← The David Frum Show
The David Frum Show
The Fight That Could Decide 2028
00:59:48
Jonathan Chait on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the far left’s attacks on Obama’s legacy, and the Michigan Democratic Senate primary that will decide the future of the party. Plus: more Trump tariffs and Eric Cline’s “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.”
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- [00:02]
David Frum
A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.
- [01:01]
Hello and welcome to the David Frum Show. I'm David Frahm, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait, and we'll be talking about Obama's legacy and what it means for the future of American politics. The book this week will be 1177 B.C. the year civilization Collapsed by Eric Klein, a study of the end of the Bronze Age. But before either my dialogue with Jonathan or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on the most recent rounds of tariff announcements by President Trump. Last Friday, President Trump announced his latest tariffs to go into effect. He targeted 60 economies. I say 60 economies because one of the 60 targeted was Taiwan, which is not regarded by the United States as a country, but only as an economy. So 60 economies, including Taiwan, 59 countries plus Taiwan. The ostensible basis of this new round of tariff increases was to combat forced labor. President Trump used a provision in American law that allows the president power to impose tariffs on countries that use forced or slave labor. And he said that's it. In order to fight forced or slave labor, these 60 economies, including Taiwan, are going to be targeted by a new round of tariff increases. The grounds given for the tariffs are not really very plausible. There is no or barely any factual showing that all of these 60 were engaged in some way in forced labor. The United States, after all, is not a complete is not completely clean on this question either. And there's no graduation of the tariff to the alleged cause. There's no saying such and such country has more forced labor or more openness to forced labor. Such and such has less therefore they have different tariff rates. No, it's just we accuse these 60 economies, we target them with tariffs and we're doing this even though our own hands are not clean. The United States economy is open in many ways to force to force labor. Pretty obviously what is going on here is that Trump is looking for some legal basis to reinstate the tariffs that he had struck down in the past. President Trump originally used an emergency economic authority from the 1970s. The Supreme Court told him he couldn't do it. Then he fell back on a temporary provision that allowed him to impose tariffs for a period of time, I think 150 days. And that time has run out. So now he's looking for what he can get. As the President returns again and again and again to imposing tariffs on the world, a question has to be asked. What on earth could any Trump supporter imagine the President is possibly doing that is in any way in the American national interest? The emotional basis, the argumentative basis, the intellectual basis for tariffs is that we are supposedly re industrializing the United States. But since Donald Trump has become President, manufacturing jobs in the United States have have declined by the tens of thousands, probably in somewhere between 80 and 100,000 net manufacturing jobs. Fewer as I record in the summer of 2026 than when Donald Trump became president at the beginning of 2025, because other sectors of the other employment sectors are continuing to grow, especially healthcare. This loss of a net 100,000 manufacturing jobs means manufacturing as a share of non farm payrolls has now dipped below 8%, which is the lowest level that manufacturing has had in American employment since figures began. Maybe it was lower in 1776 than it is now, but since good figures began, this is the lowest. It's a record. So obviously it's not working. And it's not just jobs that are being lost. Manufacturing output and manufacturing investment also seem to be in decline. This is a little harder to calculate because there's a huge capital investment boom going on because of artificial intelligence data centers. A lot of money is being committed to these data centers, and the question is to what extent does this get counted as manufacturing investment and whatnot. But private economists who have tried to separate out seem to be in some kind of agreement that at best, manufacturing investment is flat in the Trump year and a half, maybe down a little bit because of the problem of the Trump tariffs. The thing I wish I could pound into the head of tariff supporters is that every tariff item is not only a product that you sell to consumers, it's also an input into something else. When you impose tariffs on goods, you make not just things more expensive for American consumers, you make things more expensive for the American companies that buy those things and put them into other things. It's a house that Jack built problem that every time you make an input more expensive. You make the ultimate product more expensive and make the final American product that much less competitive on world markets. And the result is you can't compete, so you sell less, so you invest less, so you employ less. A large part of the attraction of terrorists to Donald Trump seems to be that they appeal to his desire for dominance. His perception of the world is divided into subjects and into enemies. And if you're not a subject, then you're an enemy. And if you're an enemy, then there are no rules. And if you're a subject, for that matter, there aren't any rules either. Everything is an expression of will and ego. And all economics is a matter of I win, you lose. And if I don't feel I'm winning, then I must be losing. This has become the signature political and economic philosophy of an entire political party under Donald Trump. The party that used to stand for markets and enterprise, the Republican party, the party of Reagan and Romney. We're on a bad track here. And these latest tariffs mark another bad milestone on that bad track. We need to get off this and we need to start trading in freedom and with rules. That doesn't mean that we pretend that China is not a problem. China is a problem and there's forced labor in China and China is a rule breaker and steals intellectual property. You need a China specific solution to the problem of trade, not a solution that destroys the whole apparatus of trade. With all of America's friends and increasingly former friends, the United States is now bound in a grinding and frustrating war with Iran. It needs all the friends it can get. The idea that it is waging economic aggression on all of its partners and then acting baffled and befuddled that these partners don't help out on the Iran problem. A war that the United States started and that it did not have to start and that now it can't get out of that just again seems to be another bad milestone on another bad path. The way out of all of America's problems. It's not the whole solution, but it's the beginning of a solution is to return to the path of free and fair trade with friendly minded nations bracketing China as a special problem and otherwise dropping tariffs to as the lowest lights possible. And returning to the days when the United States negotiated agreements with its friends to trade in freedom and prosperity with mutual benefit and understanding that true trade makes all those who participate it better off. And now my dialogue with Jonathan Shade. But first, a quick break.
- [07:45]
Best thing that's ever happened to you financially.
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Go easy.
- [07:48]
Charlie Warzel
Sold my car. On Carvana. Amazing offer, really.
- [07:51]
David Frum
I hit 200 on a scratcher.
- [07:53]
Charlie Warzel
Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once.
- [08:01]
David Frum
Okay, that's fair.
- [08:02]
Charlie Warzel
It's like the lottery, except you always win.
