The Daily Beast Podcast - How Trump Corrupted The Presidency Into an ATM

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

David Frum joins Joanna Coles to unpack the jaw-dropping scale of Donald Trump’s presidential profiteering—from the $400 million Qatari plane to his so-called ‘presidential library’ money funnel. Frum, Senior Editor of The Atlantic and host of the new podcast The David Frum Show, explains how Trump turned the presidential office into a personal ATM—and why the Republican party let him. He breaks down why Trump’s grift dwarfs anything in U.S. history, how social media fuels both the scam and the silence, and why the real question isn’t what Trump will do next, but what we’ll tolerate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From 1982 to 2007, 25 years, for Americans, there was one mild recession and no inflation, a quarter century of economic stability. Now look at what's happened since 2007. The Great Recession, the pandemic shop, the follow-up inflation. We've lived through a time of a tremendous economic turbulence. I'm Joanna Coles. I'm the chief content officer of The Daily Beast. Welcome to the Daily Beast podcast.

I hope you're ironing your clothes, walking your dog or doing something equally useful. Today we are talking to one of my favourite conservative writers, David Frum, from the Atlantic, who's just launched his own podcast for David Frum show. He worked for George Bush and in fact coined the term the axis of evil. But last November, he left the Republican Party, just given up with Donald Trump as leadership. So we're going to get into it. How did the Republican Party end up in this place? and let's talk about that monumental grift that Donald Trump has been doing. So David Fram, very excited to have you on the podcast.

This is the first time we've had you on. And I guess my first question, just stepping back a little bit from what's actually going on at the moment is you left the Republican Party in November. Are you politically homeless? And does the Republican Party ever come back, not necessarily to what it was before, but to a home. for moderates? Well, I stayed in through the first Trump term and then through the Biden years because I believe, look, I spent my political life there and I believe that I had some duty to assist at the reconstruction when that became possible. And I remained optimistic that reconstruction was coming. To me, one of the messages of the November 2024 election is

reconstruction is not coming. This is the future. And those of us who don't agree with this future, we need to go somewhere else. I don't worry too much about a personal home for myself. I'm a writer and not a political activist. I don't need to be in association with large numbers of people to do my work. But what I continue to stand for as I mean, it's not, I wouldn't pretend that I've never changed my views on anything. I've changed my views on a lot of things. And I've tried to explain it when I do.

But markets, free trade, collective security and the U.S. leadership, rule of the law, at home. Those are my talismans. And that's not a place I feel comfortable within the Republican Party at the same time. And as we've seen in the past weeks, American leadership is indispensable to keeping the peace and security of the democratic world. And I'm not at home either with those who doubt the necessity of American power. So where do people who believe in those things, which Donald Trump appears to be less keen on at home, where do they go? How does the Republican Party remake itself? Or does it?

I mean, you say that, I mean, and I get your point, you're a writer, so you're not an operative. But for people who want to vote for a party that is about the upholding the law and free trade and democracy, where do they show up? How do they show up? Well, look, the choices are going to be more difficult. And the results of the New York Democratic primary. I don't know how much you can generalize them across the country, show that the Democrats are breathing a lot of the same glue fumes that the Republicans are. Because look, what is Trump about? It's about authoritarian economics powered by social media without regard to the workability of ideas or the background of the person and his ability or her ability to execute the ideas.

So the New York Democrats, Jessica Seembro said, we'll have what the man at the deck's table is drinking and give us a flag in of it. If what you believe in is markets and trade and the rule of law and American leadership in the world, you know, both parties are uncertain about how they feel. But these things happen. Look, the way American politics works, the analogy I always use is they're like big containers full of many elements. And the elements are always spilling out of the containers and being picked up and scooped up and rearranged. And you see this with the way states move in and out of the party columns, but ideas do too. You know, from the Civil War until the middle 1970s, the Democrats were the free trade party, and Republicans tended to be more protectionist. Beginning of the 1970s, the Republicans became the free trade party, and the Democrats became more protectionist.

