S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain

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I'm JVL sitting in for Tim Miller, and I am joined today by a longtime friend, David Frum, now a staff writer at The Atlantic and host of a new podcast, The David Frum Show on The Atlantic. David, it is fantastic to have you here with us.
How are you, my friend?

I'm all right. Thank you.
Hello from Los Angeles. Well, thank you for being here.
We're going to talk about a bunch of different things because you're the best guest on this podcast all the time. Tim is the regular host, has to pretend that he doesn't have favorite guests, but I don't have to make any such things.
You are the best guess. Last night, we got a Supreme court ruling unanimously on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father of a special needs child who was wrongly deported down to the mega prison in El Salvador.
The court ruled that the administration must facilitate his return, but it did not order it. And it also indicated that courts may not have the power to do so because of, quote, deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.
David, this reads to me like a less good decision than some people seem to hope because it presumes a world of regular order. Tell me, what are your thoughts on this? Well, I think oftentimes in these decisions, you have a choice of the full espresso, 5-4, the espresso macchiato, 6-3, or the cafe americano at 9-0.
And so pretty obviously Roberts thought it was more important to have a 9 to zero outcome than to have a really robust decision. I think I'm not going to gainsay John Roberts on those kinds of Supreme Court tactics.
It's pretty obvious. It got the headline, bring this guy home.
He's not in Siberia. He's not in China.
Your claim that you have no ability to return somebody from America's only ally in the world right now, El Salvador, which is being paid. We hear $6 million a year, but we don't really know.
And we don't know if there's a fee for the president on top of the stated $6 million. But you can't get them out of the El Salvadorian prison you helped to create.
We don't believe you. So that's all worth doing.
They've also given the Trump administration a pathway to return somebody. Because the Trump administration is so obsessed with not losing face, they can never admit they made a mistake.
But now there's a nine to zero court order. They're going to have to comply.
And that opens the way to returning other people who are wrongly held and who never got a hearing. Do you think that Trump wants to comply with this? Because it seems to me that it's pretty easy for him to not comply if he doesn't want to.
He can do one of two things. He could say no, because this is actually foreign affairs and has to do with the national security of the United States with purview of the chief executive.
Or he could say, I tried. I spoke to them.
And I can't tell you about those discussions because of executive privilege, but it is simply not possible. Look, we can power a small city with the energy generated by JVL worry.
Yes. But I think in this case, the worry is right, but I think it's pointed in the wrong direction.
My concern, and I'm not saying I'm right, but I think they will return the first. A nine to zero Supreme Court decision, you start defying those and now we're on the path to outlawlessness.
And I think Trump is saving that for the 2026 elections. I don't think he wants to go early.
I don't think he wants to have the people in the streets now, especially with the economy and such a shambles. I think the plan is if he's thinking about defying the rules, he's going to do that in the 2026 election season.
What I worry about in this case, there's my guess that the Supreme Court would come down this way. Having told Trump, you have to have some kind of hearing before you send someone in U.S.
power into a prison. They will say, that's it.
We've done our work. And so the next big question is, can Trump fire Jerome Powell? And the Supreme Court may think, well, we gave one to the never Trumpers on not sending people to foreign prisons without a hearing.
We're going to have to give one to Trump on his power to fire the head of the Federal Reserve Board, which is the next critical crisis that is on our way. And we had a ruling on that on Wednesday, which is helpful to Trump on that, right? Can you talk a little bit about this? Why would Trump feel the need to fire Powell now instead of just waiting out the end of his term? I mean, I have so many questions for you, but let's start with that one.
So Trump has crashed the car. He has an economic strategy that was unbelievably stupid, and it's visibly failing.
And the little amphetamine injection that the economy got from the pause of some of the tariffs, the market has quickly figured out that doesn't mean anything. that the United States is launched in simultaneous trade war with its three most important trading partners, not just China, but Canada and Mexico.
The Canada and Mexico tariffs are all still there. Interest rates, we're going to have an 8% mortgage rate in the blink of an eye.
American retail is going to stop, not immediately because retailers have built up a lot of inventory of things from China, but there's a trade embargo with China. And so that means for everything from t-shirts to electronic components, sooner or later that embargo is going to mean those items fail and there's a retail and manufacturing crisis in the United States.
So Trump needs an excuse. He needs someone to blame.
And this is where we get to the sub-rational parts of the Trump brain. There has to be someone else whose fault it is.
And I noticed that the Trump suck-ups in Silicon Valley have begun to say, we need a rate cut. We need a rate cut right now.
The Federal Reserve was going to say, are you joking? We've got this inflationary crisis headed our way. You can't have a rate cut now.
And this is a supply crisis of your own making. We can't give you a monetary exit from a genuine supply crisis you made.
No,