- [08:05]
David Frum
Not like the lottery at all, actually.
- [08:08]
Charlie Warzel
Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply.
- [08:17]
David Frum
A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show, Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or. Or watch.
- [09:17]
Jonathan chait has dedicated 30 years as one of this country's sharpest, wittiest, and most ornery advocates for liberalism. First the New Republic, then at New York magazine, and since 2024 at the Atlantic. It's a remarkable career, made more impressive by the fact that journalism was always his second choice of avocation, adopted only after the involuntary abandonment of his true ambition. Head coach of the University of Michigan football team, Jonathan Chait is the author of How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy that Will Prevail. And Jonathan is a continuing reminder that liberalism doesn't have to be apologetic or bashful about itself. Jonathan, welcome to the David Frum Show.
- [09:59]
Jonathan Chait
Thank you, David.
- [10:00]
David Frum
Okay, so we have a number of things to talk about today. I know this is a topic that's maybe a little more interesting to me than to you, but to start by looking back at the White House Correspondents Dinner that was recorded Saturday night just. Just a few days before you and I record. This has always been a kind of troublesome event from a point of view of Washington journalism. There are big advantages to being close to politicians and big hazards as well. So I know you worked at the glory days of the New Republic when there was a lot of intimacy between the New Republic and the politicians it liked. How do you think about events like the White House Correspondent's Dinner? And do you think about them differently in the age of Trump from the way you thought about them before.
- [10:38]
Jonathan Chait
I was always very skeptical of these events. I went to one to see what it was like, but I felt like if you go to more than one, then you're no longer going. Anthropologically, you're actually part of the thing. And I didn't want to be part of the thing because I think it's a little bit gross. Part of it just mechanically, is journalistic outlets using themselves as intermediaries for their advertisers to give them access to politicians and to celebrities. The celebrities come because they get some cachet for being at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. The politicians get access to donors and celebrities and to journalists. And I feel like it's cozy for everyone, but I don't think it's really good for the journalism profession question at all and never has been in the Trump era, people have started to question it more than they have. But I feel like the New York times was correct 20 some years ago to pull out of the event, and I wish everyone else would, too.
- [11:34]
David Frum
Trump has changed the ritual in one very noticeable way, which was in the past. The president's speech always followed a strict form, which was a series of gentle jibes at the press, somewhat tougher jibes at himself, occasional jibes at political opponents that was handled with extreme care. Obama did them more than others. But that was always a little dangerous to do because it sort of violated the treaty of the evening, followed of course, by the moment at the end, where the politician switches from humor to seriousness and pays tribute to the important role of the press. And everyone likes hearing him say it. Whatever the politician may think in the recesses of of the politician's heart, Trump just goes on. Pure aggression, pure attack. And that may make it easier for journalists to disavow or disconnect themselves from something that was troublesome before.
- [12:25]
Jonathan Chait
I think that's right. What was the most revealing joke he made was actually a decent joke, at least on paper. His delivery was horrible because he can't deliver written text. But he made a joke about how he's basically taken control of CBS News, how he who effectuated regime change there and installed Barry Weiss. And that's actually pretty chilling, right? I mean, that's the Orban playbook that we were all warning about in action. And he's just boasting about it to the faces of the journalists.
- [12:57]
David Frum
It's also, by the way, self defeating in a way that Trump's speeches are often not very strategic. But if it were true that Barry Weiss was the person you had installed at cbs. That is the last joke in the world that a president should make because it only detracts from the effectiveness of your supposed ally, which, again, I don't think she is. But if she were, it detracts from your effectiveness. It undercuts her, it puts her in an untenable situation. Why would you say such a thing? Trump doesn't seem always to think those things through.
- [13:26]
Jonathan Chait
Well, he doesn't think them through, but I think at some level he's acting from some instinct to dominate and to make everyone acknowledge the domination. Right. He doesn't work with any subtlety. He actually has to tell people what he's done and force them to wear the hat on their head. We may not want to go down this path of debating what's happened at cbs, but I think it's pretty clear that Trump believes he has done this at cbs. Now, whether Barry Weiss thinks that what she's doing is a different question.
- [13:58]
David Frum
I think you make a very shrewd point, which is that Trump, even when he would do better to allow dignity to people whom he thinks of as allies, he can't do it. He has to humiliate. He has to dominate. He has to actually take his friend's head and dump it in the bucket of shit and pull the friend's head out again and say, see, my friend is now covered in shit, thanks to me. That's what, that's the kind of guy I am. And this is the kind of low grade character my friend is.
- [14:21]
Jonathan Chait
That's right. That's right. I mean, bending the knee is, is a, is a metaphor people often use, but there's a visual strikingness to it, right? I mean, an actual sign of submission is what he requires of people who submit to him.
- [14:35]
David Frum
Now, let me pivot here to the Barack Obama first White House correspondent dinners and then his presidency. When I wrote speeches for President W. Bush, I occasionally tried to introduce jokes into them. I have this especially vivid memory of writing a joke that I'm now going to forget what the joke is, unfortunately. But I remember thinking it was quite good and putting it into a speech and having the joke be struck by Karl Rove personally. And when I went to Karl Rove to complain and say the joke was funny, Rove said, and I thought this was very wise, he said the joke was funny. That's why he killed it. It was too funny. President shouldn't be that funny. And one of the things that was very striking when Obama spoke at the White House correspondent said it was. He was that funny. He said the thing you couldn't believe a president had said. They were often hilarious, but often sometimes too funny. Did you have qualms about that?
- [15:26]
Jonathan Chait
No, I don't. I think there's a belief that some people have that humor and insight and dignity are in tension with each other. And I've just never thought that. I've always thought of humor as an aspect of intelligence. When someone can say something funny to me, that's a sign that they have some insight that they're able to express into the world. And I've never objected to any figure of any persuasion being funny. Ted Cruz, with whom I disagree on almost everything, can often be very, very funny, and I appreciate that about him. I think we need more of it.
