When Jack Abramoff dominated Washington lobbying in the 1990s and early 2000s, he observed that there were two kinds of people in town: those who “get the joke” and those who don’t.
Those who got the joke understood that all of the city’s talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense. Those who didn’t—didn’t.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the recent gifts given to President Donald Trump by the Swiss government.
On July 18, President Donald Trump signed into law the boastfully named GENIUS Act. If the law wreaks havoc on the financial system, as seems highly likely, that name will become a grim joke: What genius thought that letting the cryptocurrency industry write its own rules would be a good idea?
The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act purports to create a regulatory framework for a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoins.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about the coming Supreme Court battle over President Donald Trump’s use of tariff powers. If the Court endorses Trump’s claim that anything he deems an emergency allows him to impose tariffs, Frum argues the United States will face a constitutional crisis unlike any before.
The shutdown of the federal government that began on October 1, now the second-longest in history, has also been called the “most bizarre” and the “weirdest.” What makes this fight so unusual is that it is simultaneously the least angry of the five major shutdowns since 1990 and also the hardest to resolve.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with an urgent warning about TikTok’s looming deal with Trump-aligned insiders—a move David calls the “biggest giveaway since the days of the railway grants.” He argues that the American media landscape has been quietly transformed, and political power has shifted from legacy outlets to algorithmic platforms loyal to the president.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with observations about the ongoing government shutdown, how it could be a strategic mistake for Republicans, and why this political standoff is best understood as a “quasi-election” about the rule of law itself.
Then Frum is joined by Lord Charles Moore, the authorized biographer of Margaret Thatcher, to mark the centenary of her birth.
Sometimes even the Trump administration acts like a normal American government. The bailout of Argentina is one of those times.
The Trump administration is proposing to lend Argentina up to $20 billion to support its currency on financial markets. The plan is unpopular with Republicans and Democrats alike. Yet at a time when much of U.S.
President Donald Trump recently ordered his attorney general to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, and tonight, the Department of Justice delivered an indictment of Comey for lying to Congress. Comey, for his part, insists on his innocence. But the charges against Comey are not just about the president’s abuse of his power for personal retribution. They represent a test of the president’s plans for the future.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum argues that President Donald Trump is making a miscalculation in his second term. Instead of consolidating power before plundering the state, Trump has reversed the sequence, imposing massive tariffs that raise prices on ordinary Americans, flaunting foreign wealth, and enriching his inner circle at public expense.
President Donald Trump is worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is moving too slowly to prosecute his political adversaries on fake charges. Trump has good reason to be concerned. He is carrying out his project to consolidate authoritarian power against the trend of declining public support for his administration and himself. He is like a man trying to race upward on a downward-moving escalator.
Last week, I paid a $26.05 tariff on a small purchase from the United Kingdom. On August 29, a federal appeals court ruled that the U.S. government had no right to take that money. It allowed the tariff to remain in place until October, pending further litigation. But the Trump administration has lost every round of this fight to date. If it keeps losing, the question will sooner or later arise: What happens to my $26.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the misuse of history in today’s politics. He argues that fascism, once thought to have been buried by the Second World War, has reemerged in modern forms, thriving on the endless hunt for enemies, stoking culture wars, and exploiting new technologies. And he explains why the best antidotes remain liberty, equality, and sometimes humor.
After Donald Trump left the presidency in 2021, he was indicted for retaining dozens of government documents, including some containing nuclear secrets. He was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. His company was convicted of criminal tax fraud.
When Trump returned to the presidency this year, he sought payback by accusing others of the crimes for which he’d been indicted or convicted.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum begins with reflections on how Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown has transformed America into what he calls a “society based on fear.” Frum warns that the president’s methods risk discrediting not just immigration enforcement, but also law, police, and the very idea of democratic legitimacy.
In the 1980s, the world’s largest producer of shoes was the Communist Soviet Union. In his 1994 book, Dismantling Utopia, Scott Shane reported that the U.S.S.R. “was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year—twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks on press freedom.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down the conversation around the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Frum explains why Trump’s move has triggered backlash from parts of his own base and why it reveals a deeper political fracture inside the MAGA movement.
