I point this out, people will never believe me. I’ve been pointing this out for 15 years, and no one will believe me. So I think I just have to accept that I’m wrong, and that Barack Obama actually was president in 2008, and he’s therefore responsible for the bank bailout that occurred in 2008.

Frum: I think the bank bailout was good. And whoever was president in 2008—which turns out to be maybe a more difficult question than … I’m sorry to have interrupted you, because I thought it was an easy question. But as you say—as with the question, Who was president in 2020?—it turns out to be quite hard.

Chait: Yes. (Chuckles.)

Frum: So leaving aside the mysterious question of who was president in 2008, why is it, if you’re the left and you love [President] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved the banks, why do you hate whoever was president in 2008, who saved the banks?

Chait: Yeah. I’ve brought up this point many times. It’s very hard for me. I want to faithfully reproduce their criticisms; I don’t want to just be battling straw men. But it’s very hard for me on this point, because I feel like so little sense can be drawn from the criticisms they make. Like I said, the No. 1 point they make is the bank bailout. That’s by far the most common critique they make of Obama. The second most common they make is failing to jail anyone for the crimes of the financial crisis.

What actually happened was, [the Obama administration] looked at it and said: Well, they didn’t commit any crimes. The problem is all this stuff was legal, so we need to change the laws. And so they passed the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, which were the strongest regulations of Wall Street since the 1930s. At the time, those reforms were celebrated by progressives. If you ask any of the progressive experts in financial regulation, they will say that’s a very powerful law; a set of reforms that were formative. It looked at all the problems of the financial crisis, really regulated all of them. It also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But [critics] blame Obama for not imprisoning anyone for activity that was only subsequently made illegal. So again, I’m sort of attacking arguments that sound like straw men, but these really are the most common attacks made on Obama.

Frum: Go, take a step beyond the attacks. Because often when people say things, they are applying imperfect words to deep feelings. Okay, so maybe they don’t have good rationalizations, but where does it come from? What is the mentality that says, I revere Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but I hate Barack Obama? Where does that mood come from? Where does, where does Bernie Sanders-ism, what is the emotional need that it meets?

Chait: I think there was significant difference between Obama and the organized progressive movement. Do you remember when Obama’s spokesman derided the professional left? That was a somewhat notorious comment, but it really did capture a hostile relationship between the organized progressive movement and the Obama administration. And he thought that these organized progressive lobbies were unrealistic, didn’t have good ideas, and he had better ideas for messaging and for policy strategy. So they were always on the outs with him, and they resented that.

Biden, by contrast, was so deeply enmeshed with the progressive movement—the “professional left,” as they were called under the Obama era—that it was almost impossible to draw any distance between them at all. Biden did whatever they wanted. And so even though Biden had dramatically less legislative success, the progressive movement really celebrated Biden’s administration all the way ’til the end, when they decided that now Gaza was the only thing that mattered, and Gaza was the reason that he was a failure. But really, up until that moment they were celebrating Biden as the heir to Roosevelt. Biden as the progressive hero, and Obama as the sad, weak appendage to the Reagan era.

Frum: Is there something going on, too, that if you’re on the real left that you regard Trump as not the worst possible outcome? Because if you’re on the real left, Trump is obviously—it isn’t that they like him, but they know the working class, they will sooner or later see through the folly of Trump.

So all we have to do is eliminate the false messiahs and then give them our true messiah, and then they will see through the right and turn to the true messiah. And in fact, an interval of right-wing government maybe—or a Trump government, whether you call it right wing—is a necessary step in the process. Just as Hitler led to the triumph of communism in Germany, so—not to compare Trump to Hitler—but this is the thinking. The far right gets its turn; then we get our turn. We just need to exclude the middle, and then we win.

Chait: This was also the thinking of the communist left in Weimar Germany, right? They saw Hitler’s constituency as their own constituency. They really thought that there was this fluidity between the far left and the far right. I don’t think that was correct at all.