the answer is no. So Trump needs now a huge hullabaloo to give MAGA people something to shout about and to blame and to point fingers.
And Jerome Powell is going to be the designated target. And while he could wait him out, of course, Trump's just psychology means he has to do something.
He has to be seen in command. And so he's got to, like Truman firing MacArthur, he will need to fire Powell.
He also needs, and this is a little more rational, Trump in his first term twice tried to get unacceptable people onto the Federal Reserve. And one was actually literally voted down and the other was denied without a vote.
The Republicans in the Senate in first term protected the Federal Reserve. The new, more defeated Republicans of the second term are right now unlikely to do that.
But if you wait to the end of Powell's term, things may be so bad for Trump that at that point, Republicans begin to show a little bit more spine and say, you know, you can't put, you know, your stooge on the Federal Reserve. So this is a better moment.
He needs to act. It's a better moment to act.
And I truly fear the Supreme Court won't stop him, not just for Trumpy reasons, but for larger reasons of conservative legal ideology. It is actually quite hard to explain why the president can't fire the head of the Federal Reserve.
This stuff is also so fundamentally important, but also when you step back from it, firing Powell or even replacing him with sycophants or replacing him with whatever the Federal Reserve version of Pete Hexeth is, does seem likely to harm the markets more. Yes.
Does it not? I mean, this is how South American banana republics are run, and their economies are not great. This is a longstanding theory of mine.
You have to understand that Trump's career as a businessman since his first bankruptcy in 1989 has been, what contrivance do I need to keep the creditors at bay for the next 24 hours? He has never had long-term plans because he's just been always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Politically now, in his first term, in retrospect, we can see how much his shiftlessness and incompetence saved America because in his first term, it took him a while to figure out that his main objectives were golf and steel.
He also had kind of in those days, some pretty petty, he was stealing single millions of dollars, which showed a lack of imagination. It was because he had become such a small businessman in his private life that he was thinking, if I can make a dishonest $3 million here, I've done my week's work.
And it never occurred to him, you could make a dishonest $3 billion. You could make a dishonest $30 billion.
What are you talking about? So in his second term, he said, I am never thinking in terms of single millions again.

I have a plan.

I know how things work.

And I'm going to put a little bit more energy and effort into my presidency that I did round

one.

And so we're seeing that.

So the markets won't like it.

But Trump will be in a position where in 30 or 40 days, where stock markets are down, container traffic has stopped between the United States and China. He has no allies except El Salvador in this confrontation with the world's second largest economy.
And meanwhile, people are going to be paying 8% for their mortgages. And he's going to start railing and ranting about the need to cut interest rates to get the economy moving.
He just will need the drama. And firing Powell will take a little bit of time.
So that gives Fox and friends and his allies in online media something to talk about instead of the gathering recession. Wow, well, that's all super, super happy.
Let's talk about the tariffs. You've written a great deal about this.
I don't know that we need to explain to people anymore, but I want to walk through it anyway, just because it was fun. You did a piece over at The Atlantic about the tiny little screws.
You basically did just like a Surat picture. We're going to zoom in and zoom in and zoom in until you can see all the little pointillism can you walk people through the utter insanity of the the idea that manufacturing just in all caps comes back to america through the the tiny little screws in the iphone the pentalobes i would start with a personal reflection so through the past 20 years i had different ideas at a different time.
But through the past, my big idea is what been, I believe in markets undergirded by some forms of social insurance. And in 2010, I got drummed out of the conservative world because of the second part of that.
I believe too much in social insurance. And that made me a rhino and out you go and i you know what not wrong okay i accept it you

guys are in a very libertarian phase but it's really weird to me right now to be in a phase where the first half of the things which is i believe in markets that's what makes me a rhino and a traitor to the conservative cause because you know what hayek plus beverage that's those names don't mean anything but you know free markets to produce the wealth and then some social insurance to protect people from the consequences of markets. So I'm ashamed to have

to repeat this in a Republican administration, how supply chains work. But Howard Lutnick went on TV and said, we need to bring back the manufacture of iPhones because we can't have the Chinese drilling these tiny screws into iPhones.
Okay, well, what would it mean to bring back the iPhone industry? And right now, since there's a trade embargo with China, nothing's going to be moving, we have to. Well, as he said, iPhones are held together at the base.
I got a case here, but inside there are two tiny little screws with five-headed heads. A week ago, I knew nothing about them, because I live in an advanced capitalist society.
I don't have to know how things work, they just work. I do my job.
And then through the miracle of markets and prices, things arrive. And I don't know often how.
I don't even know what goes into them. But now I do.
So the way you make a tiny screw is you start with a piece of wire. It can be made of any kind of metal, brass, but typically some kind of steel.
And you extend the wire at enormous length and you slice it into tiny little pieces. Those pieces are then coated in some kind of corrosion-resistant material, nickel, for example, or else is ink.
But in the iPhones, it's nickel. And then there are other little tiny slices which become the head.
And they are shaped and cut and attached. And all of this is both tremendously laborious and requires extreme skill in the operator.