Right now we have two protectionist parties, unfortunately, but there is a free trade argument, and somebody's going to pick it up. I don't know where it will go. And I think when I think what can I usefully do? I can only speak for myself is to continue to champion ideas that I think are worth picking up by somebody. And trade and freedom, collective security, American leadership, rule of law, democracy, respecting election outcomes, dignity for every person. And that's what I tried to talk about in my work at the Atlantic and my podcasting work. And we'll see it's available for whomever. One of my mentors, And here was Bill Buckley at a dark moment in his political life, said he saw his job as maintaining a landing strip in the jungle. And it's true that there are not many planes arriving right now, but he believed that eventually the planes would land. And when they did, coffee would be on the house. That's a very Buckley-esque type response.

To what extent do you think that this is also about the proliferation. of social media and in particular TikTok, which we know is owned by the Chinese. Well, TikTok doesn't help. I think there are deeper causes because how do I know what is a good answer? So what I see is this kind of, these kinds of political changes are happening in almost every developed country. And so we need an explanation that works in France and Germany and the UK and other countries as well as the United States. And we need an explanation that begins, in my view, this change to this kind of more irresponsible politics really gets going after the Great Recession. So we need something that spreads in geography across many countries

and extends in time back to 2010-12, so before there was a TikTok. So social media is obviously part of the story. I think the economic turbulence of our time. I graduated from college in 1982. From 1982 to 2007, 25 years, for Americans, there was one mild recession and no inflation, a quarter century of economic stability. Now look at what's happened since 2007, the Great Recession, the pandemic shop, the follow-up inflation. We've lived through a time of a tremendous economic turbulence at a time when wealth is becoming more concentrated and when the cost of housing in particular is in almost every day. developed country fast outpacing the standard of living. That didn't used to be, that didn't

used to happen. It used to be the cost of housing was driven by people's wages. Now it seems to me not. You have the aging of the baby boom generation and their vulnerability to certain kinds of political extremism. You have, among the younger people, you have this non-marriage, non-partnership. You know, when men and women live together, they end up with more coordinated. converging opinions when men and women live largely apart, as the people under 35 seems to be living largely apart. The men go one way, the women go another way. And so that's one of the things you saw in the 2024 election in the United States is good news, racial polarization way down. Trump did well among non-white groups. And meanwhile, white people are more comfortable with the Democratic

Party than they've been for a long time. So decreasing racial polarization, good news, bad news rising sexual polarization. Men and women vote increasingly differently, which they didn't used to do. So these are some of the things I think are driving what is happening everywhere. And I would date the beginning of these changes to the immediate after shock and then aftermath of the Great Recession. So do you think that the men and women, and it's a very interesting point and it's completely undercovered and underdiscuff, and I totally agree with you on it. Do you think that's also exacerbated by social media?

because what we know drive social media is conflict, right? That's what makes people switch on. It's the algorithm then speeds up and feeds you more of that. And yet I'm very conscious when you actually talk to young men and talk to young women, they're not actually at loggerheads with each other. I hope not. I hope not. But what I do notice is they do marry less.

They do cohabit less. Well, isn't that because divorce is, such a night in that. You know, that may be the reason. I don't know why it's happening. It doesn't matter. Why is there sometimes harder to explain than hows and what's? But what we see is if you have a lot of young men who have not been on a date in a year, they are losing the ability, they are losing a sense of, well, what things, how do I speak in ways that are not offensive to women? And so a lot of the, a lot of the things I see on social media are, men and women talking to their own group in ways that are pretty offensive across the gender line.

And that if you were living with somebody, she would say, you know, I didn't think that was very funny. Or he would say, you know, you don't have to denigrate men all the time. Why are you engaged in these insulting generalizations? But when you're apart, that kind of talk and, of course, separated groups self-radicalize. And so it's, you know, one other thing that happens in the social media era. And I think this is special about American politics. So if you live in a parliamentary country, Britain, Canada, where I am right now, there's a party. And it's a real thing.

You actually have to fill out a card to belong to the card. Sometimes you have to pay some money. There's a leader. And there are a bunch of people who aren't leaders. So if you say, well, what does the Liberal Party of Canada think? What does the Conservative Party of Great Britain think? If there's some loudmouth on social media saying something, you can't say, well, that's the party, because that's just some loudmouth in social media. But in the much more disaggregated American system, I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between what some loudmouthed and social media says and what some responsible political figure says.

