The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History

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Hello, and welcome to episode 5 of the David Frum Show.

I'm David Fromm, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

This week, I'll be joined by my Atlantic colleague and dear friend, Anne Applebaum, one of the world's leading authorities on democracy and authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and the rule of law.

I am so looking forward to the conversation with Anne, but first, some thoughts.

This podcast will post in the week that the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe.

The Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30th, 1945.

After his death, the German armies in Europe, one by one, began to approach the Allied commanders to surrender in Italy, in northwestern Europe.

Finally, on May 7th, the overall command structure of the German armies approached the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, to discuss an instrument of surrender for all the remaining German forces.

The original instrument of surrender was rejected by the Soviet Army.

It didn't mention the Soviet Union explicitly, and they had some other objections to it.

And so the final instrument was negotiated during the day of May 8th, was agreed about shortly before 10 o'clock p.m.

on the 8th of May, and went into effect a little past 11 p.m.

on the 8th of May.

11 p.m.

May 8th was, of course, the early early morning in Moscow, May 9th.

And so this chain of events is left ever afterwards a question mark about what is the exact and proper date of the end of the Second World War in Europe, whether it's May 8th, as it was in Berlin and where the Allied armies were, or May 9th as it was in Moscow.

Of course, the war itself would continue for more months.

As the Germans surrendered in the West, American forces in the Pacific were fighting a brutal battle on the island of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the whole war, certainly I think the bloodiest battle of the American Pacific campaign.

And no one knew on the day that the Nazis surrendered how long that war in the Pacific would last.

Except for a handful of Americans who were party to the secret of the atomic bomb, most Americans, most people assumed that there was probably another year of fighting ahead,

an invasion of Japan and many thousands, maybe many hundreds of thousands of American casualties and Allied casualties too, because the American army that entered Japan would be supported by Commonwealth forces, Australia, British, Canadian.

But the atomic bomb did explode.

Japan Japan did surrender, and the war came to an end, a final and formal end, with the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September, 1945.

So this is a time of commemoration.

And in this time, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, issued a very strange post about the event on the 8th of May.

He wrote, Many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day.

But we did more than any other country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II.

I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I.

We won both wars.

Nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance.

But we never celebrate anything.

That's because we don't have leaders anymore that know how to do so.

We are going to start celebrating our victories again.

Now, that post was such a perfect crystallization of the Trump style.

Bombast and boast, all of it making Trump himself the center of a story that he had nothing whatsoever to do with.

The statement is unwise and unattractive in all kinds of other ways, too.

It denigrates the sacrifices and heroism of others, and it turns the tragedy and horror of war into a triumphant narrative that was completely alien to almost all the people who experienced it as nothing but a tale of suffering and waste and cruelty and misery.

I want to draw attention to something maybe less obvious about what is wrong, what is missing from the president's statement.

The first is, as so often when Donald Trump talks about American military history, he emphasizes power and success and triumph and military genius.

But always lacking is any mention of the values for which Americans fought.

America didn't go into World War II or even World War I to be top nation, to beat and dominate others.

It went to defend things that Americans regarded as precious, and not only Americans, but others too.

And one of the measures of how precious those values were, not only to Americans, to others, but the world that has grown up as a result of the war.

Because at this interval of eight decades, I think it's maybe most useful and most necessary not to think about what ended, the war in Europe that ended on May 8th or the war overall that ended on September 2nd in Tokyo Bay.

I think it's more useful to think about what began, the process of reconstruction and reconciliation that occupied the next eight decades, the way in which former enemies became present partners, the way the Germans and the Japanese themselves discovered in their own defeat, their own liberation, because they came to accept the values for which Americans went into battle.

The story of how we turned the chaos and trauma of the Second World War into something better, and not Americans alone, but Americans working with allies, working with defeated adversaries.

That is not as dramatic as the battles of World War II.

I don't know that people are going to make successful documentary series out of trade negotiations and food aid and the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But those achievements were great.

And they are the things that at the eight decadate interval require us most to be mindful because they are the things that are most in danger of being lost.

You know, they're marble and bronze statues that commemorate all the horror and bloodshed of the war.

But those quiet victories of peacetime that built a better world, we're in danger of forgetting them.

Because right now, the United States is step by step unraveling its own great achievement.

You know, Winston Churchill described described the Battle of Britain in 1940 as Britain's finest hour.

If Americans are looking for a finest hour of their own, it's not anything that happened during the war, when America was, by the way, a late entrant.

It's the five, seven years, ten years after the war, when Americans and others learned from the mistakes after the First World War and built a better world that we still enjoy.

Now, All of those lessons have been forgotten, and Donald Trump is single-handedly determined to repeat all the mistakes that after the First World War put the world on the path to the Second World War.

Protectionism, isolationism, narrow nationalism, lack of forbearance, lack of mutual understanding, lack of any understanding of America's place as a leader because of its values, because it's a country that is admired and trusted, not just because it's a country that is strong and powerful and feared.

We should think of the 8th of May and the Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day as the beginnings of our modern story.

And maybe the message that we need to hear from leaders is not a message of self-congratulation and self-celebration, but a message of rededication to the work that was done after the end of the war to build a better world that those of us who grew up in it had the privilege of enjoying and that we are at risk of not bequeathing to the generations that come after us.

And now, my conversation with Ann Applebaum.

But first, a quick break.

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I am so pleased and happy to welcome today Anne Applebaum to join the conversation.

Ann Applebaum is one of the world's leading thinkers on problems of authoritarianism and democracy.

Normally, you have to say English-speaking world, but not in Anne's case, because she's just been awarded a prize as the hero of the German nation.

She's, of course, a colleague at the Atlantic.

She is a dear friend.

She is the author of books that have shaped the way we all think about these issues.

