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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.

The world laughed at Donald Trump.
Seven years ago, Trump was just a few sentences into his annual United Nations General Assembly address when most of the gathered leaders of the 193 countries represented began to chuckle—and then outright guffaw. A visibly startled Trump had been boasting about his administration’s successes; he had long claimed that other nations mocked his presidential predecessors, and now it was happening to him. Trump later publicly downplayed the moment.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Partisan claims of fraud in the presidential election. Elaborate statistical analyses. Reports of shadowy, closed-door doings. All of this, they say, points to one conclusion: The results were compromised, and the real winner was kept out of the White House.

Today, President Donald Trump threw one of the most important tenets of his own foreign policy into a 180-degree turn, reversing course without even slowing down. Trump has always been overly deferential to Vladimir Putin, including enabling the Russian president’s war in Ukraine. Now Trump appears to be signaling that he’s fed up with the Kremlin. But is he?
Trump’s latest policy reversal came after he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly for nearly an hour today.

As chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Alfred Sikes took the agency’s duty to foster broadcasting in “the public interest” seriously. Sikes, a conservative who was appointed by George H. W. Bush in 1989, engaged in a long-running battle against Howard Stern’s employer, Infinity Broadcasting, levying repeated fines against its stations for violating rules against broadcasting “indecent” material when children were in the audience.

Luther Campbell, the front man for one of the most controversial rap groups in history, has advice for Jimmy Kimmel and for any media executives trying to decide how to respond to the Trump administration’s attempts to censor disfavored speech: You’ve got to fight. He would know. When the government came after him and his music, he fought, and he won, creating a legal precedent that still protects artists and entertainers who offend the sensibilities of those in power.