← The David Frum Show
The David Frum Show
Why Trump Sides With Putin
01:00:10
Fiona Hill on Putin’s long game, Trump’s transactional foreign policy, and the danger of mistaking size and bluster for real power. Plus: Trump’s grocery-price fiction and V. S. Naipaul’s “Among the Believers.”
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- [00:00]
A
Ann.
- [00:01]
B
I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year to make sure their opponents can't win.
- [00:32]
A
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.
- [00:38]
C
We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
- [00:47]
B
Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
- [01:13]
D
Hello and welcome to the David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be Fiona Hill, an advisor to three American presidents on Russia and Eurasia generally, and, of course, a central figure in exposing President Trump's wrongdoing that led to the 2019 first impeachment of President Trump. My book this week will be a 1981 travelogue by the great writer VS Naipaul among the believers which took him to, among other countries, Iran in the immediate aftershock of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Before I get to the dialogue and the book, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about a domestic subject, and that is this extraordinary moment where Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins informed a TV interviewer that her department had run thousands of simulations and good news. It was possible to feed an American person for less than $3 if that person ate a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, acorn, tortilla, and one other thing. She didn't have enough respect either for her audience or for the people she was talking about to remember what that fourth thing was that would make up this kind of snack plate. And this has attracted a lot of question marks. What if you want a second corn tortilla? And by the way, with chicken selling even at Walmart for between 25 and 30 cents an ounce, how big a piece of chicken is that piece of chicken going to be for? Under $3. But aside from the let them eat cake aspect of this, one of the things that is really striking has been the refusal of the Trump administration to even to acknowledge that there is a food affordability problem in the United States. President Trump has responded to the increases in the price of food. The general price increase under his presidency by simply lying about it. I've got a little summary here. I don't pretend this is an exhaustive summary. Here he is on October 21st. Grocery prices are way down. Here he is on October 16th. Groceries are down. Here he is on October 14th. Now, as you know, groceries are down October 10th. We've gotten prices way down for groceries at the United nations at September 23rd, under my leadership, grocery prices are down. I'm sure there are many other instances. On January 13, President Trump addressed the Detroit Economic Club, and there he spoke from a script. So there was a little bit more effort to make the words not a complete lie. And his quote on January 13 was, Grocery prices are starting to go rapidly down now. Grocery prices are up, up, up. Data released in the week that I record this program by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the cost of food at home rose 2.4% overall in the 12 months of 2025 and 0.7% in December alone, the fastest single month increase since October of 2022. And the rise in food prices stands out because many other prices are ceasing to go up so fast. Gasoline, rent, other similar prices, the worst of the inflation for them seems to have at least taken a little pause in December. But grocery prices continue to grow, and many individual food items are up astonishingly high. The price of beef, up 16.4%. The price of coffee, almost 20%. Price of lettuce, other fresh produce, the price of frozen fish, again up. The one exception to all of this is the one price that the Trump people love to talk about, and that is the price of eggs. Those are down. But across the board, grocery prices are way up. And this is not, as it was under Biden, just a product of a general price inflation affecting the whole world. Many of the price increases have been driven very deliberately upward by particular policies. Price of a can of beans is up because the price of the can is up. And the price of the can is up is because the metals in the can have been hit by tariffs by President Trump. You put a tax on aluminum and steel, you make cans more expensive. And if you make a can more expensive, the thing in the can becomes more expensive, whether it's beans, whether it's soda. Trump threatened to put a 92% tariff on Italian pasta. He backed away from that threat a little bit in January, but pasta is still tariffed. And the Canadian wheat that goes into American made pasta, that's also tariffed. So this was done deliberately and on purpose and without a lot of Regard for the fate of the people on the other end. This could be dealt with by a different kind of president, by some argument that it's worth it. Yes, you're all going to have to pay more for food, but that is on the way to my vision of self sufficiency. Through tariffs, we'll seal off the United States economy in the world. And even though you'll all pay more and maybe be a little poorer, at least you'll have less trade with foreigners. But the Trump people are just systematically incapable of dealing with trade offs and telling the truth. And they're especially dishonest about the distributional effect. When you put food prices up, not everybody pays equally. The richer you are, the smaller proportion of your income you spend on food and the less you notice the price at the grocery. But the people who are in the middle or in the lower part of the income distribution, they feel it most. And they are many of the people who trusted Donald Trump to help them, because through Campaign 2024, he promised that would be his first priority, not just that he would stop prices from going up, but that he would make them go