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What Comes Next for Iran?
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum urges an end to wishful thinking about Iran, and a focus instead on the regime's threatening words and murderous actions. Then David is joined by the Carnegie Endowment scholar Karim Sadjadpour for an urgent conversation about the internal decay of Iran's theocracy. They discuss the survival instincts of Supreme Leader Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, the regime's obsession with martyrdom and repression, the true cost of the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions, and the disconnect between the revolutionary slogans of the state and the aspirations of Iranian society. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I had a slightly different plan for the podcast this week, but the startling news of the Israeli airstrike on Iran beginning on the night of Friday, the 13th, upended plans. And so I've had to improvise something. And I want to thank our friends here at the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario, for making their boardroom space available to me. I will be speaking today to Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the closest study we have on the thought of the supreme leader of Iran. But before I speak to him, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts of my own about the situation unfolding. These are not thoughts on the military situation; I am no kind of military expert in any way. We're recording 36 hours in advance, so the situation may well be changed. We know a lot about the internal politics of Israel because it's such an open society. We know a little bit less about the politics of the society on the receiving end of the Israeli exchange, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that's what I'm going to talk about with Karim: How is all this affecting the Iranians? What can we expect? What can we hope for? And before we get to that dialogue, I want to offer some preliminary thoughts. Now, I am in no way any kind of Iran expert or even amateur. I don't speak the language. I've never been to the country. I once had an opportunity to go; I was invited by an international businessman who was closely connected to one of the leading families in the clerical regime, and he wanted to invite me to come in and meet some of the figures. This was at a time in my life when I had a kind of outsized notoriety as a figure in Iran politics because I ghostwrote a speech for President George W. Bush that became important. And I got credited or blamed or demonized as that figure. And I said, I would love to go. I'd be really interested to come in. How confident are you that I'll be able to leave on time, and not 10 years later? And he assured me he was really, on the whole, quite confident. And that was not good enough, and so I declined to make the trip. I didn't want to end up chained to a radiator for the next decade. But here are the preliminary thoughts I want to offer. American policy to Iran, as long as I've been paying attention to it, has veered back and forth between two competing ideas or hopes about what Iran might be. One of them has been the hope that cooperation with the Islamic Republic of Iran is at hand. We heard a lot of that hope just after the 9/11 attacks, where some diplomats like Ryan Crocker, who was then, I think, ambassador—to I forget where; he was a special diplomat—said he had worked out a deal with the Iranians to help in Afghanistan. The Obama administration had vast hopes of cooperation with the Islamic Republic. And those hopes always come to grief because, it turns out, the people who have staged regular marches chanting 'Death to America' are not actually all that interested in cooperating with the United States. And the hopes that repeatedly appear—we saw them in 2009, when President Obama declined to help the Green Revolution in Iran, and in 2015, when he tried to reach a diplomatic agreement with Iran to constrain its nuclear-weapons force—those hopes come a cropper. But there's another hope that also has been disappointed again and again, and that is the hope that we're on the verge of some kind of transformational breakthrough—regime change in Iran. Repressive regimes can be very powerful, and especially those that come to power not by a coup but by a kind of mass revolution that brought the Islamic regime to Iran in 1979. They have staying power. It doesn't mean they're going to be here forever. Every one of those regimes sooner or later collapses, and perhaps collapse will come this week or next month or next year. Who knows? But it is a dangerous thing to put too much stock in. I think there's a real chance that when the Islamic regime in Iran changes, it may not change to something much nicer than what's there now. It may change into a more traditional authoritarian regime that gives up some of its more ambitious hopes in order to consolidate power. That's what happened to Cuba after Fidel Castro. The Castro regime is still there; it's just not a revolutionary regime anymore. It's a criminal regime, but it keeps power by being less aggressive toward the world around it. It could also be a terrible bloodbath. We have, I think, a distorted idea of revolution from the happy experience of the revolutions in the northern part of Central Europe in 1989. The crowds come out. The leaders run away. The flags are waved. The people cheer. And a transition that is more or less peaceful begins. Revolutions against terrible regimes can often be terribly bloody. Terrible regimes inflict a terrible blood price on their society. And there's a lot of payback that may be coming. The regime change in Iran may turn out to be a very, very bloody business, and a very protracted business that doesn't end soon. All of this is speculative—guesswork, really. I think the thing we ought to be thinking about, and this is the thing I think that the Israelis have in mind, is not the future of Iran—not what will happen inside Iran, not guesswork about the transformation—but attention careful to the capabilities of that regime joined to its expressed intentions. We know that Iran had capabilities that were almost on the verge of nuclear breakout. And, of course, it expresses its intentions in every way we can see and hear, not just by its chants of 'Death to America,' 'Death to Israel,' but by its backing for terrorist regimes, terrorist groupings all over the planet. And not just in the region—Iran still has the blood on its hands from attacks in Argentina on the Jewish community center there; they killed dozens and dozens of people in two separate attacks in the early 1990s. Iran has attempted terror operations in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. We know their intentions. We know their capabilities. That's the thing we have to focus on, and not our hopes or our fears, or our imaginings, or our beliefs, or our opinions, or our guesses about the way of the future. I'll be talking more about that in this dialogue. I want to say one last thing, which is: Conflict is a reality of human existence. It's a terrible reality. It's a reality. And we have to be prepared and meet for it, and we have to sometimes anticipate it and try to avert the worst by acting more decisively in the present. But those necessary actions are not any kind of enthusiasm for conflict. No one wants to see conflict. No one wants to see human suffering. But it doesn't go away because you choose not to believe it or postpone it later for other people to deal with after you. This problem of the Iranian nuclear weapon has been postponed for a long time. I think we've now reached the point where it can be postponed no longer. And I think we all have to hope for a decisive resolution, as rapid a resolution as possible. It's past the point of a peaceful resolution. But it can still be a stable and successful resolution—stable and successful not just for the people who are threatened by the Iranian nuclear weapon, but by the millions of Iranians who are oppressed and taxed and stolen from in order to fund the weapon that they don't want and that will do them no good. Iran is the center of a great and historic civilization. Persia has been the great cultural exporter of the whole central Asian region, from Istanbul to Delhi. For hundreds of years, if you had a new poem, a new recipe, a new way of dressing, probably it originated in Persian; it came out to you. The game of chess is Persia's gift to the world—one of its many—along with a great poetic tradition. This is a society that has been cut off from its birthright and that has been cut off from its future, from its capability to contribute to humanity. Perhaps we will live to see that potential realized and that great connection to its great past revived. In any case, we can hope. I turn now to my conversation with my friend Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you all for watching. [ Music ] Frum: I'm joined today by Karim Sadjadpour, who is one of the most sought-after experts in all of Washington on the topic of the internal development of Iran, the author of a 2009 book about Iran's supreme leader that is a classic that is much consulted in the field, son of the Iranian diaspora, a native of the great state of Michigan. I'm delighted to welcome Karim to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today. Karim Sadjadpour: It's wonderful to be with you, David. Thanks for inviting me. Frum: Let's first state that we are recording this on the morning of Monday after the opening of the air war by Israel inside Iran. There will be a little bit of a lag between the time we record and time that this posts. So there may be some events that we're unaware of. Forgive us for that. I don't think we're going to talk much about the strictly military events. Those are amply covered by people closer to the scene. I want to talk more about the situation inside Iran. Let's begin first by recalling your book about the supreme leader. What kind of man do you take him for? He was more vigorous, obviously, when you wrote about him. What's the mentality of the leadership in Iran? Sadjadpour: Well, I'm sure you remember that wonderful book by Eric Hoffer that came out in the '50s called The True Believer, and Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei is a true believer. He's someone who is now the 'last of the Mohicans.' He is the last of the first-generation revolutionaries, the revolutionaries from 1979, and he's someone who is committed to the principles of the revolution. In fact, we call them hardliners. They call themselves principleists, and that means, as I said, they're loyal to the principles of the revolution. And what are those principles? I think at this point, you can distill it to three big ideas: 'Death to America,' 'Death to Israel,' and the mandatory hijab—the veiling of women, which Ayatollah Khamenei called the flag of the Islamic Revolution. And so Khamenei is committed to those principles, and he has internalized some of the thoughts of the great philosophers like Tocqueville and Machiavelli, which is that the greatest danger for any bad government is when it tries to reform itself. He took the lessons of Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet Union to heart, and said that didn't prolong the shelf life of the Soviet Union; it hastened its collapse. And for that reason, he's, on one hand, a very earnest believer in these revolutionary principles, but he also believes that if he were to change those principles, it would actually hasten the Islamic Republic's collapse. So he's now 86 years old. He's not going to change his worldview. But the final thing I'd say here, David, is that Khamenei is arguably the longest-serving autocrat in the world, right? He came to power as president in the early '80s He has been supreme leader since 1989. So if my math is correct, that's about 36 years he's been supreme leader. He hasn't left the country since 1989. And I'll just say, you know, in conclusion, you don't get to be the longest-serving autocrat in the world if you're a gambler. So he has very good survival instincts. And, you know, as Hannah Arendt once said many years ago, even 'the most radical revolutionary [will become] a conservative the day after the revolution,' because you suddenly have something you want to preserve. So he's, up until now, had good survival instincts, and we'll see, you know, how he gets himself out of what's probably been the greatest bind in his political career. Frum: Well, one of the great gambles that this regime has taken is the gamble on a nuclear program. Becoming a nuclear state is a very hazardous undertaking. A lot can go wrong on the way there. Once you're there, like Pakistan, you get the ability to commit terrorism without fear of consequence or, like Russia, the ability to commit aggression without fear of consequence. But on the way there, you can end up like—remember the Argentine dictators had a nuclear program in the '90s, and that led to the collapse of their regime? The South African apartheid regime had a nuclear-weapons program. Collapse of regime. A lot of people become much more interested in collapsing your regime if you are on the way to a nuclear program. So you have this terrible zone of danger, and the Iranians seem now to be in that zone of danger. In your assessment, which do they care about more as preservationists: preserving the nuclear program or preserving the regime? Can those be separated? Sadjadpour: I think they can, in that what's obviously paramount for them is their own survival. And we should emphasize that if you contrast this regime to the previous government in Iran—the monarchy, the shah—that was a government which had a very close relationship with the United States, with the West. Many of its political and military elite had studied overseas. And so when things got bad for that government, many of them could remake their lives in Los Angeles or London or Bethesda. Whereas this Iranian regime is deeply isolated, one of the only friends they had was the Syrian government, which collapsed last fall. So for that reason, they have these survival instincts, and they've shown themselves able to make tactical compromises, including in the nuclear domain, when their survival is at stake. Now, the challenge that he has, Ayatollah Khamenei, is he's now in this situation in which the parameters are: If he feels that if he doesn't retaliate—if he doesn't show any strength—he loses his face. And he loses face not only externally, but also internally. And every dictator wants to be feared by its own population. So if he doesn't respond strongly, he loses face. If he responds too strongly, he could lose his head. And so he's in these very tight parameters at the moment, and he's long believed that if you compromise under threat and you compromise under pressure, that doesn't alleviate the pressure—it actually signals that the pressure is working and invites even more of it. And so that's why I say he's in a very difficult bind these days. Frum: Is this how they see it? I mean, they look like they've been completely—they look like fools. They look penetrated. They look helpless. They look defensive. They look as unintimidating as possible. That's a dangerous way for a dictatorship to look. And their enemies look effortlessly superior over them. And the regime also seems to be projecting a lot of fear, because there's this question of: Can the Israelis do anything about the nuclear installation under that big mountain? But everyone seems to take for granted that the United States could, if it would. And all the Iranians can do is hope that the Americans choose not to. They have no levers of power against the United States. Their retaliatory terror weapon, Hezbollah, has been taken from their hands, and although we're told there are hunter-killer teams prepositioned all over the Western world, after the last few days, those kinds of claims of Iranian fearsomeness look a lot less credible than they used to do. How does that redound on a dictatorship like this, where you just look like—you look defeated? Sadjadpour: So you're right that if we look in virtually every realm—militarily, intelligence, financially, technologically, diplomatically—Iran is outmatched in every sense by Israel. There was a very good piece in [Monday's] Wall Street Journal about how Israel has established total air dominance over Iran. And so there's no doubt that in this head-to-head conflict, Iran is going to lose. The question is: What comes next once the dust starts to settle? I think for the Israelis, they want two outcomes from this war. They want to significantly degrade and set back Iran's nuclear program. As you alluded to, the big question mark will be: What happens to that deep underground facility in Fordo, and do the Israelis have the wherewithal to damage it badly, or would that require Donald Trump's intervention? That's one big question. But the other big question as the Israelis have also defined it is that: How does this impact the stability of the Iranian regime? And how does this impact the future of the supreme leader? We've had so much discussion in the United States about President Biden's cognitive and physical abilities during his presidency. I mean, in Iran, you have an 86-year-old supreme leader, as we talked about, Khamenei, whose only education was in the seminaries of Qom seven decades ago now. He doesn't have the wherewithal to be leading this very high-tech, military, financial, technological war. But what happens to his leadership, and what is likely to happen to the system? There's a possibility that it could transition into a system, a government whose organizing principle is no longer the revolutionary ideology of 1979, but the national interests of Iran. That certainly is a possibility, but there's also a danger, David, as you alluded to earlier, that you could have some more aggressive military commanders come to power who also take the same lesson you did, which is that the regimes which didn't have nuclear weapons—[Muammar] Qaddafi's Libya, [Saddam Hussein's] Iraq, Ukraine when it gave up its nuclear weapons after the collapse of the Soviet Union—they all were vulnerable to external intervention. Whereas regimes like North Korea, which had the nuclear weapons, provided themselves a cloak of immunity. So Israel, no doubt they've tactically—this war, they will prevail. The question is, strategically, six months to a year from now, what is this due to the nature of the regime and the nuclear program? Frum: So we hear the phrase regime change a lot. I think to those of us of a certain age, that conjures up memories of 1989, where at least in the northern part of Central Europe—East Germany, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics—the process was bloodless. The crowds came into the streets, the leaders resigned or went away, and there was a rapid transition to a Western-oriented system, and everybody 20 years later is much more prosperous. And you have some nostalgic extremists, but really, these are successful societies. So that's the model of regime change that I think we all want to imagine. But of course, revolutions tend to be, usually, much bloodier affairs. And even in Eastern Europe, there was the case of Romania, where hundreds died. So Iran must be riddled. When you think about the number of people who have been prisoners, the number of women who have been abused, the number of families that have lost loved ones to the Revolutionary Forces—when that regime's power breaks, you could be looking at a very, very bloody confrontation, where maybe there isn't a transition of power. Maybe there's just bloodshed for a long time, until some Napoleon Bonaparte figure emerges at the top. Sadjadpour: So there's a piece that I'm preparing for Foreign Affairs for later in the year about Iran's potential—five potential futures for Iran. And they do vary dramatically, right? There's the bloodless-coup option. There's something that could be more violent. The challenge we have at the moment is: You have a regime which has very limited popular support. I would put it at, at most, perhaps 20 percent, most likely lower than that. Let's say 15 percent of society. Just to take a step back for a second, this is a regime which is not only politically authoritarian, but it's also an economic basket case and socially authoritarian. So they not only—you know, a lot of places they're just dictatorships, but you're allowed to pursue economic advancement or you're allowed to at least watch what you want, or drink what you want, or eat what you want. This is a regime which—it polices your private activities, as well. So it has very few redeeming qualities. But the challenge is that they may not have much in terms of the breadth of their support. But they do, up until now—their support does have some depth, meaning that the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia have shown themselves willing to go out and continue to kill and die for the cause. And there was a book which came out about a decade ago, which was based off of an article in the Journal of Democracy, which I believe it was called ' The Durability of Revolutionary Regimes,' and essentially made the argument that revolutionary governments—meaning those authoritarian regimes that are borne out of a revolution, whether it was the Soviet Union, Cuba—tend to be more durable than just your run-of-the-mill dictatorship because there is an organizing principle that helps the security forces cohere. You're not just killing and staying in power to enrich one man and his family. And so that's a big question. You know, because you have a society—as I said, perhaps 80, 85 percent of society—that is opposed to the regime, but at the moment, they're unarmed. They're unorganized. They're leaderless, and I say this to their credit, not to the detriment: It's a regime which believes in martyrdom, but a society which doesn't believe in martyrdom. We're trying to separate mosque and state, not join it, which is distinct from a lot of the Arab opposition movements. And so in some ways, the portrait I'm painting, David, is: I see light at the end of the tunnel in Iran, but there's no tunnel at the moment, you know, for people to get from where they are to where they want to go. Frum: Is there gonna be any, do you think—or do you expect any kind of rally around the flag effect, which is: We hated the regime, but now the Israelis are bombing us, so we rally to our leaders because at least they're ours? Sadjadpour: I don't think so. I think what tends to happen in these situations is that people's existing political disposition is simply accentuated. So if prior to this Israeli bombing, you were a supporter of the regime, a defender of the regime, and you blame everything on America and Israel, you obviously have much more ammunition to hold those views. And if prior to this, you were an opponent, a critic of the regime, and say that this is a regime which has never prioritized the security and well-being of the Iranian people, there's far more evidence to continue to support that view. But how that plays out in practical terms—up until now, what we've seen is that those supporters of the regime are willing to go out into the streets and show off that support, whereas the opponents of the regime, whenever they've done that, they've been brutalized. And so that dynamic hasn't yet changed. Frum: We see these clips circulating on social media of Iranian soccer fans booing any mention of Palestine, of people amending their paths so they do not step on the flag of the United States when it's painted on the sidewalk. So those obviously have great currency in our world. It's we want to believe is going on. Are we kidding ourselves, or is there some fondness or attachment or fantasy about the outside world? Sadjadpour: No, I think that's right that, after having lived under a repressive theocracy for 46 years, it's a society which is desperate to be part of the outside world and to have—I think people recognize that Iran will never fulfill its enormous potential as long as its national slogan is 'Death to America, and death to Israel.' That's not a winning slogan. So I think that's right. People are patriotic, they're prideful, and I think they recognize that, prior to the revolution, when Iran did have a good relationship with the United States, the country's status was so much better. So I don't think we're being delusional about the nature of Iranian society. But this is, as I said, kind of a lesson I've repeatedly come to see, which is that leadership is so important. And there's a huge popular demand for change in Iran, but we haven't yet seen a supply of an opposition leadership, which can, as I said, lead people from where they are now to where they want to go. Frum: Why did the regime want an atomic bomb or a nuclear bomb so, so badly? We tend to take it for granted. It's an obvious thing. You're trying to terrorize the neighbors—of course, you want a nuclear weapon. But it's very risky to go from here to there. And it is the nuclear weapon that involved them with a conflict with Israel, whereas without a nuclear weapon, they could easily dominate all of their Arab neighbors, and Afghanistan to the east. Why did they make this choice? It was made a long time ago, and it's been persisted in, in the face of tremendous difficulties—sabotage in both the United States and Israel. Why bother? Why not concentrate on building up the strength of your Hezbollah arm, for example, and having a less-confrontational approach that would allow you to maximize your power in a more endearing way? Sadjadpour: So their nuclear program has really been, now, a six-decade odyssey. Obviously, it was started during the time of the shah, and after the revolution, the revolutionaries shut down the program. They said pursuing a nuclear program is un-Islamic. And at that time, if you recall, Chernobyl had happened, Three Mile Island. And so nuclear power was out of vogue. It was after the— Frum: But under the shah, it was a civilian nuclear program. Sadjadpour: Well, even under the shah, it was a program in which I think they were hedging. It was obviously cloaked in a civilian guise. Even the shah himself, I think, wanted to keep his options open. But during the time of the shah, they had access to elite technology. It was American companies that were providing Iran that technology. Obviously, things shut down. The revolutionaries shut it down. And after the Iran-Iraq war, when they realized it was a country which was largely friendless, very few allies, they started to restart the program. Then in the late '80s, the Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan provided them some of the intelligence to try to build it. But I think the challenge they've always had is that, as you said, it's such a deeply unpopular regime, and it actually has been for quite a long time that there's been so many, not only Iranian civilians, but also regime insiders who have been willing to collaborate with, whether it's U.S. intelligence, Israeli intelligence, to out elements of the program. And they've always—certainly in the last decade, since the program was exposed to the public in the early 2000s, just before the Iraq War—they've tried to maintain this facade that it's a nuclear-energy program, right? The reality is that this is a program which has cost the nation—if you want to measure it, both in terms of sunk costs, but also ancillary costs and opportunity costs in terms of sanctions and lost oil revenue—the price tag is, I think a conservative estimate, at least $500 billion, considering how much oil revenue and oil production Iran has lost. And that's for a program which barely provides just over 1 percent of Iran's energy needs. And it hasn't provided a deterrent either. So it's really been a colossal failure to have spent this much time and money on a nuclear program which neither provides you energy nor deterrence. But just on this point, David, it's possible that a conclusion that some of the Revolutionary Guard commanders are reaching is not that Iran shouldn't have pursued a nuclear program, but it may be possible the conclusion they may draw is that they shouldn't have pursued the program so deliberately, that instead of this marathon approach of inching towards nuclear-weapons capability, they should have tried to sprint out and done what North Korea has done, which they have this cloak of immunity. Frum: The sprint out? Is that going to be a feasible thing? You quote this program—it's not exactly a positive program—'Death to America, death to Israel' it, it sounds pretty negative. But 'Death to America' is just a slogan and a fantasy. 