Frum: But at the intellectual level, there’s something to that. I mean, we all know people, and we could name them if we wanted to, who do seem to move very easily between far left and far right. And these are people who are very well educated, who care a lot about politics, care a lot about ideas. You’ll hear them say: I’m a progressive, but I feel at home when I talk to these ultra-MAGA people. We both hate bankers, we both hate Ukraine, we both hate Israel. We have so much in common. And they think, and that must apply at the voting level, where people vote for reasons that are less ideological.

Chait: That’s right. It’s the same error. And that’s why in some level, you’re right that Trump’s election filled them with hope. That they really saw this proletarian uprising that they’ve been longing for but were dejected that was not happening, finally glimmers of it happening. Because you could see elements of Trump’s populist rhetoric as reflecting their own. So I think you’re spot on on that observation.

Frum: So how much of your life do you spend defending the Obama legacy to people who want to detract it, from the left?

Jonathan Chait: Too much. Too much. I’m planning to write something maybe early next year. I’ve gotta just put it all in one place. But It’s gotten to the point where I have this alternate history that only I and a handful of deranged lunatics are aware of. And we’re living in an alternate universe in which everyone else has settled on a completely different interpretation of what happened during those years.

So I’ve gotta just put it all in one place, I think.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about your native Michigan now, because these issues are being played out in real time. Why is the Michigan Senate race, in your view—so much attention was focused on Maine. Now Maine is fading from the center of the discourse. The camera is swiveling to Michigan. Why is that Senate race so important?

Chait: There’s a Democratic Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is the left-wing candidate. Haley Stevens is sort of the mainstream center-left candidate. They’re both—

Frum: And is there an incumbent senator in Michigan?

Chait: No. Gary Peters is the incumbent Democrat who’s retiring, so there’s an open seat.

Frum: How competitive a state is Michigan?

Chait: It’s a slightly blue state, although Trump won it in 2024 and in 2016. So it’s very close at the presidential level. Democrats have usually won the Senate races and have usually won the gubernatorial races most of the time, but Donald Trump did win it a couple times. And it’s close enough that the Democrats could lose a Senate seat even in a wave year if they really screw things up. And they seem to at least be putting that possibility on the table.

Frum: So now there’s an open Democratic nomination. There is a Republican candidate who’s competed before, who’s a strong candidate, who’s not a loony at all.

Chait: Right.

Frum: And the Democrats will soon vote to choose one of two candidates. So tell us about the two Democratic choices.

Chait: There’s Haley Stevens, who’s a kind of center-left traditional Democrat. Who would basically—if you took all the Democrats who have won Senate races in Michigan in the last 30 years and put them in a blender and poured them out, you know, you would get Haley Stevens. She’s just an amalgamation of the traditional center-left Democratic Party in the state of Michigan.

Abdul El-Sayed is very left wing for the Democratic Party. He would be the most left-wing Democrat in the Senate, I think even to the left of Bernie Sanders. He would be as far left maybe as people like [U.S. Representatives] Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. He’s just across-the-board left on every issue, and has really emphasized opposition to Israel as a campaign theme. But he’s trying to do what [former Senate candidate] Graham Platner seemed to be on the road to doing in Maine. But I think he’s even doing it in a more confident, ideologically confident fashion. And he said that if he wins the primary and wins the general election, he is going to start carrying out purges of other Democrats who he thinks can be beaten in primaries.

Frum: And he seems to be a less psychologically troubled person than Graham Platner. And although this is maybe invidious to say, probably more intelligent than Graham Platner.

Chait: I actually have come to question some of his political judgment recently. I feel like he’s played this shrewdly but aggressively, really pushing up against the edge of how much he can get away with. But I feel like recently, it’s like a gambler who’s on a winning streak and is just overplaying his hands.

I’ll give you an example. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens over the weekend.

Frum: Gretchen Whitmer is the governor.

Chait: The popular governor of the state of Michigan. Popular with Democrats and popular with voters on the whole. If you’re El-Sayed, you just want to just take your lump and walk away from it, right? You want to minimize the impact of this. This is not going to be a good story for you. The only question is how much attention it’s going to get.