Her book, Gulag, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.

She really did win a prize as hero of the German nation.

Other prizes too many to count.

She's also a long-standing, dear, dear friend of mine and my wife.

My wife and Anne wrote a cookbook together.

So we're going to be making a lot of references to a lot of common points, and I hope they're not too obscure.

But before we begin, I have to ask Anne.

about the president's comments this weekend about americans especially american girls owning too many pencils.

And the reason I'm raising this is on my way into the little home studio I use, I accidentally tripped over the case in which my wife keeps her art supplies.

And the president had been talking about American women having to, so I found not one case of two dozen pencils, but all of these pencils.

And I feel a certain shame that America can't be great again so long as we are indulging this

insane accumulation of excessive numbers of pencils per person, especially per female person.

The president's words reminded me of a line from a movie I think we both love, Ninochka, but with Grady Garbo, in which she explains as a Russian operative that the goal of the Russian state is fewer but better Russians.

And I think we're all looking forward to a world of fewer but better pencils.

Well, maybe worse pencils.

Is there some phrase from the Soviet Union about people who accumulate too many pencils?

You know, I don't think like even Stalin had a thing about pencils or about being too many pencils.

Although it's funny, I do remember there was a shortage of pencils in the Soviet Union, and it was a big problem.

I know that, for example, accountants in the Gulag often had trouble getting pencils to make their accounts.

And they talk about creating them from bits of charcoal, and people kept records with all kinds of things because there was a scarcity of pencils, even out there.

So maybe it's a, you know, it was a, it was a decision that Stalin made without telling of us.

Of course, there's the more famous line attributed, probably incorrectly, to Marie Antoinette, which is when she was told that the people of France have no bread, she said, let them eat cake.

And so I suppose we're now waiting for Trump to say they have no pencils, let them use fountain pens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, there's something quaintly old-fashioned about this.

Like,

you realize the last time he thought about getting gifts for the children, pencils were a big item you could put along with a tangerine, perhaps, and maybe like a wooden doll.

The idea that you would

modern American children say, Here you go,

happy birthday.

Pencils.

Your most recent book is a book about the intersection of autocracy and corruption.

And that's the theme of your most recent article, very important article for The Atlantic.

I want to start by raising a problem that you and I were talking about just before we began, which is in the Trump era, there's just too much bad news to keep track of.

There's one appalling incident after another.

There's one absurd incident after another.

There's this pencil matter.

And so the way I thought to set you going was: I think I can group the things that have happened in this first term into six major headers, of which the corruption theme is the last and the binding one.

So the first is attacks on due process and individual liberties for disfavored entities and persons.

So that's the attacks on law firms.

That's the removal of due process from people who are suspected of being in the country illegally and bags are put on their head and they're sent to El Salvador without a hearing.

The second category, so the first is attacks on due process and rights for disfavored.

The second is impunity for the favored.

So pardons for the January 6th criminals, lots of pardons for Republican office holders who get caught up in corruption charges.

There seems to be one of those a week.

So due process for the disfavored, impunity for the favored, then a foreign policy that attacks allies and

sympathizes with foreign dictators.

Then the reconstruction of the whole American economy on lines that empower the state and create more favor, ability of the state to dispense favors, attacks on science, medicine, and otherwise objective sources of information.

And then finally, self-enrichment by the president, his family, his friends.

And one of your many great contributions is to say this last is the binding agent that unites all the others.

Can you take it from there and explain how we should think about this?

So if you look around the world, if you look at what links the modern dictators and stipulate that modern dictators have very different ideologies, you have nationalist Russia and communist China and theocratic Iran and

whatever North Korea is, and the Bolivarian socialists in Venezuela.

And you ask, what is it they have in common?

Why do they support one another, which they do?

Why do they help keep one another in power, which they do?

There's a whole consortia of countries keeping the Venezuelan dictator Maduro in power, for example, even though they would seem to have nothing in common.

One of the answers is that they all share an interest in

stealing and hiding money and in helping one another evade the sanctions that have been set up to prevent them from doing that, and in perpetuating their own, not just their own power, but their own wealth.

And that's a, there is now a set of systems that exist, some of which are facilitated by the Western financial world, by the offshore banking havens that we've created, and the shell company system that we've created that helps people hide money.

But it's the one thing that they have all in common, and it's the one thing that

they all pursue.

It's also true that when you have a declining democracy or a mixed system as you had in Russia, for example, in the 90s, the moment when the regime begins to really earn money is also often the moment when they really feel the need to crack down on civil liberties.

Because the most effective protest movements, and Russia is the best example of this, are often the ones that organize around corruption.

Because people can see and feel corruption.

Ordinary people, you don't need to know, you don't have to read Jon Stuart Mill or know the history of the American Constitution, you know, or even have much of an education.

You can be living in rural Ukraine or in Somalia, and you can intuitively understand that it's wrong for some people to be able to steal and keep their money, whereas other people are very poor.

And so this is often the motivating and organizing idea of anti-authoritarian movements.

I mean, actually, the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014, which was the moment when a lot of young Ukrainians went out on the street, they were waving EU flags, they were calling for an end of their authoritarian regime, which was at that time closely linked to Russia.

That was an anti-corruption movement that was classic in this sense.

So, Ukrainians understood that they were poor because their leaders were rich.

They understood that their leaders were tied to Russia.

They imagined being part of Europe, being part of the transatlantic world as a way to have the rule of law and to avoid that.

And when they won, this was the thing that panicked panicked Putin because it's that kind of rebellion and

that kind of movement that he's most afraid of inside his own country.

And indeed, the one really successful opposition leader in Russia over the last decade was Alexei Navalny.

His movement was

an anti-corruption movement.