'Death to Israel' is something that you can imagine, actually, a nuclear-armed Iran could achieve. And since the Israelis are not going to agree to be done to death, the slogan 'Death to Israel' means: War with Israel before we become a nuclear power. I mean, chess was invented in Iran. If you play the chess moves out three— Well, we tell them we want a nuclear weapon in order to murder all of them. We start developing a nuclear weapon. They've got one already. They've got a better air force. We don't. What's going to happen here? How did they not see that the logic of this was: They get hit very hard by a temporarily superior enemy before they can achieve the thing that can realize their fantasy of annihilation? Sadjadpour: Well, I always remember something you told me over lunch, David. It was almost 20 years ago now. You probably don't remember, but you said, You can enrich uranium, and you can call for Israel to be wiped off the map, but you can't do both at the same time. Frum: (Laughs.) Sadjadpour: And that proved to be prophetic, your words there. And, you know, one thing I want to emphasize is that we really need to distinguish between the ideological objectives of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the national interests of Iran, which in my view are two totally separate things that are at odds with one another, right? Because from the perspective of the national interests of Iran, Israel and Iran actually have complimentary state interests, right? Israel is a technological power. Iran is an energy power. That was a source of great cooperation prior to the revolution. There's a millennia, you know, thousands of years of history there of a Persian-Jewish affinity. Iran, to this day—although it's dwindling—their Jewish community has one of the longest continuously inhabited Jewish communities in the world. So this ethos of 'Death to Israel' does not reflect the national interests of Iran. And obviously, 'Death to America'—any state which is trying to advance the national interest in security of its people, the last thing you want to do is gratuitously pick a fight with the world's greatest economy and superpower. So you're right to say that this was always going to be a losing game if you're the Islamic Republic. But as I said, going back to what was said earlier, starting with Ayatollah Khomeini and then Ayatollah Khamenei, their worldview has always been driven by revolutionary principles, not the national interests of Iran. Frum: Well, the national interest—and this is maybe a point that Americans don't appreciate enough—is Iran is the center of a great cultural zone and a long, continuous cultural tradition. It's like the France of Asia. It's the place where the food was invented. It's the place where the poetry was invented. It was the place where the fashions were invented. If you were an important person anywhere from Istanbul to Delhi, your idea of a luxurious, elegant life was probably based on an idea that started in what is now Iran. And that zone stretches into what is now Afghanistan, stretches into what is now Uzbekistan, stretches into what is now Russian central Asia, stretches of course into what is now Iraq, stretches a little bit into what is now Syria. But only at very maximum moments had ever come to touch the Mediterranean. It was always looking in the other way, and that's the zone of the great Persian language and all its many affiliates. And you would think that a sort of a Persian Iran would be looking north and east, not westward. And this religious fervor that has gripped this regime also seems to be not, again, consistent with the long-standing religious traditions of Shiite Iran, which were never all that interested in going all the way to the Mediterranean. Sadjadpour: Yeah, I'm a big believer—who said the quote that all history is biography? And Kissinger has observed that before he was in government, he didn't think that the individual mattered that much in history. After he served in government, he reached the exact opposite conclusion, which is that the individual shaped history. And in the case of Iran, we're still living in the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. He was the one that essentially invented this ideology. The Islamic Republic was an essay that he wrote in exile in Najaf in 1970. And when you go back to Khomeini's writings, he was someone who—it's not an exaggeration to say—he was deeply anti-Semitic. He was obsessed with Israel, and when he talked about Israel, it wasn't just about Israelis. He would talk very—you know, at that time, I think now the modern Iranian officials have realized that they shouldn't use that language, and they use Zionists —but he didn't do that then. And so that's obviously profoundly shaped the character of the Islamic Republic. And you're absolutely right that if you look at where Iran has invested its political and financial capital over the last four or five decades—Lebanese Hezbollah they've spent billions; Hamas; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; Houthis in Yemen; Shia militias in Iraq; and Iran's axis, what they call their axis of resistance. It was essentially five failing or failed states. And now that we're on the topic, David, I remember in around 2008, I was at one of these track-two diplomacy conferences in Europe, and I was seated next to a senior Iranian official, and I asked him after this dinner, I said, Think of all the money that Islamic Republic has spent over the decades on Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad. At that time, it was billions. Since then, it has spent tens of billions. Think of all the—how Iran could have spent that money on sending abroad and educating these Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites and how much better off those societies would be now. Even vis-a-vis Israel, you could say you're educating these folks and advancing them economically. And I'll never forget his response. He looked at me and he said, Well, what good would that have done for Iran? And I said, What do you mean? He said, Do you think, had we sent these people abroad to become doctors and lawyers and engineers, that they're going to want to come back and fight for Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? No. They're going to remain professionals. And so it just kind of occurred to me what a cynical strategy Iran has had for the Middle East. And I kind of think of the region as: There's two kinds of actors in this region. There's those who aspire to be falcons and those who are vultures, right? You have some countries that they're in the business of trying to build things, you know? They want soaring societies, cities, economies. And then you have Iran and its proxies, and they're not in the business of building. They're in the business of destroying, and they prey on the misery of others. The problem, though, is that—this was my big takeaway from a Fulbright I did; I spent a year in Lebanon in the early 2000s, in Beirut—that it takes decades to build things, and it takes weeks to destroy them. And so that, unfortunately, that strategy, that resistance strategy, has proven effective up until now—I should say, it did until last November, last fall. Frum: Last thought on this: It does seem like there's a strange convergence between people in the region and people in the West. The people in the region say, We don't care what happens to us so long as we can blame it on somebody else. And the people in the West will say, So long as we can find someone, some reason to blame things on ourselves, we don't care what happens to the people in question, and that there's this craving for blame and accusation that becomes a motor that just crushes the lives of potentially productive others. It is an interesting exercise to go to the World Bank or IMF site and look at the chart of Iranian growth through the 1970s, and say, If this had continued, where would Iran be today? And by my crude math, it'd be a country as wealthy as Portugal or Spain. Sadjadpour: Yeah, what a lot of Iranians will tell you is that if you look at GDP in around 1978, '77—just a year or so before the revolution—Iran, Turkey, and South Korea were at the same level. And what's happened five decades after just shows you all the difference that vision and leadership makes. And so I say this is a regime which aspires to be like North Korea, and you have a society which aspires to be like South Korea. Frum: Yeah. Well, one more of those comparisons of this: As people are marking the extraordinary achievements of Poland this year, the point is made that in 1990, Poland was as poor as Iran, and today Poland is as rich as Japan. But another way to put that is: In 1990, Iran was as rich as Poland was then—why couldn't Iran be as rich as Poland is now if they'd made other kinds of choices? But the implications of this are very unsettling for a lot of people because the answer is: Well, the correct answer to your economic-development strategy is to align with the United States, open your markets, have free markets, have capitalism, get out of the military-ambition business. And there are a lot of people, and not just the Iranian leadership, but a lot say that that's not the path. We don't want to admit that the neoliberals were right. Sadjadpour: Well, I think the other thing, David, is that, on one hand, I say that this is a regime whose priority is not the national interests of Iran. So they're not interested in advancing people's economic well-being and security, but at the same time, they're deeply interested in staying in power. David, you were friends with Christopher Hitchens, as well, right? Frum: Indeed, I was, and he was once a judge at an Iranian film festival. He was able to get into Iran, which is kind of amazing. They must have made some clerical error or something. Sadjadpour: Yeah, he had a deep interest in Iran, and so he used to have these salon dinners at his home in Kalorama. And one night—I was living close to him at that time, and he kindly invited me and—one of the guests that evening was the actor Sean Penn. Sean Penn was, at that time, very interested in Iran and had just made a visit to Iran himself. And he asked me a pretty simple question, which is, Why does the United States have this problem with Iran? Why don't we just normalize relations with Iran? And I said, That's not a unilateral choice that we can make. I agree. It's in the U.S. national interest to normalize relations, but you can't force a regime which needs you as an adversary to normalize. And he said something which always stayed with me. He had just come from Havana. And he said, Fidel always jokes that if America were to remove the embargo, he would do something provocative the next day to get it reinstated, because he understood that his power is best preserved in this closed bubble. And that very much is true about the current leaders of the Islamic Republic, which is that they fear normalization with the United States, in some ways more than they fear continued cold war with the United States, because they understand that if you crack open Iran to the forces of international capitalism and civil society, it's much more difficult to preserve the rule of a theocracy, who's led by a guy who thinks he is the Prophet Muhammad's representative on Earth. That's not a winning model. And so they thrive in isolation. Frum: And isolation may be what they're going to get. Last question, and then I will thank you for your time: How optimistic should Americans be about their ability to have any influence on the outcomes in Iran? Sadjadpour: You know, it's an important question, and invariably what we've seen in the Middle East over the last two decades is that our ability to shape outcomes in the region is somewhat limited. I would say that there are more things that we could be doing right now which we're not doing. I'll give you one example. So one of the things that President Trump did in his first weeks in office is they shut down Voice of America. And you could argue, Voice of America is not that relevant in a lot of other contexts, but in the Iranian context, it still was able to reach many tens of millions of Iranians. And it's true: The product needed to be updated and reformed to be made for a great television network. But that's one way in which it is a huge tool we have in our toolkit. The regime was obsessed with Voice of America. And rather than at least getting some concessions from them for shutting it down, we did it for free. I think they've now realized that this was a mistake and we need this communication tool with the Iranians. And so we've somewhat backed some of those employees. But I think the biggest impact we can have is in terms of media and communication, because one of the other things that the regime tends to do during times of crisis is to shut off the internet. They want to prevent people from communicating with the outside world. And so that's actually a technology, frankly, which—you know, Starlink and Elon Musk, that would be a very important factor in inhibiting the regime's ability to shut down communications between Iranians, and between Iranians and the outside world. So there are things we can do, but ultimately, the future of Iran is going to be decided inside Iran. Frum: Well, as I often express, speaking on the internet, on Twitter, one of my great hopes in life is to someday embark on an art and archeology tour of the wonders of Persian civilization. I hope I'll live to see that and that it will be possible in an open Iran to rediscover firsthand, with one's own eyes, not just in a museum but in the place, the extraordinary achievements of this amazing civilization that has self-darkened itself so unnecessarily and with such loss, not just for the people of Iran-Persia, but for the world. Thank you so much for joining us today. What a pleasure to have you. Bye-bye. Sadjadpour: Thank you, David. It's great to be with you. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks to Karim Sadjadpour for joining on such short notice. I appreciate his scholarly and his personal insights into these urgent questions that we're discussing about Iran and peace in the region. Thanks to our friends at the Royal Hotel here in Picton, Ontario, for making space available to us. If you enjoy the program, I hope you'll share it, subscribe, and like, but make others aware of it too. That really strengthens our ability to bring content to you. And the best support you can give this program is to subscribe to The Atlantic, where you will see my work and that of so many of my friends and colleagues who work so hard to achieve information that is, as the saying goes, 'of no party or clique.' Thank you for watching. I hope to see you next week here on The David Frum Show. Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Plot Against the 2026 Elections
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic's David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump's behind-the-scenes strategy to subvert the 2026 midterm elections, by creating chaos to justify his use of extreme executive power. David also discusses how Trump's feud with Elon Musk reveals a deeper truth about power in the postdemocracy Republican Party. Then David is joined by Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego to discuss how Democrats can win the votes of young men, the importance of free trade and patriotism in today's Democratic Party, and how Gallego has been so successful with Latino voters at a time when Latino men are trending so strongly Republican. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week is Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona, one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party. I recorded my interview with Senator Gallego on June 5, and at that time, I also recorded a monologue talking about the White House farce, tragedy, conflict between Elon Musk and Donald Trump—Elon Musk being the richest man in the world, the biggest contributor to the Trump campaign, the de facto chief of staff and vice president to Donald Trump; and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. But one of the lessons of the Trump years is: It never pays to do things early. You always want to leave things to the last minute because however outrageous the big story on Thursday is, there may be something that happens on the weekend that is even bigger. And so it is. So we're topping that topper with another topper. Over the weekend, there was an outbreak of unruly protest, disorderly protest, and even violent protest in Los Angeles against immigration raids by the Trump administration. I'm at some distance; I wasn't an eyewitness. I'm relying on news reports, and there's some uncertainty about exactly what happened, but it looks like rocks were thrown at ICE vehicles. Protesters tried to impede ICE officers doing their duty. Fireworks were shot off. A car seems to have been set on fire. Now, all of this is illegal, disorderly, and must, of course, be met by the force of law. Fortunately, there are nearly 9,000 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, uniformed officers with the right to arrest. And the state of California—in cities and counties and at the state level—deploys, altogether, more than 75,000 uniformed officers with arrest powers. So given the state of the situation, there looked to be nothing that the state of California couldn't cope with on its own. Mercifully, at the time I record today, there were no reports of any injury to any law-enforcement personnel, which, if correct, gives you some idea of the disorderly and upsetting, but genuinely limited, nature of the lawbreaking on hand. Nevertheless, President Trump announced an intent to federalize California's National Guard and send 2,000 military personnel into the state, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in with an offer of sending actual Marines from bases in California. Now, this is being reported as, in some ways, an immigration story, but it's really much, much more than that. By the way, as it happened, it looks like the National Guard was never sent (or certainly wasn't sent in time), and the Marines also weren't sent. I think a way to think about what happened in California this weekend is as a trial run, a test, a practice for things that Donald Trump has in mind in 2026. Observers of the Trump administration have noted a strange paradox. On the one hand, Donald Trump is doing one after another outrageous act of seeming violation of rules, seeming illegality, selling billions of dollars of coins to persons unknown, accepting foreign jets—things that, if he loses the protection of control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2026, portend a world of trouble and even legal jeopardy for him in the second two years of his administration. And yet, facing that danger, Donald Trump has blithely done one thing after another that seems guaranteed to lose him at least the House, and maybe both House and Senate, in 2026: the tariffs, this tax bill that offers very little to ordinary people, the economy slowly being ground into recession under the burden of all of his restrictive actions. I mean, to do tariffs and an immigration crackdown at the same time is really asking for an economic slowdown. So how do you make sense of this? Does Donald Trump not know that the elections are coming? Does he not sense the danger that he's in, of what will happen to him, of what could happen to him should his party lose its ability to protect him in House and Senate? Well, I think the answer is: Donald Trump does know, and he does have a scheme to protect himself, but it's not doing popular things to keep his majorities in Congress. It's looking for ways to subvert the 2026 elections to prevent them from happening, or at least to control them so they don't threaten him at all. Now, we have had some inklings of Donald Trump's thinking along these lines. We saw them in 2020, when people close to Donald Trump—like his former national security adviser Michael Flynn—advised him to use the military to suppress the 2020 vote. But Flynn's advice in 2020 came too late. The election had already happened. Flynn was looking to overturn an election in the past, not to prevent an election in the future. And that's a big thing to do, especially when court after court after court has ruled that the president and his supporters' claims against the 2020 election were utterly meritless. Also, Donald Trump in 2020 had a military around him that was not likely to obey illegal orders. Under Secretary of Defense [Mark] Esper and under chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, the Defense Department had said, Look—we will follow any lawful order of the president. But when the president suggests shooting protesters—as he did during the George Floyd riots—we're going say, 'Mr. President, are you quite sure? I'm not gonna take a hint here. I need an order, and I need it maybe in writing, so that when I am court-martialed, I can show, 'The president told me to shoot those people.'' And Donald Trump always backed down because he couldn't rely on Esper and Milley to take the hint about what he wanted done. But here's how his mind worked. We saw this in 2018. In October 2018, as Donald Trump was heading toward midterm elections that would cost him his majority in the House of Representatives, he began to get very upset about an immigration caravan that was supposedly—a so-called caravan that was—heading toward the border. And he began talking in October 2018 about needing a state of emergency to do something about this, to freeze the border, to militarize the southern states. Now, that didn't go very far. In the first term, Trump's talk was often much more radical than Trump's actions. But you could see the way his mind was going. The president has very broad and quite messy emergency powers. He can do a lot of different things by invoking a state of emergency. He thought about it in 2018. He thought about it in 2020. He wasn't able to do it either time. But in 2026, he's going to have a very different kind of administration around him. He's got a former talk-show host as a secretary of defense, one with a long list of allegations of heavy drinking and allegations of sexual abuse against him, who's completely beholden to Donald Trump. There are similarly beholden people running the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. There's a striking lack of independent voices of people with substantial reputations and long-proven integrity—and, for that matter, proven loyalty to the law of the United States. He's got the administration of his dreams, and he's got the problem of a lifetime: the risk of losing the House of Representatives. So what's the plan? The state of emergency. And that was tested in California. Now, how would this work? Theoretically, of course. We don't know any of this. I'm just telling you how a criminally minded person might advise the president. The president doesn't have a button he can press to stop elections. Elections are administered by the states. But what the president can do is put pressure on certain states, or delay or stop elections in certain states in order to convene the House of Representatives, which will be full of newly elected people from his states and vacancies from the other states. There's some precedent for this. In 2018, the island of Saipan, which is a U.S. territory, was hit by a devastating typhoon, and the governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands issued a series of emergency declarations—he's acting under federal executive power; it's not a state—including ordering postponing elections that were to be held in the territory for two weeks, including an election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Northern Marianas have a nonvoting delegate. No one questioned this. It's a genuine typhoon, and things really were terribly, terribly disrupted. And two weeks is not so long to wait for the right to vote in the face of a genuine emergency. But that was a proof of the power to delay an election that could be wielded by a functionary of the executive branch. Back during Reconstruction, the Grant administration often sent federal troops into areas where there was Ku Klux Klan activity to postpone elections, reorganize elections, redo elections. Again, that was Reconstruction; they were facing terroristic violence that was threatening the rights of, in South Carolina, half the population of the state. But there are precedents here. Now, imagine this in 2026. President Trump provokes some kind of outbreak in California or in some other blue state. He declares a state of emergency. He sends the National Guard. And he says elections have to be postponed until order is restored. That may be weeks; it may be months. In the meantime, there are no representatives from California in the U.S. House of Representatives. With missing blue-state representatives, the red-state people will continue their majority, even though they would likely lose it in a free and fair election in 2026. I'm not saying this is something that will happen, but it's something that could happen, and I think it was something we just saw tested. So I think as President Trump's mind wanders into places where no president's mind has ever wandered before, it's going to fall upon all of us to let our minds follow afterwards—to listen to the hints, to listen to things that sound crazy, to listen to people who sound crazy, because they may be the prophets of what's to come. And now some thoughts on the Elon Musk–Donald Trump dispute, and then my interview with Senator Ruben Gallego. [] Frum: Everyone's talking about this. It's hard to think of anything additional to say beyond what's been said. But there's a point that I'd like to flag that I think has not gone discussed enough, which is: It's kind of insulting and kind of dangerous that American citizens have to care about this kind of personal dispute at the highest levels of government. The question of whose side you're on in this kind of personality spat is not something you expect to see in a rule-of-law government. In an authoritarian regime, for sure. Presidents and secret-police chiefs fall out, and one will assassinate the other, send the other to prison. There will be coups and countercoups. But in a democratic rule-of-law system of government, personality is supposed to count not for nothing, but for a lot less. These are all functionaries. These are all servants of the people, highly replaceable. And when they dispute, historically, we expect their disputes to reflect something other than their mere selfish-ego needs. For example, at the beginning of the Biden administration, there was a big dispute between former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, one of the most important outside advisers of the Biden administration, and many of the economic insiders in the Biden administration. Summers warned that the spending plans of the Biden administration were probably too big for the needs of the economy and were likely to generate inflation. As it happened, he was right, but that's not the point. Others in the Biden administration said, No, we made a mistake in the Obama administration, not spending enough before we were out of the woods. And anyway, this is an opportunity to get done a lot of things that we and the Democratic Party think are important. So we want to proceed with these spending plans, even at the risk of inflation. And there was a big dispute about that. As I said, Summers was right, but that was hard to know in advance. The other people were certainly motivated by sincere concerns for their vision of the public good. And sometimes it got a little testy, and some personality issues did flare up, and people made ad hominem arguments, as they will. But what everyone understood was: This is not an argument about Summers trying to dominate the insiders, and the insiders trying to dominate Summers. They were talking about something important to the public well-being: How big should the Biden post-COVID recovery plans be? How much money should be spent? How much debt should be incurred? This was something that honest and intelligent people could have meaningful, impersonal disagreements about, even if, as I said, ego gets attached, tempers flare, and the unfortunate things are said. That's the way it's supposed to be. And you can find examples of this in many other administrations. Hawks during the Cold War days—there were always disputes between the hawks and the doves, between those who wanted to have a more forward policy toward the Soviet Union and those who wanted to try harder on detente, those who were more optimistic about China and those who were less optimistic. And always the question of: Where does the government spend its money? How? On what? All of these things cause tensions and disputes. And you'll find them in back issues of old periodicals about the events of the day. But the theory was, and the practice usually was, that the issues drove the personalities, not the personalities drove the issues. It was not a question of personalities in dispute looking for reasons, looking for weapons to use against each other in the form of issues. It was a dispute about real issues: Should the government spend more after COVID? Should it spend less? How real is the risk of inflation in 2021, versus how real is the risk of persistent long-term unemployment? That's the way it's supposed to be. What's going on between Trump and Elon Musk is like something out of (you'd read it in the pages of) Tacitus in the Roman empire, something out of postcolonial states, something you'd see in the Soviet Union when the secret police would dispute with the army. This is about egos and imperatives, about two people who see themselves as independent of anybody else and as principals, not as servants of the public. It's a question of personalist government. I mean, think how weird and anomalous and really sinister the position of Elon Musk was. Elon Musk was the head of a government department. Now, formally, other people were named as the head of this DOGE—whatever, the Department of Government Efficiency—but Musk was given status as a special government employee. Everyone could see he was in charge. He hired other outside people and brought them in. All of this at the same time as he was one of the government's largest contractors, and at the same time as he was an independent businessman who had not divested any of his companies. Normally, if you're a business leader and you go into government, you have to sever yourself from your business interests to avoid conflict-of-interest rules, which are not just opinions in the government but are actually backed by the force of law, or used to be—that if someone in government employ uses his power or her power to do something that advantages his business interests or hers, or to disadvantage a competitor or hers, that's against the law. And there are a variety of statutes that can catch you up. Musk every day was ignoring all of those practices and rules and legislation, some of them backed by the force of criminal sanction. And the people who he brought into government, again, they often had outside interests or had past concerns that would've subjected them to conflict-of-interest rules. All of that, ignored. They imposed big cuts in important areas of government—not just the tragedy of cutting the HIV program in Africa, PEPFAR, that saved tens of millions of lives since it was initiated by President George W. Bush, but Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service. Agencies that directly bore on the active business interests of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, these were shut down by Elon Musk. And maybe all those IRS employees who were in charge of auditing high-income individuals, maybe those SEC people who were dealing with allegations of SEC issues involving Musk, maybe they were all irrelevant and unnecessary and redundant and overstaffed. Or maybe they were just in the way, and somebody used personal power to get rid of them—personal power that was converted into state power to get rid of them. Now, Musk is not activated just by self-interest. He does have these weird ideological ticks that seem to be getting weirder. And those have been part of what has driven the United States government too. The United States is turning away refugees from everywhere, including people who serve the United States and Afghanistan, and it's rolling out a red carpet for white Afrikaner farmers. I don't know—maybe they've got a claim. I'm not hostile to the white Afrikaner farmers. But it is strange that there's a locked door for everybody else and a red carpet for the people with whom Elon Musk identifies, as his family originally comes from South Africa. Again, this is a question of using state power for personal ends. Look—the statement that is supposed to define the United States government is that it's a government of laws, not men. The rules and regulations, the government is always supposed to be more powerful, more enduring, more important than the people who work in it. And the people there are there to serve. But that idea really does seem to be jettisoned—not just abandoned, but actively jettisoned, repudiated—in the Trump years. And this dispute exemplifies it. Musk's particular criticisms of Trump's so-called big—what do you [call it]? Big, bouncing baby boy—whatever he calls that bill. Musk's may well be valid. The bill is irresponsible; it does add a lot of money to the debts and deficits in the out years. There's a kind of card trick going on here, where, in 2017, when Trump passed his first tax cut or the tax cut of the first administration, the only reason it met the deficit-and-debt rules that it had to be passed under was by saying it would expire in 2025. Now that it is expiring in 2025, the Trump people say, Well, it doesn't really cost anything, because we're largely extending tax cuts that were passed in 2017. Yeah. But in 2017, you said they would expire, and that's why they had one price. If they don't expire, they have a different price, and you're engaged in a kind of hustle. And so Musk's criticisms of this, they may well be true. But he's not criticizing because he's motivated by a disinterested concern for the public finances. Remember how his interests