down. Now, Trump lies about a lot of things, and a lot of the things that he lies about are things that it's difficult for people to check, or maybe they just seem too abstract to check. Our economy is the hottest in the world. How do you prove that, right or wrong? But the people who decide elections, they know what everything in the grocery basket costs, and they know that the President is lying to them again and again and again. And that has an impact on their faith on him, personally and directly. It has an effect on the political calculus, but it has an effect generally on the way politics works. The Americans who turn to Donald Trump were those most distrustful of the political system, most inclined to believe that the political system is indifferent to them, deceitful to them. And they put special and unique trust in this one person, whom they regarded falsely, but whom they regarded trustingly as a great business leader, to tell them the truth and to deliver them relief. When he breaks his word to them, of course, he breaks the special political bond that he once had. And you can see that in all the polls that show him down, down, down and especially down on economic issues. But it's an attack on their faith in the general political system. Because if this one unique figure that they were willing to trust, if he too is deceptive, then what is there? And it raises the question again of how we go on from here and how we restore the relationship of trust between the American people, their government, and the president who leads the government and symbolizes the government. If he's not a person who can trust, how can anything be trusted? It's a haunting, difficult question, one probably that won't be resolved so fast, but a question that is going to dominate our politics for the three remaining years of the Trump presidency and through this election year of 2026, when people will once again get a chance to say, we resent these prices. We resent the deliberate policy to make the prices go up. We resent being lied to. We want something different. We want to change. And now my dialogue with Fiona Hill. But first, a quick break.
- [08:30]
B
I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new power, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year to make sure their opponents can't win.
- [09:02]
A
Ultimately, the destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.
- [09:08]
C
We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
- [09:17]
B
Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of autocracy in America, available now.
- [09:43]
D
Fiona Hill has served three presidents as a deep expert on Russian affairs and Eurasia broadly. Born in the United Kingdom, educated at Harvard and St. Andrews University in Scotland, she is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Chancellor of Durham University in Great Britain. In 2021, she published a memoir, There Is Nothing for your Here, about her upbringing in England's former coal country. Fiona Hill is best known for her courageous integrity during and honest testimony about President Trump's attempt to extort Ukraine for his personal political advantage in his first presidential term. In this moment of global crisis, I am one of many who turns to Fiona Hill for insight and guidance. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [10:29]
A
Thanks so much, David. It's really great to be with you.
- [10:32]
D
So let's start by looking at the world from the other side of the board. From Vladimir Putin's point of view, you'll spend a lot of time thinking about how he thinks, what he's thinking about, the way he's different and surprising from an American point of view, how does the world look to him? Ukraine, the impending crisis in NATO, but he's taken some blows in Iran and Venezuela. How does the world map look from his point of view?
- [10:57]
A
Well, David, it's good that you pointed out those negative aspects of some of the recent changes for Putin from the start. Thinking about those blows, as you put it, I think very aptly in Iran and Venezuela, two countries which have very close relationships with Putin and Russia, which I'm sure we'll get to in the course of our discussion. But if you put some of those downsides again on the shelf for the moment until we get back to them, if you took it at just face value, the world would look pretty propitious from Putin's point of view because you mentioned in your introduction, Trump's efforts to extort, as you put it, President Zelensky of Ukraine in the run up to that first impeachment trial. And Putin's all in the business of extortion, basically using all kinds of manipulation or force, bullying, you name it, to get what he wants. And he wants a world in which might makes right, in which it's a battle for basically spheres of influence by strongmen. And on the surface, that seems to be where we are. If we look back to the first Trump administration in 2016 and then of course, the whole period with Biden, things look much more ambiguous from Putin's point of view. He wasn't really quite sure what the trajectory was going to be. He wasn't sure what the direction of travel was going to be. But he was certainly hoping that he'd be able to take advantage of circumstances and to push Russia's advantage. You may remember that he also tried to BULLY Biden in 2021. It seems so far away now that none of us can really remember it when he basically puts the United States on notice that if Russia doesn't get what it wants, terms of the United States pulling out of Europe, pulling back from Ukraine, taking NATO back to the studs, back to the borders which it was in before its expansionary phase in the late 1990s, then you know, Putin was going to do something extreme, which of course turned out to be the full on invasion of Ukraine in the February of 2022. And so Putin's been pushing for advantage that whole period. And so from his point of view, if you look at it, it now looks like we are in a world where sphere of influences and strong men and transactional relationships are shaping the environment.