His organization was called the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

And he was murdered, in essence, for successfully galvanizing Russians around that theme.

So this is both the thing that unifies modern dictators, and it's also the thing that often unifies their opponents.

And so, the fact that the Trump administration is moving so quickly in a kleptocratic direction and beginning to eliminate one by one all kinds of norms, defying all kinds of laws, changing existing laws to enable theft, essentially, and to enable corruption, should really alarm us because this is very often what precedes a broader crackdown on civil society.

Wherever you see a regime that is rapidly accumulating money and is rapidly enriching itself, you will see some kind of resistance movement and some kind of crackdown afterwards.

And that's, I suppose that's why I'm so concerned about it.

In President Trump's first term, he directed money to himself in a way that had never before been seen.

by an American president, never remotely, like not in the same neighborhood.

He would stay in his hotels so the Secret Service would pay him money to protect him.

He would make clear to anyone from foreign nations that if they wanted his attention, they had better stay overnight at his hotel and hold their events in his hotel.

At the beginning of his presidency, when he won by surprise in 2016, a number of the Persian Gulf states, which had planned events at other hotels in early parts for Christmas,

2016, hastily rebooked at the Trump Hotel to gain favor.

He also moved a lot of party money, not only public money, but if you were a Republican and you wanted his endorsement, you would have his

event at his hotel.

That's a lot of money.

On the other hand, it's like something you'd expect from like a crooked governor, not someone who controls the United States.

And it looks like in his second term, he thought, you know, if I ever get another chance, this time I'm going to think big.

And it looks as if through his various mysterious crypto ventures, hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, are moving from all kinds of people all over the planet to himself and to his family.

And again, this is shadow.

He can't be very precise, but it looks like vastly more money than in the first term has already moved into his hands in the second.

It is really an extraordinary transformation.

I can only attribute it, one, to greater preparation.

This time, his family and some of his business contacts were prepared for him to win and had a set of plans ready to go, you know, should he become president.

Also, it's true that, as you say, in the first term, there were these small violations.

There was another incident when Mike Pence went many miles out of his way to stay at a Trump hotel in Ireland.

I mean, there are all kinds of things like that that happened, and there was really no resistance.

Nobody ever said, you're breaking the law.

Nobody stopped him.

It wasn't even really a major topic of concern among the many things that people were concerned about.

But you're right.

This timing around, it's very, very different.

I mean, there are about four different kinds of things happening.

And this is one of the reasons it's so hard to keep track of.

One is violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

This is essentially the clause that says the U.S.

President isn't supposed to benefit in any way from relationships with foreigners.

Clearly, Trump benefits directly from relationships with foreigners.

You know, he was just at his golf course a few weekends ago

where a tournament was taking place that's sponsored by state-owned Saudi companies.

The head of the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is one of the sponsors, was actually there.

So he would have met many Saudi people who are his investors, essentially, and clients who, of course, are also interested in his Middle Eastern policy and in American foreign policy.

So you could argue that they were there.

If maybe it's touchy to say they were trying to buy American foreign policy, but they were certainly trying to influence it.

Why else would they be?

Why else would they be there?

Secondly, there are conflicts of interest, and this again is on a scale that we have never seen before.

Elon Musk has been put in charge of, with his group of Doge, whoever they are, engineers and internet trolls, have been in charge of taking over and managing regulatory bodies who regulate Musk's own companies.

He's also got control and the power to hire and fire people, agencies that subsidize his companies.

So in other words, he can determine government policy towards his own companies.

He can direct money towards his companies if he wants to.

He can eliminate regulations of his companies if he wants to.

And he is somebody who has been found in violation of all kinds of regulations.

pollution regulations, other kinds of legal issues have plagued a lot of his companies from the beginning.

And he now has been given a mechanism to escape that.

And I should say, he's just the most egregious version of this.

There are many people throughout this administration who have kept their private interests, who haven't recused themselves from investment issues,

who have nevertheless kept their jobs.

Thirdly, there are legal changes.

There are laws that were on the books that the Trump Department of Justice or the Treasury Department will not enforce.

There's something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

This was designed to forbid U.S.

entities from bribing companies

abroad.

That law is now not being enforced.

There's also a corporate transparency act, which was designed to force the owners of shell companies and anonymous properties to register their names so that when someone bought, for example, an apartment in a Trump building, we would know who the real owner was.

You know, is it Joe Smith down the street or is it a Kazakh billionaire who's interested in having influence on the U.S.

government and they have now said they will not be enforcing that law either and then finally there is outright corruption so Trump has created a cryptocurrency company World Liberty Financial which appears to be attracting investors who have a direct interest either in escaping a regulation or in some cases a lawsuit or an indictment by the federal government or who have some interest in influencing Trump or his family in some other way.

And as you say, there may be hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into this project and into others.

We have no clear way to keep track of it.

We don't know the exact relationship between those investors and decisions made by the Treasury Department or the Justice Department.

And

it is, again, corruption and self-dealing on a scale that we've never seen in American history.

And this really puts this administration in a completely different league.

There's nothing like it because the presidencies that are thought of as corrupt,

Harding, Ulysses Grant, what happened there was you had typically an inattentive president, or in Grant's face, a president who was a little too protective of his beloved wife's relatives and turned a blind eye to corrupt practices by people around him.

And maybe the president should have known what was going on.

In Grant's case, Grant was obviously no fool.

He should have known what was going on.

Harding was more of a fool.

But the presidents themselves, the money didn't stick to them.

And people remember Teapot Dome as being associated with Harding.

But Harding didn't benefit from Teapot Dome.

He just was ineffective and inattentive.

In the same way, Grant didn't get rich as president.

His wife's family picked up some lucrative positions and made dirty tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars in the money of the day.

But again, Grant was inattentive and over-protective.

