The Dispatch Podcast - Tucker Versus MAGA | Interview: David Frum

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

David Frum joins Jamie Weinstein to break down Trump’s Iran strikes, the brewing civil war within MAGA over foreign policy, and the winners (and losers) of the tariff war. The Agenda:—The state of the Trump administration—Analyzing the Iran strikes—MAGA’s foreign policy split—Immigration policy—J.D. Vance and opportunism—What’s going on with the Democratic Party? The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is a returning one, David Frum. He is staff writer at the Atlantic and host of the David Frum show. He last was on this podcast making the conservative case for voting for Vice President Harris during the presidency. In this episode, we discuss what he makes of the first 150 days of the Trump administration, whether Trump's strike on Iran changes his view of the first 150 days of the Trump administration at all. What is Benjamin Netanyahu's legacy? What he makes of the MAGA movement, or at least the Steve Mann and Tucker Carlson wing of MAGA and the relationship with Israel, the threat of Donald Trump's a democracy, and more. Without further ado, I give you Mr. David from.

David Frum, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thank you so much. I'm excited to have this conversation, David, because I think when we scheduled it 10 days ago, it might be a little bit different conversation now than it would have been then post the Iran strikes. But let me just begin with a general question. We are a little over 150 days into the Trump administration. Is it better or worse than you expected? Well, can I pause to pay a thank you I need to pay, which is I'm recording this from the offices of the administration? Picton Gazette and Picton, Ontario. I've had a little technical trouble today, and their kind hospitality is what is allowing us to have a live internet connection. So thanks to the Picton Gazette. It's, to your question, it's both. Here's how it's worse. The Trump administration take two has been much less amateurish and chaotic than Trump administration one. They had a better understanding about how power works and a much more deliberate plan to seize it and use it in ways that are dangerous and upsetting. It is quite amazing that we are debating on at this halfway through the first year, whether people born on American soil will still be citizens under the

14th Amendment, whether not only aliens, but even whether American citizens have due process rights. We're arguing about free speech rights of law firms and universities. We've had this extraordinary undoing of public health. The vaccination of the next generation of Americans is at risk. An infectious disease is a real danger. Of course, we have seen this very costly and debilitating terror for that is slowing American growth, may push the United States into recession, has done damage to America's friends and partners, and is undoing the whole structure of economic prosperity that Americans and like-minded countries have built since 1945. On the plus side, this idea that some people had that Donald Trump would be a force for completely disarming

the United States and rendering it a null factor in international affairs, that's obviously out the window. The United States did take decisive action against Iran, and although I think this president and this presidency are dangerous. I think this action was justified and necessary. David, the first part of your answer, I was on the Matt Lewis show. I think you regularly go on as well about two days before the strikes. And I gave a similar answer up and two before Iran. But I want to focus on Iran a little bit because I was very much impressed with how it was handled. What did you make of the 12-day War? You said he was good that he struck, but what do you make of the before and the aftermath of it? Well, let's start with the aftermath and then go on to the before.

The aftermath, I think, is much more uncertain that people understand. I don't know that this war is over. Donald Trump has this idea that the way you do war is you see it on television, you react, you hit the other guy with a hammer, that's it. And you declare victory and then it's all over. But the other guy gets a vote. We don't know yet exactly how permanent the damage of the Iranian nuclear program has been. So we don't know what there's going to be around two.

And we don't know what the Iranian response will be. They get a vote too. Maybe they will take the blow and give up, but maybe they will find ways to strike back. So I don't think anybody should regard this as a finished chapter. And this is where the bad Trump episode becomes so relevant. Because one of the obvious ways that the Iranians will strike back or could strike back is the campaign of global terrorism. In the 1980s and 90s, the Iranians struck targets all over the planet.

They blew up the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. They attacked the Israeli embassy in Argentina. They committed murders in Paris and Berlin. committed murders in London. The Clinton administration put a lot of pressure on them in the 1990s, and Iran retrenched its terrorism to focus on the region. And some kind of understanding was reached. So long as you don't do terrorism outside your region, the United States won't hit you directly. They could reactivate that, terrorism outside the region. Terrorism in South America and Europe where the security is less. And meanwhile, the Trump administration has done tremendous damage

to America's counterterrorism program. It's eliminated, fired many of the experienced professionals that the FBI and DHS and Department of Homeland Security work on counterterrorism and replace them with some pretty third-string people. Can I just press you on two of those points? That was certainly always a fear of international terrorism, Hezbollah, specifically Iran's proxy. Doesn't it suggest, though, that they did this choreograph?

If they were going to do a campaign of international terrorism against American interest, that's not choreograph, it actually inflicts great damage, Would they have done some choreographed response like they did at the American base in Qatar? Or wouldn't they have not just gone silent and if they had these resources abroad, you know, told them to strike? I'm not talking about sleeper cells and things like that. I'm not sure that any of that things like that exists. And again, I don't know.