- [13:16]
D
As you and I speak. We have troops from NATO countries, including of course, Denmark, but some of its Scandinavian partners, France, the UK on their way to Greenland. How big a win is that for Putin?
- [13:28]
A
It's enormous. And the posited reasoning for the United States of wanting to acquire Greenland, and again, this does actually go back again to the first Trump administration in 2019. But the positive reasoning is some kind of pressure from, really acute pressure from Russia and China. We've also had President Xi Jinping of China saying, we're not interested in Greenland, not on us. And Putin also having never actually made any kind of claims against Greenland. So this is really something that is a fairly absurd development from everybody's point of view. But for Putin, obviously, this is potentially a bonanza, but this is where kind of a flip side of uncertainty might come into this. Because, as you're saying, who are the troops? I mean, perhaps not in the large enough numbers. I mean, actually, if I was the Europeans, I'd be sending even more in. You know, what we're seeing here is Europeans having to stake out their interests in the name of their security. But it's in reaction to the United States, not just in reaction to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. And that brings, I would say, a bit more uncertainty for Putin, just along the lines of the blows that he's already had in Iran and Venezuela.
- [14:41]
D
Well, let's look at the Ukraine map from his point of view. The war as a military matter has gone catastrophically badly for him. It's now, as I am told, a conflict, at least the. The post February 22 conflict has now lasted longer than the Soviet involvement in World War II. They started late, of course, and the toll and life and money is overwhelming. But he is maintaining his position on the ground, and he's got an American administration that seems to conceptualize a peace treaty as finding out what Putin wants and giving it to him at the expense of the Ukrainians.
- [15:14]
A
I mean, that's absolutely right. And this is where Trump's return to the White House has been a real boon for Vladimir Putin, because he is now operating in a world which is, for Putin, a very easy one to navigate in the sense of you've got global leaders, and he only really counts as global leaders. Xi and Trump, who have the same sort of mindset of wanting to kind of return to that 19th century or even 18th century, certainly early 20th century view of transactional relationships among the big powers, with everything defined really by politics at the top, not this kind of mass politics, you know, that came in much later. So Putin's very comfortable in that environment. But as you've pointed out, Ukraine was a catastrophic blunder. I Mean, he did this full on invasion in Ukraine, not expecting it to be all the things that you've described. This wasn't intended to be the largest military action in Europe since World War II. It certainly wasn't intended to last longer than the Soviet Union was battling Nazi Germany, which that's the threshold, as you point out, we just passed this month. I mean, that is just remarkable. It was supposed to be a special military operation in many respects. It was supposed to be something along the lines of what the Trump administration just pulled off in Venezuela with decapitation, thinking that they would remove Zelenskyy and they'd probably get, in fact, what the United States government is angling to get in Venezuela, a pliable alternative leader who might have actually come out of the same system. And it would be business as usual for them, not basically a new forms of business for Ukraine. So it's been an absolute disaster. But the point is that Putin is something of what one might call a survivalist and a prepper. I mean, he's basically been building up resources. He's been thinking long and hard about what it takes for Russia to be more resilient, even though it is quite brittle in terms of its political system and in terms of what we see unfolding there in Ukraine. You can't keep this up forever. But Putin has marshaled resources and all the capabilities of Russia to the point, I mean, heavily militarized the economy, heavily militarized the whole system. He has this vertical of power that enables him to do all kinds of things that other leaders cannot, even Trump. You can't really sue Vladimir Putin as you can currently still sue the United States government. But his bet is that because of these changes in international circumstances, especially because of the incumbent in the White House, that he will be able to last everyone else out. He will have the ability to basically press this to a final conclusion that despite all the losses, all the incredibly high costs, and he is ruthless and he's prepared to pay that price. Everybody else will fold. That's his bet.