were exempted from all the budget cuts that were imposed on other people. He's mad at Trump for his own reasons, and so he's using a weapon at hand. In his case, at least one of the things he's reaching for is true. The others—accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files—those may be more far-fetched. But he's reaching for everything he can get—but not because he cares about these issues, but because he's asserting his own ego to punish someone he's mad at. And Trump is doing the same. Trump is threatening to withdraw government business from Elon Musk's companies. And, again, look—there's a strong case that Starlink and SpaceX should not be in private hands, the United States government should take them over. These are essential to national security. And if it's true that Elon Musk turned off Starlink to disadvantage the Ukrainians, he was using his corporate power for personal, ideological, or other interests at the expense of the public welfare. So that has to be dealt with. But Donald Trump, again, is not motivated by impersonal concern for the public welfare. He's punishing an opponent. And so suddenly, conflict-of-interest rules that didn't interest him 15 minutes ago are suddenly the order of the day. We are having a breakdown of the rule-of-law system in the United States. I've often worried that you could have a Trump administration, or you could have the rule of law in the United States, but not both. You could have Elon Musk in government, or you could have government be pure of conflicts of interest, but not both. The law is the victim of both these men. And both of them need to be run out of town as fast as possible, after which, let the law take its course. And now my conversation with Senator Ruben Gallego. But first, a quick break. [] Frum: The story of Senator Ruben Gallego is both an amazing story of personal achievement and also a classic American narrative of what this country can deliver. A son of immigrants in this country from Latin America, Ruben Gallego grew up in Chicago in a single-parent home. He joined the Marine Corps while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He served in combat in Iraq in a unit fiercely engaged with the insurgency. He settled in Arizona after his military service, was elected to the state assembly as a Democrat, then defied the red wave of 2014 to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives in that difficult year. Here's where the high political drama begins. In 2018, Arizona Democrats elected Kyrsten Sinema to the U.S. Senate. In office, Sinema became alienated from her party and ultimately declared herself an independent. Congressman Gallego emerged as the leading challenger to Sinema's reelection. She decided not to run again, rather than face him. He then faced the ultra-Trumpy election denier Kari Lake in the general election of 2024, and beat her too. Along the way, Gallego's own image as a fighting progressive has shifted toward the political center. He's now regarded by many Democrats as one of their brightest future stars, and it's a pleasure and honor to welcome him to The David Frum Show. Senator, thank you for joining us today. Ruben Gallego: Gracias, David. Frum: I'm speaking to you from about as deep inside the beltway as you can get—like, almost the buckle of the beltway. And some of our viewers may share that same condition with me. So just to enlighten all of us, when you said your constituents want a 'big-ass truck,' how big-ass is the truck they want? Gallego: (Laughs.) Well, big enough for them to feel like they've succeeded in life. And I think that's, basically, what I'm trying to say. And when I joked about it, it really is somewhat true. Like, if you grow up, like I did, in a working-class Latino family, your measure of success was what people would consider artificial, but is actually real. It's the real, tangible things: Buying a home, being able to get a nice truck that is responsive to the fact that you worked hard for this, and you took a lot of pride in that truck. You wash that truck on the driveway every weekend, with your kids. And when we can't deliver that as a party—me and Democrats as a party—if these men feel that we're not able to get them that future that can allow them to buy that 'big-ass truck,' or take that vacation, or feel a little more comfortable, or buy that house, or start that business, then we're going to lose their votes. Frum: Well, let me ask you about that lesson. So I was going through the leadership of both parties, House and Senate, and I'm struck that leader after leader comes from about as safe a state as you can get: South Dakota; Wyoming; or New York, New York. And that's true, by the way, with the executive branch too. Donald Trump used to be a New Yorker, but he became a Floridian to run again in 2024. J. D. Vance comes from what used to be a swing state, Ohio—not a swing state anymore. You're one of the very few people who's in the national conversation who comes from a highly competitive state, possibly even the most competitive state. So as someone who's won elections in a competitive state, what lessons do you think you have for the people who are looking at politics from the safety of the sidelines? Gallego: Well, I think one of the things that you could give the credit to, really, me and Mark Kelly, for example, my senior senator, is that we don't have the luxury of being in anything safe. And one of the benefits about Arizona, too, is that there is no real bubble in Arizona. I guess you could be in a political bubble if you want, but, you know, Democrats and Republicans live next to each other. They're still friends. They still hang out. They still work together. This is why you saw so many Gallego-Trump voters, right? Because these are the people that can make these nuanced separations of who they want, who they think best represents them. And it also means that you can't avoid what is going on or what people's fears are. You know, one of the things that I think was very instructive for us—at least, like, just generally for my campaign—is that one of the things that that helped us is that we were very realistic about what was happening out there, what people were feeling. And while everyone was trying to say that the economy was getting better—because I think I'm in a competitive state, and, generally, I don't really live in an uppity area; I live in a working-class area in South Phoenix; I really get to touch real grass all the time—and I heard it from people at the grocery store, at the gas stations that they were just having a tough time making ends meet. And this isn't 2022 when I'm hearing this. I'm hearing this in early 2024. I'm hearing the sense of desperation that they're just working so hard, and they're just not getting anywhere. Or these young men and women that are looking at the world that they don't understand anymore, because, you know, for Arizona, four years ago, if you had a family making middle-class, middle-income salary, you could afford a house. Now the average house in Arizona is about $530,000. And good luck, you know, finding that house; it's probably far out in the middle of nowhere and, on average, a 7.5 percent mortgage. And so we talked to the voter about what they wanted to hear and talk about and what they were worried about. When everyone was trying to deny that there was a problem at the border, every Democrat was trying to deny the problem at the border, we knew that that was just not the case. And people were still talking about the border. They were worried about it, and they were mad at Democrats for allowing this chaos to happen. Instead of running away from it, we ran right to the fight and brought the arguments about why we were better than our opponent on these issues. And I think that ended up being one of the saving graces, why we're able to outperform really all Senate Democrats in the country, considering, especially, that Arizona does have about 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats. We have no choice as candidates—me, Mark Kelly, other statewide candidates—to make sure that we are actually figuring out a way to win in a bipartisan manner, by keeping our values also as Democrats but also delivering to Arizona. We have no choice. We have to do it. Frum: One of the things I noticed about Democrats from sort of the safer areas is: They attach a lot of importance to words, and often more importance to words rather than to things. And I'm struck here— Gallego: Or deeds, yeah. Frum: There's been a project to evaluate why Democrats are doing poorly with men. And when you read the discussion about it, it's all about changing the way we speak, changing the way we frame things. The idea that there might actually be something of substance that is the problem, that's not something that seems to be very acceptable. Now, you don't have that luxury. Gallego: I don't have the luxury. But also, it's like you don't—the Democrats are all about data until they don't like the data. The data for men is: They're just not doing well. This is not just Black men, Latino men. This is all men, right? We have the lowest amount of college attainment. Salaries are going down. Life expectancies are going down. There's just this general discontent within the male population. If you just look at the data, you would say, Hey—this population of the United States is not doing well. We should figure out what to do about it. Let's have conversations. Let's have town halls. Let's have real studies about this. And what you see, and what I've seen in the past, is there's this—I try not to exaggerate how sometimes the Democrats can be anti-male, but there is a certain amount of that that does happen. When you start talking about it, people are saying, like, Oh, you're concentrating on males and forgetting X, Y, Z population, which I don't think is the case. I think we care about Americans. We should care about all Americans. And if men aren't doing well, us as a party who are supposed to care for the people that are not doing well, we should do something about it. And we could do, at the same time, making sure we're protecting women's rights, making sure that women are also at the forefront of everything, that we're protecting the LBGTQ community, all these kinds of things, right? But the fact is, for some reason, Democrats have gotten sheepish about this. You know, there's people that are involved in different types of think tanks about the status of men and boys, and they're largely frozen out of the conversations around Democratic policy making, because what we want is: We want the male vote, but we want it cheaply. We want the male vote to come to us without us getting some other interest groups pissed off. And we also want the male vote to come with us, and we want it to be within our safe little tent of ideas and ideology, and we want them to be perfectly fine to fit with all of our other friends. Which, guess what? That's just not how we're going to win. We're going to have to accept that some of these male voters are not going to be aligned with certain sectors of our tent if we want to win. If we don't want to win, then fine. Accept that we're going to be a small tent, and hopefully we win once in a while. But in reality: The Democrats want the male vote without actually having to work the male vote. And they think they can just throw a bunch of dudes on podcasts and, you know, bro it up, and that's somehow going to solve the problem. It's not going to solve the problem. Frum: One thing that has been attended in the Trump years—and you can say this is actually a good thing about America, and maybe even one of Donald Trump's few positive legacies—is the American melting pot does continue to bubble along. You can see it as early as the 2010s, but you can really see it happening in the 2020s, that we are seeing a big decrease in race and ethnic polarization in the United States. But we're paying for it by having this big increase in sex polarization. So men are men. Women are women. Wherever they come from, whatever the color of their skin, the women are voting more like each other; the men are voting more like each other. So the melting pot is bubbling, but the wall of separation between the sexes seems to be getting higher and higher. Gallego: Yeah, a hundred percent. And look—some of it is COVID-induced. Some of it is: They're listening to different things. One of the things we knew instinctively, because growing up Latino and working class: Latino men do not intently watch Univision, Telemundo. They don't intently follow politics. They largely are disconnected from the normal avenues of—well, I would say that normal people kind of consume news and political news. And one of the things that I emphasized on my campaign early on is a nontraditional way to reach these men, because you've got to understand the way these guys are. I mean, when I was in construction, I would wake up at 6 a.m., go to the site. Hopefully, it'd be done by 3 p.m. but probably not. So maybe you're back at home by 5 p.m. You're dirty as hell. You're smelly as hell. You're jumping in the shower, and then maybe, you know, you're in time—you've made it home in time for dinner, right? You're sitting down to dinner, and then you have probably a couple hours before you zonk out to start the next day. Do you want to spend that time watching the news? Do you want to spend that time talking politics? No. You want to spend time with your family or with your friends, because your day sucked, and it's going to suck again tomorrow. And so you do this rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. So where are they getting all their information from? Well, a couple places. Number one, they're getting it from their other coworkers at worksites—which by the way, people forget when it comes to Latino men, the people they're most likely to work with besides other Latino men are white working-class men, right? And white working-class men are very much politically involved and have a lot of political information that they're getting. And they're sharing it with their Latino coworkers, right? And number two, they're living off their phones through different social media, whether it's Instagram, Snapchat, or all this kind of stuff, Twitter. So one of the things that we emphasize is trying to figure out how to get a message, a vibe, about who I was to these Latino male voters early on, so that way they understood, like, Ruben Gallego is a Democrat. Ruben Gallego says he's for the working class. But then we also had a very strong cultural attachment. Like, He understands me. He actually worked at factories, worked in construction, understands the dignity of work, the responsibility of a man to his family, to provide for his family, and how important that is to me as a man. And that kind of stuff, we are afraid to approach to get these men to start considering us as Democrats. And then, because we never talk about it, we never give them the dignity of allowing them to be family leaders and not making them feel bad about being family leaders. And then we're surprised when, year after year, we don't continue to have this conversation with us, they keep on moving away from us. And it's a dumb trade-off, because we continue to do that because we think that somehow we're going to piss off female voters. And I don't think that's the case. Female voters are worried about their sons or daughters and their husbands. They're worried about the fact that they're becoming less social. They're worried about the fact that they're not actually being productive in life. And they want to have good husbands—heck, they want to have good ex-husbands that are involved with their kids' lives, and they're making good pay and paying their child support, things of that nature. But for some reason, the Democrats have continued this trade-off, and it's going to continue going until we realize: Making sure [of] people's economic needs will cross all racial barriers and, if you do it rightly, will also cross these gender gaps that we're seeing. Frum: Well, let me ask you: You're famous for having banned the use of the term Latinx from any communication you do. But let me ask you about a term you've been using: Latino. You're originally from Chicago. If someone practiced politics in Chicago 100 years ago and someone said there's this thing called an Eastern European o—Croat, Serbs, they're the same; Poles, Ukrainians are the same; everybody loves the Ashkenazi Jews—it's just one thing. Gallego: I think if Chicago, like—if you weren't Irish or Scottish or Polish, you were Bohemian. That's the way they would describe any European that they couldn't describe. Yeah. And then me, growing up, you were Spanish or Mexican, if you were lucky, or Puerto Rican. Frum: But let me ask you this: Is this concept of Latino helping anybody understand anything at all? And as particularly the Democratic Party, that a lot of Democratic Party politics has been driven over the past quarter century by the idea, Okay, there's this new minority. They all come from the same continent and half a continent—because Mexico, of course, is in North America—and most of them speak Spanish, some speak Portuguese, some speak indigenous languages. But we're going to group them into a thing, and we're just going to assume we own them, and they're going to naturally gravitate to voting for us. They're going to be in opposition to the standard organization of American society, and they're going to want minority set-asides. And that's the way to talk to them. And the very invention of the concept of Latino has been a disabling—part of your family comes from Columbia; part of your family comes from Mexico. Those are very different historical experiences. Gallego: Oh, hell yeah. Frum: And with Eastern Europeans, we would understand if your father was Serbian and your mother was Croat, that didn't make you an Eastern European o; that made you a person with two different heritages that you had to balance. Gallego: I think the mistake that happened, it's like the names don't matter so much. Now go back to why Latinx matters versus Latino: What happened within the progressive left, as well as the Democratic Party, is that you had all these Latinos that kept voting Democratic, right? Yeah, no matter what. And the difference was two things. Number one: There was discrimination against Latinos. I mean, you saw signs going into the 1970s, you know, no spics, no dogs allowed. In the Southwest, there was housing discrimination, there was educational discrimination. And of course, that drove those voters to the Democratic Party, because we were the only party, really, that was outright for equality. The level of income attainment was extremely low. So the Latino population on average was poorer than the Anglo population. And the Democrats were the party of the middle class, a working class of: Who's going to protect your rights? Who's going to protect your wages? Who's going to give you an opportunity to go to a good school and live the American dream? That was the Democratic Party. What happened is: the Democratic Party kind of kept on evolving, and the Latino population kept growing bigger and bigger. The Latino population changed—and I don't mean change, as in there was new populations that came in, except for the Cubans; that's another tangent and a weird story there. But we got bigger, and we also got richer within our population. And even though, on average, Latinos are poorer, we have a lot of great success stories in America, right? If you look at the police forces in a lot of our big cities, you have a lot of Latino police forces. You have a lot of Latino firemen. So there's been this—and this is a good story, by the way. This is a good story. This is what you want to happen to your immigrant communities, right? This is the story of the American dream. We are moving up to middle class; we're moving everything else. And so the Democratic Party just never changed as the Latino population was changing, right? And if anything, it actually went further away from what they were, right? Focusing more on social issues and not so much on the economic issues that we were known for. And then also, just adopting things that the Latino community would naturally be against, right? Open borders, for example, was something that if you had Latino friends, they would've told you, Well, that's dumb. Like, why? Why would you do that? Kind of the anti-police rhetoric. We live in neighborhoods where we want police to treat us well but also to be present, and this anti-police rhetoric that took off for many years affects them, especially, again, when we have so many people that are in the military—sorry, in the police force. And this kind of moving away from this idea of patriotism being a core value of the Democratic Party and understanding that America is an exceptional country and we should pride and value that, it goes against the grain of what Latinos know, right? Our kids serve in the military. We actually come here because we think it's an exceptional country. And when Arizona—sorry, when Democrats are sheepish about talking about the country in that way, it does an impact. Frum: Well, let me ask you about the military. So you were in Iraq. You served with a unit that took a lot of casualties. You saw some hard things. Some of the people in your cohort who returned from Iraq, like the serving vice president, have been radicalized and embittered—or so they say that's why they've been radicalized and embittered. He wasn't radicalized and embittered. I knew him when he immediately came back from Iraq, and he wasn't radicalized and embittered then, but the farther the experience recedes, the more embittered he becomes about it. Other people who have served in the post-9/11 wars—like your former House colleague Dan Crenshaw, like some of your Senate colleagues, Tammy Duckworth—they retain their faith in America's purposes in the world, that American military power is a necessary thing and a force for good. How do you process your military experience, and how does it affect the way you think about America's role in the world and America's military in the world? Gallego: Yeah, I mean, for me, it's pretty interesting just because, I mean, the vice president and I were actually in Iraq at the same time. He was serving on a base called Al Asad, and I was a frontline infantry unit that was never on base. And actually, my unit was from Ohio, so the Reserve unit I served with, Lima 3/25. And as you know, we ended up, unfortunately, seeing a lot of combat and lost a lot of men. And I actually did come back embittered. I came back embittered at the administration for sending me to a bogus war to begin with. And they sent me to a bogus war without the equipment that I needed, that got a lot of my men killed—and the manpower, by the way, because I was covering an area the size of West Virginia with only a company of men, or battalion, I should say. And so I was very embittered at our government about that. But it never made me an isolationist, because I think, looking at the world in a rational way, we can't afford to be isolationist. I want security for the future of my kids, and I want economic security too. Part of that is going to be that we have to have friends, and we need strong friends. Because we don't have the mass that China has. And I'm not talking about the military mass—because I don't want to go to war with China—but we don't actually have the actual manpower, economic leverage that we have, unless we have other friends, unless we have other allies. And when it comes to any kind of military support, having other friends that are with us. And I want to prevent wars. I think the best way for us to prevent wars is to have alliances, is to believe in actual treaty obligations, and also to find ways to prevent wars through multilateralism, through investments in bringing down, for example, poverty around the world. I mean, one of the reasons why I had such a hard time fighting over there is because everybody in western Iraq was trying to kill me, and some of these people weren't even trying to kill me because they were idealogues, but because they were poor. Some insurgent was going to give him a hundred bucks just to drop an IED at the side of the road, right? Like, I saw the actual results of instability in the world. And yes, there was a lot of bad leadership decisions and somewhat criminal decisions that came from the Bush administration. But tearing down the system that has actually brought the longest amount of peace, in general, in the longest time since World War II is just plain dumb. And some of the things that I think actually motivates these people to actually try to destroy these institutions is because: If there's less institutions that are connecting us, if there's more isolationism, it actually empowers the most powerful people within this country, which I don't think we want either. I see this as the opposite way. It doesn't mean we have to be everywhere. I certainly have not supported engagements or potential engagements all around the world. I supported us, for example, when it came to the JCPOA, because I don't want to go to war with Iran, under President Obama. I've been against some of our potential expeditions and longstanding, overstayed, and out of compliance with some of our rules and regulations in terms of operating overseas, like in Syria and other countries. And I think we should have deep oversight. But this idea that we're just going to go to zero and close down the borders, I think is just not, when it comes to our alliances, is just not realistic. It's not going to happen, and I think it's going to make more unsafe than anything else, and I think will actually lead us to more of a situation in terms of a confrontation with China than less. Frum: You're on the border, and the Trump administration, one of its areas of greatest military adventurism has been with increased military activity in Mexico. They're overlying drones. They say the drones are unarmed, but they're drones that are capable of being armed. It looks like they didn't give the Mexican government advanced notice of all the drones that are flying. President Trump, the vice president, many others in the Republican Party have spoken about taking some kind of military action inside the territory of Mexico or on the seas that are just outside Mexico's territorial waters. How do you think about that as someone who represents Arizona? Gallego: We want, and we do have, a good relationship with the Mexican government in Arizona. Our police forces will talk to their police forces. They have problems. There's no doubt there's corruption. There's no doubt. But what you've seen is when some of the best outcomes have always been when we've actually worked with our friends and treated them like friends and allies, and helped them build their capability to fight back, fight corruption, fight these cartels, fight these terrorists. You've seen some of the best COIN operations in, for example, Colombia that were effective. And I think we could continue doing that. But if we decide to do these unilateral actions without working with these countries, without giving them some level of respect, we're going to end up having less support from that government, but less support from the people who will continue to hide these horrible, horrible humans that are also terrorizing these communities. It's also very insulting to a lot of—and this is something that I've seen that we've done, not just to them but to sort of Afghan allies we're not rolling in. It's insulting to them as if they don't have some agency, right? Thousands and thousands of Mexican police officers, government workers die every year fighting these cartels. And the fact that we kind of give this whole broad brush and say they're all corrupt, they're all evil I think is something that's going, again, to not help us make friends where we need friends to fight these organizations. Frum: Well, you mentioned Columbia. Until a little while ago, it looked like one of the big successes of American policy in the 21st century: Plan Columbia that restored order, the reorientation of the Columbian economy away from drugs to exporting agricultural goods that serve people rather than killed people. Columbia got hit with a wave of tariffs by the Trump administration. Now he's helped to legitimate the far left that has come back into Colombian politics. Is that a situation that you follow, and what lessons do you see for countering surgency from the Colombian experience? Gallego: Yeah, I do follow it a lot. Look—you know, when President Petro of Columbia really used this opportunity to kind of create this jingoistic situation where you're able to draw attention to the sins of what the United States is doing, and not necessarily the things that are occurring in Columbia, which economically aren't great. And when you're putting tariffs, you're creating two things: Number one, for your kind of marginal farmer, especially out in rural Colombia, doing, you know—export farming is profitable, but not that much. And it is also fairly marginal, right? It is a lot more profitable for you to farm and harvest cocoa, right? And other, drug, products. And so you're making an economic incentive for people to move away. You're also messing with our economy, too (the United States economy), because talking to some of these big industries down there who import American flour, corn, soy—they're right now looking for new partners anywhere else besides the United States because they don't want to deal with the drama of Am I under a tariff? versus Am I not under a tariff? You know, their biggest import from the United States is actually soy, which is ridiculous considering they're essentially next to—they share a border with—Brazil. Now, you know, the Brazilian soy market is hunting around in Colombia, trying to basically say, like, We're your better partner. They're gonna—look: They're gonna try to get flour from somewhere else. You know, the Colombian farmers, because it's a very volcanic earth, really value American tractors and farm equipment because they're solid. You know, they have a great reputation. They're easy to fix. The parts are easy to get. And now they're trying to get new products from Korea, from China, from Europe, because they don't want to deal every year, again, with whether your tractor is going to end up having a 10 percent, 20 percent tariff or counter-tariffs. So this is the instability we're causing. That what was essentially unnecessary instability, right? Because Colombia has always accepted Colombians that are being returned for deportation. All they were asking is, like, Hey—just don't bring them in a military plane and we're fine. And I think that's some of the least thing we—one of the things we could do to keep relations, to keep the flow going, obviously, people that should be deported. But, you know, we end up, again, shooting ourselves in the foot because the way that this administration does security is they focus on being tough and not smart. They focus on showing, like, We're gonna do these things, but at the end of the day, all they're doing is causing more chaos. They were talking about criminals, and now they're rounding up kids, rounding up parents, rounding up workers that we need, just so they could prove that they're wrong, when the voter really did not ask for that. They didn't ask for this, they asked for criminals. They asked for a tighter border; they got a tighter border. But now you're deporting families just so you