This is not my area of expertise. Clearly, the blow that they took, to say, dazed and disoriented the Iranians and left them, I mean, much of their command structure is dead. The Supreme Leader is an aged, out of touch person who's in a bunker somewhere hiding. for his life and a lot of his communications have been cut off. So the idea that they will organize a coordinated and planned response, you know, that's maybe a little heroic on their part. A systematic campaign of worldwide terrorism, that may be beyond their capability. But it's not so difficult to put a killer and pick up a weapon at the place where the killer is going to do is killing and then kill. Now, again, it may not have strategic value. It would seem this would be a very good

moment to have an FBI and a DHS who are run by competent professionals and not to have forced into retirement all the next layer down. This would be a good moment to have that structure intact, and Donald Trump did a lot of damage to it. I have no idea what the Iranians are going to do. I don't know if they will do anything. Maybe, and we can hope that it goes just the way Donald Trump wants it to go. That is, the damage was devastating and permanent or close enough to permanent, and the response and the Iranians have been deterred and frightened out of response, and we can bring down the curtain on this. That would be splendid if that were true, and that would be a real achievement by the Trump administration. I would not say, as we speak at the end of June, that I expect this,

I have no idea. But just so that your point that even if the program isn't set back as long as I think it might be, I mean, it's not clear. Of course, that was the BDA that had low confidence that came out in CNN. Isn't the precedent that America, kind of crossed the Rubicon, that America is willing to strike their program to set it back and maybe even go further or allow the Israelis to go further and get committee? Doesn't that put some limits on what Iran might do in response? It sure does. I mean, obviously you can strike them again, but let's understand the special nature of what happened and how much of this is owed to Israeli ingenuity and daring. And a way to think about this is to compare and contrast with the North Korean bomb program. So the United States discovered that North Korea was doing dangerous experiments with nuclear technology in the late 1980s. And the George H.W. Bush administration thought very hard about hitting the North Korean nuclear facility. And the Clinton administration came even closer in the summer of 1994. Why didn't they do it? North Korea had a million men on the border with South Korea.

They had brockets and cannons, and the South Korean capital, Seoul, is, what, 40 kilometers from the North Korean border. So essentially, they had the South Korea as hostage. The United States could certainly have knocked out the North Korean program, but at a price of many, many, many South Korean civilian lives. And the United States was deterred North Korea's conventional abilities, deterred the United States from striking North Korea's nuclear facilities when there was still time to do it. That was the situation with Iran, too, for a long time.

The program was discovered in the very early 2000, August of 2002, it became undeniable that Iran was working on a bomb. When the United States and Israel considered action, they had to risk, well, there was Hezbollah on the northern border with Israel. There was an early and then growing Iranian ballistic missile program. And you had to worry that, like the North Koreans threatening soul, that if you struck the Iranian facilities, the response would be a cascade of rockets into Israel, that the Israelis would be defenseless to stop.

So the reason that this moment was so decisive, this whole argument about how close were they to the nuclear bomb seems to me a misleading question. The real point was the Israelis had turned off the Iranian deterrent. They had disarmed Hezbollah first. They had done tremendous damage to the Iranian ballistic missile fleet. And so the United States could, Israel can strike and the United States could strike without fear of thousands of civilian casualties in Israel. Now, will that condition continue to prevail? I mean, four years from now, will there be a new Hezbollah? Will there be new Iranian ballistic missiles?

I don't know. That's something you have to think about. Will they reassert their conventional deterrent in a way that makes it harder again to do something a second time to the Iranian nuclear program? I was going to ask this question later, but your example of North Korea kind of leads right into it. There's this interesting thing happening on the MAGA right, the Steve Bannon, the Tucker Carlson wing of the MAGA movement. Sometimes it's very overt, obviously, with Candice Owens. But even Steve Bannon now, who will preface his show, saying, you know, we've always been pro-Israel, but let's be clear they're a protectorate, they're not an ally. Isn't, didn't Israel behave in a way that you would want any ally to behave, whereas the South Koreans weren't able to neuter the North Korean forces so that the U.S. can strike without great damage civilians back in the 90s, Israel was able to neuter its enemies around it, neuter the air defenses in Iran, allowing the Americans.

to more easily take out. Isn't this the ideal way that you would want an ally to perform? Well, look, I do not accept the principle that there is such a thing as the claim that there are principled mega non-interventionists. I think that's just obviously not true. That America's two most militarily capable

partner nations are Israel and Ukraine. And a lot of the mega-right, like Steve Bannon, likes one, and all of the mega-right hates the other. And I defy you to come up with a coherent, neutral principle that would explain the difference. Can I try that? I do see a difference between Israel and Ukraine.

And the difference is that it's very clear that Israel was able to, certainly after the Pager attack, neuter its enemies and win its battle against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and at least, you know, leaving one strike for America to do to take out the one part they couldn't do, as noble as Ukraine is, it doesn't seem as clear to me that they have a path to victory as Israel did.

You never know in advance with the path to Israel. Look, again, I don't want, I admire both these societies so much, and I'm so committed to both these causes. But Israel's independent capability is based on a deep and continuous and sustained relationship with American nuclear technology, with American, not nuclear, with American technology, Israel's had the benefit of access to all kinds of American technology for a very, very long time. And with an implicit American security guarantee behind it, remember, during the October War of 1973, which is probably the nearest Israel came to existential

defeat since the creation of the state. America began an outright airlift of weapons. President Nixon did this, starting on four or five days into the war of increasing flows of supplies. There was an American backstop. And so Israel's had that since 73. If Ukraine had had that for a long time since gaining its independence, I mean, they've done a lot with a little. Again, I mean, no disrespect to the amazing achievement of Israel's independent skill. But Israel has been aided in a way that Ukraine hasn't. But I want to make one more point about the so-called non-intervention. So the leading figure of non-interventionism in the Trump administration supposedly is Vice President Vance. But Vance has been one of the most forward voices calling for American military action

inside Mexico. America is flying predator drones over Mexican territory. And although the Mexicans today have given permission, they didn't give permission in advance. The Mexicans learned about the predator program from CNN and then said, okay, we don't object because we can't stop it. And anyway, we're fighting a terror war with the United States and we don't need one more source of quarreling. But the predator doors, we're told they're unarmed. Maybe that's true. Maybe it will remain true. Maybe not. We are one bad incident away from an American shooting war inside of Mexico. And Vance is all fine with it. He's often called for applying even American special forces inside Mexico. So I think the way to understand the mega right is not that they're non-intervention.