But then he goes and attacks Gretchen Whitmer. He takes a shot at her management of the roads, which was one of her original campaign slogans, just fixing the roads, and says the roads haven’t been fixed. So now you’ve given every reporter covering this race a license to extend the story and write about El-Sayed’s vendetta against Whitmer, and you’ve invited Whitmer to weigh into the race once again on Stevens’s behalf. And her approval rating among Democrats, I think, is 88 percent. So you have a tiny number of Democrats who agree with El-Sayed that Gretchen Whitmer is a corporate sellout, which he also thinks and has been saying. But the vast majority love her.

So he’s managed to skate by without really bringing to the surface the degree to which he rejects the entire Democratic Party and its entire philosophy. And he’s trying to get a lot of loyal Democrats to his side, who just want someone who will fight harder against the Republicans and don’t fully understand the ideological extremism that he is bringing to the table.

Frum: Why is this a story outside Michigan? So Democrats may be about to nominate someone who’s more to the left and has a high level of personal aggression and really, really, really hates Israel. And that’s issue No. 1 for him, how much he hates Israel. So suppose he wins. Why is this a story outside Michigan?

Chait: His plan is he will then become the leader of the left. And he said this, and a lot of other leftists have said this, that he will become their standard-bearer. Bernie Sanders is getting old now. And if [El-Sayed] can win, he will prove something that they’ve never been able to demonstrate before—that a left-wing candidate can win in a purple state. You’ve had DSA candidates winning in New York City. You have Bernie Sanders up in Vermont, which is a little bit idiosyncratic. And you have some other House candidates, you have some mayors, but you’ve never had anyone in a purple state winning on a platform this far left. And while El-Sayed is not in the DSA, he is supported by the DSA and he is aligned with the positions of a lot of DSA candidates. So that will completely change the perception of what is electable within the Democratic Party.

Frum: One of the things that matters outside Michigan is the left has probably given away the Maine Senate seat. Susan Collins looks like, at this point, if you had had to guess, she’d probably survive even in Maine, a mostly blue state, even in—

Chait: I’m not sure I agree. It’s a chance. There’s a chance. It’s at risk.

Frum: But something that should’ve been an easy pickup is now very contested.

Michigan is also very—again, as you say, a blue state, but one that does elect Republicans—also could be at risk. Is there any way to a Democratic Senate majority without both Maine and Michigan?

Chait: No. No, I don’t think there is. And the truth is, if you want to think about it from a politically sophisticated perspective, Michigan should have been an easy, easy hold, right? In a blue wave, off-year election, a state that almost always elects Democrats to the Senate—not by huge margins, but pretty reliably by three or four points—should have been an easy hold. And the outcome that I think a lot of moderates are afraid of is that El-Sayed runs, say, four points behind the national Democratic Party. Underperforms due to his extremism, but still gets in because it’s such a huge wave. And then the left turns around and says, See? This shows that our agenda is popular, and we need to implement it everywhere all the time.

Frum: And so then the Democrats lose in 2028 to J. D. Vance and his program of Orbánism in the English language.

Chait: Right. This is going to become the main proof point that’s being used in this interfactional war within the Democratic Party. So if El-Sayed wins, it will be the proof point that the Democratic Party needs to run as far as it can to the left, and that will not impair their ability to win the election in 2028. And I think actually is going to be quite important in terms of the presidential outcome in 2028. In fact, it might even be El-Sayed himself, because they are so enthusiastic about his candidacy. He could, like Obama, [who] went from a first-year senator to presidential candidate, El-Sayed could easily be on that trajectory. That’s how powerful he’s become within the movement so quickly.

Frum: Well, you know, people worry about the loss of consensus in American life and the polarization. But if you have an “El-Sayed versus J. D. Vance” ticket in 2028, at least we can have a consensus about the danger of the Jews. That would be—

Chait: (Laughs.) That’s right.

Frum: America could be united. The two parties could agree on something.

Chait: Right. And then Bloomberg will run a third-party race and get 2 percent, all Jewish vote.