FDR.

you know, allowed some of his children to engage in business practices that they should not have.

No suggestion that any of it stuck to him.

Again, inattentive and overindulgent.

Those are the practices.

It has never been a case of money flowing into the hands of a president as president on this kind of scale.

Now, one of the questions that will, I'm sure, be occurring to many people who watch and listen is: isn't this illegal?

And you've cited some specific laws.

There's also, we discussed this a couple of weeks ago with Peter Keisler, the former acting attorney general.

There are general background statutes that say you can't use public office at all in any way that benefits yourself.

You know, even if we haven't specified this is forbidden, there's a general, oh, and one more thing, you can't do this.

But as you were saying, all of this depends on the president to enforce the law.

And if the president is determined not to and punishes those who try and removes those who try, the system in the end cannot be enforced against the wish of the president, at least not so long as he has Congress on his side.

Presumably the body that would be responsible for enforcing corruption laws against the president is the Department of Justice.

And the Department of Justice in this administration is fully controlled by the president.

There's a very political, very partisan group of people in charge of it.

And we're hearing all the time, I'm sure you've heard this as well, about current employees of the Department of Justice resigning.

Some have done it publicly, some have done it more quietly.

They're looking for jobs afterwards and they don't want to be in the newspapers.

But there are many people who are resigning because the department isn't doing its job,

not just in terms of enforcing the laws on the president, but everyone else.

And so what we're going to have very soon is a very, very partisan group of lawyers or pseudo-lawyers who are supposed to be

enforcing the law, but who are all there serving at the pleasure of the president, not there to enforce the constitution or the legal system.

You know, it's always a tough thing.

I've encountered this problem in other countries.

I mean, sometimes it's called the chief prosecutor in our system.

It's called the attorney general.

It's always a tough thing to say that that person is independent of the president, even though they're appointed by the president.

I mean, they're meant to act independently.

In theory, they should have the mentality of someone acting independently.

And

that's always a touchy thing to ensure.

But at least in the last, you know, in modern American history, those people have, you know, have sought

to attain and to portray some kind of independence.

They take an oath not to the president personally, but to the legal system, to the law.

They attract the best lawyers in the countries, very young, idealistic people, because those are people who want to work for the U.S.

government, for the American people, not for the personal benefit,

the financial benefit of the president.

I'm sure, you know, listeners can point to many exceptions and moments when this hasn't, you know, the system hasn't worked, but that was the theory of it.

That was the idea.

You know, how do you get an ensure rule of law?

You get it by having people inside the system who have some kind of independence, some sense of independence.

And some of this is not ensured by some statute in the Constitution or some legal rule.

It's sured by the ethos of the people who go to work for the Department of Justice or the ethos of people who become judges.

You know, people don't become a judge, they don't become a federal judge because they want to enrich the president's family.

They do it because they feel some fealty to the Constitution.

And that system has worked up until now.

And now we will see whether this second Trump administration can break it.

I would add one other thing, which is that we know that people who were being asked for promotion and who are being up for promotion inside the Department of Justice, some of them have been asked very political questions.

For example, what do you think happened on January 6th?

And the right answer, of course, is that the great American patriots rose up to ensure that the correctly elected president, Donald Trump, would remain in office.

And people who are unable to say that, because of course, it's not true.

And so if you're saying it, you're lying, they are not going to get promoted in Trump's Department of Justice.

So we're going to have a very different body of people seeking to enforce the law.

And you can already see the results.

Yeah.

Bad character becomes a bona fide job qualification.

You pointed something here that, and this is how this becomes a linking theme.

When you're doing a backsliding democracy, we're not, of course, this is not a full-blown dictatorship like Maduro, Venezuela.

This is a backsliding democracy like those we've seen in other parts of the world,

in Central and Eastern Europe, and perhaps in parts of East Asia as well.

It becomes quite dangerous to be the chief executive because you're accumulating all this money.

There are actually statutes on the books that say you're not supposed to do this.

And there are broken but still present parts of the bureaucracy that are theoretically supposed to enforce these laws against you.

So you need for self-preservation one by one to shut them down.

And that is, I think, the linking point between Donald Trump's repressive agenda and his corruption agenda.

The corruption agenda is possibly legally dangerous unless you break also all the rest of the state.

Yeah, no, he's going to have to break a lot of institutions.

He will have to, I mean, he's seeking to break the Department of Justice right now.

He will have to break the FBI, which he's already partway towards doing that by putting, you know, the extreme partisan Cash Patel in charge of it.

He may eventually have to break, you know, the federal judicial bench.

I mean, these are the, you know, the people who are

the judges in our political system at the federal level are all people, I mean, including maybe even especially the conservatives, are all people who have made the Constitution a kind of fetish.

You know, these are often constitutional originalists, you know, people whose theory of the judiciary is that is that we should hew as closely as possible to the letter and the spirit of the law as it was written in the 18th century.

So he will have to either defy all of those people or find some way of getting around them or find some way of intimidating them if he is to continue.

So you're right, this creates an enormous interest that he has and many of the people around him have to continue breaking and subjugating those institutions.

Plus, there's a whole host of other.

I mean, anybody

whose job is transparency, that includes journalists, that includes investigative groups, you know, the consortia of journalists and NGOs who've been created over the years to do investigative reporting.

A lot of those are going to become targets, and some already have been.

You know, either targets of smear campaigns on Twitter, or maybe they will even be investigated by the administration itself.

All of those things, things, those transparency bodies, those legal bodies, all of them will have to be somehow pushed out of the way if this accumulation of funds is to continue.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things that Trump and his defenders often say is they feel uniquely persecuted.

No president has ever been investigated as much.

No president

has been convicted of crimes before.

No president has been impeached twice.