It turns out it's a highly skilled and it takes a long time to learn how to be a skilled operator in the tiny screw industry.

So the question is now, okay, we've shored the iPhone industry in the United States.

Where are the tiny screws coming from?

Well, they're not coming from China because there's now a hundred and bazillion, gazillion percent tariff on China.

We've effectively embargoed them. So that means we need to step up a tiny screw industry right here in the United States.
That will not be easy, and it will not be quick, and it will not be cheap. But there's one other problem along the way is that I mentioned how they do all these things to the wire.
The things that do that are big machines made in the USA of steel. And Trump also embargoed the steel that goes so not in pursuit of this imaginary tiny screw industry he has put tariffs on the actual industry that the united states has the machines that make the tiny screws formerly the united states made the screw making machines sold the machines to china china made the screws it went into the value change now now just out of sheer and malice, they have not only cut us off from tiny screws, but they have put an enormous burden on the people who make the equipment that makes the tiny screws.
What people, I think, maybe don't understand is that supply chains are really just the physical manifestation of economic efficiency, right? And so, you know, the individual parts come from the places where it is most efficient to make them, right? This is how these things self-organize. And to come in and say, well, I'm going to change this, as you say, it's like, again, you push the ball in one here, but something pops out over there.
Economic efficiency sounds kind of bloodless. I want to give a little bit more inspiration.
Supply chains are not, yes, they're economically efficient. They're also a realization of a beautiful idea of people cooperating across vast distances without ever knowing each other, producing wonderful things, producing the fruits of commerce and peace and prosperity, cooperating with people they've never met, whose existence they may be unaware of.
So the tiny screw, it's coated in, I mentioned it was coated, it's coated in nickel. The nickel comes from Canada or maybe from Indonesia.
And the people who are making the nickel have no idea what use does this nickel go to. And the idea that the cell phone in their pocket may contain some of the nickel they mined or refined, and they never knew it.
That's a kind of beautiful idea. Then the entrepreneur who is coming up with some new concept using the phone and texting a business partner across the other side of the world or talking on FaceTime in real time or WhatsApp, I hope not Signal, in real time on the other side of the world.
These are people who are all linked in this harmonious, peaceful commerce. I mean, I've been very caught up in the story of free trade all my intellectual life.

It's one of my fundamental causes.

And it's not a grim, efficient accountant idea.

It's a beautiful idea.

It's an inspiring idea.

And you only are reminded how beautiful and inspiring it is when someone threatens it