- [17:55]
D
I think of Prince Farquaard and Shrek. Some of you may die, but that is a price that I am willing to pay.
- [18:02]
A
Yes, in fact, that's a great analogy. You know, and all, you know, also very small leader. Exactly. Probably about the size of Vladimir Putin, in fact, and always on a horse.
- [18:14]
D
How bad is the news for him from Venezuela and from Iran?
- [18:18]
A
Well, it depends. Right? Everything always depends. And this is what Putin is very good at. He's got strategic patience. He is, and everybody talks about now it's become a complete cliche. But, you know, certainly wasn't 20 odd years ago when people were trying to understand Vladimir Putin. I mean, remember, he's actually quite predictable. Now we've got 25 years of data points, you know, from a man that we knew very little about, the Masha Gessen called the man without a Face. You know, we now know his face, we know about his family, we know all kinds of different things in about him that we did not know before. And what we also know is that he, he bides his time. If you think about Yevgeny Prigozhin, who, you know, a couple of years ago, we thought, oh my God, is it all going to teeter? He's getting this backlash from the war in Ukraine. He's got an insurgency, there's a man marching on Moscow. You know, could this be, could this be it? Could this be a coup? And there wasn't a lot of support for Putin, but of course that fizzled out. And it's a many months before Yevgeny Prigozhin meets his demise by literally, you know, falling from the greatest window in the sky, as people have a tendency to do in Russia, you know, meeting mysterious, you know, unfortunate deaths, and that's the end of the, you know, all of that. So what Putin is waiting for right now is to see if in many respects those escapades in both Iran and Venezuela, which look extraordinary harmful from all the vested interests that they have, in particular in Venezuela in terms of oil, you know, sending in security forces to prop up Maduro or Iran's support for a whole matter and manner of, of different issues for Russia, from actually helping them counteract Sunni Muslim insurgents in the country, because of course, Iran is Shia, helping produce that first batch of drones that Russia has used against Ukraine to pretty good effect as well, the Shahid drones to, you know, being that other great kind of power in the region, their hope, I think now is that everything else goes kind of haywire, that it doesn't follow those trajectories that everyone might anticipate around the theocracy doesn't fall because that would bring all kinds of uncertainty and actually not a good look for Putin. And as is the case of, we're already seeing in the case of Venezuela, Maduro is just being replaced by his deputy. So for Putin, that's actually not that bad. So he will wait, you know, to see how this plays out. It's like a judo tournament for him. You wait till everybody else is off balance. You just kind of wait and you figure out what the opponent is going to be. You don't just leap in there. You know, again, that's his expertise in judo. You just wait until you can leverage everybody else's strength against them.
- [20:47]
D
And he's got, once again, the help of his friend, the President of the United States, who in both countries, Venezuela and Iran, really seems to have betrayed any ideal of democracy in Venezuela. He seems to have made it very clear that he wants the next thug in line, the next dictator. This is not regime change, it's dictator rotation in Iran. The President promised the Iranian people that help was on the way. As you and I speak, that promise seems to have been utterly empty and again, and not honored. And people have died in the thousands and maybe the tens of thousands believing the word of the United States a mistake. It's just. It's such a shame and a sorrow even to think about that the word of an American president could be so worthless. But there it is. So Putin is going to get maybe some second bests thanks to Donald Trump.