- [16:06]
David Frum
Well, let me quote the Obama joke that made me most uncomfortable, but that was very funny. So I believe this was the White House correspondent's dinner just after he had been reelected in 2012, and he was taking a bit of a victory lap. And he mentioned that one particular donor, I think it was Sheldon Adelson, had spent the then astonishing sum of $100 million to defeat him. And Obama, sort of exalting that it hadn't worked, said, if he felt that strongly about it, why didn't he just offer the $100 million to me and ask me to leave politics altogether? I'm not saying I would have done it, but I would have thought about it, and that was really funny. It's a great joke, but why is it a great joke? So there's a theory that humor is how we adjust discomfort. It's how we deal with the taboo and discuss the taboo in a way that's socially acceptable. And so the taboo there is, yeah, politicians could bribe. We've reached an accumulate degree of wealth in American society where a rich man could say, you know, I don't like your views. Here's $10 million. Go to an island. I want you never to be heard from again. And there are politicians who might say, satchel full of money, airplane ticket in hand, off I go. And when you joke about it, you remind people of that reality, which we all know, but it's a little uncomfortable
- [17:15]
Jonathan Chait
to face, or that we're still banning bribery. At the time, we were still banning bribery. We no longer are banning bribery anymore. But you can spend $100 million. So there's this last barrier against a rich man's influence that we can't cross. So we can go all this way, but he can't just Take the most direct possible route to his ambition.
- [17:35]
David Frum
So you wrote this book about Obama. At the very end of the Obama presidency, Trump came to office. You attracted a lot of attack for the book is how could you say Obama was effective when he was immediately followed by Trump? You spent a lot of the 2010s defending Obama from critics on the right who said he was a communist and a Kenyan or a Kenyan communist or a communist Kenyan. Now, the attacks seem to come from the left. I know you're not a person of tender sensibility, but how do you deal with this?
- [18:03]
Jonathan Chait
You know, it is interesting and I have reflected on this because I would say 75 to 80% of the argument I make in the book is against those critics on the right and maybe 20% is on is against the criticisms of the left. And there were criticisms from the left of Obama at the time, but they were just much, much less important. And what's interesting in retrospect, as you sort of indicated, is that the conservative critiques have mostly been forgotten, dropped altogether. They've just moved on to other things to anger them at the moment. Whereas the left wing criticisms have survived. They've just been repeated over and over again and have established themselves as kind of official histories of that era and are widely believed, even if they weren't widely believed at the time. It has really been fascinating and I don't quite of a full handle on how that happened other than just the sheer power of repetition at the time. In other words, to listen to people talk about Obama now, you would think that Obama was just leaving on the table all these left wing victories he could have been taking because he was just such a neoliberal shill that he, out of cussedness, just hated Medicare for all and loved Wall Street. But at the time he was seen as a socialist. And it wasn't just by the Republican Party. The mainstream media was portraying him as a radical. Let me just give you one example, and there are many examples of this. But the kind of official history we have now of the stimulus is that Obama held down the size of the stimulus because he didn't want to spend more money on stimulus because he was worried about the deficit. The truth is that Obama, rightly or wrongly, was trying a strategy to get the maximum stimulus sum he thought he could get out of Congress. And Obama was being seen at the time as being completely irresponsible in pursuing stimulus. The New York Times was treating the deficit as the big crisis and the economic crisis as a secondary problem. It was treating his attempt to stimulate the economy in the face of these deficits is perverse. It was basically running stories saying we are looking at $100 trillion deficits down the road. And nonetheless, Barack Obama wants to spend even more money, which is such a hard sell. That was the mainstream narrative that he was fighting against. And the whole context in which he was operating has been completely forgotten.
- [20:35]
David Frum
Well, we were there.
- [20:37]
And it is true that Obama's first job as president was saving the banking system and the larger American free enterprise economy. And maybe he didn't love that job, but that was the job that history gave him, and that's what he did. I have a very unusual view on this, which is I actually think that the period from October 2008 to March of 2009, the Bush Obama transition, is actually one of the finest hours in the history of US Government and the finest hours in the history of the presidency. And a remarkable, remarkable testimony to two men of different backgrounds working together on a common enterprise in ways that were very generous. And the one I think about the most was one of the questions that George W. Bush faced in the fall of 2008 was, should he save General Motors or not? And there were two obvious choices. One was, save General Motors and make sure that you're. And do it. And so. And then your predecessor would have to live with it. And the other was, kill General Motors and then your predecessor would have to live with it. And Bush instead made the decision, save them for 90 days. Or probably that would forget the exact number of days, but save them for enough of a period that your successor would have full autonomy to decide for himself whether to save General Motors or not. And indeed, we didn't have a Great Depression, and we didn't have the collapse of democratic systems all over the world, and we didn't have a collapse of world capitalism. We didn't have global communism. I think of those as good things.
- [22:00]
Jonathan Chait
And do you remember the phrase that conservatives applied to the bailout of gm? Gangster government was the most common one. Gangster government. This was them indicating that he had gone beyond. They'd already called him a socialist. Now he had gone so far beyond socialism, they needed an even viler epithet to describe what he was doing. These dangerous methods he would use to leverage control of the private sector and basically put us on the road towards communism and improper uses of government power.
- [22:33]
David Frum
I remember very vividly a conversation I had sometime in the spring of 2009 with a group of young. I think they were Koch fellows or some kind of group funded by conservative projects. And I was much more in the conservative world in those days than I am now. Although well on my way out because of this. I remember talking to this group of four or five young people and they were saying that if it had been up to them, they would have allowed the banks to liquidate themselves. So I said, let's play that out and I walk them through. I won't take time here to do it. But what happens if you allow a bank liquidation? And that means all kinds of people who had good assets suddenly find they don't have liquidity sufficient to cover their assets. So even though the assets are perfectly fine, they have to be liquidated hastily to raise capital. And you have this accelerating crisis through the whole economy, which is the story of. Of 1931, 33. But I played it out for them in very vivid terms. And I remember one of them, as I just describe this nightmare scenario, getting quite ashen and saying, well, I guess it's a good thing we weren't in power then because our ideas wouldn't have worked in an emergency. Well, if your ideas don't work in an emergency, all the ideas work. In non emergency, everything works when it's not an emergency. The test of your idea is, does it work when it is an emergency?