And so people have this idea that the Democratic Party hates men or that the Republican Party despises women. And look, Donald Trump is certainly very contemptuous and disrespectful toward women. That's true. That's not true of everybody. But it's easy to get that impression. And you don't blame people for getting it, especially because of the way social media flattens everything and makes it clear that some people. person you've never heard of has said something you don't like. Well, it's also true that the Democrats sort of made people anxious that if they said something,

they might get cancelled, right? They were the party of the scold, I think, which drove certainly young men to the Republican Party and to some of the podcasts that people love like Joe Rogan. Yeah, I think there's, look, cancellation is also a feature of social media because, look, in 1998, you said something offensive at a bar. maybe your boss would hear about it, maybe not. Maybe your boss would decide to do something about it, maybe not. If your boss didn't hear about it and didn't decide to do anything about it, then all that happened was some people at the bar thought you were a jerk.

And nothing very much more than that could possibly happen to you unless you put it in writing and published at some place where people could see. What social media allows you to do is to say, even if your boss says, look, this has got nothing to do with your work, I'm not firing you, you can have catastrophic social consequences from all over the planet. I mean, the most famous of these first cancellations was a woman who worked for a large corporation said something that she thought was funny, maybe ill concede, to her 80 friends on social media. And by the time she got off her plane on the other side of the world, the whole planet was talking about it. And her life was made a misery.

This was the woman going to South Africa who made a joke about AIDS. Yeah. That just couldn't happen in 1998. No one would ever hear the joke. David, just hold on a second. We need to take some messages. And we're back with David Frum. You think of Terry Moran, the ABC correspondent,

whose contract wasn't renewed after he made a comment saying Stephen Miller was a world-class hater. Well, I think we need to distinguish between cancellation, which is non-formal, non-state personal social consequences and the government telling a news organization, fire your reporter because the president didn't like what he said. So the thing that made cancellation so hard to get your grips on was, well, what exactly had happened? You weren't, you know, you weren't being thrown in a prison cell.

You might not even lose your job, or maybe you did, but your audience for your comedy show would disappear. Well, how did you get any recourse for that? It was just thousands of individuals making separate decisions. What happened to Terry Moran was the president of the United States and the people around him said to a news organization, I don't like, I didn't appreciate the comment that reporter made, fire him. That is much more like old-fashioned state repression than it is like social media cancellation. Do you think ABC should have kept Terry Moran? Yes, absolutely. And just on

principle. Now, realistically, being on the White House beat depends on access. If somebody's burned his axis, he may become less useful for a time in that beat. So the fact is what would have happened in the olden days. And what should happen is the ABC says, absolutely not. We blow it out your ear. And then quietly say, you know what, Terry, we're sending you to Paris to cover that. Right. Because not because of anything you did was wrong, but just look, how are you going to cover the White House if they won't talk to you? Okay. So let's talk more specifically about Donald Trump. You read an absolutely brilliant essay for the Atlantic about Donald Trump's grift and how this was just of epic proportions, unlike anything American politics had ever seen before.

Let's start with the plane, the $400 million plane that he's allowed to use for his library after he leaves office. And you pointed out that he really is using politics to make money. Well, the assumption always was when you entered high office and not just the presidency, but any high office, you ended your profit-seeking activities. And you didn't. And by the way, there are a series of. laws. There are a series of corrupt practices act and conflict of interest statutes that say, if you are a governor of a state or a United States senator or notionally the president,

you can't use your office for money. But in the case of the president, these laws are hard to enforce, and they depended to a great extent on the sense of honor of the person. And I quoted a letter that George H.W. Bush wrote to his son, George W., when George H.W. Bush became vice president in 1988, in which he warned him, you're about to have a lot new friends. You need to be very careful about these new friends. And in particular, I never want to hear that you have contacted any agency of government on behalf of any of your friends ever. Now, there is no law that may George H. W. Bush do that, or George W. Bush obey. It was just the way things were done. Everyone assumed it had to be. In Trump's first term, he trampled a lot of these

old notions, and he made improper millions of dollars. But in the second term, he's making improper billions of dollars through his coin operations, through other forms. of payment, his relatives and family. And of course, this plane story, which does seem to be in a case of him putting pressure on the Qadari government to hand over a plane that they'd had in sort of surplus for a while. One more thing. Instead, this plane is supposed to go after the Trump presidency to the Trump Library. And that conjures up images of the Reagan Library where there's a 707 jet that Reagan used, another president's before Reagan. Reagan was the last president to use this iteration of Air Force One. And it's on the ground in a half.