- [21:31]
A
And that's good enough for him because you can rack up a lot of second best and then you win a tournament. You know, that's the whole point for Putin is staying in the game and, you know, kind of waiting out his opponents and, you know, seeing if he can outfox them over time. Again, he's pretty predictable in this, and he knows that Donald Trump's word is empty. Let's just be frank, because the one thing that Putin is extraordinarily good at is figuring people out, figuring out their vulnerabilities, figuring out their weaknesses. He's less good at figuring out people's strengths because he doesn't believe that anybody's altruistic. He doesn't really believe that anybody would do something for goals that are not venal or not personalized, for example. So Trump fits his category of the person he's used to dealing with perfectly. You know, there are people like the Pope, the current Pope, who I think, you know, Trump would have a more difficult time of. Of dealing with Putin, would rather. Did I say Trump? I might have said Trump. But anyway, Trump might also have a different. It's a natural mistake, the current Pope as well. But Putin, you know, anybody who's actually stands for something that's different and actually looks like they actually mean it and is not trying, you know, to achieve, you know, something Putin can actually get his, you know, hands on and try to manipulate it. I mean, that is more difficult for him. But, you know, right now, Trump is playing to form. It's the form that Putin expects. And I'm pretty sure that Putin, you know, perhaps misplaced in any case, feels very confident that he can manage everything that's happening. But I say that could be misplaced. But it's not for the reasons of Trump suddenly getting religion. To use this, you know, kind of metaphor and pull it out a bit.
- [23:08]
D
Further, one last question from Putin's side of the playing board. You mentioned a couple of times that Putin thinks in of power, but when he thinks in terms of power, he thinks in terms of military power, espionage power, maybe natural resource power. He doesn't seem to have a very sophisticated grasp of the way economies work. And so one of the things that has happened since February of 22 is that Russia's slide toward becoming a Chinese economic colony does seem to have accelerated. And he will, if he emerges from this Ukraine war, even with a seeming military success, with a change in the borders or a friendlier regime in Ukraine or a withdrawal of American support from Ukraine or Poland or the Baltic, he still has the problem that it's China who pays his bills. And does he think about things like that?
- [23:53]
A
I'm sure he does because he certainly had plenty of warnings in the past. But I think at this point, and again, it seems that this is the trajectory that he's on, he's not really thinking of a period when peace breaks out. He's become a wartime president. And I think he feels that he can keep a wartime economy ticking along for quite some time and maybe put off then the kinds of problems that he will inevitably face. I mean, we're seeing all kinds of problems in the US Economy. And the US Economy is immensely resilient because of the structure of it, the nature of it. And the Russian economy is resilient in similar, but very different ways, more related to autarky and just the vastness of its natural resources. But that, of course, makes it very difficult to marshal them and to move into those value added chains that we are, you know, expect of a more sophisticated economy. And Russia had been moving in that direction up until the full on invasion of Ukraine. But it was quite difficult because it's, its economic model was running out of steam and the war has injected a new head of steam into it. Now, the one thing that Putin clearly doesn't care about is human capital. And I mean, that is also very interesting because you wouldn't in that regard. And this is why I think President Trump just doesn't get Putin at all. He cannot understand why you would slaughter all of these people that you actually need to make your economy work. Even with a miraculous shift to AI, you're still going to need people. And that's what Putin has done. He has squandered the future of his human capital. A lot of people are working, admittedly offshore, particularly in the Gulf and other places, and still contributing to the Russian economy. You look down the line and the idea of economic recovery, that idea of innovation, that's not just related to defense and to innovation on the battlefield, that's one of the areas that Putin has likely squandered. And of course, he's completely eroded trust. And although other countries look to Russia right now and still want to factor them in as a great power, they no longer think of Russia as a superpower. And they absolutely certainly do not think of Russia as a technical, innovative economic superpower. And as you said, it's much likely to end up being some kind of appendage of China at the end of all of this, even more so than it already is.
- [26:07]
D
Yeah, I mean, when you mentioned Putin's belief in might makes right, I mean, one of the most striking legacies of his rule is going to be the definitive end of Russia as a mighty state. I mean, it may overpower Ukraine. It can certainly scare Estonia. But if you think you used to do this kind of work, if you project the world of 2036, 10 years from now, we'll have two superpowers, the United States and China. We'll have a number of countries that are economically very important, but not militarily strong. India, the European Union, if you think of that as a power player, possibly Japan, possibly Britain. Where's Russia? And I mean, maybe there with Japan and Britain as countries of some economic power because of their natural resources, some military power, but nothing like an India, let alone a China or the United States in the way that Putin imagined he might be when he started the Ukraine war.