because he believes in aggression and force and domination and exploitation

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That's joindeliteme.com slash bulwark, code bulwark. Does the Republican Party go back to free trade after Trump is gone? This is what I can't quite figure out.
Is there an actual appetite for protectionism and tariffs? Or is that just an artifact that there is an appetite for Trumpism and all the other things that Trumpism, you know, is like, like the racism and the, you know, rounding up brown people and sending people off, you know, snatching, snatching Muslim grad students off the streets. There's an appetite for that.
And if they get tariffs with that, then like, okay, they'll support it. But is there an organic place in the Republican Party for this? Free trade and protectionism are different from the others in this way.
If you are snatching up Muslim grad students from the streets without a trial, theoretically, that could happen to anybody. But you join it to enough racism, and it doesn't.
In fact, it's not true. So America spent much of its first 150 years as a nation.
On the one hand, a totalitarian nightmare state of oppression. On the other hand, a land of freedom.
Because we had this very, you know, you just looked at your wrist and noted the color of the skin. And you could predict in advance whether you had rights or whether you didn't.
And if you had the right color of skin, they were not going to do certain things to you. You could drink from whatever water fountain or sit on whatever bench you wanted in the fanciest park on Fifth Avenue.
So racism is a limiting principle that protects people from the consequences of some of their ideas. In American history, it's worked pretty well.
Protectionism, it causes a depression from which there's no escape. And I think about how America first ends, I'm going to remember the last episode.
And here's a story about that. So the young Gerald Ford, who is a young man in the early 1940s, and was a football star and a male model and a very striking figure in this generation, was an activist in America first in 1940, 41, a strong believer in isolationism, which also went with protectionism in those days.
Then comes Pearl Harbor. Then he goes into the Navy.
Then he serves with distinction. He sees the world.
He has time to think about the reason for this extraordinary disruption in his life was America's failure to act when it could have acted peacefully to stop aggression. And maybe we had a little insight that Pearl Harbor in particular, that unlike Nazi Germany, which was gripped by an ideology of aggression and domination, Imperial Japan was sort of pushed into Pearl Harbor by American protection.
Japan was a pretty liberal society in the 1920s. They lived by exporting.
Then came the Depression, and the United States and Britain cut off both their raw materials and their markets. And the Japanese, I mean, not to justify them, but they didn't have many good choices.
And invading and occupying China seemed like not a crazy solution to the predicament into which they had been thrust. And that put them on the path that led to Pearl Harbor.
And Ford, on his sea service, had time to think about this. And when he came back to the United States as a veteran, he ran for Congress in Grand Rapids.
And he started by challenging, in a Republican primary, an isolationist and protectionist congressman, and said, I have learned from the Pearl Harbor experience. We must trade in freedom, and we must protect allies, and we must have partners.
And he won his primary and went to Congress and became president. So I think there are a lot of people who are about to learn the hard way.
If you can't share my vision of global cooperation just on your own, thinking about it yourself, you will learn the hard way, what happens when you do it the other way. So I think we are going to see a react.
We are going to have some very serious economic trouble because of these decisions. And it's already started.
I think it's actually probably too late to turn. If we change our ways now, we can probably shorten the period of pain, but I don't think we can stop the period of pain.
Well, let's talk about that. I don't think there's a way to, on any kind of near-term time horizon, put things back together again.
What we're seeing right now, and here I want to talk a little bit about the bond market. What you have seen, the bond market is where risk goes to hide, as William Cohen wrote earlier this week.
And yesterday you saw the Dow lose 1,000 points and the yield on the 10-year treasury bill go up, which supposed to happen. Yeah.
Right. And what that means is that money is getting pulled out of America.
Yeah. Because investors think that America has systemic risk.
And I don't know how that gets fixed, except as like a generational project. Right.
I mean, if America is no longer a place where it is safe, really, it's no longer the ultimate safe harbor, the money and capital will find someplace else. Some things can be fixed.
Some things, as you say, can't. So what can be fixed? We can end the trade war.
And that'll be embarrassing for Trump. But since no one else in America or very few other people in America thought it was, it's not a national humiliation, it's a personal humiliation.
The whole thing was his idea. So we can end that and get commerce moving again.
And if you do that, after a couple of quarters, whatever has been set in motion, the avalanche that is in motion will stop. And then the natural dynamism and creativity of the American economy will kick in and interest rates will come down a little bit.
And the 8% mortgage will become a 5% mortgage. Those things can all be put in mash.
But what you can't undo is the fact that you've done this. It's like when Ted Cruz and others played with defaulting on the debt during the Tea Party days.
That pistol was never fired, but it was brandished. Before 2010, it was never even brandished.
Between 2010 and 2010, it got got waved around a lot but the bullet mercifully never went off but something that was where the risk was zero has become non-zero and the move from zero to non-zero is a very big move yeah so everyone has to understand the americans elected trump not once but twice the first time was a glitch in the electoral college but the second time they did it. And they sent them to Congress to protect them and support them.
So this could really happen. And then they actually did launch this embargo.
And the President of the United States has been talking about fighting wars against NATO partners, because annexing Greenland is an act of war. Making Canada a 51st state is an act of war.
And a country that threatens war, I mean, NATO, there isn't any NATO anymore. I mean, it's not abolished on paper.
No, it's dead, though. It's dead.
Because when the French government is saying we're going to have a Franco-Danish program of military cooperation to protect Greenland, against whom? They probably are not strong enough to win. But given that Trump's aggressions are completely unsupported politically at home, they might, you know make it a little expensive the project might fall apart but anyway this whole system of guarantees American troops are on there will soon be pulled from Poland it looks like the Ukrainians have been left to die in the field everyone the American guarantees are not I have talked to NATO defense ministers who are reconsidering their military procurement because they understand that American equipment is the best.
It's also the most expensive, but they're not planning on literally fighting the United States. They need equipment that's better than Russia's.
And the South Korean equipment is better than Russia's and more reliable. So save money.
It's good enough. Does the job.
You're not going to be fighting the United States Air Force. So get the South Korean or the Swedish or the French variant.
None of this is going to be forgotten. And the reaction that has

been going on in Canada, you've seen, that's not going to be forgotten either. American presidents

in the 2060s and 2070s are going to be facing consequences of things that Trump did in the 2020s.

I want to talk a little bit about a piece, another piece you brought up recently on