- [23:47]
Jonathan Chait
No, I've always been taken by that comment, because what it's saying is that our ideas are just a theological commitment, more of an aspiration, and not something that you can actually trust to work in the real world, but nonetheless that we should be guided by them for theological reasons and not for practical ones.
- [24:06]
David Frum
One of the legacies of that Obama experience was so the Obama stimulus was about $800 billion if I remember correctly, but half of it in the form of immediate cash relief and about half of it in the form of spending, which was a big number at the time. In the democratic world, that experience was remembered as Obama didn't do enough. And so Biden, who was confronting not a deflationary crisis the way Obama was, but an inflationary crisis, he spent much more and ran even bigger deficits. Well, maybe there weren't bigger deficits to the economy because the government's revenue hadn't collapsed as much, but he ran very big deficits. This time the voices of conventional wisdom were correct that Biden was spending too much and he had overlearned the Obama experience that Obama had handled successfully and Biden handled less successfully.
- [24:53]
Jonathan Chait
Obama understood that he needed to stimulate the economy more. I mean, as soon as he got the stimulus, he tried to get more stimulus. He got every dollar he could get out of Congress. You could make an argument that he could have gotten more if he tried different methods. But he was trying to get. He understood, first of all, the recession was deeper than they grasped at the time they passed the stimulus. So they calculated the size of the hole and they figured out, okay, how close to filling up the hole can we get? And then it turns out the hole was even deeper than they thought. So then they immediately were trying to get more money. And they did get more money. They got more tax credits, they pulled out more stimulus here and there, but they did not get enough stimulus and the recovery was too slow. And that was the main lesson that they needed to not repeat that mistake. But the problem is they just erred in the opposite direction under Biden.
- [25:44]
David Frum
So the left theory of the Obama presidency is Obama didn't do enough and therefore the working class got mad and they voted for Trump and it's Obama's fault.
- [25:51]
Jonathan Chait
I mean, you can explain Trump's victory through normal political arguments. You don't need to summon this crisis of capitalism that produced Trump. It's hard to win a third consecutive term for any party. Hillary Clinton was a less talented politician than Obama. She was challenged from the left by Bernie Sanders, and her response to that challenge was for herself to move leftward still. So the candidate who ran in 2016 under difficult conditions for any candidate was not running as Obama's third term, but she was running significantly to the left of Obama's third term with less political skills. Obama left office with a 60% approval rating. Obama, had he been able to run for president for a third time, would have wiped the floor with Donald Trump. There's just no reason to believe that Donald Trump was a repudiation of Obama, who was and is very popular and far more popular than Trump.
- [26:53]
David Frum
I have a really brain dead theory of what what happened that ignores all the possible personalities and so on. This is my theory of how Obama led to Trump. The economy returns to pre crisis levels of output and employment in 2014, pre the crisis of 2007. 8. So we're back at 2014 to where we were in 2007, although the growth trajectory is lower at that point. Respectable opinion says, right, Obama's been running these big deficits. This could lead to inflation if unchecked. Now is the time for the Federal Reserve to tighten interest rates. And that was not a crazy decision. That's a very conventional, normal decision. The crisis is over. I mean, we're back to where we were tightened now. And it turns out the economy was still in 2014, not healthy yet. And when you tightened in 2014, instead of saying, okay, the growth continues as it did when you tightened in the middle 80s, instead, what happened is the employment growth slows. And so you have very. Not recessionary conditions in 2015, 2016, but disappointing conditions. People do not feel continuing improvement. And they weren't just grateful to be pulled from the sea to the shore. They wanted to resume their normal trajectory from the shore, and that didn't happen. And so the incumbent party lost. And then the Federal Reserve recognized its mistake, loosened in 2016, and the economy accelerated in 2017, 2018, 2019. We had three good years before the COVID pandemic.
- [28:22]
Jonathan Chait
Right. They thought we were at capacity. There was a debate about, are we at capacity? Are we about to hit the point of accelerating inflation in 2014? And we weren't. And we found that out in Trump's first term, that there's actually plenty of slack left in the labor market, plenty of room to grow. You're right. That was an important moment, and that could well have made the difference because the 2016 election was so close. Just a little bit more growth in those last two terms could have made the difference. A lot of things could have made the difference. But I would just point out, in the overall macro situation, Obama was popular. Obama's popularity was not the problem. I mean, if he was even more popular, it would have helped more, but he was overall popular.
- [29:01]
David Frum
Now, in 2026, we have this attack on Obama from the left. He's now become quite a demon figure. And what is the left case in 2026 against Obama? Why is Obama now bad?
- [29:15]
Jonathan Chait
Well, the main thing that they will say that Obama did badly was bailing out the banks in 2008. Obama's 2008 bank bailout.
- [29:24]
David Frum
2009.
- [29:25]
Jonathan Chait
No, no, no. 2008. They will now, of course, the bank bailout did occur in 2008.
- [29:30]
David Frum
Yeah.
- [29:30]
Jonathan Chait
Obama did not become president until 2009. But when I point this out, people will never believe me. I've been pointing this out for 15 years, and no one will believe me. So I think I just have to accept that I'm wrong and. And that Barack Obama actually was president in 2008, and he's therefore responsible for the bank bailout that occurred in 2008.
- [29:49]
David Frum
I think the bank bailout was good. And whoever was president in 2008, which turns out to be maybe a more difficult question than. I'm sorry to have interrupted you, because I thought it was an easy question, but as you Say as, as the question who was president in 2020, it turns out to be quite hard.
- [30:01]
Jonathan Chait
Yes.
- [30:03]
David Frum
So leaving aside the mysterious question of who was President 2008, why. Why is it, if you're the left and you love Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved the banks, why do you hate whoever was president in 2008, who saved the banks?