hangar disabled and it doesn't fly. People walk on board and they look at what the plane used to look like. And that's sort of a good tourist attraction for a plane that was obsolete anyway. But in this case, Trump is allowing you to think the library means the plane's on the ground. But there's no guarantee of that. This plane is going to be flying and flying him around and his relatives and friends. It's a personal gift to Trump from the government of Qatar, and maybe, as we now know, not a voluntary gift, but an extracted gift. Well, and the library, it's appears to be a sort of open door for people to just put money into it, right? From his inauguration campaign to Melania's apparent documentary for Amazon, for which they've paid

$40 million. Well, the thing that's sort of crazy about this whole life, why do we have presidential libraries? So it's been a long practice in American life that the president's papers become the president's personal property after the president leaves office, which is itself nuts. No other country does that. But that's been the, view of the United States for a while. And so a president would walk away with a mountain of paper of great value. And so beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, private funds, and then public funds were raised so the president could store this paper that he had ownership of. And so Franklin Roosevelt is the first of the presidential libraries. And it's a library. It's a library.

And so it continues throughout the president's succeeding Franklin Roosevelt until the invention of email. What happens when there's no more paper that needs a physical home? What is the point of a presidential library then? And so these things have tended to become like Taj Mahals, conference centers, multiplexes. And Jimmy Carter invented this, but in his library, they're doing mostly good works and research and conflict resolution. But these things have become more and more temples to the president. And in the Trump case, they become ways to launder money. Again, and not millions, not single millions of dollars, but multiple millions of dollars and even billion. of dollars. So this is going to sound a very basic and perhaps naive question, but I still don't

understand how the Republican Party got to this point where Donald Trump appears to have everybody in a stranglehold. I mean, you talk about George Herbert Walker Bush, writing to his son and saying, do not think you can take advantage of my position as vice president. And here we have a president, basically with his hand wide open. What? How do you? How do you? How? happened in the Republican Party that this was allowed to happen. Donald Trump fought a series of battles against other people in the Republican Party and won each one. And people who stood up to them found their political careers over. They found themselves often subject to death threats.

But most of they found themselves out of office. And so those who wanted to stay in office adapted. And I would venture that probably many, certainly in the Republican Senate, disapprove of Donald Trump's financial operations, but they don't dare say so. and they certainly don't dare do anything about it. And if they tried, they fear they would fail, and they're probably right that they would fail. And then during the Biden interlude,

the great thing about Joe Biden was he was a man from a different time who believed that Trump was an aberration and the best thing to do was just to pretend it never happened and let it all go away. And the worst thing about Joe Biden was that he was a man from a different time who believed that the Trump years were an aberration, and if he just pretended it never happened, it would go away.

And so there were no new statutes passed. There is no real reckoning, not just with January 6th, but with the many other acts of wrongdoing. You didn't have that moment, as you did after in the late 1970s, when the Watergate scandal opened the door. One of the ways Richard Nixon defended himself during Watergate to say, what are you talking about? Many of the things I did, Lyndon Johnson did them. What are you talking about? They're common at the state level. And after Nixon left office, a lot of people had to face up, Nixon was right that a lot of these practices were prevalent.

And since they had been unacceptable when brought to public view during Watergate, maybe they should just be unacceptable, period. And so from 1974 to 1978 or nine, you have a spasm of political reform where we pass the modern conflicts of interest statutes where dozens of local officials are sent to jail for practices that in 1964 would have been perfectly normal and ignored. There's a big tidy up. We didn't have that between 2021 and 2025, that you didn't have the reaction to the Trump years. It was not a spasm of political reform. And that's something that in years to come, I think people are going to wonder about. Was that a missed opportunity? Why didn't that happen?

There is an argument, to your point then, that Donald Trump is simply being more transparent, that he's taking the plane. No. You don't think that. There's an argument. There's an argument. It's just not true. Yes, you hear that a lot. But one of Trump's assets is that he, and this is where social media does come in,

there's a lot of easy cynicism about political life. So you'll hear, you know, Hunter Biden traded on his father's reputation and sold some paintings and made improper tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in the Hunter Biden case, you know, yet Franklin Rose is there, and I wrote in the article, there are many precedents for that kind of behavior by relatives of the president. And it's usually a relative. It's a relative, a brother or son, some cousin. and it involves the sale of the appearance of access and involves hundreds of thousands or even single millions of dollars. And that's happened before. What is happening with Trump, the scale of it and the fact that the president himself is a personal party, not just his ne'er-do-well children, but the president himself.