President Donald Trump is being pulled toward war in the Middle East by his predator’s eye for a victim’s weakness and his ego’s need to claim the work of others as his own. But since his “unconditional surrender” social-media post on Tuesday, other Trump instincts have asserted themselves: above all, his fear of responsibility.
Trump enjoys wielding power. He flinches from accountability. Days ago, Trump seemed to hunger for entry into Israel’s war.
Donald Trump’s trade war is fast turning into a fiasco. When the president started the war, Team Trump advertised it as certain to be fast, easy, and cheap. Trump would impose tariffs. The world would yield to his will.
The tariffs would do everything at once. They would protect U.S. industry from foreign competition without raising prices, and generate vast revenues that would finance other tax cuts.
Yesterday, President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to quell disorderly protests against immigration-enforcement personnel in Los Angeles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared his readiness to obey Trump by mobilizing the U.S. Marines as well. These threats look theatrical and pointless. The state, counties, and cities of California employ more than 75,000 uniformed law-enforcement personnel with arrest powers.
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a Memorial Day message about corruption and extortion in the Trump White House, including revelations about meme-coin pay-to-play schemes and foreign-financed golf courses.
Then David is joined by his Atlantic colleague George Packer to discuss Packer’s new profile of Vice President J. D. Vance.
If you’ve ever watched a game of three-card monte, you’ve noticed that the dealer talks nonstop. The chatter serves two functions. First, it distracts the victims. Second, and maybe more important, the dealer is deceiving his victims about what’s befalling them. The spiel invites them to imagine they’re playing a game in which they stand a fair chance. In reality, they are being swindled.
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses how misinformation, distrust in science, and extremist rhetoric are fueling a deadly resurgence of preventable diseases in the United States—and urges clear and responsible leadership to protect public health.
Donald Trump pushed the Conservative Party of Canada down the political stairs. Yesterday, on Canada’s election day, he tossed a farewell bucket of slop after the tumbling Conservatives, with a final Truth Social post urging Canadians to see their choice as a verdict on him personally. As Trump gleefully confided in an interview with The Atlantic posted that same day, he knew perfectly well that the overwhelming majority of Canadians hate him.
President Donald Trump’s high-tariff regime will impose higher prices and lower growth on Americans. It will have another effect that nobody in the administration seems to have considered at all: a tsunami of smuggling.
In a few days’ time, every desirable consumer good will be dramatically more expensive in the United States than on world markets.
Eight years ago, President Donald Trump got generally good reviews for his first speech to a joint session of Congress. Back then, it would have seemed both incredible and churlish to suggest that the man who delivered that relatively conciliatory, relatively presidential speech, might within four years try to overturn an election by violence.
But that’s what happened. And that attempt remains the single most important fact about Trump’s first term as president.
Round one of Donald Trump’s trade war has come to an inglorious end. The United States has suspended its threats against Canada and Mexico in return for border-enforcement measures that Canada and Mexico either were doing anyway or had done before without making much difference in the flow of drugs. What can Americans and others learn from this costly episode—other than not to repeat it? The following:
American tariffs hurt Americans.
Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada? It was an absurd situation. I briefly considered recycling an old joke of mine about merging all of the High Plains states into a single province of South Saskatchewan. But as I toyed with it, the joke soured. The president of the United States was bellowing aggression against fellow democracies. The situation was simultaneously too stupid for serious journalism and too shameful for wisecracks.
To understand the harm Donald Trump has done with his tariffs on Canada and Mexico, here are four things you need to know:
First, every tax on imports is also a tax on exports.
The most popular beer in America is Modelo Especial, brewed in Mexico. Impose a 25 percent tariff on Modelo and sales will slide. So, too, will exports of the American barley that goes into Mexican beer. Mexico buys three-quarters of U.S. barley exports, almost all for brewing.