Frum: So what’s at stake here is not just the 2026 outcome but the 2028 outcome as well.

Chait: I think that’s correct; yeah. Yeah, so it’s tremendously consequential.

Frum: So I’m gonna ask you a somewhat personal question, and forgive me if I overstep here. But one of the reasons why Republican moderates lost first to the Tea Party and then to Trump—and there was very little resistance to the Tea Party; there was a lot of resistance to Trump, but it was overwhelmed—was that people of moderate views understandably have moderate personalities. They don’t like conflict. They don’t like trouble. They always believe in compromise, that you can work things out.

And so you get these kinds of soft—you have moderate ideas backed by soft personalities. Fred Siegel—who is a great urbanist, used to be at the Manhattan Institute—had this praise of Rudy Giuliani. And whatever you think of Rudy Giuliani personally, this is, I think, a great phrase. He described Giuliani as “an immoderate centrist.” Which is: He had centrist views, but he was just, he was full of aggression.

Chait: Which eventually won out over the centrism.

Frum: Yeah. So that I think you’ve—this is the part that I was going to put you in. I mean, you are kind of an immoderate centrist. You’re ready to—you have centrist views, but you’re ready to brawl.

Chait: Pugilistic.

Frum: But do you see, as you look at the Democratic Party, that there’s something about the moderate—they will not fight back? And therefore, they’re abdicating by default to people who are going to end up empowering Trump. And whoever Trump’s successor is, probably J. D. Vance, and all that J. D. Vance means for the future of American democracy.

Chait: Absolutely. Look, it’s, it’s an old problem, right? The definition of a liberal is someone who’s too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves, without doing anything to change, for generations.

You know, you can find historical exceptions. Sometimes we point to the post–World War II moves by Arthur Schlesinger and Walter Reuther to form Americans for Democratic Action, to exclude the communists, to keep the communists out of the New Deal coalition. And to fight for civil rights and fight for the New Deal values.

But that’s maybe more the exception than the rule in some ways. I mean, there really is something inherent to liberalism, that’s necessary to liberalism. Which is an openness to critique—to not want to become so confident in yourself that you shut out all challenges, right? So I think there is a strength to that quality of liberalism that allows us to be supple, to change our positions with new facts. And I think has made liberalism enduring.

Frum: Where is Obama in all of this? It’s his legacy that is under attack. Both institutionally, but also quite personally. Will he stand up for himself in an argument? Why doesn’t he make himself heard? In a lot of these states, if the choice is Bernie Sanders versus random local Democratic official, Bernie Sanders may win. If it’s Bernie Sanders versus Obama, we know how that fight goes. Is it because he’s an ex-president and doesn’t want to return to the muck and mire of politics? Where is he?

Chait: I think he’s calculated that he can have the most influence by operating behind the scenes. And you’ll notice that the Bernie people absolutely despise Obama, specifically not just for his presidency, but for his role in 2020, right? When you had this sudden coordination of the non-Bernie opposition. The Bernie Sanders strategy in 2020 was to win the Democratic nomination with under 50 percent, by just having his opponents stay divided all the way through the convention. And he would never have to win a Democratic Party majority, and he could get the nomination anyway. And then all of a sudden, just everyone realized they couldn’t win and dropped out and endorsed Biden. And Obama played a role there, and they hate him for that.

So Obama will take an active role, but he doesn’t want to play this factional leadership role that Bernie Sanders plays, where he goes into every contested primary and endorses the most left-wing candidate. I think he’s calculated that will reduce his ability to influence people across the party. That will just make him a much more narrow factional figure. That doesn’t seem like a crazy calculation to me. I can’t say for sure it’s right, though.

Frum: I’m reading, this summer, Kai Bird’s new biography of Roy Cohn, which is—

Chait: Oh, so am I.

Frum: Oh, okay. so if you’re reading the book, you’ll know what I mean. And one of the anecdotes that Bird tells in this book is how President Eisenhower kept coming up with very convincing, very ingenious, plausible arguments for not taking on [Senator] Joe McCarthy directly.