It's that they hate Mexico, they hate Ukraine, some of them hate Israel, some of them don't. They have reasons for that that are rooted in other kinds of ideology than any kind of security principle. Can I just take a stop? I'm certainly not of the Vance world, but if I were to try to put a coherent distinction between those, someone who's actually principled, I would say that he cares maybe more about Mexico's on our border, whereas if you're the other two, the conflicts are farther from our border. And if you were to distinguish further between Israel and Ukraine, Ukraine is fighting an enemy that has nuclear weapons.

And whatever the risk is, you might think it's less, and they might think it's greater that Putin would actually use nuclear weapons because he maybe is not as stable as some think he might be. Israel is fighting an enemy in the case of Iran that didn't have nuclear weapons yet, and the goal is to prevent it. So that would be another distinction I would put in that. There's a children's game where you're told about a character, I think is Mrs. McGillicuddy. And Mrs. McGillicuddy likes bees, but hates ants.

She likes stools, but hates chairs. She likes doors, but hates windows. You scramble as a child to figure, what is the principle? The answer is it turns out that Mrs. McGillicuddy likes words with double letters and doesn't like words without double letters. The real principle is nothing to do with ants or stools or doors and windows. It's something to do with the structure of the alphabet. I have no doubt that people as ingenious, as Vance and Bannon,

and the others can come up with an after-the-fact explanation that is acceptable and polite company as to what, but I think here's what they really think. They really think we have a tremendous fentanyl epidemic in the United States and it affects people we care about, unlike past drug epidemics which affected people, we don't care about it. And since it affects people we care about, we need a solution that doesn't in any way compromise the people we care about. We need to blame some foreign presence for the fentanyl epidemic. And so we blame Mexico and China for the fentanyl epidemic. We wouldn't do that if it were people we didn't care about, but we do care about these rural people. So we need a foreign threat to blame. And of course, the policy won't work

because you cannot shoot your way out of a drug epidemic, but it at least allows us to avoid blaming anybody we don't want to blame. And inconveniencing and impinging on people, we don't want to pinch on it. Meanwhile, with Ukraine, we hate it because we admire Russia and we admire dictatorships. We're mad at Ukrainians for not helping Donald Trump. to beat Joe Biden in 2019, 2020. And so we've made up a bunch of excuses. And with Israel, although many of our friends are really serious anti-Semites

and some of our friends are kind of opportunistic anti-Semites, we don't think it's safe quite to go there. And so we're trying to split the difference on that one. So we're going some of the way with Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, but not all the way because that would be too dangerous in the context of American politics. And so we're coming up with a structure of excuse as to why we sort of like Israel when we don't really,

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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Let me go back just to the Iran strike and how you would place it within the context of recent American history. I was trying to think of what, as you mentioned, the history of this is not yet written. things that could change over time. But where we stand right now at the Iran strike,

where would you place it in a foreign policy achievement since the fall of the Berlin Wall? Have it been any greater ones? I think it's really too early to say. I mean, I think, and I just, my heart's with it. I wish it well. I hope it's all the way it looks. But I think we have to be really open to the possibility.

This story has a lot more chapters to go. And we are at the beginning of something, not the end of something. I just, I want to be, so I don't want to, I, it's a little early to begin giving out accolades and decorations for what was done. The Iran program is, the Iran attack was a deviation because the United States has had to think about striking nuclear facilities in the past. You know, even in the 1940s, there were some people who argued for a preemptive strike on the before the Soviets developed a nuclear bomb. And I forget the exact year in 1949, I think. There were people that people were aware that they were working on it. And there were some people advocated a strike on Soviet nuclear facilities.

The Chinese bomb, there are people, I think, inside the Soviet Union who talked about some kind of preventative strike on the Chinese program. And again, it was very seriously considered whether to strike the North Korean program. The Israeli strike struck the Iraqi program in 1981. They struck a Syrian program in 2007. But the United States and other great powers have normally flinched from this kind of intervention. So this is a new thing. It has tremendous benefits. It slowed and may have stopped the Iranian nuclear program. It also has consequences because other countries that are

ever thinking about this will, you know, in the past when nuclear programs were prevented, like in the past, the Argentine military dictatorship had a nuclear program that was peacefully stopped. The Brazilian military dictatorship had a nuclear program that was peacefully stopped. And apartheid South Africa had a nuclear program that was abandoned when multiracial democracy came to South Africa. So this is a new thing. So this is a new thing. We'll see how it goes. We wish it well. We wish it well.