could say you're hitting these arbitrary numbers that Stephen Miller wants. Frum: A lot of you—you talk about the harm of tariffs very eloquently. A lot of people in your party have been having a difficult time articulating a tariff message because they actually kind of like tariffs. If President Trump has been the most protectionist president since 1945, President Biden was the second-most. And so you hear a lot of Democrats saying things like, Well, I'm against dumb tariffs. I'm for smart tariffs, implying they're for smart tariffs, implying that there is or could be such a thing as a smart tariff. And the result is you have a very narrow difference. And to your point just now, I mean, when Democrats say, I want to do the same thing as Donald Trump, but I want to do it smarter, what a lot of people hear is not, Well, you are smarter. [It's] Oh, you're the party of people who think they're so smart, but you don't actually have a principled criticism of what the president does. You're just showing off that you think you're better educated and more intelligent. But you want to do the same thing, only with fancier words, the way you always want to do it. So are there Democrats who are going to be able to say, You know what? Tariffs are just dumb. Don't do them. We should trade in peace and freedom with the rest of the world? Gallego: Are there? —I mean, I'm not a miracle worker here, David. But look—what we've seen in terms of the turnaround in our economy, right? If you would've said eight years ago that the United States was gonna be able to manufacture the majority of the chips it needs within 10 years, we would've been like, You're freaking nuts, right? Because all the chip manufacturing was being done overseas. And within that short time period, we were able to stand up and move U.S. manufacturing of advanced chips to a point where we're going to be net exporters in the next couple years. That wasn't from tariff policy; that was from an actual industrial policy about how we're actually gonna brick this back, right? And we need to figure out how we can bring certain industries back and how we could do it smartly by competing, right? By having the best workers possible, by having the best industry possible, with having the best regulatory frameworks they could add to the tax policies, everything else. Like, that's how you make it. So you could actually bring these middle-class jobs back. But the other thing that really annoys me is that, like, who do they think works these middle-class jobs? Who do you think works these factories? Right now they're about, last I heard—I'd have to go back and check. But, you know, we're probably close to a million—sorry, we're at about a million factory jobs that are opening right now. Those are immigrants that work those jobs. When I was working at a meat factory, growing up, I got $1 more because I was the only one that spoke English—or, well, I spoke English. I'm sure there's others that spoke English too. But the people that worked at that factory were Mexican immigrants and Polish immigrants, right? So let's say we do build that steel plant here. First of all, let's find the investors that are willing to put in the seven to 10 years to build it. Like, the people that work in a lot of these places are the people that we're trying to kick out of this country right now, or won't let in. And so how are we—how is this smart in any way? Frum: You come from one of the most outward-facing states in America, in the country—a border state, a state with a dynamic economy, a state of entrepreneurship and immigration. If anyone's gonna carry a flag for open trade, free trade, it's gonna be a senator from Arizona. John McCain was a great free trader. Can we look to the senators from Arizona to lead the fight against tariffs and for free trade? Gallego: Yeah. No, like, I think I can't speak for the other senator, but what we've seen is, like, Arizona is richer because of trade—and not just, by the way, [with] Mexico, which, by the way, has definitely been a big driver, besides the fact that everyone just focuses on the security side of it. We are actually a richer state, and the country would be much richer if we actually made our ports of entries faster, more aggressive, and predictable in some regards because some people don't know when they're gonna come in. But we are now trading with, you know, all around the world. We just opened up a direct airline route, or will be soon, from Phoenix to Taiwan. Our jobs, our high-skilled jobs, our highest-paying jobs are due to trade. And in some regard, if we actually want stability, especially in the Western hemisphere, we should embrace free trade that, you know, emphasizes our brothers and sisters south of the border getting good-paying jobs, getting those industry jobs that we don't want to do in the United States, so they could stop the migrations that are moving here to the United States. There is a way for this all to be a win-win for the United States. And I think using our ability, in terms of our superpower—which I think our biggest superpower is actually human capital—where we can bring anyone from all around the world and use their drive, their brainpower and put it into this massive other amount of brainpower to experiences all around the world. We could outcompete anybody, but we actually have to believe in them. We have to make the investments in them. And I think that is going to be a better way to actually move the middle class, get them those jobs that they need, than these types of, like, ham-fisted tariff policies. Frum: Last question, because I know we have a hard out, and you've been very generous with your time. You came from a tough background. You had an astonishing career. Your talent was picked out early. You went to Harvard. You volunteered. You saw some dark things in combat. You came back. You chose politics after that background at a strikingly early age. You didn't get rich first. You went into politics directly. Gallego: I did want to get rich first, to be honest. (Laughs.) Frum: (Laughs.) Why did you choose politics? Gallego: You know, I think it really chose me. I always wanted to do government service. I actually thought that I was going to end up in the State Department, or the FBI, or something of that nature. I got back from the war—I mean, I was fucked up, to be honest. You know, my best friend died. It was seven months of just hard, hard combat. And then we got back and, you know, we were Reservists, and they just let us go, right? So two weeks after I get back from Iraq, I am given my orders, I throw my stuff in my sea bag, and they're, Right. You're out; you're gone. You know, no housing, nothing. And luckily, I had friends and family to fall upon. But then the stories started coming from my guys that they were having problems getting jobs. They were having problems getting VA treatments, getting into the VA—all these things that were just terrifying to me. And I was already pissed from the war because, again, they sent me to war without the proper armor on our vehicles, proper intelligence, without enough manpower, all this kind of stuff. And so I found myself talking more and more to these guys about—these guys, my brothers—trying to help them get into the VA, trying to help them get into school. You know, some of them were living on my couch for a little bit to keep them off the streets. And I started complaining to the state reps, to the state senators, Why can't my guys have in-state tuition? Marines would be overseas for three years, and they'd come back to their home state or to another state, and they say, like, Well, you never lived here. Like, Yeah, well, I've been gone forever. And it just kept on coming back and forth, back and forth, and I just kept complaining to congressmen and to everybody. And I realized that, I mean, everyone talks a big game, but no one really gives an f about us until they really need us. But I have a purpose here, and it's going to continue to service. You know, my guys and I are going to have our 20-year reunion this year. I'm 45. I'm one of the older side of veterans, and if I'm not doing this right now, you know, who's going to hold this administration to the fire? They want to cut 83,000 veteran—VA employees arbitrarily, right? And for me, I'm able to use my position as a veteran, as a combat veteran, and I'm pushing back on them. I'm not sure if I was here, would someone be doing as aggressively as I am? And I think that that tells me I'm doing something right. Frum: Thank you. Thank you for the time today. I'm really grateful. Thank you for the candor. It's been an interesting conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time for us. Bye-bye. Gallego: Appreciate it. Adios. [] Frum: Thanks so much to Senator Gallego for joining me here on The David Frum Show. Remember, if you enjoy this dialogue and similar content, please subscribe to The Atlantic. That's the best way to support the work of The David Frum Show and all of my Atlantic colleagues. I'm going to close with some farewell thoughts about the weekend ahead. If you are planning to fly into Washington, D.C., over the weekend of June 14, be prepared for a lot of airplane closures. Reagan National Airport will be closed, and traffic at the other regional airports is likely to be disrupted. The reason for this is the big parade scheduled for June 14. Now, ostensibly, this is a parade to salute the 250th anniversary of the United States Army, founded in June of 1775. But we all know this story is not true. The Continental Navy was founded in the fall of 1775, and the Marines shortly thereafter. They, too, are celebrating 250th anniversaries this year. No parade for them, because their anniversaries do not coincide with the birthday of President Trump. President Trump is throwing a big birthday bash for himself at public expense, making a parade, which he has wanted for a long time. And the Army is his excuse but not his motive. As I say, if it were the real thing, you would find a way to honor the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps together, all of them celebrating their 250th anniversary this year. Now, President Trump has wanted a big military parade since he saw one in France in his first term, on Bastille Day. The Army and the other services, the Department of Defense, resisted this demand for a long time, and for three main reasons. The first was the reason of expense. The Trump birthday party, the military component of it, will cost, all in—both the cost of the parade and the cost of repaving the city streets afterwards—probably in the vicinity of $100 million. That's a very large amount of money, even by military standards. And in the first term, at least, the money would've been spent at a time of general prosperity and pretty lax controls of spending. In the second term, President Trump is engaged in massive budget cuts throughout the rest of the government. We've eliminated the PEPFAR program for Africa that delivers anti-HIV drugs to Africans of all ages, and especially children. People's lives are at risk to save the $7 billion that PEPFAR costs. It's indecent to be cutting PEPFAR and throwing the president a $100 million birthday party. So the military has resisted on grounds of expense. They've also resisted on grounds of uselessness. Look—parades used to serve a purpose. The skills on display in a parade—marching in step, the cavalry trotting in line—those were highly relevant military skills in the days when armies fought in formation, when infantry formed into line, when cavalry moved at a trot. But in today's world, the skills that you need to do at a parade have nothing to do with how armies fight. And the weeks and weeks of preparation that the units have to do in order to be ready for the parade is just a waste of time. And these are all, by the way, highly paid, highly skilled professionals. Their time is valuable. We want our war fighters, as Secretary of Defense Hegseth calls them, to be preparing to fight actual 21st-century war, not demonstrating their skill and readiness to fight the wars of the 18th and early 19th century. But there's an even more fundamental reason that the Army resisted for such a long time, and that was: They sensed there was something political about these parades. Trump was not doing this, really, to salute the military. He was summoning the military to salute him. And the military, rightly, would never refuse an order, but they would point out, This is expensive. This is a distraction. And if you order us to do it, we will leak the details of how expensive and how useless it is to the newspapers, so that everyone will see what you are doing. That was the first term. But in this second term, the military is headed by people who—unlike the military leadership in the first term—under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, pose no resistance to the orders and demands and wishes and imperatives and whims of President Trump. The Hegseth DOD is an arm of Trump's PR politics. And so it's all parade, all the time. There is no one now to advocate for the interests of the national defense against the whims of the president. I think this you've all heard before, but there's something else I want to point out here. The idea that a president would cause massive inconvenience to the traveling public, disrupt the traffic of the District of Columbia, all to honor himself is a real slap in the face and a real denial of the fundamental relationship that the constitutional system envisions between the president and the people. The president is a public servant. He is the highest-ranking government employee. He's not the master. He's not the king. He's not the emperor. Traditionally, presidents receive no honor of any kind in their own lifetimes. If they had distinguished themselves in office, after they had passed then they would be honored in all kinds of ways: the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Monument. Everything's the other way around. I think it's the Lincoln Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. You'd issue postage stamps for them. The streets would be named for them, counties. There are Jackson Counties all over the United States. Presidents were honored after the end of their lifetime. But in their time, they were just another government employee, like the undersecretary of agriculture. And there certainly was no public commemoration of their birthdays. Donald Trump does not see himself as a public servant. He sees himself as a public master. That's why he's always demanding thanks for his allocation of government resources. When President Trump sends emergency assistance to a county that's in need, it's not his money. No one owes him any thank-you. He's doing his job, sending the public's money to the place where public law provides for it to go. And yet he thinks, because he is the president, he, therefore, is owed deference, he is owed obedience, he's owed thanks, and he's owed a parade. And this habit of thinking is spreading through his government. Other Cabinet secretaries have also given themselves birthday parties of public expense and have issued statements on Twitter saluting the Cabinet secretary for the birthday. It's a habit that grows from the top down, and it's a violation of the way that Americans used to conduct themselves. Look—in Britain, there's a long and lively tradition of military parades on the monarch's birthday. They troop the colors. In fact, this year, the trooping of the colors for King Charles's birthday will be June 14. Charles's birthday will be June 14, just like President Trump's parade. But Charles's parade is not on his actual birthday; his actual birthday is in November. but he's going to have his parade on June 14 because that's the best day for the public to watch it and enjoy it, and it's also the easiest day for the troops to parade. If you know London, you'd much rather parade in the June sunshine than in the November gloom and rain. So Charles, the king of England, is thinking of others when he arranges the continuation of the long-established tradition of the trooping of the colors on the monarch's birthday. President Trump, ostensibly a servant of the people, ostensibly a lowercase r Republican official, ostensibly just the highest-ranking person in the government bureaucracy—he's doing more than King Charles to honor himself at other people's expense and other people's inconvenience. It's not the biggest scandal of the Trump administration by any means, but in some ways it's the most revealing. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm David Frum. I hope you'll return next week for another episode. [Music] Frum: This episode of was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's Plot Against the 2026 Elections
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum opens with a warning about President Donald Trump's behind-the-scenes strategy to subvert the 2026 midterm elections, by creating chaos to justify his use of extreme executive power. David also discusses how Trump's feud with Elon Musk reveals a deeper truth about power in the postdemocracy Republican Party. Then David is joined by Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego to discuss how Democrats can win the votes of young men, the importance of free trade and patriotism in today's Democratic Party, and how Gallego has been so successful with Latino voters at a time when Latino men are trending so strongly Republican. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week is Senator Ruben Gallego from Arizona, one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party. I recorded my interview with Senator Gallego on June 5, and at that time, I also recorded a monologue talking about the White House farce, tragedy, conflict between Elon Musk and Donald Trump—Elon Musk being the richest man in the world, the biggest contributor to the Trump campaign, the de facto chief of staff and vice president to Donald Trump; and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. But one of the lessons of the Trump years is: It never pays to do things early. You always want to leave things to the last minute because however outrageous the big story on Thursday is, there may be something that happens on the weekend that is even bigger. And so it is. So we're topping that topper with another topper. Over the weekend, there was an outbreak of unruly protest, disorderly protest, and even violent protest in Los Angeles against immigration raids by the Trump administration. I'm at some distance; I wasn't an eyewitness. I'm relying on news reports, and there's some uncertainty about exactly what happened, but it looks like rocks were thrown at ICE vehicles. Protesters tried to impede ICE officers doing their duty. Fireworks were shot off. A car seems to have been set on fire. Now, all of this is illegal, disorderly, and must, of course, be met by the force of law. Fortunately, there are nearly 9,000 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, uniformed officers with the right to arrest. And the state of California—in cities and counties and at the state level—deploys, altogether, more than 75,000 uniformed officers with arrest powers. So given the state of the situation, there looked to be nothing that the state of California couldn't cope with on its own. Mercifully, at the time I record today, there were no reports of any injury to any law-enforcement personnel, which, if correct, gives you some idea of the disorderly and upsetting, but genuinely limited, nature of the lawbreaking on hand. Nevertheless, President Trump announced an intent to federalize California's National Guard and send 2,000 military personnel into the state, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in with an offer of sending actual Marines from bases in California. Now, this is being reported as, in some ways, an immigration story, but it's really much, much more than that. By the way, as it happened, it looks like the National Guard was never sent (or certainly wasn't sent in time), and the Marines also weren't sent. I think a way to think about what happened in California this weekend is as a trial run, a test, a practice for things that Donald Trump has in mind in 2026. Observers of the Trump administration have noted a strange paradox. On the one hand, Donald Trump is doing one after another outrageous act of seeming violation of rules, seeming illegality, selling billions of dollars of coins to persons unknown, accepting foreign jets—things that, if he loses the protection of control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2026, portend a world of trouble and even legal jeopardy for him in the second two years of his administration. And yet, facing that danger, Donald Trump has blithely done one thing after another that seems guaranteed to lose him at least the House, and maybe both House and Senate, in 2026: the tariffs, this tax bill that offers very little to ordinary people, the economy slowly being ground into recession under the burden of all of his restrictive actions. I mean, to do tariffs and an immigration crackdown at the same time is really asking for an economic slowdown. So how do you make sense of this? Does Donald Trump not know that the elections are coming? Does he not sense the danger that he's in, of what will happen to him, of what could happen to him should his party lose its ability to protect him in House and Senate? Well, I think the answer is: Donald Trump does know, and he does have a scheme to protect himself, but it's not doing popular things to keep his majorities in Congress. It's looking for ways to subvert the 2026 elections to prevent them from happening, or at least to control them so they don't threaten him at all. Now, we have had some inklings of Donald Trump's thinking along these lines. We saw them in 2020, when people close to Donald Trump—like his former national security adviser Michael Flynn—advised him to use the military to suppress the 2020 vote. But Flynn's advice in 2020 came too late. The election had already happened. Flynn was looking to overturn an election in the past, not to prevent an election in the future. And that's a big thing to do, especially when court after court after court has ruled that the president and his supporters' claims against the 2020 election were utterly meritless. Also, Donald Trump in 2020 had a military around him that was not likely to obey illegal orders. Under Secretary of Defense [Mark] Esper and under chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, the Defense Department had said, Look—we will follow any lawful order of the president. But when the president suggests shooting protesters —as he did during the George Floyd riots— we're going say, 'Mr. President, are you quite sure? I'm not gonna take a hint here. I need an order, and I need it maybe in writing, so that when I am court-martialed, I can show, 'The president told me to shoot those people.'' And Donald Trump always backed down because he couldn't rely on Esper and Milley to take the hint about what he wanted done. But here's how his mind worked. We saw this in 2018. In October 2018, as Donald Trump was heading toward midterm elections that would cost him his majority in the House of Representatives, he began to get very upset about an immigration caravan that was supposedly—a so-called caravan that was—heading toward the border. And he began talking in October 2018 about needing a state of emergency to do something about this, to freeze the border, to militarize the southern states. Now, that didn't go very far. In the first term, Trump's talk was often much more radical than Trump's actions. But you could see the way his mind was going. The president has very broad and quite messy emergency powers. He can do a lot of different things by invoking a state of emergency. He thought about it in 2018. He thought about it in 2020. He wasn't able to do it either time. But in 2026, he's going to have a very different kind of administration around him. He's got a former talk-show host as a secretary of defense, one with a long list of allegations of heavy drinking and allegations of sexual abuse against him, who's completely beholden to Donald Trump. There are similarly beholden people running the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. There's a striking lack of independent voices of people with substantial reputations and long-proven integrity—and, for that matter, proven loyalty to the law of the United States. He's got the administration of his dreams, and he's got the problem of a lifetime: the risk of losing the House of Representatives. So what's the plan? The state of emergency. And that was tested in California. Now, how would this work? Theoretically, of course. We don't know any of this. I'm just telling you how a criminally minded person might advise the president. The president doesn't have a button he can press to stop elections. Elections are administered by the states. But what the president can do is put pressure on certain states, or delay or stop elections in certain states in order to convene the House of Representatives, which will be full of newly elected people from his states and vacancies from the other states. There's some precedent for this. In 2018, the island of Saipan, which is a U.S. territory, was hit by a devastating typhoon, and the governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands issued a series of emergency declarations—he's acting under federal executive power; it's not a state—including ordering postponing elections that were to be held in the territory for two weeks, including an election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Northern Marianas have a nonvoting delegate. No one questioned this. It's a genuine typhoon, and things really were terribly, terribly disrupted. And two weeks is not so long to wait for the right to vote in the face of a genuine emergency. But that was a proof of the power to delay an election that could be wielded by a functionary of the executive branch. Back during Reconstruction, the Grant administration often sent federal troops into areas where there was Ku Klux Klan activity to postpone elections, reorganize elections, redo elections. Again, that was Reconstruction; they were facing terroristic violence that was threatening the rights of, in South Carolina, half the population of the state. But there are precedents here. Now, imagine this in 2026. President Trump provokes some kind of outbreak in California or in some other blue state. He declares a state of emergency. He sends the National Guard. And he says elections have to be postponed until order is restored. That may be weeks; it may be months. In the meantime, there are no representatives from California in the U.S. House of Representatives. With missing blue-state representatives, the red-state people will continue their majority, even though they would likely lose it in a free and fair election in 2026. I'm not saying this is something that will happen, but it's something that could happen, and I think it was something we just saw tested. So I think as President Trump's mind wanders into places where no president's mind has ever wandered before, it's going to fall upon all of us to let our minds follow afterwards—to listen to the hints, to listen to things that sound crazy, to listen to people who sound crazy, because they may be the prophets of what's to come. And now some thoughts on the Elon Musk–Donald Trump dispute, and then my interview with Senator Ruben Gallego. [ Music ] Frum: Everyone's talking about this. It's hard to think of anything additional to say beyond what's been said. But there's a point that I'd like to flag that I think has not gone discussed enough, which is: It's kind of insulting and kind of dangerous that American citizens have to care about this kind of personal dispute at the highest levels of government. The question of whose side you're on in this kind of personality spat is not something you expect to see in a rule-of-law government. In an authoritarian regime, for sure. Presidents and secret-police chiefs fall out, and one will assassinate the other, send the other to prison. There will be coups and countercoups. But in a democratic rule-of-law system of government, personality is supposed to count not for nothing, but for a lot less. These are all functionaries. These are all servants of the people, highly replaceable. And when they dispute, historically, we expect their disputes to reflect something other than their mere selfish-ego needs. For example, at the beginning of the Biden administration, there was a big dispute between former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, one of the most important outside advisers of the Biden administration, and many of the economic insiders in the Biden administration. Summers warned that the spending plans of the Biden administration were probably too big for the needs of the economy and were likely to generate inflation. As it happened, he was right, but that's not the point. Others in the Biden administration said, No, we made a mistake in the Obama administration, not spending enough before we were out of the woods. And anyway, this is an opportunity to get done a lot of things that we and the Democratic Party think are important. So we want to proceed with these spending plans, even at the risk of inflation. And there was a big dispute about that. As I said, Summers was right, but that was hard to know in advance. The other people were certainly motivated by sincere concerns for their vision of the public good. And sometimes it got a little testy, and some personality issues did flare up, and people made ad hominem arguments, as they will. But what everyone understood was: This is not an argument about Summers trying to dominate the insiders, and the insiders trying to dominate Summers. They were talking about something important to the public well-being: How big should the Biden post-COVID recovery plans be? How much money should be spent? How much debt should be incurred? This was something that honest and intelligent people could have meaningful, impersonal disagreements about, even if, as I said, ego gets attached, tempers flare, and the unfortunate things are said. That's the way it's supposed to be. And you can find examples of this in many other administrations. Hawks during the Cold War days—there were always disputes between the hawks and the doves, between those who wanted to have a more forward policy toward the Soviet Union and those who wanted to try harder on detente, those who were more optimistic about China and those who were less optimistic. And always the question of: Where does the government spend its money? How? On what? All of these things cause tensions and disputes. And you'll find them in back issues of old periodicals about the events of the day. But the theory was, and the practice usually was, that the issues drove the personalities, not the personalities drove the issues. It was not a question of personalities in dispute looking for reasons, looking for weapons to use against each other in the form of issues. It was a dispute about real issues: Should the government spend more after COVID? Should it spend less? How real is the risk of inflation in 2021, versus how real is the risk of persistent long-term unemployment? That's the way it's supposed to be. What's going on between Trump and Elon Musk is like something out of (you'd read it in the pages of) Tacitus in the Roman empire, something out of postcolonial states, something