- [30:17]
Jonathan Chait
Yeah, I've brought up this point many times. It's. It's very hard for me. I want to faithfully reproduce their criticisms, so I don't want to just be battling strawmen. But it's very hard for me on this point because I feel like so little sense can be drawn from the criticisms they make. Like I said, the number one point they make is the bank bailout. That's by far the most common critique they make of Obama. The second most common they make is failing to jail anyone for the crimes of the financial crisis. What actually happened was they looked at it and said, well, they didn't commit any crimes. The problem is all this stuff was legal, so we need to change the laws. And so they passed the, the Dodd Frank financial reforms, which were the strongest regulations of Wall street since the 1930s. At the time, those reforms were celebrated by progressives. You know, if you look, if you ask any of the progressive experts in financial regulation, they will say that's a very powerful law. Set of reforms that were, that were formulated. It looked at all the problems of financial crisis, really regulated all them. It also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But they blame Obama for not imprisoning anyone for activity that was only subsequently made illegal. I know I'm sort of attacking arguments that sound like strawman, but these really are the most common attacks made on Obama.
- [31:41]
David Frum
Take a step beyond the attacks, because often when people say things, they are applying imperfect words to deep feelings. Okay, so maybe they don't have good rationalizations, but where does it come from? What is the mentality that says, I revere Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but I hate Barack Obama? Where does that mood come from? Where does Bernie Sanders is, and what is the emotional need that it meets?
- [32:02]
Jonathan Chait
I think there was significant difference between Obama and the organized progressive movement. Do you remember when Obama's spokesman derided the professional left? That was a somewhat notorious comment, but it really did capture a hostile relationship between the organized progressive movement and the Obama administration. And he thought that these organized progressive lobbies were unrealistic, didn't have good ideas, and he had better ideas for messaging and for policy strategy. So they were always on the outs with him, and they resented that Biden, by contrast, was so deeply enmeshed with the progressive movement, the professional left, as they were called under the Obama era, that it was almost impossible to draw any distance between them at all. Biden did whatever they wanted. And so, even though Biden had dramatically less legislative success, the progressive movement really celebrated Biden's administration all the way till the end when they decided that now Gaza was the only thing that mattered and Gaza was the reason that he was a failure. But really, up until that moment, they were celebrating Biden as the heir to Roosevelt, Biden as the progressive hero, and Obama as the sad, weak appendage to the Reagan era.
- [33:28]
David Frum
Is there something going on too, that if you're on the real left, that you regard Trump as not the worst possible outcome? Because if you're on the real left that Trump is, obviously it isn't that they like him, but they know the working class, they will sooner or later see through the folly of Trump. So all we have to do is eliminate the false messiahs and give them our true messiah and then they will see through the right and turn to the true messiah. And in fact, an interval of right wing government, maybe, or a Trump government, whether you call it right wing, is a necessary step in the process. Just as Hitler led to the triumph of communism in Germany. So not to compare Trump to Hitler, but this is the thinking you, we, the, the far right gets its turn, then we get our turn. We just need to exclude the middle and then we win.
- [34:19]
Jonathan Chait
This was also the thinking of the communist left in, in Weimar Germany, they saw Hitler's constituency as their own constituency. They really thought that there was this fluidity between the far left and the far right. I, I don't think that was correct at all.
- [34:34]
David Frum
But at the intellectual level, that's that there's something to that. I mean, we all know people and we could name them if we wanted to, who do seem to move very easily between far left and far right. And these are people who are very well educated, who care a lot about politics, care a lot about ideas. You know, you'll hear them say, I'm a, I'm a progressive, but I feel at home when I talk to these ultra maga people is we, we both hate bankers, we both hate Ukraine, we both hate Israel. We have so much in common. And that must apply at the voting level where people vote for reasons that are less ideological.
- [35:04]
Jonathan Chait
That's right. It's the same error. And that's why in some level you're right that the Trump's election filled them with hope that they really saw this proletarian uprising that they've been longing for but were dejected that was not happening. Finally, glimmers of it happening, because you could see elements of Trump's populist rhetoric as reflecting their own sort of. So I think you're spot on in that.
- [35:31]
David Frum
So how much of your life do you spend defending the Obama legacy to people who want to detract it from, from the left?
- [35:38]
Jonathan Chait
Too much. Too much. I'm planning to write something maybe early next year. I've got to, I've got to just put it all in one place. But it's, it's gotten to the point where I have this alternate history that only I and a handful of deranged lunatics are aware of. And, and we're living in an alternate universe in which everyone else has settled on a completely different interpretation of what happened during those years. So I've got to just put it all in one place, I think.
- [36:06]
David Frum
Let me ask you about your native Michigan now, because these, these issues are being played out in real time. Why is the Michigan Senate race, in your view, so dramatic? So much attention was focused on Maine. Now Maine is fading from the center of the discourse. The camera is swiveling to Michigan. Why is that Senate race so important?
- [36:25]
Jonathan Chait
There's a Democratic Senate primary. Abdul EL Sayed is the left wing candidate. Hannah Haley Stevens is sort of the mainstream center left candidate. They're both. No, Gary Peters is the incumbent Democrat who's retiring. So there's an open seat.
- [36:40]
David Frum
How competitive a state is Michigan?
- [36:42]
Jonathan Chait
It's a slightly blue state, although Trump won it in 2024 and in 2016. So it's very close. At the presidential level, Democrats have usually won Senate races and have usually won the gubernatorial races most of the time. But Donald Trump did win it a couple times, and it's close enough that the Democrats could lose a Senate seat even in a wave year if they really screw things up. And they seem to at least be putting that possibility on the table.
- [37:13]
David Frum
So now there's an open Democratic nomination. There is a Republican candidate who's competed before, who's a strong candidate, who's not a loony at all. And the Democrats will soon vote to choose one of two candidates. So tell us about the two Democratic choices.