smuggling in the black market that we will see. I hadn't really thought about this.
We have this long, unpoliceable border, especially between Canada and the United States. These tariffs are real.
A lot of merchandise is going to fall off the back of trucks, isn't it? Well, it's a testimony to the country that America used to be. And when I started talking about smuggling, everyone had this, oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that.
Because historically, Americans comply with the law. I mean, since prohibition.
And they may not comply with the laws against drugs and fentanyl, but most people do because we recognize that these are laws against self-harm. I mean, we all cheat sometimes on seatbelts.
We all maybe, you know, roll through the stop sign sometimes and people buy drugs. But mostly drug laws are complied with because people understand, you know, fentanyl shouldn't be taking it.
And I don't want to see my kids or my spouse taking it. The idea that you'd have wide scale civilian, most people cooperate with the tax laws.
Most people pay their taxes. It's a high trust society.
But once you start saying, okay, tube socks are going to cost three times in the United States, where they cost anywhere else in the world, you become very rapidly a low trust society. And if we take the Trump plan seriously, if it ever went into really effect, Nintendo consoles that are supposed to cost $445 will cost $660 in the United States, but they'll still cost $445 in Toronto and Vancouver.
That's going to arbitrage. I mean, I have a house on Lake Ontario, have a little boat, and you can leave from my marina and pilot a small boat onto 10,000 backyards on the other side of the lake or on the other side of the St.
Lawrence River. It's just people's houses.
So you could bring 100 Nintendo. I'm not going to do this.
I just want, if anyone's listening, don't look for me. My boat will.
I am not participating in this traffic. But somebody, there are a lot of boats.
In my marina, there are a lot of boats. And they can carry tube socks.
And the bigger ones could carry flat screen TVs. And they'll all be able to carry French champagne, which is a proud Canadian tradition of bringing champagne to freedom deprived Americans.
I'm sort of struggling to even think this all the way through because it's so depressing, but that would present another vector for Trump's use of the police state, right? I mean, And at that point, we do start inching towards Stasi and lives of others and stuff, don't we? But you have to build the police state. So there are, if I remember this right, 26,000 uniformed customs officers for the Canadian border, the Mexican border, every seaport and every airport.
So if you're going to do Stasi-like control of smuggling, that doesn't begin to be adequate. Okay, so maybe you call on state and local police to help.
But as we discovered during Prohibition, it's hard to police a society against something that most people don't think is wrong. So maybe you'll be able to get some cooperation in Alabama to get the local police there to stop the person who drives a truck into the school parking lot in a school in Birmingham at midnight and opens up the truck and there are tube socks and Nike shoes.
Maybe the police will arrest that person one time. Well, they arrest the next one and the next one after that? Now, I don't think this actually is a real vision because I think the whole scheme collapses way faster than the smugglers can get organized and certainly in the police.
But Trump wants to run an authoritarian state, but mostly it has been very easy and successful for him and worryingly so to defy laws. But enforcing laws is a more challenging project.
And it's enforcing laws that will be broadly violated and where there's no moral consensus in favor of the laws and where the local police don't want to be your partners. Okay, in Alabama, they'll do it.
Will the California state police cooperate with the crackdown on tube sock smuggling? I don't know. Doubt it.
Yeah. And once it's in, right, once the merchandise gets into the states, then stopping distribution is impossible.
I don't think this happens right away because I think retailers have built massive inventories already. Warehouses are full of normal goods at normal prices.
And there probably are a couple of quarters where things can be sold at normal prices. And I imagine the tariff scheme collapses before we run out of inventories of tube socks, but maybe not.
So you launched your new show, the David Frum Show, over at The Atlantic this week. We have Rahm Emanuel on.
He has your first guest. It's a very interesting conversation.
You talked a lot about Canada, too. Can you just talk to me a little bit about what it has been like personally for you to see America, your adopted country, basically take sides against your home country? I mean, it must be horrifying.
How does that work? What is it? Let me be personal about this, because it's not just a matter of mom and dad quarreling. So I was born in 1960.
I came of age during the heyday of Canadian anti-Americanism. So Canada has two kinds of anti-Americanism.
It has a right-wing variety, which is loyalty to the British Empire, anger at America as basically the daughter who betrayed mom. And my home province of Ontario, the motto at the bottom of the provincial coat of arms is faithful she began, faithful she remains, in Latin.
faithful to what? to the British crown because Ontario was originally settled by and my part of Ontario

where I live in the summers

is settled by refugees

from the American Revolution

New York faithful she remains in lapc faithful to what to the british crown because ontario was originally settled by and my part of ontario where i live in the summers is settled by refugees from the american revolution new yorkers who said you broke you know my neighbor broke his oath of allegiance to our king but i'm not doing that i'm moving to ontario and getting a land grant and raising my family and faith and loyalty to the true king so that was that there's a conservative faith but in the 60s and 70 because of Vietnam and American racial problems, the left, which had always been a little bit more sympathetic to the dynamism of the American Republic, it turned anti-American too. And so from about 1965 to about 1985, there was a period of controls on US investment in Canadian industries, controls on US investment in Canadian energy, attempts to build state-owned Canadian companies in areas like energy, but other areas too, satellite communication.
And as a young person, infatuated with Hayek and Mises and Milton Friedman, I began my political life in opposition to all this. This is expensive.
This is crazy. It's making Canadians poor.
It is not gaining freedom of action. It's the path to becoming Argentina.
And my whole first intellectual thought was cross-border cooperation and that Canada's former motherland, Britain, was cooperating with the United States. Canada could do the same.
And I campaigned ardently for the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement of the middle 1980s. with my then girlfriend, now wife,