But it's a little early to congratulate. Do you think it was right to stop at where they stopped and not pursue regime change, whether it is attacking regime targets or supporting or many of the movements within Iran who would like to see the regime overthrown? I think the striking nuclear targets, it has a limiting principle. Also, I think there's been more push toward regime change than you might think. because this campaign has been hugely humiliating to the Iranian regime.

A way to think about this is the year before the Shah fell, the GDP per capita in Iran was about the same as it was in Portugal in 1978. So since 78, Portugal has made, Churchill is emerging from dictatorship in the 70s. It's made a series of good choices. It liberalized, it democratized, it joined the European Union.

It generally didn't pursue it. It ended its colonial wars and it pursued peace and reconciliation and construction. And Portugal is now, if you've been there, an exceedingly pleasant place to live with a great medical system and good universities. Iran could have been on that path since 1978, too. Instead, they have invested all the difference between the average living standards of Portuguese people and all the living standards of Iranian people, which is now a big difference in terrorism and aggression. And all of that for nothing. For nothing.

It's all been smashed to pieces. It's got to be obvious to an Iranian if you're living with inadequate housing and poor medical care and inadequate educational systems and poor universities and no access to world markets and meager goods and services, if you sacrificed everything that the Portuguese have for this aggressive campaign that has been exposed as not only beaten but defenseless, the regime looks pretty bad. Military authoritarian regimes like Iran's suffer when they are discredited in this way. And one of the ways that dictatorships do tend to fall is after they lose a war. So I think we have taken more steps toward regime change. Second, we need to be very careful about this regime change idea. There have been two illusions that have stalked American policy toward Iran for a long time. One has been the illusion, and it came to its fullest culmination in the Obama years,

which is there could be some kind of detaunt with Iran, that the quarrel was because the United States was not accepting enough and nice enough to Iran. And if only the United States were more accepting and nicer, the Iranians would drop their hostility, and there'd be some kind of cooperation. There's a quote, I don't forget now who is the source of it, but someone inside the Obama administration said in 2015 that they wouldn't be surprised of 10 years from now.

The United States had a close relationship with Iran than it did with Saudi Arabia. So that was illusion one. Illusion two is that this extraordinarily complex society, with us Tucker Carlson points out, 92 million people, and a linguistic and poetic tradition that Dote goes back hundreds of years, is this one of the great culture-bearing nations of Asia, that we can guide it in some way.

I don't think that's feasible. And I really think we ought to take one more thing seriously when we consider regime change is we all have in mind that regime change will look, or we hope it would look something like what happened in Central Europe after 1989, a peaceful transition from one system to another. But there have been a lot of atrocities inside Iran.

And the people who did the atrocities are have wealth, have power, are alive. And the victims of the atrocities may have agendas of revenge. So we need to consider that regime change in Iran, may look very bloody, maybe very protracted, and may produce some outcomes that are exceedingly hard to predict. Do you think that the strike itself has done anything to deter further Russian aggression or Chinese intentions in the near future in Taiwan? Do you think seeing that changes their calculus in any way? I wouldn't dare guess, and I can't possibly know. For the

Russians in particular, I think they have quite clear insight at Donald Trump. Trump's actual thinking. And again, there's something going on there between Trump and Russia. I don't know what it is. I've given up trying to answer the why question of the Trump-Russia bond, but there clearly is one. And it has been decisive in U.S. Russian relationships, both in the first Trump term and even more in the second. So I don't know that they look at this and think Donald Trump might do the same to us. I think they have a pretty good idea about what Donald Trump will and won't do to them. Last question on Iran, Benjamin and Yahoo after October 7th was obviously, or even from quarters that normally were sympathetic to him

thought that he might go down as the worst prime minister in the history of Israel for that security failure. Starting with the Pager attack, and now what looks might be a neutered Iran, and perhaps if you believe some reports in the Israeli press and having a conformed potential for a peace deal in Gaza that returns the remaining hostages and more countries joining the Abraham Accords,

potentially all under his watch. What do you think this does to Benjamin Netanyahu's legacy? It certainly looks better today than it did on October 7th. And indeed, some people who know more about the situation than I do say, the two might be related. It might be that the most fundamental cause of the October 7th failure was Netanyahu's preoccupation with the Iranian threat. And that because he was so vigilant against one threat,

he was therefore negligent against another. and maybe the successes and the tragedies are not so separate from one another. Maybe they have this kind of close relationship one with another. But he has an opportunity now. I don't know that he's going to continue his political career. I mean, if you are managing the publicity

for his political career, you might say, you know, this is a good moment. This is a good note to end on. And give the big speech saying, taking responsibility, true responsibility for what happened on October 7th, saying that you hope you've redeemed yourself in the eyes of Israel and the world,

and saying, and now you intend to live a quiet life. Consequences for the MAGA wing, of the Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon world that we talked about earlier, having been wrong in their predictions to Trump and what they told Trump would happen and losing this battle, do you think it undermines them? Are they weakened going forward?

Or does Trump ignore them to some degree? Or will they live to fight another day and get his ear again? Look, the abnormal psychology in the MAGA world, I don't think I can completely ever successfully enter into. But when Tucker Carlson predicted all the dramatic consequences of thousands of American dead, I don't think that was a good faith action. I don't think he did a risk assessment and said, what do I really think is going to happen? I think he thought, what do I need to say? I think what he thought is basically, this is a Jewish war. Like every war, the United States

has fought since 1917. If it weren't for the Jews, we wouldn't have fought the First World War. If it weren't for the Jews, we wouldn't have fought the Second World War. Jews, Jews, Jews, the Jews are doing it again. What can I say to save America from the Jews? I think that's the kind of analysis that was going on there. So I doubt that he repents of being wrong because I think he would say, did I say thousands of American dead? I should have said tens of thousands.