- [37:28]
Jonathan Chait
There's Haley Stevens, who's a kind of center left, traditional Democrat, who basically, if you put, if you took all the Democrats of one Senate races in Michigan in the last 30 years and put them in a blender and poured them out, you'd Get Haley Stevens. She's just an amalgamation of the traditional center left Democratic Party party in the state of Michigan. Abdul El Sayed is very left wing for the Democratic Party. He would be the most left wing Democrat in the Senate. I think even to the left of Bernie Sanders. He would be as far left maybe as people like Ilhan Omar, Rashid Tlaib. He's just across the board left on every issue. Has really emphasized opposition to Israel as a campaign theme. But he's trying to do what Graham Platner seemed to be on the road to doing in Maine. But I think he's even doing it in a, in a more confident, ideologically confident fashion. And he said that if he wins the primary and wins the general election, he is going to start carrying out purges of other Democrats who he thinks can be beaten in primaries.
- [38:46]
David Frum
And he seems to be a less psychologically troubled person than Graham Platner. And although this is maybe invidious, probably more intelligent than Graham Platner, I actually
- [38:55]
Jonathan Chait
have come to question some of his political judgment recently. I feel like he's played this shrewdly but aggressively, really pushing up against the edge of how much he can get away with. But I feel like recently, you know, it's like a gambler who's on a winning streak and is just, is just overplaying his hands. I'll give you an example. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens over the weekend.
- [39:22]
David Frum
Gretchen Whitmer is the governor, the popular
- [39:26]
Jonathan Chait
governor of the state of Michigan. Popular with Democrats and popular with voters on the whole, if you're El sayed, you just want to just take your lump and walk away from it, right? You want to minimize the impact of this. This is not going to be a, a good story for you. The only question is how much attention it's going to get. But then he goes and attacks Gretchen Whitmer. He takes a shot at her management of the roads, which was, which was one of her original campaign slogans, just fixing the roads and says the roads haven't been fixed. So now you've given every reporter covering this race license to extend the story and write about El Sayed's vendetta against Whitmer. And you've invited Whitmer to weigh into the race once again on Stevens behalf. And her approval rating among Democrats, I think is 88%. So you have a tiny number of Democrats who agree with Elsayed that Gretchen Whitmer is a corporate sellout, which she also thinks and has been saying, but the vast majority love her. So he's managed to skate by without really bringing to the surface the degree to which he rejects the entire Democratic Party party and it's entire philosophy. And he's trying to get a lot of loyal Democrats to his side who just want someone who will fight harder against the Republicans and don't fully understand the ideological extremism that he is bringing to the table.
- [40:49]
David Frum
So why is this a story outside Michigan? So the Democrats may be about to nominate someone who's more to the left and has a high level of personal aggression and really, really, really hates Israel. And that's issue number one for him, how much he hates Israel. So suppose he wins. Why is this a story outside Michigan?
- [41:05]
Jonathan Chait
His plan is he will then become the leader of the left. And he said this, and a lot of other leftists have said this, that he will become their standard bearer. Bernie Sanders is getting old. Now, if he can win, he will prove something that they've never been able to demonstrate before, that a left wing candidate can win in a purple state.
- [41:26]
Ryan Reynolds
Right.
- [41:27]
Jonathan Chait
You've had DSA candidates winning in New York City. You have Bernie Sanders up in Vermont, which is a little bit idiosyncratic. And you have some other House candidates, you have some mayors, but you've never had anyone in a purple state winning on a platform this far left. And while EL Sayed is not in the dsa, he is supported by the DSA and he is aligned with the positions of a lot of DSA candidates. So that will completely change the perception of what is electable within the Democratic Party.
- [41:59]
David Frum
One of the things that matters outside Michigan is the left has probably given away the main Senate seat. And Susan Collins looks like at this point, if you had to guess, she probably survived even in this, even in Maine, a mostly blue state, even in.
- [42:14]
Jonathan Chait
I'm not sure I agree. It's a chance. There's a chance. It's a risk.
- [42:18]
David Frum
It's something that should have been an easy pickup, is now very contested. Michigan is also very, again, as you say, blue state, but one that does elect Republicans also could be at risk. Is there any way to a Democratic Senate majority without both Maine and Michigan?
- [42:33]
Jonathan Chait
No. No, I don't think there is. And the truth is, if you want to think about it from a politically sophisticated perspective, Michigan should have been an easy, easy hold.
- [42:43]
Ryan Reynolds
Right?
- [42:43]
Jonathan Chait
In a blue wave off your election, a state that almost always elects Democrats to the Senate not by huge margins, but pretty reliably by three or four points, should have been an easy hold. And the outcome that I think a lot of moderates are afraid of is that El Sayed runs, say four points behind the National Democratic Party, underperforms due to his extremism, but still gets in because it's such a huge wave. And then the left turns around and says, see, this shows that our agenda is popular and, and we need to implement it everywhere, all the time.
- [43:15]
David Frum
And so then, and then the Democrats lose in 2028 to J.D. vance and his program of, of urbanism in the English language.
- [43:22]
Jonathan Chait
Right. This is going to become the main proof point that's being used in this inter factional war within the Democratic Party. So if Elsayed wins, it will be the proof point that the Democratic Party needs to run as far as it can to the left and that will not impair their ability to win the election. 2028. And I think, well, actually, actually is going to be quite important in terms of the presidential outcome in 2028. In fact, it might even be El Sayed himself because they are so enthusiastic about his candidacy. He could, you know, like Obama went from a first year senator to presidential candidate. El Said could, could easily be on that trajectory. That's how, that's how powerful he's become within the movement. So quickly.
- [43:59]
David Frum
Well, people worry about the loss of consensus in American life and the polarization. But if you have an El Sayed versus JD Vance ticket in 2028, at least we can have a consensus about the danger of the Jews. That would, that would be America could be united. The two parties could agree on something.
- [44:15]
Jonathan Chait
Right? Right. And then Bloomberg will run a third party race and get the 2%.
- [44:21]
David Frum
So what's at stake here is not just the 2026 outcome, but the 2028 outcome as well.
- [44:26]
Jonathan Chait
I think that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. So it's tremendously consequential.