we drove around from university campus to university campus. I would set up a soapbox because the claim was the treaty was so mysterious and no one could understand.
I said, I've read it, I've studied it, ask me anything about it, and I will tell you that your fears are groundless. And the fears were crazy and the fears were groundless.
And since then, Canada and the United States have entered into ever closer cooperation and not only in the realm of trade, but in the realm of national defense, in the realm of counterterrorism, in the world of intelligence sharing. It's a demonstration that you can have all the benefits of shared sovereignty while retaining all the meaning of individual sovereignty.
and to watch that be blown up, it's not just like a personal thing about Canada and the United States. It's an attack on the most fundamental belief of my intellectual life at the area where in precisely the place where it's most strong.
Because if you don't believe in international cooperation between Canada and the United States, then we're in a world of war of state upon state. We're back in some nightmare medieval vision of endless wars of petty state against petty state.
Do you take Trump to be serious about this? My position is that it actually doesn't matter if he's serious or not, because, as you say, it is Chekhov's gun. Once it's on the table, you can't unsee it.
And my view is that what Mark Carney said two weeks ago now, that era of deepening cooperation that is over, I think that's true. And I think it has to be true, just from the view of real politique.
What are your views on this? Look, one immediate fact is, if Kamala Harris had won the election in 2024, right now the Conservative Party of Canada would be on its way to a crushing victory over some other nominee than Mark Carney. The whole handoff from Trudeau to Carney and then Carney's rise in the polls, that's all a product of a reaction against Trump.
And the Conservative Party is caught in this unsolvable problem where about a quarter of the members of the Conservative Party like Trump and three quarters hate him. And so that makes it impossible for the party to come up with a coordinated and effective response to Trump, because you can't agree, because you'll be overwhelmingly rejected not only by most Canadians, but by most Conservatives.
But you also can't disagree too much, because then you'll lose an important part of your own base. And so the Conservative message during this campaign has mostly been, let's talk about something else than the topic everybody is talking about.
And that's never good for a political party, which is, you know, yes, voters, you have your priorities, but we have our priorities. And we choose to talk about our priorities, not your, wham up, you know, that's why they're going to be so badly beaten.
But Carney is talking about reviving the national economic, the statism, He's talking about making an all-in-Canada car. And he's talked about limits on foreign investment.
And these are destructive ideas. But Canada is being pushed toward them.
And it's hard to raise the objection that the young David would have raised, which is, for God's sake, you're going to do all this stupidity. And for what? You're not even solving a real problem.
Well, the old David has to concede. You are addressing, okay, it's a real problem.
This may not be the right answer, but it's a real problem. Whereas in 1985, I could say it's an imaginary problem.
So these are the kind of conversations which are so worth having. What is your vision for the new show? So you had Rom on to start the first episode.
Who are the people you're going to have on to talk with is it just going to be like newsmakers are you going to go outside of politics and talk economics i mean your interests are so wide-ranging as to be like embarrassing to me because it makes me feel provincial because you're interested in everything which is why a david from show just sounds like cotton candy to me oh thank. I'm going to try to stay away more from daily headlines.
It's a weekly show, not a daily show. I'm going to talk about things that I am interested in, which can be a little offbeat, but hope that others find them interesting.
I'm going to do a lot on the subject of medical progress. And one of the things that I hear from these crackpot anti-vaxxers is, what has big pharma and modern medicine ever done for us? People really say, people didn't used to vaccinate their children.
What happened? And so the idea, well, half of them died, actually. Literally half of them died.
So I have a lot of people from the world of proper medicine. And I notice because there's so much online audience, even people who, I'm not going to name names, but there is a big open door to healthcare crackpots because people like to listen to healthcare crackpots.

No one wants to be told that the secret to longevity is wear a seatbelt, go for a walk.

They want to be told it's marijuana and vitamin A because things that aren't true are much more exciting than things that are true.

So we're going to talk about medical progress.

We're going to talk about the workings of a free economy.