Yeah, in the situation, I'm stuck on what you said about. When do you think he started this mindset that the Jews started all the wars? I mean, I used to know him very well. I wouldn't say he was ever very pro-Israel. And in fact, I predicted in Jason Zangeli's book coming out that he'll be the most anti-Israel commentator on the right when he left Fox. But it does seem gone to a new level. Well, some of this is pre-existing material. The theory that the United States has been pushed into global wars by the Jews was a big belief of the paranoid isolationist right of the 1930s.

And some people may be surprised that I mentioned the first World War in the series, but there are a lot of people who believe that about World War I, It was somehow global bankers and many of them Jewish who had pushed the United States into World War I. And just to interject, that's what also his favorite historian, I guess, Marty Meade, the Daryl Cooper, he made the claim about World War II with Jewish bankers and Churchill, which made no sense. And all historians said no evidence of that. Right. I don't think you come to that belief by reading a lot of history. I think you come to that belief by reading a lot of other kinds of literature.

You then go groping for bits of historical fragment that will support a view that you came to for non-historical reasons. Bannon is a very different character. I don't think Bannon is motivated that way. I think with a lot of the mega entertainment complex that they are dealing with an audience that is looking for ever more intoxicating fiction. So just keeping up the drama and the excitement and the sense of betrayal and the sense of betrayal and the sense of conspiracy, that's necessary to maintain the connection. How this will affect Donald Trump, I don't know.

I think in Trump's case, what is going on is he's very cautious about foreign conflict because I think the one bit of self-awareness he has and a president who doesn't have a lot is that he's not, he can't be a real war leader. He's never tried to do the broadly unifying things that you have to do if you want to leave the country to something difficult and dangerous. And so because he's not got that kind of broad appeal, he's very much a leader of half the country. When he does do something military, it's important that it be cheap, easy, and successful and over early before his lack of broad political support catches up with him. So that's what he's

trying to do with Iranis to pronounce it a tremendous success before he needs to go to Congress for supplemental appropriation, before he needs to speak to the nation, before he has to worry about how he polls, before he has to worry about getting an authorizing resolution of some kind through houses of Congress. You mentioned Bannon again in talking about the matter, right? Just in a curiosity, Have you ever met him? Do you know him? I see clips sometimes online, and I saw him once refer to you while attacking your position as one of the smart guys on the other side. He seems to have some at least grudging respect for what you think. We did a debate together in Toronto in 2018. We spent a couple of hours on the stage, and I made an appearance in one of the movies he made in the early Obama years. One of the secrets of Bannon's success, he pays a lot of people compliments. And one of the things that Bandon understands about Washington is, you you can get away with a lot if you always preface it with a personal compliment. Let me learn from Steve Bannon and say that Bannon is also obviously a very astute person. I think is driven more by awareness of what's going on in the political world

than someone like Tucker Carlson who's driven by other kinds of imperatives. I mentioned do you think the MAGA movement is weakened. Do you think it does give room on something like immigration where Trump does seem have conflicting opinions? you know, when you don't get him with Stephen Miller next to him, he might be, you know, open to H-1B visas or more lenient on terms of, you know, who they're trying to catch and deport. Do you think there is any movement there?

Do you see any daylight between Trump and MAGA on immigration when he's alone in his thoughts if he has those moments? Well, Trump is MAGA. Maga is a bunch of impulses that were minority impulses on the American right until Donald Trump came along. He then built into something because of the personal connection he built with disaffected parts of America. Donald Trump offered America, one of the best explanations of him I've ever heard is Donald Trump is one of life's winners, but who feels like one of life's losers on the inside. And that gives him a bond, that he can both bond with people who feel defeated because he so obviously feels like he doesn't get what he wants from this earth. But he's got all the trappings of success.

And so you can, you know, if you're someone who identifies with him, you say, you know, he feels the way I do and he also offers me the possibility and promise of success. And that's why the people around him who like him are so vulnerable to some of these get rich quick schemes that he peddles because they're looking for a kind of trumpified version of success. But what I would say about his daylight, look, something had to be done about the immigration problem in 2025, that the Biden people just collapsed on border enforcement. We've been, the asylum system in particular has been discredited and has been abused for now a greater part of greater, more than a decade. The growth of the American economy has pulled labor from all over the planet, and I don't blame anybody. This is not a moral morality tale. I don't blame anybody who sees the possibilities of life in America for making tremendous sacrifices to get a part of those.

That's an individually often heroic act. And those are decisions that if you and I were in their shoes, we would probably want to make two. We might, depending on how risk-converse, we might or might not make the exact same decision. But there's no one here is doing anything wicked. It's like a highway. You don't blame any particular driver for choosing to pull into the lane.

But if enough drivers pull into the same lanes and enough time, you have an unfortunate situation that impedes. traffic altogether. But the decision to do both immigration enforcement and wage trade war against the entire world is a supply shock to the American economy and the world economy that is going to have very negative consequences. And so I think one way or another, the Trump people are going to learn the hard way that doing both of these at the same time is a big mistake. And doing tariffs is always is a mistake, period. And joining the immigration enforcement to tariffs means that immigration enforcement is not going to have the results you want. It's going to have, it's going to have, it's

to really constrain American economic activity. I think your ultimate concern about Trump, which has been a theme of this show, is the threat to democracy. We had two professors on recently, Larry Diamond of Stanford, who sees it as almost an existential threat to American Dubai.