- [44:29]
David Frum
So I'm going to ask you a somewhat personal question. Forgive me if I overstate step here, but one of the reasons why Republican moderates lost first to the Tea Party and then to Trump and there was very little resistance to the Tea Party, there was a lot of resistance to Trump, but it was overwhelmed was that people of moderate views understandably have moderate personalities. They don't like conflict, they don't like trouble. They always believe in compromise, that you can work things out. And so you get these kinds of soft, we have moderate ideas was backed by soft personalities. Fred Siegel, who is a great urbanist, used to be at the Manhattan Institute, had this praise of Rudy Giuliani. And whenever you think of Rudy Giuliani personally, this is, I think, a great phrase. He described Giuliani as an immoderate centrist, which is, he had centrist views, but he was just, he was full of aggression.
- [45:20]
Jonathan Chait
Right out over the centrism.
- [45:23]
David Frum
Yeah. So that, that I think you've, this is the part that I was going to put you in. I mean, you are kind of an immoderate centrist. You're ready to, you have centrist views, but you're ready to brawl. But do you see as you look at the Democratic Party, that there's something about the moderate, they will not fight back and therefore that they're abdicating by default to people who are going to end up empowering Trump and whoever Trump's successor is, probably J.D. vance and all that J.D. vance means for the future of America Democracy.
- [45:53]
Jonathan Chait
Absolutely. Look, it's an old problem. Right. The definition of a liberal is someone who's too broad minded to take his own side in an argument. This has been something that liberals have noticed about ourselves and have been complaining about ourselves without doing anything to change for generations. You can find historical exceptions. Sometimes we point to the post World War II moves by Arthur Schlesinger and Walter Reuther to form Americans for Democracy Democratic Action and to exclude the Communists, to keep the communists out of the New Deal coalition and to fight for civil rights and fight for the New Deal values. But that's maybe more the exception than the rule in some ways. I mean, there really is something inherent to liberalism that's necessary to liberalism, which is an openness to critique, to not want to become so confident in yourself that you shut out all challenges. Right. So I think there is a strength to that quality of liberalism that allows us to be supple, to change our positions with, with, with new facts and I think has made liberalism enduring.
- [47:00]
David Frum
Where is Obama in all of this? It's his legacy that is under attack. He's both institutionally but also quite personally. Will he stand up for himself in an argument? Why doesn't he make himself heard in a lot of these states? If the choice is Obama vs Bernie Sanders, if the choice is Bernie Sanders vs random local Democratic official, Bernie Sanders may win. If it's Bernie Sanders versus Obama, we know how that fight goes. Is it because he's an ex president and doesn't want to return to the muck and mire of politics, where is he?
- [47:28]
Jonathan Chait
I think he's calculated that he can have the most influence by operating behind the scenes. And you'll notice that the Bernie people absolutely despise Obama specifically, not just for his presidency, but for his role in 2020 when you had this sudden coordination of the non Bernie opposition. The Bernie Sanders strategy in 2020 was to win the Democratic nomination with under 50% by just having his opponents stay divided all the way through the convention. And you would never have to win a Democratic Party majority and he could get the nomination anyway. And then all of a sudden just everyone realized they couldn't win and dropped out and endorsed Biden. And Obama played a role there and they hate him for that. So Obama will take an active role, but he doesn't want to play this factional leadership role that Bernie Sanders plays where he goes into every contested primary and endorses the most left wing candidate. I think he's calculated that will reduce his ability to influence people across the party. That will just make him a much more narrow factional figure. That doesn't seem like a crazy calculation to me. I can't say for sure it's right though.
- [48:33]
David Frum
I'm reading this summer Kay Bird's new biography of Roy Kong, which is okay, so if you're reading the book, you'll know what I mean. And one of the anecdotes that Byrd tells in this book is how President Eisenhower kept coming up with very convincing, very ingenious, plausible arguments for not taking on Joe McCarthy directly. And the first time he says it, and the second time he says it, you think you make a point. The third and fourth time you begin to think you're just unwilling. Possibly you're scared, but you're unwilling to take the risk. And actually you're not acting for good statesmanlike motives, you're acting for self preservationist and maybe unworthy motives. When McCarthy starts to attack the army and to attack Eisenhower's friends, not just George Marshall, who He attacked in 52, but he attacks John J. McCloy in 53 and 54. And Eisenhower keeps trying to do things indirectly and has some success, partly because McCarthy is a desperate alcoholic and becoming very sick. But if McCarthy had not been a desperate alternative alcoholic, it's not clear that Eisenhower's methods would have worked so well and he just was making things easy for himself. And I wonder whether, with all the subtlety and ingenuity you attribute to Barack Obama, whether he's also just trying to make things easy for himself.
- [49:45]
Jonathan Chait
You might be right. I'm trying to explain what I think his calculation is. I can't say for sure that the alternative course of action wouldn't work. That if he really was willing to fight back and defend his legacy, he does do it in bits and pieces. But he really has allowed the left to win this argument about his legacy, and he hasn't put up much of a fight. I mean, I was making the point during his presidency that his support for education reform, which was really something he cherished, began to disintegrate when the teachers unions and the left fought back against it. And he just kind of let them do it and he didn't defend it. And by the time Hillary Clinton came along, there was really no longer viable ground to defend it in the Democratic Party. So I think you're right that there
- [50:32]
David Frum
is this passivity when you say that's what he thinks will work. One of my rules of politics is, in fact, none of us know what will work. We are always guessing, and we're usually looking in the mirror and projecting our own wishes. We're very poor judges of what will work, but we can be very good judges of what's the right thing to do. And we also can be, if we really look inward. We know when our reluctance to take a risky action is prompted by a truly a prudential calculation and when there's just a certain element of it'll be a lot of trouble, a lot of hardship. It'll be easier for me if I take the softer course. And now I will persuade myself. Well, the softer course is also, that's also the smart decision. But we never know what the smart decision is. We only know what the right decision is.
- [51:14]
Jonathan Chait
I can't improve on that.