And the first time he says it, and the second time he says it, you think, You make a point. The third and fourth time, you begin to think: You’re just unwilling—possibly you’re scared, but you’re unwilling to take the risk. And actually you’re not acting for good statesmanlike motives. You’re acting for self-preservationist and maybe unworthy motives. When McCarthy starts to attack the Army and to attack Eisenhower’s friends—not just George Marshall, whom he attacked in ’52—but he attacks John J. McCloy in ’53 and ’54. And Eisenhower keeps trying to do things indirectly and has some success. Partly because McCarthy is a desperate alcoholic and becoming very sick. But if McCarthy had not been a desperate alcoholic, it’s not clear that Eisenhower’s methods would’ve worked so well, and he just was making things easy for himself. And I wonder whether with all the subtlety and ingenuity you attribute to Barack Obama, whether he’s also just trying to make things easy for himself.

Chait: You might be right. I’m trying to explain what I think his calculation is. I can’t say for sure that the alternative course of action wouldn’t work, that if he really was willing to fight back and defend his legacy. You know, he does do it in bits and pieces. But he really has allowed the left to win this argument about his legacy, and he hasn’t put up much of a fight.

I mean, I was making the point during his presidency that his support for education reform, which was really something he cherished, began to disintegrate when the teachers’ unions and the left fought back against it, and he just kind of let them do it. And he didn’t defend it, and by the time Hillary Clinton came along, it was really no longer viable ground or defended in the Democratic Party. So I think you’re right that there is this passivity.

Frum: When you say, That’s what he thinks will work. One of my rules of politics is, in fact, none of us know what, what will work. We are always guessing, and we’re usually looking in the mirror and projecting our own wishes. We’re very poor judges of what will work.

But we can be very good judges of what’s the right thing to do. And we also can be, if we really look inward—we know when our reluctance to take a risky action is prompted by truly a prudential calculation. And when there’s just a certain element of, Oh, it’ll be a lot of trouble, a lot of hardship. It’ll be easier for me if I take the softer course. And now I will talk, persuade myself, well—the softer course is also the smart decision. But we never know what the smart decision is. We only know what the right decision is.

Chait: I can’t improve on that.

Frum: Wow. Well, that’s very collegial. (Laughs.)

Jonathan Chait, thank you so much. I’ve got to pocket the rare Chait positive review and put it into my pocket.

Chait: Thank you. I’ll find something to criticize you. Don’t worry. (Laughs.)

Frum: Okay. I know. (Laughs.) Thanks so much for joining me today.

Chait: Thank you, David.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Jonathan Chait for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a work of history—1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline. Published in 2014 by Princeton University Press.

Now, I have not yet seen The Odyssey. I may be alone on my block. It sounds wonderful, and I’m keen to get to it. But one of the things that I am remarking with admiration is that as people have gone to see The Odyssey, they have become fascinated by this question of the transition from one period of civilization to another. A character, I think it’s Odysseus himself, says in the movie, “Our age of bronze is collapsing.” Which is maybe a little on the nose for movie dialogue, but is right.

The Odyssey is a story set in the Bronze Age, written in the Iron Age, measured by which metal was the predominant metal that went into weapons of war and other kinds of tools. And there was a big collapse in between the two. And Eric Cline’s book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed is a study of the collapse and an attempt to explain why it happened.

As I understand, and again, I haven’t seen the movie, but the great theme of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is that this collapse is, first and foremost, a moral collapse. One civilization has had the kind of life energy seep out of it and is giving way to a new and successor civilization that will be guided by different rules and different values.

And indeed, there really was, across the eastern Mediterranean, a remarkable collapse around the year 1177 B.C. The Hittite Empire—which was the superpower of the time based in what is now southern Turkey—that vanished entirely, and its capital disappeared. Across the Mediterranean, city-states vanished. The Minoan civilization vanished. The New Kingdom in Egypt didn’t quite vanish, but it lost a lot of its military power and never again exerted the kind of power over the region that it had before about the year 1200. Mycenaean Greece, which is where the the characters in The Iliad and The Odyssey supposedly come from, that civilization utterly collapsed. It even lost the ability to read and to write for hundreds of years, only to reemerge later as an Iron Age civilization. And so it is, through up and down the Levant, into the islands, Cyprus.