He doesn't know where we'll go, but there is a real threat, America democracy, liberal democracy survives the Trump term. On the other hand, we had Professor Harvey Mansfield, who sees it as a, really live threat, but he seems more sanguine about where this will end.

He believes kind of American systems will ultimately prevail, and this will be a chapter in American history that we move on from. I wonder what end of the spectrum that you find your concerns on. There was a joke in Central Europe after the fall of communism, which was how many polls, checks, Hungarians, Romanians fill in the blank, does it take to change a light bulb? And the answer is none. The market will do it.

Okay. So I think Mansfield, who is such a subtle thinker, is falling a little bit victim to that joke, which is the way Donald Trump, there are, there are no systems. There's just us. There's people doing what people do. So how big a threat this ultimately proves to be is a matter of individual and collective decision. And if you make it too, if you say to people nothing to worry about, when there's obviously something to worry about, you make the risk greater, not smaller. I know the impulse to not to seem to overstate things, not to look unduly fearful.

But you also need to not demotivate and demoralize people because if this story ends well, it will be because a lot of people agreed to make sure that it does end well. Do you think he really intends, for instance, or at least contemplates it potentially to run for a third term? A lot of the things Donald Trump says, like I'm speaking to you from Canada right now.

He talks a lot. He's talked about a necks in Canada. Does Donald Trump have a plan to annex Canada? No. Is he revealing weird and fixed hostility to Canada? Yes. Does Donald Trump have a plan to get a third term? I mean, I'm sure there are people kicking around crazy ideas

the way they were kicking around crazy ideas in 2021. I don't think those ideas will work. But is this a thing that a proper American president should allow even to enter his consciousness for a second? Now, it's revealing. So it's not that I think there will be a Donald Trump. Trump third term. But would Donald Trump break constitutional provisions for his advantage if he could? Yes. I think that's what he's telling you. So you need to hear the message behind the message, which is he doesn't respect the written constitution in the United States

at all. And that's something that's worth knowing. You were in Canada now. You brought up Canada. Just out of cure, I mean, other than his dislike of Trudeau, who's no longer the prime minister, what do you, where do you think this host still towards Canada comes from? I think it comes from the demise of the Trump hotels in Toronto, Vancouver, especially the Trump Hotel Vancouver. In Toronto, there was a hotel that Trump licensed his name to, but the Vancouver Hotel was one that his company more actively developed.

And it spectacularly failed after he was elected in 2016, because Vancouver rights just wouldn't step across the threshold of a hotel with the Trump name on it. So I think that is not a small part of what's going on. I think he also has more seriously a vision of retreat from the world, that Trump, that Trump's idea is that the United States, China, and Russia will each operate their section of the planet. And his section of the planet starts at the Panama Canal and extends to Greenland and he wants all of it. He wants to run it. And the fact that he is so unpopular in Canada only incites him more. Because as a lot of women have attested, he's not very good at taking no for an

answer. If in three and a half years when he leaves office, you know, his record is, you know, he his bitcoin or whatever's meme coin he's worth now you know 50 billion dollars or something he clearly made a huge amount of money off the office and somehow it wasn't illegal and he's you know he definitely was corrupt but you know american democracy even though he tested it is is okay the situation in the middle east is remarkably good that in a way that we almost could never have imagined Saudi Arabia is part of the abraham accords Iran is neutered there is relative peace in the rest of the world? Is there a way, even if there's major negatives that we frame the Trump presidency

as a success three and a half years from now? Well, again, there's a lot of counting chickens before they're hatched there. And the thing you're leaving out is for any of that to be true, Trump would have to abandon and reverse the central economic idea of his life because the tariff war is ongoing. And although some of the more dramatic elements of it have been scaled back, it's still there. and it's a drag on the U.S. economy, it's a drag on the world economy. So the combination of saying we're going to squeeze the American labor force and not across the board because there are industries like construction where immigrant labor and even

illegal immigrant labor are very, very important. So the construction industry is heading for some major bumps. I think one of his most important legacies, ironically, is going to be the damage he does to American manufacturing because American is all manufacturing. American too, involves assembling pieces that come from all over the world into goods that are made and then in a particular place and then sold all over the world. And if you damage world markets, you damage manufacturing. So I don't know that you want to be too quick to say that the fact that we are, as of the summer

of 25, not yet in a major economic downturn means that he's going to end his administration of peace and prosperity. The first term, it was three good economic years and then a fourth year of total catastrophe for which Donald Trump mostly escaped blame, but he did end his administration in a total economic catastrophe, not with COVID and with the choices he made about COVID. COVID was obviously not Trump's fault,

but he did make it worse for this, and it was related to his trade ideas. People forget that Donald Trump started a trade war in his first term, and not only against China, but against Europe and Canada and Mexico too, but especially against China. And the two things,

there were two negative consequences for Americans very rapidly because of the trade war, which is the first China's purchase of U.S. soybeans collapsed until the first Trump term. The United States was by far the world's largest producer and exporter of soybeans. China pivoted to buying from Brazil and American agriculture was badly damaged in ways it is not recovered from to this day. And second, the stock market got very bumpy. The second half of 2018 saw very bad developments in the stock market, big sell-offs. And Trump got very worried about that. And he then began to try to seek for some

