Faithless, chaotic, and corrupt: Donald Trump’s character also shapes his foreign policy. The latest victim is Saudi Arabia—not a sympathetic victim, maybe, but a victim all the same.
On July 22, United States Energy Secretary Chris Wright and his Saudi counterpart signed an agreement for a Saudi-U.S. civilian nuclear partnership.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts questioning whether the Trump administration has any plan at all to meet the challenge of debt and deficits.
Then, David is joined by Vincent Smith, director of agricultural policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and professor emeritus of economics at Montana State University.
In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. Had they won, they could have stalled President Biden’s agenda and forced him to govern on Republican terms. All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a run-off in January.
Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the effect of this talk in Georgia.
Donald Trump’s favorite movie is Sunset Boulevard. That movie tells the story of an aging silent film star, Norma Desmond, who has locked herself away from the real world so that she can endlessly replay past glories until she loses her mind entirely. In his Independence Day speech, Donald Trump indulged in his own protracted Norma Desmond moment.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has been a Trump-made fiasco from start to end.
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the Brexit vote, which was cast 10 years ago this month. David explains why Brexit has not only been a failure but has led to years of political instability in the U.K. in the decade following the British vote to leave the European Union.
Then, David is joined by Professor David W.
The Maine Senate race is far from the first time that an American political party has had to choose between character and power.
In 2017, Alabama Republicans nominated a state supreme court judge named Roy Moore for U.S. Senate. A month before election day, The Washington Post published a report that when Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, he initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl.
“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”
That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas.
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The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli air strikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing.
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to recent reporting surrounding the Trump family’s “patriotic,” Trump-branded cellphones. David explains how this is yet another instance of the most powerful sowing doubt about the fairness of American business and destroying confidence in the ideals of American enterprise.
Why don’t more Republicans defy President Trump? The president’s poll numbers are bad. The war in Iran is raising gasoline prices. The president’s family is pocketing billions. The president seems to care only about building glitzy monuments to himself. With the impending midterms looking pretty bad for Republicans, you’d think that Trump’s co-partisans would be taking a cue from Meat Loaf: “I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” But no.
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, David is joined by his wife, the writer Danielle Crittenden, to discuss her new memoir, Dispatches From Grief, and the loss of their daughter Miranda.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
When an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the MAGA movement seized the moment to demand a campaign of repression. Vice President Vance called for an ambitious program to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” He named the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Nation magazine as examples of candidates for the retaliation he had in mind.
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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the recent election in Hungary and the defeat of Viktor Orbán. David counters Orbán defenders who claim that this loss proves Orbán was never a threat. Antidemocratic leaders often face institutional constraints, and it was those institutional constraints that compelled Orbán to accept a defeat after years of abuse of power.
The most important thing to understand about the “madman theory” of foreign policy is that it was designed by losers for losers.
The world first heard of the madman theory from a 1978 memoir by President Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. According to Haldeman, Nixon said: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on President Trump’s dangerous disregarding of Congress’s powers of war-making and peacemaking. David argues that though Republicans have enabled the president’s dark impulses, Democrats in congress also seem happy to turn a blind eye to the Trump administration’s actions in Iran.
The agent asks an Iranian: “Are you willing to work for Israel and the United States to overthrow the Khamenei theocratic regime?”
The Iranian replies: “I am willing!”
The agent says: “That’s awesome! A hundred thousand dollars!”
The Iranian looks troubled, hesitates for a moment, grits his teeth and says: “A hundred thousand it is! But I can’t come up with that much all at once—can I pay in installments?”
That joke, which I happened to come across today, sheds light on what’s happening in Iran.
During the planning for President Trump’s latest strike on Iran, Britain refused to allow the United States to launch air attacks from the U.S.-U.K. base at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Only a few hours’ flying time from the Middle East, Diego Garcia offers airfields long enough for the heaviest bombers and has naval docks large enough for aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. It is British territory, left over from colonial times, but was jointly developed under a U.S.-U.K.
Last week, the polling firm Gallup announced that it would no longer survey presidential-approval ratings. This news stirred suspicions. President Trump’s numbers are declining badly, much worse than Joe Biden’s at the equivalent point in his presidency. Gallup’s most recent presidential-approval poll, in December, had Trump at 36 percent—well below the RealClearPolitics poll average of 42 percent. Trump is known for taking punitive action.
In the 1630s, King Charles I tried to tax English people without the consent of their legislature. He lost his head.
In the 2020s, Donald Trump tried to tax Americans without the consent of Congress. He just lost his case.
A tariff is a tax. The Trump tariffs imposed in and after April 2025 were projected to raise as much as $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Constitution assigns authority over taxes, including tariffs, to Congress.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a warning about President Trump’s escalating efforts to bend American institutions to his will.
David Frum is joined by The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum to react to the news of the American raid and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a special episode of The David Frum Show.
Transcript forthcoming.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He examines the many actions President Donald Trump has taken that run counter to the ideals articulated in 1776, and considers how the Founders’ constitutional genius may ultimately be what frustrates Trump’s attempt to consolidate power.
Attend a public event in Canada and you will likely hear it open with a land acknowledgment. In the city of Vancouver, for example, the script might read:
“This place is the unceded and ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and has been stewarded by them since time immemorial.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the Trump administration’s hostility toward NATO. David discusses why NATO was created, what it does, and why we should care about it. David also analyzes the United State’s global leadership role and why so many bad actors advocate for isolationism.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the shooting at Bondi Beach and the rise of anti-Semitic violence globally. He discusses what willing governments can do to crack down on radicals and prevent future acts of violence.
Then David is joined by Will Thomas, a professor at the Michigan Ross School of Business, to discuss Thomas’s paper “Crypto Kleptocracy.
Updated at 2:48 p.m. ET on December 14, 2025
It’s long past time to stop saying “Anti-Semitic violence has no place in our society.” Outrage upon outrage confirms that anti-Semitic violence has a large and expanding place in Western societies—that it is supported by many, that it is tolerated by many more, and that it is often appeased or even enabled by governments fearful of confronting large and militant factions within their populations.
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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the absurd Peace Prize awarded to Donald Trump by FIFA. David discusses how the invented prize reflects what FIFA understands about our president—that he’s the kind of leader who can be won over with shiny trinkets and fancy ceremonies.
On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the shocking alleged corruption that has informed President Donald Trump’s actions toward Ukraine and the scandal of the recently proposed “peace plan” by the United States. He goes on to discuss how the many scandals of the Trump presidency make it hard to focus on just one, as it is quickly replaced in the news cycle by another.
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.