So what happened? Eric Cline tries to give us an answer. But the key thing to keep in mind, as to the background that enabled all this is that bronze, which is the weapon that the heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey used for, the metal that they used for their weapons. And that was the main form of armor and tools.

Bronze is a compound of copper and tin. So copper was relatively abundant in the Mediterranean world. There were copper mines in Cyprus and in other places. But tin was scarce in that part of the world and had to be brought to be united with the copper from very far-flung places—as far as Cornwall in Great Britain and Afghanistan in the center of Asia.

So when you’re committed to bronze, you’re committed to very global trade routes. And because the trade routes are so extended, you build large states. Because you have large states, you need ways to manage the states, including organized religion and reading and writing and some kind of numbering system. How do you keep track of how much tin has moved from Afghanistan to Babylonia, and when it moved, and who moved it? You need some form of writing. And you need a bureaucracy. You need comparably sophisticated and elaborated states.

Something happened around the year 1177 [B.C.E.], and Cline makes a good case that it’s a compound of ecological effects. Droughts and earthquakes that weakened the states, ended their ability to import tin, reduced the availability of the bronze alloy made from copper and tin, and set these states reeling backward and made them militarily vulnerable to invaders and small bands that otherwise they would’ve just brushed off with superior strength.

Through the Bronze Age, people knew about iron. But iron was a more difficult material to work. In particular, it required a lot of heat. And it just seemed that bronze—which was easier to work with and had a lot of prestige attached to it—that that was the natural metal of choice. But once the bronze is no longer available because the tin has become hard to get, people are forced back to figure out ways to work with the iron. And once they do so, they find that iron is a dramatically superior weapon of war. Makes sharper, stronger swords, spears, and arrowheads. And so iron replaces it, and the world never looks backward to bronze. Bronze is from then on used primarily for statuary and art, because it remains a prestige material, but it’s not a workable material.

But the Cline story is one of environmental change leading to material innovation, not a story of moral decay. It wasn’t that people somehow lost faith in themselves and therefore turned away from bronze, and then found a new faith and therefore turned to iron. They had very practical problems. Now, I don’t want to dispute the importance to art of telling stories about moral decay and moral regeneration. But as we’re trying to understand why civilizations actually change, I mean, morality surely plays a part in it. Anyone watching the crisis of American democracy right now has to face that the greatness of a society and the ebb of greatness can be attributed to moral defects in that society.

But we also need to pay a lot of attention to ecological changes that force change upon society, and to the material responses to environmental change. Because while we’re not doing a great job in 21st-century America to adapting to our moral challenges, we’re doing an even worse job of adapting to climate changes. And if climate is what felled the Hittites, and as other historians will tell us, if climate is what felled the Romans, and if climate is what, as other historians again tell, felled the Ming Empire and led to the rise of new civilizations in China—then climate, if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be the falling of us.

So as we enjoy the movie, as we absorb its powerful moral lessons, we also need to keep our eye on the material world, the world of climate and weather. Maybe we can’t control it, but we’d best learn to adapt to it. Because if we don’t, it will be the end of us.

Thanks so much for watching The David Frum Show this week. I hope you will share the program and like it on whatever platform you use. As ever, if you’re minded to support the program, the best way to do so is by subscribing to The Atlantic and support all of my colleagues, including my colleague Jonathan Chait. See you next week on The David Frum Show.

Bye-bye.

Faithless, chaotic, and corrupt: Donald Trump's character also shapes his foreign policy. The latest victim is Saudi Arabia—not a sympathetic victim, maybe, but a victim all the same.