kind of negotiated out from his trade war with China. And that was his top foreign policy priority through 2019, along with getting dirt from Ukraine about Joe Biden. In the second half of 2019, he was doing this beseeching the Chinese, give me an out, give me an out. That's why he was flattering the Chinese president so much when the COVID threat materialized at the end of 2019, you know, you have this in charge, you're such a great leader, give me an out from the trade war I started. And I think one of the reasons he was so slow to act, and especially slow, given how xenophobic

and anti-Chinese is, you would think that Donald Trump would in November of 2019 be sounding the alarm about this Chinese virus. he doesn't because what his top priority then was to get out from the to get a face saving out from the trade war and get the stock market moving in time for the election of 2020 had he acted decisively in November and December with information that it now seems he had would COVID have been as catastrophic as it was it's a question we're thinking about I agree with everything you said there including the part on the tariffs being Trump's he's been saying it for 40 years but the one part that it makes me think

why don't you think he's going to reverse here? It seems like he's already started. I mean, 10% is still a lot higher than it was before he got into office. But it seems like he's back on caring about market breaking record highs and the market seems to think his taco, the trade that he had,

that he'll reverse himself on a lot of these tariffs. Other countries exist too and other countries have politics too. I just have been a small example. I bought, as I read in Canada, I bought online a car cleaning product two days ago. They cost $50, $50 American dollars. And I bought it in the past and shipped it to Canada without incident.

I was just hit with a $75 Canadian tariff on my $50 American car cleaning product. By the way, it's one of those things you don't find out what the tariff is until it's too late to retract the purchase. So you're said it stuck. But I won't do it again. I won't do it again. So there are Canadian tariffs on American goods. They're European tariffs on Canadian goods. They're Chinese tariffs.

They're export taxes on things that other countries sold. So bringing us back to trade peace requires not just the United States to say, okay, we're dropping some of the things we're doing, that other countries have reacted in ways that are not going to be easy to roll back. And what Trump has also done is created interest groups in the United States that depend on systems of protection. Tariffs create winners. And the people who win from tariffs, the classic example of this is there is a 25% tariff on, light trucks imported in the United States that was imposed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And he imposed it as part of a trade war with the United States was then having

with the European Common Market as it then was. The trade war was settled. And most of the American retaliatory measures were dismantled. But by then, the United Auto Workers had become very fond of the 25% tariff on light trucks. So that tariff that was imposed in 1964 is still there in 2025. You don't reverse these things as easily as I think the present-day stock market is hoping they will be reversed. So when you say, what will Donald Trump's judgment be? I mean, there's just a lot of what we hope this Iran war is decisive and over. And in a satisfactory way, we hope so. But it may not be. Well, what if, I mean, I guess let me put it to you this way. Can you imagine after four years, despite the corruption, which will be there, that won't be not

reversed. He will continue to, he and his family will continue to make money off the presidency in ways that we have never seen before and probably will never quite see again. Despite that, despite January 6th, which is hard to get out of our minds, is there a way that if three and a half years from now, we do see this piece in the Middle East, we do see AI, I guess, overcome his trade tendencies and allow him to failures there because the economy just booms. with AI coming to fold, where we have to look at him as not the worst president of the 20th century, 21st century. I can't predict future.

How we evaluate a presidency, of course, there's a long-haul aspect to it. The United States, it's true. We're hoping, look, the reason you and I do what we do and so many others do what they do is because we hope that we can get past this. We do hope. It's not over. It's not doomed.

And American democracy is an up and down story. The story of American democracy, the year that Dred Scott, the Dred Scott decision was handed down, looks very different from the way American democracy looked 10 years later, which in turn looked very different from the way it looked during the darkest moments of reconstruction. There have been moments when American democracy was optimistic and expanding in moments of retreat and regression. And one of the things I think that I've, that I should say have learned from the Trump years is growing up in forming my consciousness in the 70s, I did tend to have a kind of theory of up and up and up and up and up.

of expanding and improvement. And yes, occasionally there was a little backsliding, but those were unimportant incidents in a generally up-up story. And I now think the backsliding is part of the story too. And we are definitely in a backsliding. So I hope that nothing that we will overcome this. And I think the lesson is always not to be,

what I would say just as a general answer, is people want to race to the evaluation portion of the program. How was this? How did we evaluate Donald Trump? How did it turn out? I think we need to be focused on the action part of the program. What are we doing? Are we doing all we can to make sure the harms are minimized?

One of the things that is kind of baffling to me is why, when Trump was defeated in 2021, why was there not a great age of institutional reform after Trump? Why is it? I mean, this mean point, I'm not sure it's legal. There are general conflict of interest statutes and many other things. It may be just that Trump has been able to shut down the enforcement of the law against them. But it should be much more clearly illegal than it is. How did that not happen?

Why didn't Biden return the United States to the trans-Pacific partnership? Why didn't Biden give Ukraine absolutely everything it needed to win its war while it could? He acted as if he had all the time in the world and send them half of what they needed. He was slow with tanks. He was slow with planes. He was slow with the flow of information. He was slow with permission to reach Russian targets. There's been a kind of lack of urgency.