you'd see in the Soviet Union when the secret police would dispute with the army. This is about egos and imperatives, about two people who see themselves as independent of anybody else and as principals, not as servants of the public. It's a question of personalist government. I mean, think how weird and anomalous and really sinister the position of Elon Musk was. Elon Musk was the head of a government department. Now, formally, other people were named as the head of this DOGE—whatever, the Department of Government Efficiency—but Musk was given status as a special government employee. Everyone could see he was in charge. He hired other outside people and brought them in. All of this at the same time as he was one of the government's largest contractors, and at the same time as he was an independent businessman who had not divested any of his companies. Normally, if you're a business leader and you go into government, you have to sever yourself from your business interests to avoid conflict-of-interest rules, which are not just opinions in the government but are actually backed by the force of law, or used to be—that if someone in government employ uses his power or her power to do something that advantages his business interests or hers, or to disadvantage a competitor or hers, that's against the law. And there are a variety of statutes that can catch you up. Musk every day was ignoring all of those practices and rules and legislation, some of them backed by the force of criminal sanction. And the people who he brought into government, again, they often had outside interests or had past concerns that would've subjected them to conflict-of-interest rules. All of that, ignored. They imposed big cuts in important areas of government—not just the tragedy of cutting the HIV program in Africa, PEPFAR, that saved tens of millions of lives since it was initiated by President George W. Bush, but Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service. Agencies that directly bore on the active business interests of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, these were shut down by Elon Musk. And maybe all those IRS employees who were in charge of auditing high-income individuals, maybe those SEC people who were dealing with allegations of SEC issues involving Musk, maybe they were all irrelevant and unnecessary and redundant and overstaffed. Or maybe they were just in the way, and somebody used personal power to get rid of them—personal power that was converted into state power to get rid of them. Now, Musk is not activated just by self-interest. He does have these weird ideological ticks that seem to be getting weirder. And those have been part of what has driven the United States government too. The United States is turning away refugees from everywhere, including people who serve the United States and Afghanistan, and it's rolling out a red carpet for white Afrikaner farmers. I don't know—maybe they've got a claim. I'm not hostile to the white Afrikaner farmers. But it is strange that there's a locked door for everybody else and a red carpet for the people with whom Elon Musk identifies, as his family originally comes from South Africa. Again, this is a question of using state power for personal ends. Look—the statement that is supposed to define the United States government is that it's a government of laws, not men. The rules and regulations, the government is always supposed to be more powerful, more enduring, more important than the people who work in it. And the people there are there to serve. But that idea really does seem to be jettisoned—not just abandoned, but actively jettisoned, repudiated—in the Trump years. And this dispute exemplifies it. Musk's particular criticisms of Trump's so-called big—what do you [call it]? Big, bouncing baby boy—whatever he calls that bill. Musk's may well be valid. The bill is irresponsible; it does add a lot of money to the debts and deficits in the out years. There's a kind of card trick going on here, where, in 2017, when Trump passed his first tax cut or the tax cut of the first administration, the only reason it met the deficit-and-debt rules that it had to be passed under was by saying it would expire in 2025. Now that it is expiring in 2025, the Trump people say, Well, it doesn't really cost anything, because we're largely extending tax cuts that were passed in 2017. Yeah. But in 2017, you said they would expire, and that's why they had one price. If they don't expire, they have a different price, and you're engaged in a kind of hustle. And so Musk's criticisms of this, they may well be true. But he's not criticizing because he's motivated by a disinterested concern for the public finances. Remember how his interests were exempted from all the budget cuts that were imposed on other people. He's mad at Trump for his own reasons, and so he's using a weapon at hand. In his case, at least one of the things he's reaching for is true. The others—accusing Trump of being in the Epstein files—those may be more far-fetched. But he's reaching for everything he can get—but not because he cares about these issues, but because he's asserting his own ego to punish someone he's mad at. And Trump is doing the same. Trump is threatening to withdraw government business from Elon Musk's companies. And, again, look—there's a strong case that Starlink and SpaceX should not be in private hands, the United States government should take them over. These are essential to national security. And if it's true that Elon Musk turned off Starlink to disadvantage the Ukrainians, he was using his corporate power for personal, ideological, or other interests at the expense of the public welfare. So that has to be dealt with. But Donald Trump, again, is not motivated by impersonal concern for the public welfare. He's punishing an opponent. And so suddenly, conflict-of-interest rules that didn't interest him 15 minutes ago are suddenly the order of the day. We are having a breakdown of the rule-of-law system in the United States. I've often worried that you could have a Trump administration, or you could have the rule of law in the United States, but not both. You could have Elon Musk in government, or you could have government be pure of conflicts of interest, but not both. The law is the victim of both these men. And both of them need to be run out of town as fast as possible, after which, let the law take its course. And now my conversation with Senator Ruben Gallego. But first, a quick break. Frum: The story of Senator Ruben Gallego is both an amazing story of personal achievement and also a classic American narrative of what this country can deliver. A son of immigrants in this country from Latin America, Ruben Gallego grew up in Chicago in a single-parent home. He joined the Marine Corps while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He served in combat in Iraq in a unit fiercely engaged with the insurgency. He settled in Arizona after his military service, was elected to the state assembly as a Democrat, then defied the red wave of 2014 to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives in that difficult year. Here's where the high political drama begins. In 2018, Arizona Democrats elected Kyrsten Sinema to the U.S. Senate. In office, Sinema became alienated from her party and ultimately declared herself an independent. Congressman Gallego emerged as the leading challenger to Sinema's reelection. She decided not to run again, rather than face him. He then faced the ultra-Trumpy election denier Kari Lake in the general election of 2024, and beat her too. Along the way, Gallego's own image as a fighting progressive has shifted toward the political center. He's now regarded by many Democrats as one of their brightest future stars, and it's a pleasure and honor to welcome him to The David Frum Show. Senator, thank you for joining us today. Ruben Gallego: Gracias, David. Frum: I'm speaking to you from about as deep inside the beltway as you can get—like, almost the buckle of the beltway. And some of our viewers may share that same condition with me. So just to enlighten all of us, when you said your constituents want a ' big-ass truck,' how big-ass is the truck they want? Gallego: (Laughs.) Well, big enough for them to feel like they've succeeded in life. And I think that's, basically, what I'm trying to say. And when I joked about it, it really is somewhat true. Like, if you grow up, like I did, in a working-class Latino family, your measure of success was what people would consider artificial, but is actually real. It's the real, tangible things: Buying a home, being able to get a nice truck that is responsive to the fact that you worked hard for this, and you took a lot of pride in that truck. You wash that truck on the driveway every weekend, with your kids. And when we can't deliver that as a party—me and Democrats as a party—if these men feel that we're not able to get them that future that can allow them to buy that 'big-ass truck,' or take that vacation, or feel a little more comfortable, or buy that house, or start that business, then we're going to lose their votes. Frum: Well, let me ask you about that lesson. So I was going through the leadership of both parties, House and Senate, and I'm struck that leader after leader comes from about as safe a state as you can get: South Dakota; Wyoming; or New York, New York. And that's true, by the way, with the executive branch too. Donald Trump used to be a New Yorker, but he became a Floridian to run again in 2024. J. D. Vance comes from what used to be a swing state, Ohio—not a swing state anymore. You're one of the very few people who's in the national conversation who comes from a highly competitive state, possibly even the most competitive state. So as someone who's won elections in a competitive state, what lessons do you think you have for the people who are looking at politics from the safety of the sidelines? Gallego: Well, I think one of the things that you could give the credit to, really, me and Mark Kelly, for example, my senior senator, is that we don't have the luxury of being in anything safe. And one of the benefits about Arizona, too, is that there is no real bubble in Arizona. I guess you could be in a political bubble if you want, but, you know, Democrats and Republicans live next to each other. They're still friends. They still hang out. They still work together. This is why you saw so many Gallego-Trump voters, right? Because these are the people that can make these nuanced separations of who they want, who they think best represents them. And it also means that you can't avoid what is going on or what people's fears are. You know, one of the things that I think was very instructive for us—at least, like, just generally for my campaign—is that one of the things that that helped us is that we were very realistic about what was happening out there, what people were feeling. And while everyone was trying to say that the economy was getting better—because I think I'm in a competitive state, and, generally, I don't really live in an uppity area; I live in a working-class area in South Phoenix; I really get to touch real grass all the time—and I heard it from people at the grocery store, at the gas stations that they were just having a tough time making ends meet. And this isn't 2022 when I'm hearing this. I'm hearing this in early 2024. I'm hearing the sense of desperation that they're just working so hard, and they're just not getting anywhere. Or these young men and women that are looking at the world that they don't understand anymore, because, you know, for Arizona, four years ago, if you had a family making middle-class, middle-income salary, you could afford a house. Now the average house in Arizona is about $530,000. And good luck, you know, finding that house; it's probably far out in the middle of nowhere and, on average, a 7.5 percent mortgage. And so we talked to the voter about what they wanted to hear and talk about and what they were worried about. When everyone was trying to deny that there was a problem at the border, every Democrat was trying to deny the problem at the border, we knew that that was just not the case. And people were still talking about the border. They were worried about it, and they were mad at Democrats for allowing this chaos to happen. Instead of running away from it, we ran right to the fight and brought the arguments about why we were better than our opponent on these issues. And I think that ended up being one of the saving graces, why we're able to outperform really all Senate Democrats in the country, considering, especially, that Arizona does have about 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats. We have no choice as candidates—me, Mark Kelly, other statewide candidates—to make sure that we are actually figuring out a way to win in a bipartisan manner, by keeping our values also as Democrats but also delivering to Arizona. We have no choice. We have to do it. Frum: One of the things I noticed about Democrats from sort of the safer areas is: They attach a lot of importance to words, and often more importance to words rather than to things. And I'm struck here— Gallego: Or deeds, yeah. Frum: There's been a project to evaluate why Democrats are doing poorly with men. And when you read the discussion about it, it's all about changing the way we speak, changing the way we frame things. The idea that there might actually be something of substance that is the problem, that's not something that seems to be very acceptable. Now, you don't have that luxury. Gallego: I don't have the luxury. But also, it's like you don't—the Democrats are all about data until they don't like the data. The data for men is: They're just not doing well. This is not just Black men, Latino men. This is all men, right? We have the lowest amount of college attainment. Salaries are going down. Life expectancies are going down. There's just this general discontent within the male population. If you just look at the data, you would say, Hey—this population of the United States is not doing well. We should figure out what to do about it. Let's have conversations. Let's have town halls. Let's have real studies about this. And what you see, and what I've seen in the past, is there's this—I try not to exaggerate how sometimes the Democrats can be anti-male, but there is a certain amount of that that does happen. When you start talking about it, people are saying, like, Oh, you're concentrating on males and forgetting X, Y, Z population, which I don't think is the case. I think we care about Americans. We should care about all Americans. And if men aren't doing well, us as a party who are supposed to care for the people that are not doing well, we should do something about it. And we could do, at the same time, making sure we're protecting women's rights, making sure that women are also at the forefront of everything, that we're protecting the LBGTQ community, all these kinds of things, right? But the fact is, for some reason, Democrats have gotten sheepish about this. You know, there's people that are involved in different types of think tanks about the status of men and boys, and they're largely frozen out of the conversations around Democratic policy making, because what we want is: We want the male vote, but we want it cheaply. We want the male vote to come to us without us getting some other interest groups pissed off. And we also want the male vote to come with us, and we want it to be within our safe little tent of ideas and ideology, and we want them to be perfectly fine to fit with all of our other friends. Which, guess what? That's just not how we're going to win. We're going to have to accept that some of these male voters are not going to be aligned with certain sectors of our tent if we want to win. If we don't want to win, then fine. Accept that we're going to be a small tent, and hopefully we win once in a while. But in reality: The Democrats want the male vote without actually having to work the male vote. And they think they can just throw a bunch of dudes on podcasts and, you know, bro it up, and that's somehow going to solve the problem. It's not going to solve the problem. Frum: One thing that has been attended in the Trump years—and you can say this is actually a good thing about America, and maybe even one of Donald Trump's few positive legacies—is the American melting pot does continue to bubble along. You can see it as early as the 2010s, but you can really see it happening in the 2020s, that we are seeing a big decrease in race and ethnic polarization in the United States. But we're paying for it by having this big increase in sex polarization. So men are men. Women are women. Wherever they come from, whatever the color of their skin, the women are voting more like each other; the men are voting more like each other. So the melting pot is bubbling, but the wall of separation between the sexes seems to be getting higher and higher. Gallego: Yeah, a hundred percent. And look—some of it is COVID-induced. Some of it is: They're listening to different things. One of the things we knew instinctively, because growing up Latino and working class: Latino men do not intently watch Univision, Telemundo. They don't intently follow politics. They largely are disconnected from the normal avenues of—well, I would say that normal people kind of consume news and political news. And one of the things that I emphasized on my campaign early on is a nontraditional way to reach these men, because you've got to understand the way these guys are. I mean, when I was in construction, I would wake up at 6 a.m., go to the site. Hopefully, it'd be done by 3 p.m. but probably not. So maybe you're back at home by 5 p.m. You're dirty as hell. You're smelly as hell. You're jumping in the shower, and then maybe, you know, you're in time—you've made it home in time for dinner, right? You're sitting down to dinner, and then you have probably a couple hours before you zonk out to start the next day. Do you want to spend that time watching the news? Do you want to spend that time talking politics? No. You want to spend time with your family or with your friends, because your day sucked, and it's going to suck again tomorrow. And so you do this rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. So where are they getting all their information from? Well, a couple places. Number one, they're getting it from their other coworkers at worksites—which by the way, people forget when it comes to Latino men, the people they're most likely to work with besides other Latino men are white working-class men, right? And white working-class men are very much politically involved and have a lot of political information that they're getting. And they're sharing it with their Latino coworkers, right? And number two, they're living off their phones through different social media, whether it's Instagram, Snapchat, or all this kind of stuff, Twitter. So one of the things that we emphasize is trying to figure out how to get a message, a vibe, about who I was to these Latino male voters early on, so that way they understood, like, Ruben Gallego is a Democrat. Ruben Gallego says he's for the working class. But then we also had a very strong cultural attachment. Like, He understands me. He actually worked at factories, worked in construction, understands the dignity of work, the responsibility of a man to his family, to provide for his family, and how important that is to me as a man. And that kind of stuff, we are afraid to approach to get these men to start considering us as Democrats. And then, because we never talk about it, we never give them the dignity of allowing them to be family leaders and not making them feel bad about being family leaders. And then we're surprised when, year after year, we don't continue to have this conversation with us, they keep on moving away from us. And it's a dumb trade-off, because we continue to do that because we think that somehow we're going to piss off female voters. And I don't think that's the case. Female voters are worried about their sons or daughters and their husbands. They're worried about the fact that they're becoming less social. They're worried about the fact that they're not actually being productive in life. And they want to have good husbands—heck, they want to have good ex -husbands that are involved with their kids' lives, and they're making good pay and paying their child support, things of that nature. But for some reason, the Democrats have continued this trade-off, and it's going to continue going until we realize: Making sure [of] people's economic needs will cross all racial barriers and, if you do it rightly, will also cross these gender gaps that we're seeing. Frum: Well, let me ask you: You're famous for having banned the use of the term Latinx from any communication you do. But let me ask you about a term you've been using: Latino. You're originally from Chicago. If someone practiced politics in Chicago 100 years ago and someone said there's this thing called an Eastern European o —Croat, Serbs, they're the same; Poles, Ukrainians are the same; everybody loves the Ashkenazi Jews—it's just one thing. Gallego: I think if Chicago, like—if you weren't Irish or Scottish or Polish, you were Bohemian. That's the way they would describe any European that they couldn't describe. Yeah. And then me, growing up, you were Spanish or Mexican, if you were lucky, or Puerto Rican. Frum: But let me ask you this: Is this concept of Latino helping anybody understand anything at all? And as particularly the Democratic Party, that a lot of Democratic Party politics has been driven over the past quarter century by the idea, Okay, there's this new minority. They all come from the same continent and half a continent—because Mexico, of course, is in North America—and most of them speak Spanish, some speak Portuguese, some speak indigenous languages. But we're going to group them into a thing, and we're just going to assume we own them, and they're going to naturally gravitate to voting for us. They're going to be in opposition to the standard organization of American society, and they're going to want minority set-asides. And that's the way to talk to them. And the very invention of the concept of Latino has been a disabling—part of your family comes from Columbia; part of your family comes from Mexico. Those are very different historical experiences. Gallego: Oh, hell yeah. Frum: And with Eastern Europeans, we would understand if your father was Serbian and your mother was Croat, that didn't make you an Eastern European o; that made you a person with two different heritages that you had to balance. Gallego: I think the mistake that happened, it's like the names don't matter so much. Now go back to why Latinx matters versus Latino: What happened within the progressive left, as well as the Democratic Party, is that you had all these Latinos that kept voting Democratic, right? Yeah, no matter what. And the difference was two things. Number one: There was discrimination against Latinos. I mean, you saw signs going into the 1970s, you know, no spics, no dogs allowed. In the Southwest, there was housing discrimination, there was educational discrimination. And of course, that drove those voters to the Democratic Party, because we were the only party, really, that was outright for equality. The level of income attainment was extremely low. So the Latino population on average was poorer than the Anglo population. And the Democrats were the party of the middle class, a working class of: Who's going to protect your rights? Who's going to protect your wages? Who's going to give you an opportunity to go to a good school and live the American dream? That was the Democratic Party. What happened is: the Democratic Party kind of kept on evolving, and the Latino population kept growing bigger and bigger. The Latino population changed—and I don't mean change, as in there was new populations that came in, except for the Cubans; that's another tangent and a weird story there. But we got bigger, and we also got richer within our population. And even though, on average, Latinos are poorer, we have a lot of great success stories in America, right? If you look at the police forces in a lot of our big cities, you have a lot of Latino police forces. You have a lot of Latino firemen. So there's been this—and this is a good story, by the way. This is a good story. This is what you want to happen to your immigrant communities, right? This is the story of the American dream. We are moving up to middle class; we're moving everything else. And so the Democratic Party just never changed as the Latino population was changing, right? And if anything, it actually went further away from what they were, right? Focusing more on social issues and not so much on the economic issues that we were known for. And then also, just adopting things that the Latino community would naturally be against, right? Open borders, for example, was something that if you had Latino friends, they would've told you, Well, that's dumb. Like, why? Why would you do that? Kind of the anti-police rhetoric. We live in neighborhoods where we want police to treat us well but also to be present, and this anti-police rhetoric that took off for many years affects them, especially, again, when we have so many people that are in the military—sorry, in the police force. And this kind of moving away from this idea of patriotism being a core value of the Democratic Party and understanding that America is an exceptional country and we should pride and value that, it goes against the grain of what Latinos know, right? Our kids serve in the military. We actually come here because we think it's an exceptional country. And when Arizona—sorry, when Democrats are sheepish about talking about the country in that way, it does an impact. Frum: Well, let me ask you about the military. So you were in Iraq. You served with a unit that took a lot of casualties. You saw some hard things. Some of the people in your cohort who returned from Iraq, like the serving vice president, have been radicalized and embittered—or so they say that's why they've been radicalized and embittered. He wasn't radicalized and embittered. I knew him when he immediately came back from Iraq, and he wasn't radicalized and embittered then, but the farther the experience recedes, the more embittered he becomes about it. Other people who have served in the post-9/11 wars—like your former House colleague Dan Crenshaw, like some of your Senate colleagues, Tammy Duckworth—they retain their faith in America's purposes in the world, that American military power is a necessary thing and a force for good. How do you process your military experience, and how does it affect the way you think about America's role in the world and America's military in the world? Gallego: Yeah, I mean, for me, it's pretty interesting just because, I mean, the vice president and I were actually in Iraq at the same time. He was serving on a base called Al Asad, and I was a frontline infantry unit that was never on base. And actually, my unit was from Ohio, so the Reserve unit I served with, Lima 3/25. And as you know, we ended up, unfortunately, seeing a lot of combat and lost a lot of men. And I actually did come back embittered. I came back embittered at the administration for sending me to a bogus war to begin with. And they sent me to a bogus war without the equipment that I needed, that got a lot of my men killed—and the manpower, by the way, because I was covering an area the size of West Virginia with only a company of men, or battalion, I should say. And so I was very embittered at our government about that. But it never made me an isolationist, because I think, looking at the world in a rational way, we can't afford to be isolationist. I want security for the future of my kids, and I want economic security too. Part of that is going to be that we have to have friends, and we need strong friends. Because we don't have the mass that China has. And I'm not talking about the military mass—because I don't want to go to war with China—but we don't actually have the actual manpower, economic leverage that we have, unless we have other friends, unless we have other allies. And when it comes to any kind of military support, having other friends that are with us. And I want to prevent wars. I think the best way for us to prevent wars is to have alliances, is to believe in actual treaty obligations, and also to find ways to prevent wars through multilateralism, through investments in bringing down, for example, poverty around the world. I mean, one of the reasons why I had such a hard time fighting over there is because everybody in western Iraq was trying to kill me, and some of these people weren't even trying to kill me because they were idealogues, but because they were poor. Some insurgent was going to give him a hundred bucks just to drop an IED at the side of the road, right? Like, I saw the actual results of instability in the world. And yes, there was a lot of bad leadership decisions and somewhat criminal decisions that came from the Bush administration. But tearing down the system that has actually brought the longest amount of peace, in general, in the longest time since World War II is just plain dumb. And some of the things that I think actually motivates these people to actually try to destroy these institutions is because: If there's less institutions that are connecting us, if there's more isolationism, it actually empowers the most powerful people within this country, which I don't think we want either. I see this as the opposite way. It doesn't mean we have to be everywhere. I certainly have not supported engagements or potential engagements all around the world. I supported us, for example, when it came to the JCPOA, because I don't want to go to war with Iran, under President Obama. I've been against some of our potential expeditions and longstanding, overstayed, and out of compliance with some of our rules and regulations in terms of operating overseas, like in Syria and other countries. And I think we should have deep oversight. But this idea that we're just going to go to zero and close down the borders, I think is just not, when it comes to our alliances, is just not realistic. It's not going to happen, and I think it's going to make more unsafe than anything else, and I think will actually lead us to more of a situation in terms of a confrontation with China than less. Frum: You're on the border, and the Trump administration, one of its areas of greatest military adventurism has been with increased military activity in Mexico. They're overlying drones. They say the drones are unarmed, but they're drones that are capable of being armed. It looks like they didn't give the Mexican government advanced notice of all the drones that are flying. President Trump, the vice president, many others in the Republican Party have spoken about taking some kind of military action inside the territory of Mexico or on the seas that are just outside Mexico's territorial waters. How do you think about that as someone who represents Arizona? Gallego: We want, and we do have, a good relationship with the Mexican government in Arizona. Our police forces will talk to their police forces. They have problems. There's no doubt there's corruption. There's no doubt. But what you've seen is when some of the best outcomes have always been when we've actually worked with our friends and treated them like friends and allies, and helped them build