And they don't connect any of these results, the predicates of their own action.

But what is revealing about those comments is they reveal how endangered Trump and the people around him feel.

I mean, even if in the end, the American political system cannot hold a president to account, which looks like something we discovered about the system in the Biden years, that he had a president tried to overthrow the

government of the United States.

There's lots of evidence he'd taken bribes, he'd stolen documents.

And everybody seemed to make a kind of collective, unspoken decision.

You know what?

Too big.

We can't deal with this.

But lots of other people, a thousand people who took part in the January 6th crime, were prosecuted and were sentenced.

The others are also in danger.

So they become co-authors of the need to break institutions with the president, who may in the end get away with it because the system can't, the American system can't do that to its own president.

That's interesting.

I mean, I hadn't thought of that psychological

insight, namely that they talk all the time about being prosecuted and being victims and so on.

And maybe it's because they, you know, of course they know they're guilty.

They know they broke the law.

They know what happened on January the 6th.

They know how much money they're stealing.

So you're right.

Maybe they do feel, maybe it's a reflection, a kind of authentic reflection of how afraid they feel.

And they are all people who are engaged in breaking the law and in

destroying and undermining the Constitution.

And they're perhaps at some level, consciously or unconsciously, afraid eventually they might pay a price for it.

I mean, this, of course, we see this also in other countries.

I mean, why is, you know, why is Netanyahu, for example, so keen to break the Israeli judicial system?

It's partly because he too is worried about being held to account.

You know, why is Viktor Orban so determined to stay in office, despite the fact that this is the prime minister of Hungary?

What that his numbers are falling, he has a real political opponent.

You know,

what might persuade him to try and, you know, to try and block that political opponent, maybe even through extra legal means?

It's also, again, the fear that the very real crimes he's carried out, the money that he's stolen, the money that his family have benefited from taking from the Hungarian state, you maybe that's going to be investigated.

So their anxiety about in paranoia has a real basis.

You're right.

Yeah.

And if there are free and fair midterm elections, given the very bad economic news that seems to be arriving day by day, Congress can be an investigative body even if you can shut down the Department of Justice.

So you have to worry.

You just have all these points of danger and you have to shut them down one by one, the free press being one of the most important.

Now, historically, Americans have seldom cared all that much about corruption in government.

People always cite Watergate, but I think one of the things I think we've all learned from the Trump years is if 1974, if instead of being the worst economic year since the Great Depression, the year of Watergate, if it had been a great economic year, I am no longer very confident that Richard Nixon would have been in much trouble and that people were ready to hear bad news about Watergate because it was a terrible year economically, inflation and unemployment and oil shortages and gas lines.

But 2017, 2018, 2019 were pretty prosperous years.

And although the offenses that were happening over those years, not as big as now, but bigger than anything ever seen before, Americans tended to shrug.

And as by the way, they mostly shrugged through teapot dome.

I wonder if it's that or whether it's the extreme, you know, the partisanship that we now live in that makes people literally unable to see.

Trump's corruption.

And this is a theme I know you may also be interested to discuss.

I have one or two friends who during the Biden years became very angry by what they perceived to be as Biden's corruption.

Nothing that was ever proven, nothing was ever shown.

There was a lot of rumors about what Hunter Biden had done or not done.

You know, as far as I can see, Hunter Biden was guilty of taking advantage of his father's name and he got himself appointed to a couple of boards.

But there is no, you know, we're not even living in the same world.

You know, the world in which it's very bad that Hunter Biden was on a board of a Ukrainian or any other company because of who his surname was, and the world in which the president himself is openly taking hundreds of millions of dollars in de facto bribes from all over the world, these aren't really the same planet.

And yet you can find people who will say, what about Hunter Biden?

Or Joe Biden was very corrupt too.

And

that's a fallback position that people find, continue to find very useful.

And if you live in the media bubble where you see, you watch Fox News and

your information comes from the right, then you probably haven't heard very much about the scale of corruption in the Trump administration.

And you've probably heard endlessly about Hunter Biden.

And so,

that's the other piece of the story that's, I think, maybe even different from the 1970s.

I don't think we were that divided.

I don't think we were that partisan.

I mean, of course, in the 1970s, the other thing that happened was that we had, you know, it was the Republicans ultimately who held Nixon to account, and the Republican Senate and the Republican Congress who put pressure on him to resign.

And we don't have that anymore either.

We're missing this really vital piece of the U.S.

Constitution.

We're missing, as you you said a minute ago, we're missing Congress.

And if there are no leaders on the right, if there are no Republican leaders who are willing to stand up to this, then maybe it's not surprising that ordinary Americans who take their steer from their political leaders don't see it either.

They're not hearing anyone talk about it.

They're not hearing anyone investigate it or say anything about it at all.

Well, Hunter Biden stands in a...

long and rather dismal American tradition of the bad relative of the serving president.

And there is almost always one of these.

Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy.

You go through the list.

George H.W.

Bush had a son who traded on the family name.

There's almost always a relative.

I think Eisenhower is the only one where all the brothers were as exceptional as Eisenhower himself, each in his own way.

Usually there's a disgraceful relative out there.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's children, my God, they were the Hunter-Bidens of their day, and they did all kinds of shady business deals.

But this maybe does create some shadow of permission for those who want to believe in Trump because it's, you can, if you are minded to ignore what's going on, you can say, well, every president has a son or brother, a nephew who is making a dishonest living of hundreds of thousands of dollars by trading on the president's name and selling paintings to people who obviously are not interested in the quality of the art in the painting.

And therefore, that practice inures you or predisposes you, as you said, if you're partisan, to say, and therefore there's no difference between the president himself taking hundreds of millions of dollars, not hundreds of thousands, and using it in a way that directly influences American politics and politics.