And if there's a lesson of the first Trump term and then the failures of the Biden administration, it's be more urgent about threats. Act while you can because you may lose the chance. Let me close on these last few questions. You knew J.D. Vance at a time in his life. Have you had any contact since he's become vice president? And what type of president would he make

if he were to succeed, Donald Trump? Yeah, I think the last time I saw him was at a dinner in my house during the early Trump administration. I know I saw him a few times in January 2017. I think there was one more dinner after that. So we were not good friends,

but we had sort of amicable social relationships who, you know, he's a guest in my house a few times and I would see him at things and I published his work, something that understood him, which he revealed, not me. What kind of president would be? Highly opportunistic.

I mean, it's a funny thing. When he was less successful, he had many fewer grievances than he does now that he's more successful. And that's, it usually goes in the other way. And he used to be a much sunnier and more optimistic person than he is now that he has risen. So I think he could change in many ways. I think he's, I think a lot of the positions he's taken are taken in response to where he feels the pressure of political forces were.

I mean, and a lot of things in kind of random and strange. It's a very strange thing for someone whose family so much represents what the American future is going to look like to be giving these blood and soil speeches about seven generations. of my family. He said, like, how is it you, you want your, and he said in the speech of the convention, we talked with seven generations of my family and he hoped his children. And then, well, you know, your children have two branches of their family. And they're supposed to love both, right? And honor both. So they have very different stories. And what is more American than that of this kind of mixing and mingling of people have been here for a long time with people who have been here from new? Both of those are the American story. And I think he may rediscover that because I think

one of the stories about J.D. Vance is he's got so much ability. He's got so much intellect. He's got such a weak character. And such a person can end up almost anywhere. Are there any Democrats that you're impressed with right now? They've just been handed their big moment, which is this crazy result in New York City. All that happened, what happened to the New York primary was it demonstrated in a low turnout environment, fringe candidate with a highly committed but small base of support can win a primary. Congratulations. And that's Mark Robinson proved the same thing. this is an opportunity for national Democrats to say,

you know what, this is our opportunity. That's not that we can actually define ourselves against. This is the advice that Dick Moore used to give against Bill Clinton. You define yourself both against your opponents and against your false friends. And that's how people know who you are. The great question mark about Democrats is always, is always can they say no?

Great question mark over Republicans is can they say yes. So you've been given this opportunity. Here's a chance to say no. This is not who we are. We are not socialists. are not people who think that wealth is stolen. We admire, when wealth is legitimately earned, we applaud success as any American would. We think, of course, you should pay your fair share. Other things you've earned like Social Security and Medicare, you should keep those too, but if someone's earned a fortune,

congratulations. We don't find it difficult to condemn the phrase, globalize the intifada, because we know it means blowing up buses with full of school children, and we think that's bad. So this is an opportunity. So we'll see who the Democrats are. It's such a mess of a party with so many different impulses. My one piece of advice to the Democrats would be, when you're thinking about your talent pool, look to the purple states. The great burden that Kamala Harris had that she could never escape was she had learned all of her political instincts in California. She was like someone who's been quite successful in a college sport who then goes to the major leagues and just doesn't know how hard the hitting can be and doesn't know that you have to watch that when you're looking

around the field from where danger, danger is not only going to come from this side of the field. So when she answered that crazy ACLU questionnaire about are you in favor of it's like a new Gingrich speech, sex change operations for illegal immigrants and also federal prisoners, by the way, let's throw on the federal prisoners here. Criminal's

illegal alien sex change operations in one sentence. The answer is is this a joke? Is this a prank? I am not answering this stupid questionnaire. No way. But her whole, every instance she had was it would be dangerous for me to refuse to answer this question, yes. She

had no idea that it would be dangerous to, sorry, to refuse to ask this question. She had no idea that would be dangerous to say yes. So get somebody from Georgia or Arizona, North Carolina, or someplace competitive, where they've learned that danger can come from all over the field, not just from the far left. And let me just close with this, David. Is there any issue you think the press is undercovering that they should cover more, that they're missing a major story? I always doesn't answer this question in the same boring way, Mexico. I am just baffled by the American refusal to read about Mexico to think about Mexico. A successful Mexico would be such an incredible enhancement of American strength, security, prosperity. An unsuccessful Mexico would be

the greatest threat the country could face. So you should be thinking about that all the time. And here's the Mexico factoid that I throw out. Mexico joined NAFTA in 1994. If in the year since 1994, Mexico's economy had grown at one quarter, at one half to snow, one quarter of the speed of China's. One quarter of the speeds of China since 1994, Mexico today would be as wealthy as the countries of Southern Europe. And if the United States were today bordering on Spain or Italy, Americans could be pretty relaxed about that border. Some people might slip across, so what. There'd be a lot of Americans, by the way, living on the other side of the border, the way the British people moved to Mexico, as we moved to Spain because housing is cheaper, but it's still,

you know, a European country with Wi-Fi and good health care and everything that they expect. Mexico's democratic, prosperous, free market development is one of the most. Supreme foreign policy interests in the United States and Americans just take for granted that Mexico is always going to be troublesome. There's nothing they can do about it. Their policy doesn't matter. The idea that Donald Trump is waging the trade war

against Mexico and calling into question Mexico's integration into a single North American united economy as just amazingly irresponsible to me. David Frum, thank you for doing the Dispatch Podcast. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you.