On July 22, United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart signed an agreement for a Saudi-U.S. civilian nuclear partnership. The multi-decade, multibillion-dollar deal allows American companies to develop and operate commercial nuclear power plants on Saudi soil, potentially including a uranium-enrichment facility. The Saudis have sought such a deal for almost 20 years. United States presidents from Barack Obama onward have expressed openness to it, but on two conditions: Any deal must include safeguards against Saudi use of enrichment for nuclear weapons and also a normalization of relations with Israel.

With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2024, the Saudis surely hoped their moment had arrived. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in Trump and the Trump family, including licensing deals with the Trump Organization potentially worth billions of dollars and a huge commitment to the private-equity firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. This week, those investments seemed to have paid off. Details on Wednesday’s agreement are sparse, but The Washington Post reported that the pact, by clearing a way to nuclear enrichment, opened a path to an eventual Saudi nuclear weapon. The deal also reportedly dropped the precondition that Saudi Arabia recognize Israel.

[Read: The art of the giveaway]

The Saudis, essentially, had got everything they wanted, with little sacrifice in return. But no sooner was the deal signed than the reneging began. In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump insisted that the deal did not, in fact, include uranium enrichment and that it is “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords”—that is, to normalized relations with Israel. Utter chaos and confusion duly erupted over what Trump meant to accomplish with these words. Is Trump attempting to blow up the freshly inked deal after hearing Republicans criticize it on Fox News and elsewhere, as CNN suggests? Or was the outburst simply Trump bluster without real-world consequences?

No one seems to know. Trump did not consult the Saudi leadership before adding a late condition to the deal they had just celebrated. Just what this means for the deal’s fate in Congress is unclear too. Congress can block it, but would need a veto-proof majority in both the House and Senate to do so—presuming Trump even wants the deal to go ahead.

The Saudis must be puzzled. They paid their “quid” to the Trump family. Where is their “quo”? Can criticism on Fox News cancel billions paid for the Trump family’s favor?

This turnabout comes at a very bad time for Saudi Arabia. The country has already been left stranded and exposed by the failure of Trump’s Iran war, which has emboldened Iran and tightened its hold on the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia’s most important maritime connection to world oil markets. Saudi Arabia needs protection. Its traditional protector has been exposed as fickle and weak. The kingdom may now see a nuclear force of its own as a condition of its survival in a post-American Middle East.

[Read: The mess the Iran War made]

American advocates of a U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal have long warned that if the United States does not partner with Saudi Arabia, the Saudis might look to Russia or China for nuclear technology and stronger military ties. But past Saudi efforts to find alternative security arrangements have not worked well. In 2023, Saudi Arabia signed a Chinese-brokered rapprochement with Iran, but China’s friendly relations with Tehran did nothing to protect Saudi Arabia from Iranian missile attacks in recent months.

Saudi Arabia’s other options look even worse. The country, which reportedly financed the Pakistani nuclear-weapons program in the 1990s, is believed to hold some kind of call on those weapons if it ever needs them. The two countries formalized a joint defense pact last year. But a future as a Pakistani military protectorate is not a promising one, especially because India ranks among Saudi Arabia’s top three export markets, and is probably its fastest-growing one.

Which brings us back to Saudi Arabia’s Plan A. Is the nukes plan cooked? Trump often announces things on social media that don’t come true in real life. In his first term, he announced on Twitter in 2019 that he had ordered all U.S. businesses out of China. The “order” was dropped three days later. In June 2025, Trump announced a pause on immigration enforcement on farms, and at hotels and restaurants. The pause was reversed several days later. Trump has repeatedly announced tariff increases that are then shelved and military strikes that are never carried out, including a vow last November to invade Nigeria “guns a-blazing” to wipe out that country’s Islamic insurgents. So it may be with Trump’s after-the-signature demand that Saudi Arabia recognize Israel as an additional price for a deal greased by the flow of funds to Trump companies and relatives.

America’s traditional democratic allies feel betrayed and baffled by the unpredictability of Trump’s pay-for-play diplomacy. But those willing to pay can suffer betrayals and bafflements of their own. If not even the Saudis, who showered Trump and his family with cash and gifts, can trust Trump’s diplomacy, who else on earth can feel any confidence at all?