In ways we can see the crypto industry is going to go unregulated, in part because the crypto industry has directed so much money to Donald Trump, or the direct benefit apparently, as best we can tell, to Elon Musk's companies and interests that have flowed from his actions in government.

These are different kinds of things.

But if you want to give yourself permission to cite Franklin Roosevelt's children or Joe Biden's, you can do that.

But you're not telling yourself the truth.

You're just saying, here are two things, and we can apply words to these two quite different things and use words to make them seem similar, even though they're not.

Yeah, no, but it's effective.

I mean,

I have heard people use this logic and make these arguments, and it seems to be useful in

convincing people who might otherwise have some doubts about Trump and the Trump administration, who might otherwise feel a little uncomfortable about supporting something that's this obviously corrupt.

I mean, there's another mechanism that I'm also worried about, and this is something you get in authoritarian regimes, which is when you have a political leader who so constantly and repeatedly lies himself.

I mean,

Trump was lying just the other day about gas prices, for example.

He says they're lower than they are.

And he will lie about the effect of tariffs as they come in.

He lies about things that people can see and feel.

I mean, Americans who buy gas know what the price of gas is.

So Trump saying it's something else doesn't change that.

But when the president lies like that, he creates also an atmosphere where people say, like, the president is lying and who knows what's really true.

I have no idea what any of this means.

I'm just going to stay out of it.

Like, I'm staying home.

I'm not going to involve myself in this totally corrupt, dishonest world that is our political system.

I'm not going to participate.

I'm not going to engage.

How can I have any influence in a world where, as my friend Peter Pomerance have used this Hannah Arendt quote for his book title, you know, nothing is true and everything is possible.

There's anything can happen and

I don't have any control on it.

So you can see

the beginnings of really an attempt not just to keep journalists out and people who are interested in transparency and accountability out, but also everybody out.

Nobody's going to want to be part of this completely corrupt system where everyone is bad.

Some of this, I think, is an unintended result.

And I think I'll give two examples from the weekend.

I suspect even the politically engaged people who would listen to a podcast like this will recognize in themselves what I'm describing.

So over the weekend, just past, President Trump tweeted about restoring Alcatraz as a federal prison.

Now,

this can't happen.

I mean, Alcatraz is an ancient prison.

It's been a federal museum, I think, for half a century.

It's just,

the cells are not to modern standards.

You can't do it.

And it looks like what happened was a TV station that he was watching had a movie that was set in Alcatraz, and he watched the movie and thought, Alcatraz, I'm going to make that a prison again.

And as the whim formed itself in his impulsive brain, he put a message on True Social that he wants to do this.

Should you react to that or not?

And I think most of us react.

I'm not going to react to that.

That's so obviously something that's not going to happen.

That's not a real thing.

It's just noise.

And I'm sure that's the correct response for each of us as working individuals with finite time and finite energy.

You know, you can't react to everything crazy he says because he says more crazy things than you can have reactions to.

On the other hand, it opens a process of endless devaluation of the president's words, that what the president says really doesn't matter.

So in that same weekend, President Trump posted on TrueSocial Comment about how he wanted to have tariffs on movies to create an all-in-America movie industry.

So that's a little less impossible than turning Alcatraz back into a federal prison.

It's also pretty impossible and something he's probably not going to do.

And again, but it's something that could happen, unlike the Alcatraz example.

And so should you take the energy...

if you're a journalist who writes about these things, if you're a concerned citizen, to react to the movie thing, or should you let that one go?

And there's this endless pushing of just, he says so much stuff that's nonsense that you actually begin, and your more sophisticated peers will say, You're kind of a sucker.

You know, it's just something the president said.

He says things all the time.

You can't react to that.

And then when he says, I don't know whether I'm bound to, and the same weekend, I don't know whether I'm bound to obey the Constitution or not, which is something he said, is that something we should dismiss?

Is that Trump just gassing?

Or is that something that is directionally significant?

So he wears down people, even who are the most committed, by saying so many things that are just ridiculous.

But buried in them are little poisoned barbs of danger.

No, I mean,

and he devalues the word of the president.

Nobody knows whether to take him seriously or not.

And you're right.

And then when we come to a moment where it matters what the president says and it matters what decision he takes and it matters whether he believes in the constitution or not, there will be a lot of people who have tuned out because

there's so much noise.

And the president a couple of days ago posted a photograph of himself dressed as the pope, a kind of AI image of himself, profoundly insulting to millions of Catholics around the world who are still in mourning for the late Pope.

You know, and yet it, and all of it contributes to this atmosphere where people just want to say, well, I don't, this is too much.

I can't stand it.

I'm not going to participate and I'm going home.

And that is the quintessential authoritarian tactic.

You know, because what you want is to rule behind a shadow of secrecy.

You know, you want to be able to steal the money or take the money and have no one know about it.

You want to be enacting laws and rules of your own design in the dark without courts, without judges, without attention.

And you want the population to be dulled and

bored and angry and cynical, and you want them all to stay home.

And so we see all that.

We've seen this movie before in other countries, I should say.

And we're seeing it happen in the United States right now.

Well, let me wrap up by taking us in a slightly different direction to something that it's a little uncomfortable for us to discuss.

When you and I talk about people who do this or people who do that, it's not just a figure of speech.

We're talking about people oftentimes whom we know personally, know sometimes quite well, because I think you a little less than me, but I very much come from the conservative political tradition, very much a conservative legal tradition.

I was a president of the Federalist Society on a college campus a long time ago.

And many of these people are people you also have come into contact with.

And we watch people we know sometimes cynically, or at least at the start, it's cynical, then it becomes more fanatical.

You know, people we knew from the Claremont Colleges, which became a center, has somehow become a a center of right-wing anti-constitutionalism.