- [51:16]
David Frum
Wow. Well, that's very collegial. Jonathan Chait, thank you so much. I'm sorry, I gotta take Pocket the rare Cheat positive review and put it in my pocket.
- [51:30]
Jonathan Chait
I'll find something to criticize soon. Don't worry.
- [51:32]
David Frum
Okay, I know. Thanks so much for joining me today.
- [51:35]
Jonathan Chait
Thank you, David.
- [51:36]
Ryan Reynolds
Bye.
- [51:36]
Charlie Warzel
Bye.
- [51:44]
David Frum
A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel onto the David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.
- [52:33]
Thanks so much to Jonathan Chait for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a work of history. 1177 B.C. the Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Klein, published in 2014 by Princeton University Press. Now, I have not yet seen the Odyssey. I may be alone on my block. It sounds wonderful and I'm keen to get to it. But one of the things that I am remarking with admiration is that as people have gone to see the Odyssey, they have become fascinated by this question of the transition from one period of civilization to another. A character, I think it's Odysseus himself, says in the movie our Age of Bronze is collapsing. Which is maybe a little on the nose for movie dialogue, but is right. The Odyssey is a story set in the. In the Bronze Age, written in the Iron Age, measured by which metal was the predominant metal that went into weapons of war and other kinds of tools. And there was a big collapse in between the two. And Eric Klein's book 1177, the Year Civilization Collapse, is a study of the collapse of. In an attempt to explain why it happened. As I understand, and again, I haven't seen the movie. But the great theme of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is that this collapse is first and foremost a moral collapse. One civilization has had the kind of life energy seep out of it and is giving way to a new and successor civilization that will be guided by different rules and different values. And indeed there really was, across the eastern Mediterranean, a remarkable collapse around the year 1177 B BC the Hittite Empire, which was the superpower of the time, based in what is now southern Turkey, that vanished entirely and its capital disappeared across the Mediterranean city states. Vanished. The Minoan civilization vanished. The New Kingdom in Egypt didn't quite vanish, but it lost a lot of its military power and never again exerted the kind of power over the region that it had before about the year 1200, Mycenaean Greece, which is where the characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey supposedly come from. That civilization utterly collapsed. It even lost the ability to read and to write for hundreds of years, only to re. Emerge later as an Iron Age civilization. And so it is through up and down the Levant into the islands Cyprus. So why did the bronze. Why?
- [54:45]
What happened?
- [54:46]
Er, Klein tries to give us an answer. But the key thing to keep in mind as to the background that enabled all this is that bronze, which is the weapon that the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey used for their. The metal that they use for their weapons. And that was the main form of armor and tools. Bronze is a compound of copper and tin. So copper was relatively abundant in the Mediterranean world. There were copper mines in Cyprus and in other places, but tin was scarce in that part of the world and had to be brought to be united with the copper from very far flung places, as far as Cornwall in Great Britain and, and Afghanistan, in the center of Asia. So when you're committed to bronze, you're committed to very global trade routes. And because the trade routes are so extended, you build large states. Because you have large states, you need ways to manage the states, including organized religion and reading and writing and some kind of numbering system. How do you keep track of how much tin has moved from Afghanistan to Babylonia and when it moved and who moved it? You need some form of writing, and you need a bureaucracy. You need comparably sophisticated and elaborated states. Something happened around the year 1177, and Klein makes a good case that it's a compound of ecological effects. Droughts and earthquakes that weakened the states, ended their ability to import tin, reduced the availability of the bronze alloy made from copper and tin, and sent these stakes reeling backwards and made them militarily vulnerable to invaders and small bands that otherwise they would have just brushed off with superior strength. Through the Bronze Age, people knew about iron, but. But iron was a more difficult material to work, Particularly it required a lot of heat. And it just seemed that bronze, which was easier to work with and had a lot of prestige attached to it, that that was a natural medicine medal of choice. But once the bronze is no longer available because of two, tin has become hard to get. People are forced back to figure out ways to work with the iron. And once they do so, they find that iron is a dramatically superior weapon of war, Makes sharper, stronger swords, spears, and arrowheads. And so our iron replaces it. And the world never looks backward to bronze. Bronze is from then on used primarily for statuary and art because it remains a prestige material, but it's not a workable material. But the Klein story is one of environmental change leading to material innovation, not a story of moral decay. It wasn't that people somehow lost faith in themselves and therefore turned away from bronze and then found a new faith and therefore turned to iron. They had very practical problems. Now, I don't want to dispute the importance to art of telling stories about moral decay and moral regeneration, but as we're trying to understand why civilizations actually change, I mean, morality surely plays a part in it. Anyone watching the crisis of American democracy right now has to face that the greatness of a society and the ebb of greatness can be attributed to moral defects in that society. But we also need to pay a lot of attention to ecological changes that force change upon society and to the material responses to environmental change. Because while we're not doing a great job in 21st century America to adapting to our moral challenges, we're doing an even worse job of adapting to climate changes. And if climate is what felled the Hittites, and as other historians will tell us, if climate is what failed the Romans, and if climate is what, as other historians again tell, felled the Ming empire and led to the rise of new civilizations in China, then climate, if we don't pay attention to it, it could be the falling of us. So as we enjoy the movie, as we absorb its powerful moral lessons, we also need to keep our eye on the material world, the world of climate and weather. Maybe we can't control it, but we'd best learn to adapt to it. Because if we don't, it will be the end of us. Thanks so much for watching the David Frum show this week. I hope you will share the program and like it on whatever platform you use. As ever, if you're minded to support the program, the best way to do so is by subscribing to the Atlantic and support all of my colleagues, including my colleague Jonathan Schait. See you next week on the David Frum Show.
- [58:48]
Bye Bye. This episode of the David Frum show
- [59:16]
was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine.
- [59:24]
Our theme is by Andrew Edwards.
- [59:27]
Claudine Abayad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
- [59:34]
Ryan Reynolds
Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint Story is better. Every plan $15 a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending. Zero tears. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [59:56]
David Frum
of 45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or $180 for 12 month plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. C terms.