One of the things that we're going to talk about medical progress. We're going to talk about the workings of a free economy.
One of the things I hope to achieve is I'm hoping to remind people, you know, our mutual friend, Stuart Stevens wrote a very powerful book called It Was All a Lie and referring to the conservatism of his and my youth. I don't believe that that i don't think it was all i think a lot of it was true and it's just been stained by shit so what i'm hoping to do is to do a little scrubbing and to say you know what uh that hayekian vision markets dynamism it's worth believing in again we have to recover we have and we have to defend it from the abusers so there's gonna be a lot of economic talk there's gonna be some history talk i'm gonna try to be relentlessly global the world i want you know what let's reclaim the word globalist and if it means if jews are the globalists then congratulations jews you're standing for something important which is a world linked by peace and prosperity and commerce i believe in that at 1990s vision which in the end did not come true christopher hitchens used to say that as long as he lived he would always be a child of 1968 and i realized as long as i live i will be a child of 1989 that moment where the borders opened believe in it and not that doesn't mean you have to have limitless immigration and that doesn't mean that people who whose towns have been hit hard by chinese exports don't need some kind of help you know immigration has to be limited i've written a lot about that and yeah if your town is suddenly put out of business government should act and saying people that doesn't mean stopping world commerce but you need something so i'm for that but i want to talk about those things we're going to have guests from all over the world.
They're not going to be actual decision makers because they're not interesting to talk to, but a lot of them will be potential decision makers. That's a very nice vision for our future.
And I hope that the David Frum show vision is what we get. I think the more likely case is a very Rousseauian future.
And I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about nuclear proliferation over the last few weeks, because as you say, NATO is dead. And it seems to me that the logic of that creates a whole bunch of follow-on things which become as inevitable as physics.
And one of them is that the EU needs a separate nuclear umbrella from the American nuclear umbrella that has to be undergirded by the French and the Brits. It will eventually necessitate Poland and Germany becoming nuclear powers.
And I think Canada, Japan obviously is going to need nuclear weapons. I think the Canadians probably need a nuclear deterrent as well.
Am I crazy about this? Well, I wrote an article in 1986 for a small Canadian magazine called Why Canada Needs the Bomb, but it was mostly a backward-looking piece, saying, because in the 1940s, the Manhattan Project was a trilateral project between Britain, Canada, and the United States. Americans wouldn't know this, but the heavy water for the project was manufactured at a plant near Ottawa, which, by the way, nearly went into meltdown in 1954 and nearly caused a major accident that would have caused the destruction of the city of Ottawa.
But fortunately, there was an American, a young American nuclear engineer on the scene who, at enormous personal risk, stopped the meltdown. His name was Jimmy Carter.
And that's what put Carter on the path to leadership was his heroic actions that stopped the Chalk River meltdown. But Canada had an opportunity to become a nuclear power.
And it didn't because the basic was it would have cost money. And for what? And Canada today, it wouldn't do any good.
But you're right about the EU. The point is not national nuclear bombs.
The French already have a nuclear program. The British, who stupidly left the EU and need to

come back, have a nuclear bomb. The first thing it needs is a European National Security Council

with weighted voting. No more Slovenia, Slovakia, and Hungary outvoting everybody else.

The Germans get a percentage of the vote corresponding to their wealth and population,

the French do. It's time to retire all those fears of German power.
We have other problems. The polls obviously are going to be an important, crucial part.
And you need then a European military force. As Vladimir Putin discovered in Ukraine, nuclear weapons are not that useful.
They're only useful to protect you against existential threats. You need a real military and you need a military defense base.
And all of that is going to happen. That's one of the prices of Trump is like programs like the F-35, which we will have one NATO fighter.
We'll have one NATO this, we'll have one NATO that. The Europeans are going to say, sorry, the American defense industry is going to be paying for Trump for the next half century.
The goal of the American administration, which so the Europeans are, you know, already upping their defense spend. And one of the things they're doing is looking around and they're going to rebuild their own defense industry and stop buying American.
This was in Politico Europe last week. The Americans are outraged.
They're like, no, no, no, no, you should be buying weapons from us. And are like, are you kidding? We're not going to be dependent upon you for our security, right? I mean, you're telling us that you're threatening to have a shooting war with Denmark, and you think that we should be tying our security to your defense base? Look, in Europe, we'd like to think about is that the problems are relatively simple, and because there's so much goodwill that we can imagine this relationship being put to, it's a comfortable thing to think about.
What's not comfortable to think about is what Trump has done in the Indo-Pacific, where the version of NATO did not yet exist. So starting with the Clinton administration under Bush and then under Obama, there has been a real effort to coordinate Indo-Pacific major powers into some kind of cooperation.
It's a much harder project than the European project was because these countries have no tradition. They're not even used to thinking themselves as part of the same entity because the distances have been so big.
And they have much more skeptical attitudes toward the United States. They are shaped by memories of colonialism, not by memories of the Marshall Plan.
And so to get India and Vietnam and the Philippines and Indonesia and Malaysia and Taiwan and South Korea and Japan all to cooperate together, it started in the economic realm, but it's hard. But that's the new center of conflict, not Europe.
And these are large countries and on their way to being rich countries with their own traditions, often very authoritarian, often very nationalistic, and often very resistant to accepting American leadership. India is never going to accept the concept of American leadership in the way that Germany did, but it might accept American cooperation for specific ends under specific conditions if the United States is trustworthy.
But the message that the Chinese are sending to all the Indo-Pacific is, we may be unpleasant, but we're predictable. And we may be aggressive, but we're cautious.
And the Americans are unpredictable and incautious. And you don't like them much to begin with.
You don't have a lot in common with them. So why doesn't India seek a detente? It was just so big.
Why doesn't it seek a detente with China? You know, that seems more prudent. And, you know, with Japan, as you say, Japan may strike out on its own more independently.
But countries like Indonesia, and by the way, no one should assume that just because they speak English, the Australians won't follow. Australia does a lot more business with China than it does with the United States.
And it has a lot less reason to be dragged into a quarrel with China. And Australia has always been, there's a fantastic book about this called The Tyranny of Distance.
Its security policy has always been driven by the fact that the imperial metropole of the day is far away. And the defense of Australia is one of its lowest priorities.
And so the Australians have always proven themselves super good allies. That's why the Australians went to Vietnam to show the Americans, we fought for you.
Will you fight for us? And then they get this, the slap in the face. You know what? Appeasing China is actually a very attractive option for us.
I wanted to end this conversation on a hopeful note, but I'm not going to because I can't. I'll just ask this.
Aren't those rational calculations by other countries? And here's the problem. This is like the fundamental, you know, my best friend Sarah Longwell and I fight about this on a weekly basis.
The problem isn't Trump or it isn't just Trump. I mean, Donald Trump is both symptom and cause, but he really is symptom.
I mean, the problem is that the American people are decadent and undependable. Maybe not a majority, but a large enough percentage of them want something like this that the Pax Americana, all that stuff is no longer supportable.
Because for that stuff to hold together, you need like super majorities, right? And if you have 30% or 35% that actually kind of wants an authoritarian regime, that's too much. We're at the end of our process.
I can't launch into too long in answer to that. But first, I just want to note here, the term decadence arrives into politics from art criticism.
It begins with the idea that certain art critics like work from certain cultures that were done in an earlier period more than they like the artwork that were done in later periods. And they said that there was then a falling off, a decadence from one period of art to another period of art.
Applying this to politics seems to me a completely bogus move. So here's, it's not a message of hope, but it's a call to action.
There were probably always 30, 40% of the American public who were interested in all kinds of terrible things. That's why segregation lasted as long as it did.
What we had from the period from Pearl Harbor through 1989 until the Great Recession was an elite consensus in favor of American leadership, in favor of open markets, in favor of all these purposes where that 30 to 40 percent had no one to vote for. And this is the kind of thing that joe rogan is always hosting shows why can't we invite the anti-vaxxers into the debate why can't we invite the holocaust deniers into the debate you know for we had all these years where anti-vaxxers and holocaust deniers were just not allowed on television isn't it a better world where the largest media platforms in america say you know nothing happened to the jews and they deserved it or don't vaccinate your kids let them die of measles isn't it better that we have people on major platforms inviting, you know, nothing happened to the Jews and they deserved it.
Or don't vaccinate your kids, let them die of measles. Isn't it better that we have people on major platforms inviting, you know, exterminationist antisemitism and measles death? You know, I'm going to put myself as a voice of dissent.
I don't think it's better. We're about to learn the hard way what the Americans of the 1930s and 40s learned the hard way.
And we may fail to learn, in which case the world you talk about is open, but we may learn. And it may be that the people under 30 today, like the young Gerald Ford in the Pacific, saying, why am I on this, whatever it was, destroyer, whatever he sailed? Why am I here? I'm here because of America first.
If we had intervened promptly, if we'd maintained free trade in the 1930s, and if we'd acted more promptly in the late 1930s, I would right now be with my girlfriend back in Grand Rapids.