How do you cope with this in your, without, and I'm not going to ask you to use names or anything like that, but in your private life, how do you cope with people whom you once held dear going off in these bad paths?

So this was a topic of my previous book, Twilight of Democracy.

I had this experience actually in multiple countries because I didn't know if you would call me conservative or Republican, but I was certainly an anti-communist.

And that put me in that camp for many years.

And my friends in Poland, where I live part of the time, and in London, where I worked for many years, and in the United States, were also came from that world.

And I watched that world divide in many places.

And it's funny, I thought that in 2016, I'd been through that, 2015 in Poland, 2016 in the US, that I'd been through that, that the divisions had resolved themselves, the people who were really fanatical and wound up being pro-Trump or fanatically pro-Brexit in some cases, you know, that they had sort of faded out of my life.

And then I discovered in this election cycle in 2024 that

there were new incidents of it.

And there were new friends who were put off by whether it was transgender issues or whether it was economic issues who found themselves wanting to support Trump.

And I frankly don't cope very well with it.

I know some people are better at separating their political views and their private lives than I am.

Some people, I know a lot of people have relatives who are on the other side of a divide and they have to live with them because you don't desert your elderly father for something like that.

But I have found it difficult because this story comes so close.

to, I want to say, values that I hold, but also values that I thought all of us shared.

You know, so you know, if I have, I'm the people who I know and who I consider to be friends, I think of them as people who believe in the rule of law, who support the Constitution, who think, you know, a democratic political system is better, who are bothered by lying in politics.

And, you know, it's not not that we all share,

we don't have to have the same views about everything, but there are these kind of basic values that we share.

And I've discovered that that's not true.

And I find it now difficult to deal with people who now live in this other reality.

And the thing I'm most afraid of now is that once you made the decision to vote for Trump in 2024, especially in 2016, it was different because you could be, we didn't really know what kind of a president he was going to be.

It could have been a protest.

You didn't like Hillary Clinton, whatever.

There were reasons why people people did it.

When you chose in 2024, you chose someone who had broken the law in multiple ways and you knew it.

You chose someone who sought to overthrow the results of the election of 2020 and you knew it.

So you were choosing someone who you knew to be lawless, who you knew had disdain for American institutions.

And I think that the people who made that decision are going to have a lot of trouble.

backtracking, moving back on it.

And, you know, I've seen, there are lots of commentary now about, you know, Trump did this or that.

You know, are the people who voted for him going to be sorry now?

And I think it's going to be a long time before they're sorry because they made this intellectual commitment to something that was against many of the things that they stood for.

They had to justify it to themselves in many different ways.

We just talked about one of them because, you know, because Biden is corrupt, whatever.

And now it's going to be very hard to turn around and say that was wrong.

You know, it's going to be, you know, they will stick to this.

They will go stand by it.

They will find new reasons to support Trump, precisely precisely because it was such a bad choice, and precisely because they had to overcome their own internal doubts, and precisely because they know he broke the law, and precisely because they know he has disdain for things that they say that they value.

And so I worry that it's going to be very hard to make up with them at some point in the future.

And

let me end with this last more hopeful thought, maybe.

Maybe what happens in the lives of countries is you get these periodic moral crises as a sort of prod to to alert us.

I mean, American politics was much cleaner after Watergate than it had ever been before Watergate.

Before the Second World War, America was a democracy for some people, but for many, not.

I mean, there's a lot of research now, but much of the Nuremberg laws that the Nazis imposed on German Jews in 1935 were based on the everyday practices in southern American states in 1934.

And Americans, not only did the Nazis notice it, but Americans noticed it too and became ashamed.

And you wonder if there hadn't been a World War II and if there hadn't been a Cold War, would the transition away from racial segregation in this country have been as dramatic and decisive and more or less peaceful as it was?

So maybe this is one of those, I think, doesn't Lincoln say something in the

second inaugural address?

This is one of those offense

that needs to come.

And maybe it's an offense that needed to come because

the people who'd grown up since the Cold War had lost sight of some of the things that we experienced during the Cold War, but why democracy was precious and worth fighting for.

The feeling of losing things and the understanding that something is slipping away can be a very dramatic,

it can galvanize people to resist.

That's true.

And you can hear in the national conversation, I even had a conversation with a niece yesterday, and I've talked to a lot of other younger people.

They feel and understand that something is wrong and that something is being lost.

And they are beginning now to reorient themselves to think about how they protect it or how they save it or how they change the country

in ways that make sure it doesn't happen again.

I mean, it may be that, you know, certainly, as we've been discussing, there has been a long slide in this direction.

You know, it wasn't just as if Trump arrived in January and suddenly began to do things that had no precedent.

I mean, he had a precedent in his first term.

The decline of the electoral system began much, you know, much longer ago with Citizens United.

You know, the role of money in politics has been increasing.

You know, you can trace, he's part of a path, but he is now creating a crisis that takes us off that slow glide and makes this into a moment that could galvanize people.

And you're right, I hope it will.

And there's never a conversation I have with you where I don't come away feeling I've learned something and maybe also steeled myself to try a little harder and better.

So, so thank you.

It is such a pleasure, and it's such a kind act that you would come and talk to me.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

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Thanks to Ann Applebaum for that fascinating and inspiring conversation.

I'm so grateful to her for joining the David Frum Show.

Now, I'm going to put in a commercial here for The Atlantic because Ann and I are colleagues there.

If you like what you see and hear on the David Frum Show, remember you can support Ann's work and mine and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theAtlantic.com/slash listener.

Repeat that slowly: theatlantic.com/slash slash listener.

And now, some questions from viewers and listeners that I'll try my best to answer.

The first question is from Soren.