their capability to fight back, fight corruption, fight these cartels, fight these terrorists. You've seen some of the best COIN operations in, for example, Colombia that were effective. And I think we could continue doing that. But if we decide to do these unilateral actions without working with these countries, without giving them some level of respect, we're going to end up having less support from that government, but less support from the people who will continue to hide these horrible, horrible humans that are also terrorizing these communities. It's also very insulting to a lot of—and this is something that I've seen that we've done, not just to them but to sort of Afghan allies we're not rolling in. It's insulting to them as if they don't have some agency, right? Thousands and thousands of Mexican police officers, government workers die every year fighting these cartels. And the fact that we kind of give this whole broad brush and say they're all corrupt, they're all evil I think is something that's going, again, to not help us make friends where we need friends to fight these organizations. Frum: Well, you mentioned Columbia. Until a little while ago, it looked like one of the big successes of American policy in the 21st century: Plan Columbia that restored order, the reorientation of the Columbian economy away from drugs to exporting agricultural goods that serve people rather than killed people. Columbia got hit with a wave of tariffs by the Trump administration. Now he's helped to legitimate the far left that has come back into Colombian politics. Is that a situation that you follow, and what lessons do you see for countering surgency from the Colombian experience? Gallego: Yeah, I do follow it a lot. Look—you know, when President Petro of Columbia really used this opportunity to kind of create this jingoistic situation where you're able to draw attention to the sins of what the United States is doing, and not necessarily the things that are occurring in Columbia, which economically aren't great. And when you're putting tariffs, you're creating two things: Number one, for your kind of marginal farmer, especially out in rural Colombia, doing, you know—export farming is profitable, but not that much. And it is also fairly marginal, right? It is a lot more profitable for you to farm and harvest cocoa, right? And other, drug, products. And so you're making an economic incentive for people to move away. You're also messing with our economy, too (the United States economy), because talking to some of these big industries down there who import American flour, corn, soy—they're right now looking for new partners anywhere else besides the United States because they don't want to deal with the drama of Am I under a tariff? versus Am I not under a tariff? You know, their biggest import from the United States is actually soy, which is ridiculous considering they're essentially next to—they share a border with—Brazil. Now, you know, the Brazilian soy market is hunting around in Colombia, trying to basically say, like, We're your better partner. They're gonna—look: They're gonna try to get flour from somewhere else. You know, the Colombian farmers, because it's a very volcanic earth, really value American tractors and farm equipment because they're solid. You know, they have a great reputation. They're easy to fix. The parts are easy to get. And now they're trying to get new products from Korea, from China, from Europe, because they don't want to deal every year, again, with whether your tractor is going to end up having a 10 percent, 20 percent tariff or counter-tariffs. So this is the instability we're causing. That what was essentially unnecessary instability, right? Because Colombia has always accepted Colombians that are being returned for deportation. All they were asking is, like, Hey—just don't bring them in a military plane and we're fine. And I think that's some of the least thing we—one of the things we could do to keep relations, to keep the flow going, obviously, people that should be deported. But, you know, we end up, again, shooting ourselves in the foot because the way that this administration does security is they focus on being tough and not smart. They focus on showing, like, We're gonna do these things, but at the end of the day, all they're doing is causing more chaos. They were talking about criminals, and now they're rounding up kids, rounding up parents, rounding up workers that we need, just so they could prove that they're wrong, when the voter really did not ask for that. They didn't ask for this, they asked for criminals. They asked for a tighter border; they got a tighter border. But now you're deporting families just so you could say you're hitting these arbitrary numbers that Stephen Miller wants. Frum: A lot of you—you talk about the harm of tariffs very eloquently. A lot of people in your party have been having a difficult time articulating a tariff message because they actually kind of like tariffs. If President Trump has been the most protectionist president since 1945, President Biden was the second-most. And so you hear a lot of Democrats saying things like, Well, I'm against dumb tariffs. I'm for smart tariffs, implying they're for smart tariffs, implying that there is or could be such a thing as a smart tariff. And the result is you have a very narrow difference. And to your point just now, I mean, when Democrats say, I want to do the same thing as Donald Trump, but I want to do it smarter, what a lot of people hear is not, Well, you are smarter. [It's] Oh, you're the party of people who think they're so smart, but you don't actually have a principled criticism of what the president does. You're just showing off that you think you're better educated and more intelligent. But you want to do the same thing, only with fancier words, the way you always want to do it. So are there Democrats who are going to be able to say, You know what? Tariffs are just dumb. Don't do them. We should trade in peace and freedom with the rest of the world? Gallego: Are there? —I mean, I'm not a miracle worker here, David. But look—what we've seen in terms of the turnaround in our economy, right? If you would've said eight years ago that the United States was gonna be able to manufacture the majority of the chips it needs within 10 years, we would've been like, You're freaking nuts, right? Because all the chip manufacturing was being done overseas. And within that short time period, we were able to stand up and move U.S. manufacturing of advanced chips to a point where we're going to be net exporters in the next couple years. That wasn't from tariff policy; that was from an actual industrial policy about how we're actually gonna brick this back, right? And we need to figure out how we can bring certain industries back and how we could do it smartly by competing, right? By having the best workers possible, by having the best industry possible, with having the best regulatory frameworks they could add to the tax policies, everything else. Like, that's how you make it. So you could actually bring these middle-class jobs back. But the other thing that really annoys me is that, like, who do they think works these middle-class jobs? Who do you think works these factories? Right now they're about, last I heard—I'd have to go back and check. But, you know, we're probably close to a million—sorry, we're at about a million factory jobs that are opening right now. Those are immigrants that work those jobs. When I was working at a meat factory, growing up, I got $1 more because I was the only one that spoke English—or, well, I spoke English. I'm sure there's others that spoke English too. But the people that worked at that factory were Mexican immigrants and Polish immigrants, right? So let's say we do build that steel plant here. First of all, let's find the investors that are willing to put in the seven to 10 years to build it. Like, the people that work in a lot of these places are the people that we're trying to kick out of this country right now, or won't let in. And so how are we—how is this smart in any way? Frum: You come from one of the most outward-facing states in America, in the country—a border state, a state with a dynamic economy, a state of entrepreneurship and immigration. If anyone's gonna carry a flag for open trade, free trade, it's gonna be a senator from Arizona. John McCain was a great free trader. Can we look to the senators from Arizona to lead the fight against tariffs and for free trade? Gallego: Yeah. No, like, I think I can't speak for the other senator, but what we've seen is, like, Arizona is richer because of trade—and not just, by the way, [with] Mexico, which, by the way, has definitely been a big driver, besides the fact that everyone just focuses on the security side of it. We are actually a richer state, and the country would be much richer if we actually made our ports of entries faster, more aggressive, and predictable in some regards because some people don't know when they're gonna come in. But we are now trading with, you know, all around the world. We just opened up a direct airline route, or will be soon, from Phoenix to Taiwan. Our jobs, our high-skilled jobs, our highest-paying jobs are due to trade. And in some regard, if we actually want stability, especially in the Western hemisphere, we should embrace free trade that, you know, emphasizes our brothers and sisters south of the border getting good-paying jobs, getting those industry jobs that we don't want to do in the United States, so they could stop the migrations that are moving here to the United States. There is a way for this all to be a win-win for the United States. And I think using our ability, in terms of our superpower—which I think our biggest superpower is actually human capital—where we can bring anyone from all around the world and use their drive, their brainpower and put it into this massive other amount of brainpower to experiences all around the world. We could outcompete anybody, but we actually have to believe in them. We have to make the investments in them. And I think that is going to be a better way to actually move the middle class, get them those jobs that they need, than these types of, like, ham-fisted tariff policies. Frum: Last question, because I know we have a hard out, and you've been very generous with your time. You came from a tough background. You had an astonishing career. Your talent was picked out early. You went to Harvard. You volunteered. You saw some dark things in combat. You came back. You chose politics after that background at a strikingly early age. You didn't get rich first. You went into politics directly. Gallego: I did want to get rich first, to be honest. (Laughs.) Frum: (Laughs.) Why did you choose politics? Gallego: You know, I think it really chose me. I always wanted to do government service. I actually thought that I was going to end up in the State Department, or the FBI, or something of that nature. I got back from the war—I mean, I was fucked up, to be honest. You know, my best friend died. It was seven months of just hard, hard combat. And then we got back and, you know, we were Reservists, and they just let us go, right? So two weeks after I get back from Iraq, I am given my orders, I throw my stuff in my sea bag, and they're, Right. You're out; you're gone. You know, no housing, nothing. And luckily, I had friends and family to fall upon. But then the stories started coming from my guys that they were having problems getting jobs. They were having problems getting VA treatments, getting into the VA—all these things that were just terrifying to me. And I was already pissed from the war because, again, they sent me to war without the proper armor on our vehicles, proper intelligence, without enough manpower, all this kind of stuff. And so I found myself talking more and more to these guys about—these guys, my brothers—trying to help them get into the VA, trying to help them get into school. You know, some of them were living on my couch for a little bit to keep them off the streets. And I started complaining to the state reps, to the state senators, Why can't my guys have in-state tuition? Marines would be overseas for three years, and they'd come back to their home state or to another state, and they say, like, Well, you never lived here. Like, Yeah, well, I've been gone forever. And it just kept on coming back and forth, back and forth, and I just kept complaining to congressmen and to everybody. And I realized that, I mean, everyone talks a big game, but no one really gives an f about us until they really need us. But I have a purpose here, and it's going to continue to service. You know, my guys and I are going to have our 20-year reunion this year. I'm 45. I'm one of the older side of veterans, and if I'm not doing this right now, you know, who's going to hold this administration to the fire? They want to cut 83,000 veteran—VA employees arbitrarily, right? And for me, I'm able to use my position as a veteran, as a combat veteran, and I'm pushing back on them. I'm not sure if I was here, would someone be doing as aggressively as I am? And I think that that tells me I'm doing something right. Frum: Thank you. Thank you for the time today. I'm really grateful. Thank you for the candor. It's been an interesting conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time for us. Bye-bye. Gallego: Appreciate it. Adios. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks so much to Senator Gallego for joining me here on The David Frum Show. Remember, if you enjoy this dialogue and similar content, please subscribe to The Atlantic. That's the best way to support the work of The David Frum Show and all of my Atlantic colleagues. I'm going to close with some farewell thoughts about the weekend ahead. If you are planning to fly into Washington, D.C., over the weekend of June 14, be prepared for a lot of airplane closures. Reagan National Airport will be closed, and traffic at the other regional airports is likely to be disrupted. The reason for this is the big parade scheduled for June 14. Now, ostensibly, this is a parade to salute the 250th anniversary of the United States Army, founded in June of 1775. But we all know this story is not true. The Continental Navy was founded in the fall of 1775, and the Marines shortly thereafter. They, too, are celebrating 250th anniversaries this year. No parade for them, because their anniversaries do not coincide with the birthday of President Trump. President Trump is throwing a big birthday bash for himself at public expense, making a parade, which he has wanted for a long time. And the Army is his excuse but not his motive. As I say, if it were the real thing, you would find a way to honor the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps together, all of them celebrating their 250th anniversary this year. Now, President Trump has wanted a big military parade since he saw one in France in his first term, on Bastille Day. The Army and the other services, the Department of Defense, resisted this demand for a long time, and for three main reasons. The first was the reason of expense. The Trump birthday party, the military component of it, will cost, all in—both the cost of the parade and the cost of repaving the city streets afterwards—probably in the vicinity of $100 million. That's a very large amount of money, even by military standards. And in the first term, at least, the money would've been spent at a time of general prosperity and pretty lax controls of spending. In the second term, President Trump is engaged in massive budget cuts throughout the rest of the government. We've eliminated the PEPFAR program for Africa that delivers anti-HIV drugs to Africans of all ages, and especially children. People's lives are at risk to save the $7 billion that PEPFAR costs. It's indecent to be cutting PEPFAR and throwing the president a $100 million birthday party. So the military has resisted on grounds of expense. They've also resisted on grounds of uselessness. Look—parades used to serve a purpose. The skills on display in a parade—marching in step, the cavalry trotting in line—those were highly relevant military skills in the days when armies fought in formation, when infantry formed into line, when cavalry moved at a trot. But in today's world, the skills that you need to do at a parade have nothing to do with how armies fight. And the weeks and weeks of preparation that the units have to do in order to be ready for the parade is just a waste of time. And these are all, by the way, highly paid, highly skilled professionals. Their time is valuable. We want our war fighters, as Secretary of Defense Hegseth calls them, to be preparing to fight actual 21st-century war, not demonstrating their skill and readiness to fight the wars of the 18th and early 19th century. But there's an even more fundamental reason that the Army resisted for such a long time, and that was: They sensed there was something political about these parades. Trump was not doing this, really, to salute the military. He was summoning the military to salute him. And the military, rightly, would never refuse an order, but they would point out, This is expensive. This is a distraction. And if you order us to do it, we will leak the details of how expensive and how useless it is to the newspapers, so that everyone will see what you are doing. That was the first term. But in this second term, the military is headed by people who—unlike the military leadership in the first term—under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, pose no resistance to the orders and demands and wishes and imperatives and whims of President Trump. The Hegseth DOD is an arm of Trump's PR politics. And so it's all parade, all the time. There is no one now to advocate for the interests of the national defense against the whims of the president. I think this you've all heard before, but there's something else I want to point out here. The idea that a president would cause massive inconvenience to the traveling public, disrupt the traffic of the District of Columbia, all to honor himself is a real slap in the face and a real denial of the fundamental relationship that the constitutional system envisions between the president and the people. The president is a public servant. He is the highest-ranking government employee. He's not the master. He's not the king. He's not the emperor. Traditionally, presidents receive no honor of any kind in their own lifetimes. If they had distinguished themselves in office, after they had passed then they would be honored in all kinds of ways: the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Monument. Everything's the other way around. I think it's the Lincoln Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. You'd issue postage stamps for them. The streets would be named for them, counties. There are Jackson Counties all over the United States. Presidents were honored after the end of their lifetime. But in their time, they were just another government employee, like the undersecretary of agriculture. And there certainly was no public commemoration of their birthdays. Donald Trump does not see himself as a public servant. He sees himself as a public master. That's why he's always demanding thanks for his allocation of government resources. When President Trump sends emergency assistance to a county that's in need, it's not his money. No one owes him any thank-you. He's doing his job, sending the public's money to the place where public law provides for it to go. And yet he thinks, because he is the president, he, therefore, is owed deference, he is owed obedience, he's owed thanks, and he's owed a parade. And this habit of thinking is spreading through his government. Other Cabinet secretaries have also given themselves birthday parties of public expense and have issued statements on Twitter saluting the Cabinet secretary for the birthday. It's a habit that grows from the top down, and it's a violation of the way that Americans used to conduct themselves. Look—in Britain, there's a long and lively tradition of military parades on the monarch's birthday. They troop the colors. In fact, this year, the trooping of the colors for King Charles's birthday will be June 14. Charles's birthday will be June 14, just like President Trump's parade. But Charles's parade is not on his actual birthday; his actual birthday is in November. but he's going to have his parade on June 14 because that's the best day for the public to watch it and enjoy it, and it's also the easiest day for the troops to parade. If you know London, you'd much rather parade in the June sunshine than in the November gloom and rain. So Charles, the king of England, is thinking of others when he arranges the continuation of the long-established tradition of the trooping of the colors on the monarch's birthday. President Trump, ostensibly a servant of the people, ostensibly a lowercase r Republican official, ostensibly just the highest-ranking person in the government bureaucracy—he's doing more than King Charles to honor himself at other people's expense and other people's inconvenience. It's not the biggest scandal of the Trump administration by any means, but in some ways it's the most revealing. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm David Frum. I hope you'll return next week for another episode. [ Music] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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04-06-2025
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- Yahoo
Why Are the Media So Afraid of Trump?
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic's David Frum opens with a warning about how Donald Trump's second term has brought a more systematic and punishing assault on American media, through regulatory pressure, retaliatory lawsuits, and corporate intimidation. Then David is joined by the legendary newspaper editor Marty Baron to discuss how today's media institutions are struggling to stand up to power. Baron reflects on his tenure at The Washington Post, the new pressures facing owners such as Jeff Bezos, and how Trump has turned retribution into official policy. They also examine how internal newsroom culture, social media, and a loss of connection to working-class America have weakened public trust in journalism. David closes the episode by reflecting on the recent media overhyping of President Joe Biden's age issues. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 9 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, I'll be joined by Marty Baron, formerly executive editor of The Washington Post during the first Trump term and during the transition of ownership at The Washington Post from the Graham family that had led it through so many years to new ownership under Jeff Bezos. Marty Baron is one of the most important media leaders of our time and has spoken forcefully, both in person and in his memoir, Collision of Power, about the threats to free press and the responsibilities of that press. I'll finish the episode with some thoughts about the way the media have covered the old age and infirmity of former President Joe Biden. But let me begin by addressing this larger topic of press freedom and press responsibility in the second Trump term. President Trump began his campaign and has spent much of his first term attacking the media, coining phrases, calling the free media enemies of the people, enemies of the state, and huffing and puffing and complaining, and generally persecuting and often inciting dangerous threats against individual members of the press. If you covered the Trump presidency in that first term, especially if you were a woman, you suddenly found yourself being attacked, both digitally and often in person, in ways unlike anything ever seen before: death threats, harassment, abuse, anti-Semitic and misogynistic, racist—the worst kind of garbage. I even got a little splash of myself. I had an FBI man come to the house to warn my wife that there had been some threats against me. The Atlantic is kind of high-toned, and I think a lot of the people who make the worst threats don't read The Atlantic, and so we get spared to some degree, but it was nasty. But it was also mostly ineffective. The press worked during the first Trump term. Institutions like The Atlantic, like The New York Times, like The Washington Post, like CNN kept bringing to light important stories about what the Trump presidency was doing, about corruption, about ties to Russia, about many things that people needed to know. And while their lives were much more difficult than they had been in the past, and while the pressures on them were real, it did not, in the end, detract from getting the job done, for the most part, in the first Trump term. In the second Trump term, things have been different. President Trump has been much more systematic, much more deliberate, much more sustained, and much more effective in putting pressure on America's free media. He does it by squeezing the corporate parents of media institutions, making it clear that mergers of the upstream parent will not be allowed or will be harassed or even illegally prevented in some way, unless those institutions change the way that their reporting arms behave themselves. And we have seen media people end up paying what look very much like inducements, material inducements, to Trump. Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, paid millions of dollars for the rights to make a Melania documentary, money it has to know it will never see back for a documentary that will probably never be produced. ABC paid millions of dollars directly to President Trump's so-called library, but really to himself, because of pressure put upon the Disney Corporation, ABC's corporate parent. CBS offered a settlement to Trump for an even more vexatious and absurd lawsuit: Trump complained that he didn't like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris—which, So what? You don't like our editing? You have no claim on that. That gives you no right of due action. I mean, send us a letter if you don't like the editing. And other people don't like the editing of the interview we did with you; that's not lawsuit material. The Atlantic, too, after our Signal story, a that reported that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been added to what should have been a more sensitive discussion of a military operation in Yemen: In addition to the usual concerns for accuracy that, of course, we had, we knew that there was a chance that the federal government under President Trump would pursue some sort of baseless, legal retaliatory action against us, and we had to fear that in a way that probably in another time we would not have had to fear. So there are real things to worry about, and they're not just specific to Trump. We've seen other people in American politics do the same. When Ron DeSantis was governor of Florida—or he is the governor of Florida. When he was running for president, he made one of his signature issues threatening the Disney Corporation for exercising its free-speech rights to comment on some of his social legislation by stripping them of various business privileges that they had long had and punishing the corporate parent for exercises of corporate free speech, because Disney was unhappy that the DeSantis administration was penalizing what they saw as the free-expression rights of gay and lesbian people in the state of Florida. So DeSantis took the Trump path. In the end, it didn't do him any good, but Disney still took the blow. We have seen this kind of acceleration of new kinds of threats, and they're working because media institutions of the traditional kind are more vulnerable than they ever used to be before. Look—the companies that were powerful in 1972 are a lot less powerful in 2025, but they remain the main sources of dispassionate, fact-checked, accurate information about the events of the day. New media does not see that as its mission, but the old media do. But because they've been losing audience share, because they're less wealthy than they used to be, they're subject to various kinds of pressure, and those pressures are being imposed on them with real-world consequences for all of us. Meanwhile, the whole mental landscape is being altered by the rise of different kinds of media institutions. TikTok has to be regarded as the most important media company in America today, alongside Facebook and other social-media platforms. These are shaping the minds and mentalities of Americans, especially Americans under 40, especially those Americans who are not closely involved with the political process, and so whose votes are maybe more up for grabs and are therefore some of the most valuable voters to politicians. We have a new kind of landscape, and it's one that we all have to navigate with great care and one in which our responsibilities as citizens are as much at stake as our rights as citizens. The information landscape is being reshaped, and Trump is abusing the powers of state in this new landscape to hasten the reshaping in ways favorable to him. Congress passed a law putting TikTok out of business. The Supreme Court approved that law. Trump has postponed enforcing the law long past all the deadlines that were supposed to be there, because he likes the way TikTok covers him. Remember, one of the rules of authoritarianism is: The protection for the culpable is as much a resource for the authoritarian as harassment of the innocent. The goal and end state of all of these evolutions, of these pressures, of these changes in the media landscape is to create a world—or create an America—in which nobody will know anything that can be relied upon and shared with neighbors. Instead of knowledge informing our politics, our politics will inform our knowledge. Now, there's no ready answer to this, but each of us as an individual has a power to do something about it, to be a better consumer of news, to be a wiser user, to read more carefully, to question more of what we see, to fortify our immunities against the coming wage of AI-fed distortion that is surely on its way. It's going to be a different kind of country, different kind of way of processing information. But the task of democracy and the challenge of democracy remains eternal, even as the challenges and threats change. And we're all going to have to step up and be the best kind of citizens, the best-informed citizens that we know how to be, even as it becomes more difficult in the face of authoritarian pressure and new technology. And now my dialogue with Marty Baron, formerly editor of The Washington Post. But first, a quick break. [] Frum: Marty Baron is a newspaper editor whose real-life story inspired an Academy Award–winning movie. After reporting for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, he was appointed executive editor of the Miami Herald. From Miami, he moved to Boston, where he led the Boston Globe's coverage of sex-abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That coverage won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and inspired the 2015 movie Spotlight. In 2013, Marty Baron moved to The Washington Post. He led the paper through its purchase by Jeff Bezos and through the first Trump term, winning more accolades and prizes for himself and his reporters along the way. He retired in 2021 and published his memoir, Collision of Power, in 2023. Marty, thank you so much for joining the program today. Martin Baron: Thanks for inviting me, David. Frum: All