I wouldn't be on this boat.

So I learned that the hard way.

So we're going to learn some things the hard way.

And maybe God sent Trump.

You hear all the people like Trump say, God sent Trump.

And maybe he sent him as an affliction.

And as the Old Testament prophet so often said, to call us back to better ways.

To say, you know what? we are going to learn why protectionism is bad why isolation is bad why the greatest power on earth can't be an egoistic power why even the greatest power on earth needs allies why we need the rule of law at home we're going to learn that the hard way and maybe we will act on those lessons and build something better the way Americans did in the worst crisis of depression in World War. Maybe.
It's a maybe for everybody else, but for you individually, it's a decision. And if you recommit to those things, that's the beginning.
And maybe then your neighbor will too. I love that.
It's like I'm looking at Sarah Longwell right here. David, thank you again for being so generous with your time.
I mean, I don't need to say this because everybody who listens to this loves you, but go seek out David's new show over on the Atlantic Podcast Network. The first episode is a banger.
It's already in my feed, and it should be in yours too. Yeah, no, I'm upbraided by my wife, Danielle, because I'm so terrible at remembering to say things like this, but like, and subscribe.
I just have to learn to do that.

Yeah, no, go, go and subscribe to it.

It's a, it's important.

Never know that I come from like three generations of merchants.

I can never merchandise.

All right, David, thank you.

Everybody else, Tim will be back on Monday.

Till then, good luck, America.

Bye-bye. You pull me close, then knock me down Then I beg to come back around I'm so addicted to your lies And in the mirror I get weak At the girls staring back at me They're your eyes, they're your eyes Don't call tonight, unless you wanna hurt me Don't call tonight, it's not because you fail Don't call tonight, tomorrow you deserve me I can hear everything you're saying from here Don't call tonight, don't call tonight Saturday morning, my head is on fire

Hard to blame you for your crimes when I have mine

The sun is rising, but we're out of light

We twist the knife too many times to take a fire

You pull me close and knock me down

Then I beg to come back around

I'm so addicted to your lies