Soren writes: I'm a high school student in Seattle, and I've noticed many of my peers are deeply polarized, often echoing media talking points and struggling to engage in thoughtful political discussions, especially across party lines.

How can I encourage more open, level-headed political conversations among young people who seem entrenched in tribal thinking?

Well, Soren, I commend you for this open-minded approach and for your patience with your peers.

And I salute the question you're asking.

It's a difficult problem.

And look, it's not like those of us who are older succeed any better at it than those of you who are younger.

I think one thing, I remember doing this when I was in high school and debating with my friends, is sometimes saying, look, I'll tell you what, I'm going to give you one thing to read.

And you can do the same for me.

You give me something you want me to read.

I'll give you something I'd like you to read.

Let's read them both together and then talk about afterwards what we've read.

And if you can limit the conversation to what's on the page, no what about questions, no, well, what do you also think, just what's on the page.

I think the more you channel a conversation, the more productive it can be.

And

at the very least, you can introduce your friends to a better quality of reading material than maybe they've been reading so far.

Here's a question.

from Bruno.

In the latter part of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, working classes supported political movements that better their lives against the so-called robber barons.

Now, it seems they support political movements which worsen their lives to the benefit of billionaires.

Why?

Well, congratulations, Bruno, for putting your finger on one of the most vexed questions in all of American history and political science.

In the 19th century, across most of the industrial world, Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, there arose social democratic parties associated with trade unions that tried to advance a worker-focused agenda.

The United States never produced such a movement, such a party.

Instead, the United States produced protest movements that operated within and against both the Republican and Democratic parties, never producing a really effective social, broad-based social democratic movement.

So that's the historical part.

To your question about the present day, I think the problem is in the modern world, the idea of working class is an idea that makes less and less sense.

So many people claim to be working class, and it's often very hard to understand exactly what they mean, or they mean contradictory things.

Very classic example.

Imagine an argument over Thanksgiving dinner between one brother-in-law with a high school diplomas working as a car salesman, and in a good year might make $120,000, in a bad year makes $60,000, but has not that much status in society and is a little insecure about his academic bot of ideas.

And he argues with his brother-in-law, who's an adjunct professor at a local college, who makes maybe $45,000 a year, but who has a PhD?

Which of them is working class?

Well, they will argue about that all night.

I think just generally, class-based analysis doesn't really work all that well in America because it's a country with so many differences of people's situations that people often end up transposing class as a marker of attitude and consumption patterns.

I remember a political scientist named Charles Murray wrote a quiz years ago in which he asked the question, how thick was your bubble?

And he had a set of questions, and they were all cultural.

What kind of clothes did you wear?

What kind of cards did you drive?

That's what made you working class.

And the idea was he was very hostile to people who got a lot of their position in society from their levels of education.

But if a person with a lot of education is economically precarious, it works under the direction and control of others, I don't know what we are saying when we say that that person is or isn't working class.

In 2024, Donald Trump did very well among the most affluent people in society.

The Republican vote still skews rich.

There are a lot of people who tell you it doesn't.

But the way they get to the claim that the Republican Party is a working-class party is by using education as their metric rather than income or rather than working under the supervision and control of others.

From Jeff.

At what point will the Trump administration start fudging or outright falsifying economic data, such as jobs reports, inflation measures, and consumer confidence data, and other traditional information put out by the departments of labor or commerce?

And how will we even know the information is bogus?

This is a great question and an important question.

A big part of the project of Elon Musk's Doge, I don't know if I'm supposed to pronounce it, dog or doge group, was to break a lot of the conveyor belts for reliable public information, not so much to create false information, but just to withdraw accurate information.

And we see the president himself doing his bit by making up these crazy stories about the price of gasoline based on strange data sequences like wholesale prices, not the price at the pump.

Mercifully, there is abundant private sector data on many economic issues that you can get some idea of whether things are right or wrong.

The government produces jobs reports, but there is a lot of information from purchasing and things like that that tends to be proprietary and is sometimes expensive.

But that people who care about these issues can track and will begin to sound an alert if the government information is wrong.

I would worry in the immediate term, not about false information, but about lacking information, absent information, broken information.

That's the direction the Trump administration, with Elon Musk's help, seemed to be heading.

And the last question from Colin.

He quotes something I said on air an episode or two back.

I had always thought of myself as a conservative because I believe in things like a strong and robust foreign policy to oppose authoritarianism abroad, in free markets and personal liberties, and in constitutional values that underpin our democracy.

And Colin asked, well, why do you call those things conservative?

And I suppose I'm reflecting the world in which I came of age, but in the late 1970s, The question of market or not market, that was a lively debate.

And the people who were skeptical of markets proudly identified themselves as being on the the left.

That was a time when there was a lot of post-Vietnam trauma over America's role in the world.

And the people who were more skeptical of that role, who doubted that the United States was a force for good or anyway thought that good intentions would likely go awry, again, they mostly, not always, but they mostly identified themselves proudly as being on the left.

And so it seemed to me that the people who were opposite those things were the people on the right.

But many of these are deep American values that normal times are more broadly shared.

Unfortunately, we live right now in what is not a normal time.

And a lot of the things that I thought of when I was a young Reagan enthusiast in 1980 that I thought of as belonging to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, they've surrendered those commitments and those beliefs.

And it's shameful for them and sad for all the rest of us.

Thank you for listening today to The David Frum Show.

We'll be back next week with more.

And again, the best way to support our work, if you like what we're doing, is subscribe to The Atlantic.

But otherwise, visit us here on YouTube or your favorite podcasting platform for more next week of the David Frum Show.

This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez.

It was engineered by Dave Grine.

Our theme is by Andrew M.

Edwards.

Claudine Abayed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm David Frum.

Thank you for listening.

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