right, so we've got some things to cover, and we've talked about what those might be, but let me start off with a straightforward question: If you were editing The Washington Post today, do you think you'd keep your job? Baron: (Laughs.) I think I would, actually, because I think I did a good job while I was there, and I think that was appreciated and I was supported by the owner and the publisher at the time. Obviously, some things have changed. But I think it would be very risky for them to fire me. And the news department continues to maintain its independence from the owner. The owner has not interfered in the news coverage, as far as I know. And I think all of us would know, because there would be an explosive reaction within the newsroom if he had interfered. So yes, I think I would keep my job. Frum: It's a major theme of your memoir, Collision of Power, that first-term Trump tried to pressure The Washington Post's new owner, Jeff Bezos, into submission, and that Bezos consistently and courageously resisted. Bezos paid a price for this. Amazon lost a $10 billion contract with the federal government because of Trump's unhappiness with The Washington Post coverage. Amazon and the Post don't have a relationship, but Bezos is the owner of both. They're the largest shareholder in Amazon and [he's] the sole owner of the Post. Second-term Trump seems much more deliberate, methodical, purposeful, and effective in his pressures on the Post and other media institutions. And this time, he also seems more successful, and not just with the Post but with many others. I described in my opening monologue some of the other cases—CBS, ABC. What are media owners so afraid of? Baron: Well, I think what they're afraid of is they're afraid of being made a target by Trump, that he's going to do severe damage to their other commercial interests. I think in the case of Bezos, he's afraid of the impact that Trump can have on Amazon, which has enormous contracts—particularly in the area of cloud-computing services—with the federal government. And he has a private, commercial space venture called Blue Origin, which had fallen well behind SpaceX, the Elon Musk company, but was at the point of launching a rocket into orbit and then being able to start to compete, really, with SpaceX. It has now launched that rocket successfully into orbit. But it's highly dependent on contracts with the federal government, and I think that's true of the other companies as well, the parent companies of CBS and ABC. So in the case of ABC, Disney depends on the federal government for approval of mergers and things like that, and does not want to be in conflict with the president of the United States. And of course, Paramount, which owns CBS, wants to execute a merger with Skydance, and that requires approval by the FCC. Frum: You know, you've had a long and storied career through many, many different institutions, and I'm sure along the way, you have observed close-up and directly how angry mayors, governors, and presidents and members of Congress can get at media coverage. And there's always a lot of huffing and puffing and bluster and anger. What is happening since the election in 2024 seems qualitatively different from anything that I've observed. Is that your observation? Baron: Well, absolutely. Look—I mean, Trump, during his campaign, promised to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies. That's what he's doing right now. You can see that, of course, in his attacks on law firms that have represented individuals and institutions that were opposed to him, seeking to bar them from access to federal-government buildings, seeking to deny them any contracts with the federal government—basically, punish them in every conceivable way—and really, he's seeking to destroy those law firms. The same applies to universities, first with Columbia University and then now with Harvard, of course. You can see that he's applying all of the not just threats, but actually, use of force and denying billions of dollars in grants to Harvard in an effort to force them to submit to his wishes. So that's what's happening. It's qualitatively different from what we've seen before. And of course, the federal government has enormous power. And Trump is exercising that power—actually, not just exercising it; he's abusing it. Frum: Why is it so much more effective now? One of the semi-remembered details of the Watergate scandal was that President Richard Nixon tried to put pressure on The Washington Post at that time because the Post was then seeking permission, or the Graham family was seeking permission, to acquire some radio stations, which required FCC approval. And there's a famous crude quote about it, We're going to put Katie Graham's tits through the wringer. And what that was referring to was that her family wanted to buy these radio stations—or maybe sell them; I can't remember which. But either way, they needed an FCC permission, and Nixon said, Aha! I have the brain wave. We'll use that as a pressure on the Post. And it spectacularly backfired. It didn't work for Nixon at all. Now, a half century later, similar kinds of threats do seem to be working, at least for now. What's the difference? Why was the press so much more robust in the 1970s than the prestige press seems to be in the 2020s? Baron: Well, I don't know if it was more robust. Certainly, in the case of The Washington Post, they resisted. And I wish that Jeff Bezos would do the same. As I said, I think the news department continues to operate independently, and it's doing a great job, an admirable job of investigating what's happening in this administration. And yet he has sought to repair his relationship with Trump by doing all sorts of things, the first one being killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris and then, of course, donating to the inauguration, appearing at the inauguration, Amazon agreeing to a contract to buy the rights to a Melania Trump documentary about her own life for an extraordinary sum of money, and then Amazon agreeing to buy the rights to The Apprentice. I think what's different now is, well, you don't have a Congress that's doing its job. I mean, at the time of Watergate, you actually had some confidence that the other pillars of government would stand up, would hold up. And in the case of Watergate, you had a Congress that conducted an investigation that obtained internal tapes, and that made all the difference in the world. And now you have a president who has control of both houses of Congress, and you have a Congress, a Republican Party, that is a completely servile. Frum: Mm-hmm. Is there something different about the media institutions themselves? Have they changed in some way, as compared to what they were half a century ago? Baron: Good question. Look—in the past, I think sometimes we romanticized what the media was like. Keep in mind: We used to have incredibly wealthy owners of media, people like Hearst, who often collaborated with government and abused their power. I mean, the Chandler family, you know, remade Los Angeles, brought water from the Owens Valley in the north down to L.A. to essentially enrich themselves. So I think we romanticize what media ownership was in the past. I think that now, you know, a lot of media—big, institutional media—is owned by, first of all, very wealthy people who have other very substantial commercial interests. And you have, also, these parent companies, which have other substantial commercial interests. And they're highly dependent on the federal government, and the federal government has probably more power today than it had back in the previous years, previous decades. Frum: One reason it seems to me that media institutions are weaker in the 2020s was because they went through a self-imposed spasm of self-cannibalization in the late 2010s, culminating in the events of 2020. The most famous example of this is the forced resignation of James Bennett from The New York Times op-ed page for the sin of running an op-ed that some of the staffers thought was too interesting. They claimed that the op-ed would lead to violence, which was, on its face and certainly by the result, a false claim. But Bennett was forced out, and other institutions saw these kind of little staff mutinies. You experienced many at The Washington Post, and the hypothesis is: Was there some kind of weakening of the sinew, some kind of weakening of the courage, some kind of weakening of the solidarity between staff and leadership at the institution that happened between 2015, culminating in 2020? And is that in any way responsible for the weakness of institutions today? Baron: Well, I don't disagree with you that there has been a certain ideological rigidity within newsrooms and unwillingness to recognize nuance, a tendency on the part of, particularly, the younger generation, I think, to divide the world into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed, and basically see the world without a nuance, see it through sort of a binary separation. I think that what that has done—I don't know that it has weakened. Certainly, there have been rebellions within newsrooms. I did experience that due to my efforts to try to enforce social-media guidelines, for example, and then, also, in reaction to the George Floyd killing, the demand for greater diversity in the newsroom and in leadership. But I think that the unwillingness to sort of recognize nuances has hurt our credibility with the general public. That's where I think it's done real damage, is that it has contributed to the decline in confidence in major news institutions. And that's a perilous place to be. Frum: You know, diversity is a complex concept with many different meanings, and I think what it can sometimes mean and has sometimes meant for many institutions is that while the staff become more diverse in a series of biographical attributes, they become more monolithic in the way they think and more different from the people to whom they want to deliver their product. So if you've got a newsroom that is all full of—from every background, every climb, but—all graduates of certain four-year institutions with certain common outlooks, and the readership doesn't meet those qualifications. I mean, they may, you know, have different biographies, but they have similar outlooks, and it's one that puts them increasingly at odds with who their consumers are, in a way that just wasn't the case when you went to a newspaper from high school, not from college. Baron: I think that's true. I think that we do not have a certain level of diversity that we should have. It's people from a lot of different backgrounds, people who didn't go to all the same sorts of schools. I certainly didn't, by the way. I did not go to an Ivy League school, and I grew up in Florida and not in the Washington area. And I just ended up there because I was approached about taking on the editorship of The Washington Post, which was a surprise to me. So I've always seen Washington as a bit of a bubble, and I think it is. Look—we did work when I was at the Post to increase the diversity, in and in respects other than demographic. We tried to hire more military veterans. We thought that was important. The country had been at war for so many years, and yet we had very few military veterans in our newsroom. We needed more. We hired people who came from evangelical Christian colleges. I thought that was really important, given the importance of religion in this country, and particularly evangelicalism in this country. And to try to get more people from working-class backgrounds as well. And we need to do more of that. There's no question. I think there are a lot of people in the newsroom who don't understand the struggles and lives of ordinary people in the middle of the country, and we need to work harder at that. There's no question about that. Frum: One thing I think that gets lost sight of—and I'm old enough to remember it, and maybe you are too—was: In the middle of 1970s, most of the people who worked for a newspaper were engaged in a form of manufacturing. The paper, yes, it was written. But after it was written, it was then composed by people who worked for the newspaper, and it was then physically printed and then physically distributed. It was a giant manufacturing enterprise, and most of the staff were blue-collar people who had nothing to do with the content of the paper and everything to do with the physical existence of the paper. And this was brought home when my wife's stepfather created a newspaper in Toronto—which was created in the early 1970s, The Toronto Sun—which was like this. You saw it when you went to the athletic events, or the picnics, the softball games that the reporters might have had a slightly more-educated background. But most people who were there were blue-collar people when they played softball together, when they did picnics together, when they socialized together—that the newspaper affirmed its identity as part of the culture of the city, and it was a manufacturing enterprise. Well, technology has changed that. Newspapers don't manufacture anymore. They deliver a nonphysical product. The people who produce the product are highly educated. The production staff are probably even more technically skilled than the content staff. And all of them are more and more unlike the rest of the people of the city or country in which they serve. Baron: Well, I agree with you on that. Look—this was evident prior to Trump being elected. People have asked me what our failures were prior to Trump being elected, and I always say, It wasn't the coverage of the campaign. It was what occurred prior to that—years prior to that. It's that we didn't understand the country well enough. We just did not understand people's struggles, their expectations, their aspirations, and we needed to do that better. And there's no question that—look: Everybody, people talk about their life experiences these days, but everybody's life experiences, by definition, are narrow. It's just them. Our job as journalists is to get outside of our life experience and understand the life, the experiences of other people. And we need more people in our newsrooms who come from a variety of different backgrounds. And I think we should get to work doing that. Frum: A point I made in my first Trump book about this is a way of driving it home. So the great opioid toll begins in 2014. By 2016, it's killing more Americans than Vietnam. I went to The New York Times search engine and typed in, for the year from January 1, 2016, to the end of 2016, the two words opioid and transgender. And I don't want to derogate from the importance of any issue. If I remember right, there were, like, 80 or a hundred times more stories about transgender issues in The New York Times in 2016 than there were about the opioid epidemic. Now, that would change the following year, but it just marked that something could be happening in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and it was invisible to the people who produced the country's most elite newspapers. And one of Trump's secret weapons in the campaign of 2016 was he would campaign in these places and just say the word opioid. He had no plan. He had no concept. And indeed, the problem would continue to get dramatically worse under his presidency, but at least he knew it was there, which other people seem not to know. Baron: That's a very interesting data point, that research that you did. And I think it does highlight just how sorely disconnected we are from so much of what is happening in the country, and I think that's something that definitely needs to be corrected, and corrected quickly. It's cause for a lot of self-reflection on the part of all of us who are in the media, and we need to make sure that that doesn't continue. Frum: As we talk about media, of course, people of a certain generation have an idea of what media is, and we often have a way of using that phrase to mean institutions that were important in 1972—The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News. And it's a little hard to absorb that everybody who has one of these devices, which everybody has, can communicate instantly any image or any language to anybody on the planet on a scale that would've staggered the editors of The Washington Post in 1972, or even the CBS Evening News. And I suppose one of the questions we have to think more philosophically about is: What is media in the 2020s? I mean, TikTok shapes more minds than The New York Times, and Joe Rogan has a bigger audience than 60 Minutes. And we have a kind of anti-media that creates relationships with its consumers by presenting itself as non-media, by attacking the institutions that were important in 1972 but that are themselves also forms of media, obviously, and that are different from the traditional institutions only in that they seem to have no code of conduct, no code of ethics whatsoever. Baron: Well, clearly the definition of media has expanded tremendously. We've seen a radical change in the kind of media there is, and a radical change in the way that media is consumed. And a lot of the new media is communicating with a level of authenticity—or at least perceived authenticity—that institutional media has been unable to deliver. We in the traditional media have always focused on our authority, the reporting that we do, the verification process—all of which, of course, is essential and core to who we are and what we ought to be doing, what our mission is. At the same time, we are not communicating the same level of authenticity that a lot of the new media are. And because we don't do that, because we don't communicate authenticity, we're not getting credit for the authority that we have. And people who do communicate authentically, or perceived authentically—a lot of the new media—they're being given credit for authority that frequently they don't deserve. Not always. There are people who are quite capable who are doing that, but a lot of them don't deserve the authority. And look—this is a huge challenge. I mean, it's an opportunity, of course, to reach more people. But it is a huge challenge to traditional news institutions, and that's one that we clearly have to confront and we have to change. Frum: Well, you're very polite about it when you call it authenticity. I think one of the lessons I think from a media-business point of view: The media of the 1970s ignored large parts of demand. It turns out, there's a much bigger demand for virulent anti-Semitism in America than anyone in 1975 thought there was. There's much more demand for crackpot medical advice than people used to think. And in 1975, if you'd said to The New York Times or The Washington Post or CBS, You know, you could make more money by serving the anti-Semitic market or the medical crackpot market, they would say, You know what? We're making enough money. Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need to tell people the polio vaccine is no good. But people, entrepreneurs have discovered there is a big market for anti-Semitism. There is a big market for The polio vaccine is no good, and you can get very rich—or at least selected individuals can—meeting that demand, which is not infinite but large. And we are in a world that is, you know—the price of the internet may be the return of infectious diseases that had been banished in 1998. Baron: Look—they are an enormous number of bad actors. By using the word authenticity, I don't suggest that many of them aren't bad actors. There are good actors too. There are people who are doing really good work. And I think there's a reason you have a podcast, that you developed a podcast because you saw it as a better way of communicating with people or, at least potentially, a more-effective way of communicating with people. And there are a lot of other people who are doing that as well. So I don't want to discredit everybody who's in new media, because they don't deserve to be discredited, because many of them are quite good. But there are a lot of bad actors in spreading crazy conspiracy theories and a lot of hate. And that is the nature of the internet these days, is that it allows for that because it's a highly fragmented market, and people are going to exploit that fragmented market for their own personal, professional, political, or commercial gain. And that's exactly what's happening. I would say, however, that traditional media is not irrelevant, as is often claimed by people in that new-media field, by a lot of our politicians today, including Trump and Musk and whoever. The reality is that we remain relevant. There's a reason why Trump is completely obsessed with traditional media. He would not be obsessed with traditional media if it were irrelevant; that would be insane. And by the way, when Elon Musk just recently stepped away from the White House, who did he give interviews to? Amazingly, traditional media, the very media that he had denigrated all along. Frum: How should we think about what is and what isn't media? A person offering makeup advice on TikTok to a million viewers, is that media? I don't know anymore. Baron: Yeah, it's media. I mean, I think it is media—media writ large. Absolutely. People who are on TikTok are having an enormous impact. I mean, people are forming their opinions of what's happening, let's say in the Middle East, based on a 15-second TikTok. They think they know everything based on the 15 seconds that they saw on TikTok. Now, that is appalling, of course. Anytime you're dealing with a complex subject, like the Middle East, which has centuries of history behind it, you don't want to think that you've absorbed everything you need to know based on something you saw in 15 seconds on TikTok. But there's no question. That's media. That is how people are receiving their information, like it or not. Frum: Let me offer you a last question, some advice for the viewers: How does one become a better consumer of media content in this day and age? Are there any guidelines or advice you can offer to the viewer who is not selling makeup tips to a million people, but who has a phone, uses it, looks at it. How do we use this incredible new device, this incredible new power, responsibly and effectively to live better and more informed lives as citizens and individuals? Baron: Well, look. I mean, one of the biggest challenges today, a huge challenge and problem for us, is that we can't agree on a common set of facts. We can't even agree on how to determine what a fact is. All of the things that we've used in the past—education, experience, expertise, and actual evidence—have all been discredited. Not discredited, but denied and dismissed and denigrated. I think that consumers should be looking at that. They ought to be looking: Does this person actually have an education in the field? Does this person have experience in the field? Does this person have expertise? Is there actual evidence? Can I see the evidence? Who is behind this? Use your critical faculties to judge the quality of information and the quality of the people who are disseminating that information, and determine whether in the past you've relied on them. I mean, one of the interesting things about traditional media is that when there's a natural disaster, guess where people turn? They turn to traditional media. They don't turn to some of these fringe outfits to tell them where the hurricane's going to hit and what they ought to be doing, or where the tornado is, or anything like that, or where the flooding is going to be. They turn, typically, to traditional media because, look—there's a reserve of confidence in them because they know that they're going to get accurate information. And so I think consumers of information need to look for that education, expertise, experience. And what is the evidence that they are providing? Are you just relying on your beliefs, or are you confusing your beliefs with actual facts? Frum: Maybe the good news or the bad news of the same, which is we all have many more opportunities, but we're all going to have to work a lot harder to make sure that we are accurately and truthfully informed. And while it's never been easier if you have some medical symptom—never been easier to find out for yourself what that probably is—it's also never been easier to be deceived by people who, for reasons of gain or sociopathy, want to make you sicker or want to deny you the medicine you really need. And so we have seen the decline in vaccinations. It's still more than 90 percent that are properly vaccinated. So nine out of 10 people are doing the right thing. But five or eight out of 100 are doing the wrong thing, and they pose risks not only to their own children, but to everybody's children. Baron: And I think the consumers of information have to work harder, but also, those of us who are delivering information have to work harder to show people our work, to show people why they should believe us—not just to tell them what's happening but to show them the work that we've done, the evidence that we're relying upon. Be as transparent as possible, communicate more effectively, and make sure that we're covering the entirety of our communities and our society and our country, and do a better job of that. Frum: Marty, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your candid memoir—it's going to be an important resource for anyone who wants to understand the Trump era, and also the transformation of media under new kinds of ownership, and, above all, your extraordinarily important institution, The Washington Post, which you led to such heights, and which we hope is able to retain at least most of the glory that you delivered for it. Baron: Thank you, David. I appreciate it. Frum: Thank you. Bye-bye. [] Frum: Thanks so much to Marty Baron for joining me today. If you appreciate this dialogue and the others like it, I hope you will subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you use. I hope you'll also consider subscribing to The Atlantic, in print or in text form. That is how we under support all the work of this podcast of myself and of all my Atlantic colleagues. As we wrap up this all-media day today, I want to delve into one final topic, and that is: the way this scandal, this outrage, this outcry that has been womped up about the age of former President Joe Biden. Everyone saw the debate that President Biden had obviously become infirm, and now there is a lot of accusation that this was somehow covered up or neglected, and that not only were the people around President Biden culpable, but that somehow the press was implicated, too, in its failure to address the question sufficiently and in time. This strikes me as something with a kernel of truth to it, but more distraction and misleading than truth. And let me explain what I mean. Now, I'm proud to say that The Atlantic was early and direct on the Biden age story. We ran a piece in June of 2022 by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich saying Biden was too old and should not run again. Had Leibovich's advice been followed, history would've taken a very different course. And I think you'll find many other examples in many other places—Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine—of people who brought attention to the President Biden's gathering infirmity. Obviously, there were people around him who tried to put the best face on the president's health. That's always true. President Kennedy was much sicker than anybody knew at the time when he was president in the early '60s, when he seemed to be a model of physical fitness. President Eisenhower, the severity of his heart attacks—again, that was not known to people at the time. The full seriousness of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981—his recovery, it was much more touch and go than people were allowed to think at the time. People are invited to think of the president as healthier than the president often is. It is a body-killing job, and nobody comes out of it in the same shape that they went into it. And surely, the people around President Biden tried to represent him as healthier than perhaps he was, especially toward the end. And it is an important news story to cover the capability of the president. Kudos to those who dig into that topic, who separate what is true from what is rumored, and who alert people when the president isn't as capable as the president should be, or as those around him want to be. That's a job that continues even after the presidency. As I said, with these previous presidents, the full degree of their infirmity was often not known until sometime afterwards. Woodrow Wilson was struck down by a stroke in October of 1919. Now, people understood that he was ill and was invalided, but how radically invalided he was, that was something—and he was invalid from October of 1919 until he left the presidency, in March of 1921, almost a year and a half—that was covered up by his wife and his doctor. And the full truth was not known for a long time, and that really did change the course of history. Many of the worst acts of the Wilson presidency happened after the stroke of October 1919, and it's not clear whether Wilson approved of them, authorized them, or even was aware of them. The Palmer Raids, for example, where immigrants were rounded up and deported without much of a hearing, if any—those started in November of 1919 and were at their peak in January of 1920. Not clear that Wilson even ever knew about it. So bringing the truth retrospectively, also an important task. And I understand that journalists, when they follow these stories, can sometimes lose perspective. You know, if the school superintendent is stealing pencils from the supply cabinet, that's probably not the most important story in the world. But the only way you're ever going to find out about it is if one person in the local paper decides that for him or for her, that story will be the most important story in the world for however long it takes to get to the bottom of it. And only a person who acts as if the superintendent stealing the pencils is the most important story in the world will bring the story to light at all and give it whatever attention it deserves. So their tunnel vision is kind of a bona fide job qualification for being a reporter. But when you consume and read and react to news, that's where the perspective comes in. And you need to say, Okay, maybe the people around Biden did try to hush up how sick he was. And maybe not every journalist worked as hard as Mark Leibovich to get the truth. Not every journalist worked as hard as Olivia Nuzzi to get the truth. Not every journalist was willing to brave the blowback that Mark Leibovich and Olivia Nuzzi got for their reporting of the truth. But how important was this story, really? And today—when there is an effort to make it seem like this is the biggest scandal in American history, or at least the biggest scandal going today—at a time when the present president is pillaging billions of dollars, the story now that is the overwhelming story here in Washington is corruption on a post-Soviet, postcolonial Africa scale. Billions of dollars going into and affecting everything, every decision that this administration makes, from pardons to foreign policy. That's the story. Everything else, also interesting. But don't oversell it, and don't overbuy it. Thanks very much. I hope to see you next week here on The David Frum Show. [] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
04-06-2025
- General
- Atlantic
Why Are the Media So Afraid of Trump?