And it's not a hundred thousand dollars here. It's not a free vacation. It's billions. That the scale and the location of that, you've never seen anything remotely like that in America. history. Never. Nothing like it. Not, and not Harding, not Grant, not Nixon, not anybody. Nothing like this. It's different. And do you think that the public cares? I think in good times, the public tends not to care very much about corruption issues. One of the reasons Watergate was so powerful was it coincided with a really severe economic shock.

The oil shock and the very severe recession of 1974. And Trump, through the first three, it was for three of the first four years of his first term at generally economic good times, and so people don't care. We're heading into some bumpier times, and Trump has not learned his own lesson that you can get away with more in times of prosperity than you can in times of economic chaos. And his tariff craziness, which is very hurtful to the economy and maybe even more hurtful than we see yet, that is going to withdraw a lot of the permission. People will, and if we find ourselves in a major country,

conflict in the Middle East, again, the president's selfishness is going to matter a lot. You can be more selfish in good times where people don't pay attention. So if you were a betting man, how would you say this ends for Donald Trump? I'm not a betting man. And I don't want to be, and I'm not a passive man. So I want to say, how does it end? That's not a question that exists independently what each of us as individuals do. The way it ends depends on not him, but you. you and me and everyone who watches us and everyone in reach of our voice. So the question is how, what is acceptable to you? What will you put up with? What will you do? He's not the question.

The citizen is the question. So I don't want to make a prediction as if this is all some impersonal working out of history. This is what happens next is the product of personal choices. But it's also about the people that work around him, isn't it? And whether or not you have people that are prepared to be primaried or that are prepared. I mean, at least Lisa McCursky, at least Lisa McCursky said that she was afraid, that they were all afraid of him. Well, you know, I mean, it's obviously true that many are afraid. I don't have a lot of respect for that.

I'm sorry, you do or you don't. I do not. You know, you volunteer, especially for people in political life, you volunteered to be in politics. You sought it. You worked hard for it. Your political career is not indispensable to anybody. You swear oaths, you take obligations, you have larger duties. And this is still a free and democratic country. They're not going to murder you. They're not going to throw you in prison. So, you know, yes, there will be economic consequences. There'll be career consequences. There will be social consequences. Every Fourth of July, you read speeches about how great the people were who braved much bigger risks than you. So don't be such a worm. Brave the risks yourself. is less is asked and more is at stake.

What are the, I mean, you worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002. What are the Republicans that you used to work with saying about Donald Trump? Many of them, especially in our speech writing shop, did end up jumping ship like the late Mike Gerson, my colleague Pete Wainer, many men, there was for some reason that there was a, there's a real line of anti-Trump resistance that ran through that office. and many people in the Bush world have, to a greater or lesser extent, made clear their views. Liz Cheney, very notably. President Bush himself has so far not said anything, but that may change. Mitt Romney, who is...

Do you think he should say something? I think in his case, as a former president, he has to weigh very carefully whether it would work. And saying something where it wouldn't work would be more harmful than saying nothing. And you also never know what is the moment. before January 6th, he would say, this is the worst. Then came January 6th, and that was the worst. There may be worse than January 6 yet to come. So some of these people may still be needed and may be waiting the moment when they are. All right, David, it's very thought-provoking to hear your point of view. Thank you very much. And I would love you to come back and analyze his foreign policy for us, which we're all living. We're all living through. Thank you so much.

Well, David is never shy of his opinions and I have no idea where he's going to vote. And I would love to hear from those of you who think of yourselves as moderates or old-style Republicans who don't hold with the way that Donald Trump is leading the party. Leave us a comment. You know we love to read them. And so many of them are very thoughtful, intelligent. And I love the conversations you have with each other on our YouTube channel. So if you have been, thank you for listening or watching, feel free to subscribe. Tell all your friends, tell strangers on the train about our podcast.

And don't forget, be Beast. For up-to-date coverage on everything, we are independent media and you can subscribe to us at www. The Daily Beast.com. And this podcast was produced by Devin Rodgerino, Anna von Erson, and it was edited by Jesse Millwood. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.

Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.