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic 's David Frum opens with a warning about how Donald Trump's second term has brought a more systematic and punishing assault on American media, through regulatory pressure, retaliatory lawsuits, and corporate intimidation. Then David is joined by the legendary newspaper editor Marty Baron to discuss how today's media institutions are struggling to stand up to power. Baron reflects on his tenure at The Washington Post, the new pressures facing owners such as Jeff Bezos, and how Trump has turned retribution into official policy. They also examine how internal newsroom culture, social media, and a loss of connection to working-class America have weakened public trust in journalism. David closes the episode by reflecting on the recent media overhyping of President Joe Biden's age issues. The following is a transcript of the episode: David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 9 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, I'll be joined by Marty Baron, formerly executive editor of The Washington Post during the first Trump term and during the transition of ownership at The Washington Post from the Graham family that had led it through so many years to new ownership under Jeff Bezos. Marty Baron is one of the most important media leaders of our time and has spoken forcefully, both in person and in his memoir, Collision of Power, about the threats to free press and the responsibilities of that press. I'll finish the episode with some thoughts about the way the media have covered the old age and infirmity of former President Joe Biden. But let me begin by addressing this larger topic of press freedom and press responsibility in the second Trump term. President Trump began his campaign and has spent much of his first term attacking the media, coining phrases, calling the free media enemies of the people, enemies of the state, and huffing and puffing and complaining, and generally persecuting and often inciting dangerous threats against individual members of the press. If you covered the Trump presidency in that first term, especially if you were a woman, you suddenly found yourself being attacked, both digitally and often in person, in ways unlike anything ever seen before: death threats, harassment, abuse, anti-Semitic and misogynistic, racist—the worst kind of garbage. I even got a little splash of myself. I had an FBI man come to the house to warn my wife that there had been some threats against me. The Atlantic is kind of high-toned, and I think a lot of the people who make the worst threats don't read The Atlantic, and so we get spared to some degree, but it was nasty. But it was also mostly ineffective. The press worked during the first Trump term. Institutions like The Atlantic, like The New York Times, like The Washington Post, like CNN kept bringing to light important stories about what the Trump presidency was doing, about corruption, about ties to Russia, about many things that people needed to know. And while their lives were much more difficult than they had been in the past, and while the pressures on them were real, it did not, in the end, detract from getting the job done, for the most part, in the first Trump term. In the second Trump term, things have been different. President Trump has been much more systematic, much more deliberate, much more sustained, and much more effective in putting pressure on America's free media. He does it by squeezing the corporate parents of media institutions, making it clear that mergers of the upstream parent will not be allowed or will be harassed or even illegally prevented in some way, unless those institutions change the way that their reporting arms behave themselves. And we have seen media people end up paying what look very much like inducements, material inducements, to Trump. Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, paid millions of dollars for the rights to make a Melania documentary, money it has to know it will never see back for a documentary that will probably never be produced. ABC paid millions of dollars directly to President Trump's so-called library, but really to himself, because of pressure put upon the Disney Corporation, ABC's corporate parent. CBS offered a settlement to Trump for an even more vexatious and absurd lawsuit: Trump complained that he didn't like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris—which, So what? You don't like our editing? You have no claim on that. That gives you no right of due action. I mean, send us a letter if you don't like the editing. And other people don't like the editing of the interview we did with you; that's not lawsuit material. The Atlantic, too, after our Signal story, a that reported that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been added to what should have been a more sensitive discussion of a military operation in Yemen: In addition to the usual concerns for accuracy that, of course, we had, we knew that there was a chance that the federal government under President Trump would pursue some sort of baseless, legal retaliatory action against us, and we had to fear that in a way that probably in another time we would not have had to fear. So there are real things to worry about, and they're not just specific to Trump. We've seen other people in American politics do the same. When Ron DeSantis was governor of Florida—or he is the governor of Florida. When he was running for president, he made one of his signature issues threatening the Disney Corporation for exercising its free-speech rights to comment on some of his social legislation by stripping them of various business privileges that they had long had and punishing the corporate parent for exercises of corporate free speech, because Disney was unhappy that the DeSantis administration was penalizing what they saw as the free-expression rights of gay and lesbian people in the state of Florida. So DeSantis took the Trump path. In the end, it didn't do him any good, but Disney still took the blow. We have seen this kind of acceleration of new kinds of threats, and they're working because media institutions of the traditional kind are more vulnerable than they ever used to be before. Look—the companies that were powerful in 1972 are a lot less powerful in 2025, but they remain the main sources of dispassionate, fact-checked, accurate information about the events of the day. New media does not see that as its mission, but the old media do. But because they've been losing audience share, because they're less wealthy than they used to be, they're subject to various kinds of pressure, and those pressures are being imposed on them with real-world consequences for all of us. Meanwhile, the whole mental landscape is being altered by the rise of different kinds of media institutions. TikTok has to be regarded as the most important media company in America today, alongside Facebook and other social-media platforms. These are shaping the minds and mentalities of Americans, especially Americans under 40, especially those Americans who are not closely involved with the political process, and so whose votes are maybe more up for grabs and are therefore some of the most valuable voters to politicians. We have a new kind of landscape, and it's one that we all have to navigate with great care and one in which our responsibilities as citizens are as much at stake as our rights as citizens. The information landscape is being reshaped, and Trump is abusing the powers of state in this new landscape to hasten the reshaping in ways favorable to him. Congress passed a law putting TikTok out of business. The Supreme Court approved that law. Trump has postponed enforcing the law long past all the deadlines that were supposed to be there, because he likes the way TikTok covers him. Remember, one of the rules of authoritarianism is: The protection for the culpable is as much a resource for the authoritarian as harassment of the innocent. The goal and end state of all of these evolutions, of these pressures, of these changes in the media landscape is to create a world—or create an America—in which nobody will know anything that can be relied upon and shared with neighbors. Instead of knowledge informing our politics, our politics will inform our knowledge. Now, there's no ready answer to this, but each of us as an individual has a power to do something about it, to be a better consumer of news, to be a wiser user, to read more carefully, to question more of what we see, to fortify our immunities against the coming wage of AI-fed distortion that is surely on its way. It's going to be a different kind of country, different kind of way of processing information. But the task of democracy and the challenge of democracy remains eternal, even as the challenges and threats change. And we're all going to have to step up and be the best kind of citizens, the best-informed citizens that we know how to be, even as it becomes more difficult in the face of authoritarian pressure and new technology. And now my dialogue with Marty Baron, formerly editor of The Washington Post. But first, a quick break. [ Music ] Frum: Marty Baron is a newspaper editor whose real-life story inspired an Academy Award–winning movie. After reporting for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, he was appointed executive editor of the Miami Herald. From Miami, he moved to Boston, where he led the Boston Globe 's coverage of sex-abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That coverage won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and inspired the 2015 movie Spotlight. In 2013, Marty Baron moved to The Washington Post. He led the paper through its purchase by Jeff Bezos and through the first Trump term, winning more accolades and prizes for himself and his reporters along the way. He retired in 2021 and published his memoir, Collision of Power, in 2023. Marty, thank you so much for joining the program today. Martin Baron: Thanks for inviting me, David. Frum: All right, so we've got some things to cover, and we've talked about what those might be, but let me start off with a straightforward question: If you were editing The Washington Post today, do you think you'd keep your job? Baron: (Laughs.) I think I would, actually, because I think I did a good job while I was there, and I think that was appreciated and I was supported by the owner and the publisher at the time. Obviously, some things have changed. But I think it would be very risky for them to fire me. And the news department continues to maintain its independence from the owner. The owner has not interfered in the news coverage, as far as I know. And I think all of us would know, because there would be an explosive reaction within the newsroom if he had interfered. So yes, I think I would keep my job. Frum: It's a major theme of your memoir, Collision of Power, that first-term Trump tried to pressure The Washington Post 's new owner, Jeff Bezos, into submission, and that Bezos consistently and courageously resisted. Bezos paid a price for this. Amazon lost a $10 billion contract with the federal government because of Trump's unhappiness with The Washington Post coverage. Amazon and the Post don't have a relationship, but Bezos is the owner of both. They're the largest shareholder in Amazon and [he's] the sole owner of the Post. Second-term Trump seems much more deliberate, methodical, purposeful, and effective in his pressures on the Post and other media institutions. And this time, he also seems more successful, and not just with the Post but with many others. I described in my opening monologue some of the other cases—CBS, ABC. What are media owners so afraid of? Baron: Well, I think what they're afraid of is they're afraid of being made a target by Trump, that he's going to do severe damage to their other commercial interests. I think in the case of Bezos, he's afraid of the impact that Trump can have on Amazon, which has enormous contracts—particularly in the area of cloud-computing services—with the federal government. And he has a private, commercial space venture called Blue Origin, which had fallen well behind SpaceX, the Elon Musk company, but was at the point of launching a rocket into orbit and then being able to start to compete, really, with SpaceX. It has now launched that rocket successfully into orbit. But it's highly dependent on contracts with the federal government, and I think that's true of the other companies as well, the parent companies of CBS and ABC. So in the case of ABC, Disney depends on the federal government for approval of mergers and things like that, and does not want to be in conflict with the president of the United States. And of course, Paramount, which owns CBS, wants to execute a merger with Skydance, and that requires approval by the FCC. Frum: You know, you've had a long and storied career through many, many different institutions, and I'm sure along the way, you have observed close-up and directly how angry mayors, governors, and presidents and members of Congress can get at media coverage. And there's always a lot of huffing and puffing and bluster and anger. What is happening since the election in 2024 seems qualitatively different from anything that I've observed. Is that your observation? Baron: Well, absolutely. Look—I mean, Trump, during his campaign, promised to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies. That's what he's doing right now. You can see that, of course, in his attacks on law firms that have represented individuals and institutions that were opposed to him, seeking to bar them from access to federal-government buildings, seeking to deny them any contracts with the federal government—basically, punish them in every conceivable way—and really, he's seeking to destroy those law firms. The same applies to universities, first with Columbia University and then now with Harvard, of course. You can see that he's applying all of the not just threats, but actually, use of force and denying billions of dollars in grants to Harvard in an effort to force them to submit to his wishes. So that's what's happening. It's qualitatively different from what we've seen before. And of course, the federal government has enormous power. And Trump is exercising that power—actually, not just exercising it; he's abusing it. Frum: Why is it so much more effective now? One of the semi-remembered details of the Watergate scandal was that President Richard Nixon tried to put pressure on The Washington Post at that time because the Post was then seeking permission, or the Graham family was seeking permission, to acquire some radio stations, which required FCC approval. And there's a famous crude quote about it, We're going to put Katie Graham's tits through the wringer. And what that was referring to was that her family wanted to buy these radio stations—or maybe sell them; I can't remember which. But either way, they needed an FCC permission, and Nixon said, Aha! I have the brain wave. We'll use that as a pressure on the Post. And it spectacularly backfired. It didn't work for Nixon at all. Now, a half century later, similar kinds of threats do seem to be working, at least for now. What's the difference? Why was the press so much more robust in the 1970s than the prestige press seems to be in the 2020s? Baron: Well, I don't know if it was more robust. Certainly, in the case of The Washington Post, they resisted. And I wish that Jeff Bezos would do the same. As I said, I think the news department continues to operate independently, and it's doing a great job, an admirable job of investigating what's happening in this administration. And yet he has sought to repair his relationship with Trump by doing all sorts of things, the first one being killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris and then, of course, donating to the inauguration, appearing at the inauguration, Amazon agreeing to a contract to buy the rights to a Melania Trump documentary about her own life for an extraordinary sum of money, and then Amazon agreeing to buy the rights to The Apprentice. I think what's different now is, well, you don't have a Congress that's doing its job. I mean, at the time of Watergate, you actually had some confidence that the other pillars of government would stand up, would hold up. And in the case of Watergate, you had a Congress that conducted an investigation that obtained internal tapes, and that made all the difference in the world. And now you have a president who has control of both houses of Congress, and you have a Congress, a Republican Party, that is a completely servile. Frum: Mm-hmm. Is there something different about the media institutions themselves? Have they changed in some way, as compared to what they were half a century ago? Baron: Good question. Look—in the past, I think sometimes we romanticized what the media was like. Keep in mind: We used to have incredibly wealthy owners of media, people like Hearst, who often collaborated with government and abused their power. I mean, the Chandler family, you know, remade Los Angeles, brought water from the Owens Valley in the north down to L.A. to essentially enrich themselves. So I think we romanticize what media ownership was in the past. I think that now, you know, a lot of media—big, institutional media—is owned by, first of all, very wealthy people who have other very substantial commercial interests. And you have, also, these parent companies, which have other substantial commercial interests. And they're highly dependent on the federal government, and the federal government has probably more power today than it had back in the previous years, previous decades. Frum: One reason it seems to me that media institutions are weaker in the 2020s was because they went through a self-imposed spasm of self-cannibalization in the late 2010s, culminating in the events of 2020. The most famous example of this is the forced resignation of James Bennett from The New York Times op-ed page for the sin of running an op-ed that some of the staffers thought was too interesting. They claimed that the op-ed would lead to violence, which was, on its face and certainly by the result, a false claim. But Bennett was forced out, and other institutions saw these kind of little staff mutinies. You experienced many at The Washington Post, and the hypothesis is: Was there some kind of weakening of the sinew, some kind of weakening of the courage, some kind of weakening of the solidarity between staff and leadership at the institution that happened between 2015, culminating in 2020? And is that in any way responsible for the weakness of institutions today? Baron: Well, I don't disagree with you that there has been a certain ideological rigidity within newsrooms and unwillingness to recognize nuance, a tendency on the part of, particularly, the younger generation, I think, to divide the world into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed, and basically see the world without a nuance, see it through sort of a binary separation. I think that what that has done—I don't know that it has weakened. Certainly, there have been rebellions within newsrooms. I did experience that due to my efforts to try to enforce social-media guidelines, for example, and then, also, in reaction to the George Floyd killing, the demand for greater diversity in the newsroom and in leadership. But I think that the unwillingness to sort of recognize nuances has hurt our credibility with the general public. That's where I think it's done real damage, is that it has contributed to the decline in confidence in major news institutions. And that's a perilous place to be. Frum: You know, diversity is a complex concept with many different meanings, and I think what it can sometimes mean and has sometimes meant for many institutions is that while the staff become more diverse in a series of biographical attributes, they become more monolithic in the way they think and more different from the people to whom they want to deliver their product. So if you've got a newsroom that is all full of—from every background, every climb, but—all graduates of certain four-year institutions with certain common outlooks, and the readership doesn't meet those qualifications. I mean, they may, you know, have different biographies, but they have similar outlooks, and it's one that puts them increasingly at odds with who their consumers are, in a way that just wasn't the case when you went to a newspaper from high school, not from college. Baron: I think that's true. I think that we do not have a certain level of diversity that we should have. It's people from a lot of different backgrounds, people who didn't go to all the same sorts of schools. I certainly didn't, by the way. I did not go to an Ivy League school, and I grew up in Florida and not in the Washington area. And I just ended up there because I was approached about taking on the editorship of The Washington Post, which was a surprise to me. So I've always seen Washington as a bit of a bubble, and I think it is. Look—we did work when I was at the Post to increase the diversity, in and in respects other than demographic. We tried to hire more military veterans. We thought that was important. The country had been at war for so many years, and yet we had very few military veterans in our newsroom. We needed more. We hired people who came from evangelical Christian colleges. I thought that was really important, given the importance of religion in this country, and particularly evangelicalism in this country. And to try to get more people from working-class backgrounds as well. And we need to do more of that. There's no question. I think there are a lot of people in the newsroom who don't understand the struggles and lives of ordinary people in the middle of the country, and we need to work harder at that. There's no question about that. Frum: One thing I think that gets lost sight of—and I'm old enough to remember it, and maybe you are too—was: In the middle of 1970s, most of the people who worked for a newspaper were engaged in a form of manufacturing. The paper, yes, it was written. But after it was written, it was then composed by people who worked for the newspaper, and it was then physically printed and then physically distributed. It was a giant manufacturing enterprise, and most of the staff were blue-collar people who had nothing to do with the content of the paper and everything to do with the physical existence of the paper. And this was brought home when my wife's stepfather created a newspaper in Toronto—which was created in the early 1970s, The Toronto Sun —which was like this. You saw it when you went to the athletic events, or the picnics, the softball games that the reporters might have had a slightly more-educated background. But most people who were there were blue-collar people when they played softball together, when they did picnics together, when they socialized together—that the newspaper affirmed its identity as part of the culture of the city, and it was a manufacturing enterprise. Well, technology has changed that. Newspapers don't manufacture anymore. They deliver a nonphysical product. The people who produce the product are highly educated. The production staff are probably even more technically skilled than the content staff. And all of them are more and more unlike the rest of the people of the city or country in which they serve. Baron: Well, I agree with you on that. Look—this was evident prior to Trump being elected. People have asked me what our failures were prior to Trump being elected, and I always say, It wasn't the coverage of the campaign. It was what occurred prior to that—years prior to that. It's that we didn't understand the country well enough. We just did not understand people's struggles, their expectations, their aspirations, and we needed to do that better. And there's no question that—look: Everybody, people talk about their life experiences these days, but everybody's life experiences, by definition, are narrow. It's just them. Our job as journalists is to get outside of our life experience and understand the life, the experiences of other people. And we need more people in our newsrooms who come from a variety of different backgrounds. And I think we should get to work doing that. Frum: A point I made in my first Trump book about this is a way of driving it home. So the great opioid toll begins in 2014. By 2016, it's killing more Americans than Vietnam. I went to The New York Times search engine and typed in, for the year from January 1, 2016, to the end of 2016, the two words opioid and transgender. And I don't want to derogate from the importance of any issue. If I remember right, there were, like, 80 or a hundred times more stories about transgender issues in The New York Times in 2016 than there were about the opioid epidemic. Now, that would change the following year, but it just marked that something could be happening in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and it was invisible to the people who produced the country's most elite newspapers. And one of Trump's secret weapons in the campaign of 2016 was he would campaign in these places and just say the word opioid. He had no plan. He had no concept. And indeed, the problem would continue to get dramatically worse under his presidency, but at least he knew it was there, which other people seem not to know. Baron: That's a very interesting data point, that research that you did. And I think it does highlight just how sorely disconnected we are from so much of what is happening in the country, and I think that's something that definitely needs to be corrected, and corrected quickly. It's cause for a lot of self-reflection on the part of all of us who are in the media, and we need to make sure that that doesn't continue. Frum: As we talk about media, of course, people of a certain generation have an idea of what media is, and we often have a way of using that phrase to mean institutions that were important in 1972— The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News. And it's a little hard to absorb that everybody who has one of these devices, which everybody has, can communicate instantly any image or any language to anybody on the planet on a scale that would've staggered the editors of The Washington Post in 1972, or even the CBS Evening News. And I suppose one of the questions we have to think more philosophically about is: What is media in the 2020s? I mean, TikTok shapes more minds than The New York Times, and Joe Rogan has a bigger audience than 60 Minutes. And we have a kind of anti-media that creates relationships with its consumers by presenting itself as non-media, by attacking the institutions that were important in 1972 but that are themselves also forms of media, obviously, and that are different from the traditional institutions only in that they seem to have no code of conduct, no code of ethics whatsoever. Baron: Well, clearly the definition of media has expanded tremendously. We've seen a radical change in the kind of media there is, and a radical change in the way that media is consumed. And a lot of the new media is communicating with a level of authenticity—or at least perceived authenticity—that institutional media has been unable to deliver. We in the traditional media have always focused on our authority, the reporting that we do, the verification process—all of which, of course, is essential and core to who we are and what we ought to be doing, what our mission is. At the same time, we are not communicating the same level of authenticity that a lot of the new media are. And because we don't do that, because we don't communicate authenticity, we're not getting credit for the authority that we have. And people who do communicate authentically, or perceived authentically—a lot of the new media—they're being given credit for authority that frequently they don't deserve. Not always. There are people who are quite capable who are doing that, but a lot of them don't deserve the authority. And look—this is a huge challenge. I mean, it's an opportunity, of course, to reach more people. But it is a huge challenge to traditional news institutions, and that's one that we clearly have to confront and we have to change. Frum: Well, you're very polite about it when you call it authenticity. I think one of the lessons I think from a media-business point of view: The media of the 1970s ignored large parts of demand. It turns out, there's a much bigger demand for virulent anti-Semitism in America than anyone in 1975 thought there was. There's much more demand for crackpot medical advice than people used to think. And in 1975, if you'd said to The New York Times or The Washington Post or CBS, You know, you could make more money by serving the anti-Semitic market or the medical crackpot market, they would say, You know what? We're making enough money. Thanks, but no thanks. We don't need to tell people the polio vaccine is no good. But people, entrepreneurs have discovered there is a big market for anti-Semitism. There is a big market for The polio vaccine is no good, and you can get very rich—or at least selected individuals can—meeting that demand, which is not infinite but large. And we are in a world that is, you know—the price of the internet may be the return of infectious diseases that had been banished in 1998. Baron: Look—they are an enormous number of bad actors. By using the word authenticity, I don't suggest that many of them aren't bad actors. There are good actors too. There are people who are doing really good work. And I think there's a reason you have a podcast, that you developed a podcast because you saw it as a better way of communicating with people or, at least potentially, a more-effective way of communicating with people. And there are a lot of other people who are doing that as well. So I don't want to discredit everybody who's in new media, because they don't deserve to be discredited, because many of them are quite good. But there are a lot of bad actors in spreading crazy conspiracy theories and a lot of hate. And that is the nature of the internet these days, is that it allows for that because it's a highly fragmented market, and people are going to exploit that fragmented market for their own personal, professional, political, or commercial gain. And that's exactly what's happening. I would say, however, that traditional media is not irrelevant, as is often claimed by people in that new-media field, by a lot of our politicians today, including Trump and Musk and whoever. The reality is that we remain relevant. There's a reason why Trump is completely obsessed with traditional media. He would not be obsessed with traditional media if it were irrelevant; that would be insane. And by the way, when Elon Musk just recently stepped away from the White House, who did he give interviews to? Amazingly, traditional media, the very media that he had denigrated all along. Frum: How should we think about what is and what isn't media? A person offering makeup advice on TikTok to a million viewers, is that media? I don't know anymore. Baron: Yeah, it's media. I mean, I think it is media—media writ large. Absolutely. People who are on TikTok are having an enormous impact. I mean, people are forming their opinions of what's happening, let's say in the Middle East, based on a 15-second TikTok. They think they know everything based on the 15 seconds that they saw on TikTok. Now, that is appalling, of course. Anytime you're dealing with a complex subject, like the Middle East, which has centuries of history behind it, you don't want to think that you've absorbed everything you need to know based on something you saw in 15 seconds on TikTok. But there's no question. That's media. That is how people are receiving their information, like it or not. Frum: Let me offer you a last question, some advice for the viewers: How does one become a better consumer of media content in this day and age? Are there any guidelines or advice you can offer to the viewer who is not selling makeup tips to a million people, but who has a phone, uses it, looks at it. How do we use this incredible new device, this incredible new power, responsibly and effectively to live better and more informed lives as citizens and individuals? Baron: Well, look. I mean, one of the biggest challenges today, a huge challenge and problem for us, is that we can't agree on a common set of facts. We can't even agree on how to determine what a fact is. All of the things that we've used in the past—education, experience, expertise, and actual evidence—have all been discredited. Not discredited, but denied and dismissed and denigrated. I think that consumers should be looking at that. They ought to be looking: Does this person actually have an education in the field? Does this person have experience in the field? Does this person have expertise? Is there actual evidence? Can I see the evidence? Who is behind this? Use your critical faculties to judge the quality of information and the quality of the people who are disseminating that information, and determine whether in the past you've relied on them. I mean, one of the interesting things about traditional media is that when there's a natural disaster, guess where people turn? They turn to traditional media. They don't turn to some of these fringe outfits to tell them where the hurricane's going to hit and what they ought to be doing, or where the tornado is, or anything like that, or where the flooding is going to be. They turn, typically, to traditional media because, look—there's a reserve of confidence in them because they know that they're going to get accurate information. And so I think consumers of information need to look for that education, expertise, experience. And what is the evidence that they are providing? Are you just relying on your beliefs, or are you confusing your beliefs with actual facts? Frum: Maybe the good news or the bad news of the same, which is we all have many more opportunities, but we're all going to have to work a lot harder to make sure that we are accurately and truthfully informed. And while it's never been easier if you have some medical symptom—never been easier to find out for yourself what that probably is—it's also never been easier to be deceived by people who, for reasons of gain or sociopathy, want to make you sicker or want to deny you the medicine you really need. And so we have seen the decline in vaccinations. It's still more than 90 percent that are properly vaccinated. So nine out of 10 people are doing the right thing. But five or eight out of 100 are doing the wrong thing, and they pose risks not only to their own children, but to everybody's children. Baron: And I think the consumers of information have to work harder, but also, those of us who are delivering information have to work harder to show people our work, to show people why they should believe us—not just to tell them what's happening but to show them the work that we've done, the evidence that we're relying upon. Be as transparent as possible, communicate more effectively, and make sure that we're covering the entirety of our communities and our society and our country, and do a better job of that. Frum: Marty, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your candid memoir—it's going to be an important resource for anyone who wants to understand the Trump era, and also the transformation of media under new kinds of ownership, and, above all, your extraordinarily important institution, The Washington Post, which you led to such heights, and which we hope is able to retain at least most of the glory that you delivered for it. Baron: Thank you, David. I appreciate it. Frum: Thank you. Bye-bye. [ Music ] Frum: Thanks so much to Marty Baron for joining me today. If you appreciate this dialogue and the others like it, I hope you will subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you use. I hope you'll also consider subscribing to The Atlantic, in print or in text form. That is how we under support all the work of this podcast of myself and of all my Atlantic colleagues. As we wrap up this all-media day today, I want to delve into one final topic, and that is: the way this scandal, this outrage, this outcry that has been womped up about the age of former President Joe Biden. Everyone saw the debate that President Biden had obviously become infirm, and now there is a lot of accusation that this was somehow covered up or neglected, and that not only were the people around President Biden culpable, but that somehow the press was implicated, too, in its failure to address the question sufficiently and in time. This strikes me as something with a kernel of truth to it, but more distraction and misleading than truth. And let me explain what I mean. Now, I'm proud to say that The Atlantic was early and direct on the Biden age story. We ran a piece in June of 2022 by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich saying Biden was too old and should not run again. Had Leibovich's advice been followed, history would've taken a very different course. And I think you'll find many other examples in many other places—Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine— of people who brought attention to the President Biden's gathering infirmity. Obviously, there were people around him who tried to put the best face on the president's health. That's always true. President Kennedy was much sicker than anybody knew at the time when he was president in the early '60s, when he seemed to be a model of physical fitness. President Eisenhower, the severity of his heart attacks—again, that was not known to people at the time. The full seriousness of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981—his recovery, it was much more touch and go than people were allowed to think at the time. People are invited to think of the president as healthier than the president often is. It is a body-killing job, and nobody comes out of it in the same shape that they went into it. And surely, the people around President Biden tried to represent him as healthier than perhaps he was, especially toward the end. And it is an important news story to cover the capability of the president. Kudos to those who dig into that topic, who separate what is true from what is rumored, and who alert people when the president isn't as capable as the president should be, or as those around him want to be. That's a job that continues even after the presidency. As I said, with these previous presidents, the full degree of their infirmity was often not known until sometime afterwards. Woodrow Wilson was struck down by a stroke in October of 1919. Now, people understood that he was ill and was invalided, but how radically invalided he was, that was something—and he was invalid from October of 1919 until he left the presidency, in March of 1921, almost a year and a half—that was covered up by his wife and his doctor. And the full truth was not known for a long time, and that really did change the course of history. Many of the worst acts of the Wilson presidency happened after the stroke of October 1919, and it's not clear whether Wilson approved of them, authorized them, or even was aware of them. The Palmer Raids, for example, where immigrants were rounded up and deported without much of a hearing, if any—those started in November of 1919 and were at their peak in January of 1920. Not clear that Wilson even ever knew about it. So bringing the truth retrospectively, also an important task. And I understand that journalists, when they follow these stories, can sometimes lose perspective. You know, if the school superintendent is stealing pencils from the supply cabinet, that's probably not the most important story in the world. But the only way you're ever going to find out about it is if one person in the local paper decides that for him or for her, that story will be the most important story in the world for however long it takes to get to the bottom of it. And only a person who acts as if the superintendent stealing the pencils is the most important story in the world will bring the story to light at all and give it whatever attention it deserves. So their tunnel vision is kind of a bona fide job qualification for being a reporter. But when you consume and read and react to news, that's where the perspective comes in. And you need to say, Okay, maybe the people around Biden did try to hush up how sick he was. And maybe not every journalist worked as hard as Mark Leibovich to get the truth. Not every journalist worked as hard as Olivia Nuzzi to get the truth. Not every journalist was willing to brave the blowback that Mark Leibovich and Olivia Nuzzi got for their reporting of the truth. But how important was this story, really? And today—when there is an effort to make it seem like this is the biggest scandal in American history, or at least the biggest scandal going today—at a time when the present president is pillaging billions of dollars, the story now that is the overwhelming story here in Washington is corruption on a post-Soviet, postcolonial Africa scale. Billions of dollars going into and affecting everything, every decision that this administration makes, from pardons to foreign policy. That's the story. Everything else, also interesting. But don't oversell it, and don't overbuy it. Thanks very much. I hope to see you next week here on The David Frum Show. [ Music ] Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