- [26:54]
A
Yeah. And actually, I mean, Russia was on before this and in fact, before seizing Crimea, which I think was the moment where Putin shifted the trajectory of his presidency. You know, Russia was up there in, you know, the larger economic powers. There was a whole goal of being not just in the G7 or the G8, but being one of the top five or six global economic powers. And, you know, at one point, that looked like that might be possible. But as you're saying, you know, that's not likely to be where, you know, kind of Russia is. Although, you know, it shifts in its trade pattern still the commodities, you know, that might bring something, but you know, I think that the world is going to be a very complex place. If I look up to 2036, you know, I think we're squandering ourselves. The United States, some of that, you know, bases those fundamental bases of power which, I mean, you've been pointing out in many of your podcasts and the things that you've, you know, been writing and with your colleagues in the Atlantic, you know, I think that we're going to look more, much more regional basis of power. But of course, the United States and China are both going to still. Well, the United States still, let's say, is still going to have the ability to shape things in the world. And China is increasing, going to have more ability, particularly in terms of technology, research, education, all kinds of innovation to shape the way that everybody else responds. But I wouldn't rule out India, Brazil, you know, even South Africa, which the United States seems to be in a fight in at the moment. And European countries, perhaps not in the EU configuration, but there's just been such a jolt to Europe that, you know, we shouldn't rule out some constellation of European countries, maybe in northern Europe, Scandinavians, the Baltics, the polls, you know, and others actually really stepping up there, you know, in response to what's happening, especially what's happening in Greenland and becoming much more of a military place. Finland is significant, you know, as a military. We've still got Turkey as a major military power. So, you know, things could change quite a lot in this next decade.
- [28:42]
D
Well, the most dramatic slap in the face, and I can't quite do this math in the head while I'm talking live, but as I sort of think pull up what I recall the figures and just do a quick calculation. We're not very far away from Poland overtaking Russia in the size of its economy.
- [28:56]
A
Yes. And Poland is spending about 5% now of its GDP on its.
- [29:03]
D
This puts Russia back to where it was in the 1600s when Poland was the stronger, at least economically.
- [29:07]
A
Well, and bring the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was actually Europe's biggest country and most significant, you know, for that period up until when you're talking about Let.
- [29:15]
D
Me ask you then to take now to change the lens back to Washington. There's always been this strange, mysterious, difficult to explain but unmistakable to observe affinity that Trump has had for Putin, and that does seem to continue. The big Trump idea for ending the war in Ukraine is to cut off the flow of information, reduce the flow of supplies to Ukraine and put pressure on them to yield to Russia's terms. You have any sense of why. Not just Trump, but Steve Witkoff and people around him think that that's such a good idea.
- [29:47]
A
It's how they think about power and the manifestation of power. They don't think about we the people, as in, you know, UI and what is it, 340 million people who live in the United states or the 140 million in declining in Russia. They don't think anybody has agency apart from big guys and usually men, of course. And if there are no checks and balances and you have unfettered power, then that is kind of the epitome of might, and might makes right. You know, as Trump himself has said over and over again. I mean, most recently in the New York Times, you know, lengthy interview, he sees no constraint apart from his own. And that's how they see Putin. And indeed, Putin has whittled away all of the checks and balances in his system. He seems to be at this pinnacle of this vertical of power and to be unchecked, unconstrained in every way imaginable. And so for them, he's the guy to deal with Steve Wyckoff and Trump as real estate moguls. They'd go to the guy who was in charge and then get their guys on lower levels to deal with things from there. And, I mean, it's really the kind of power that Trump has. I remember in Trump 1.0, the former US ambassador to Hungary, who was a good friend of Trump's, he was a jeweler from New York and known him for many, many, many years. And he was talking about Viktor Orban. And in fact, I think it was an interview in the Atlantic, of all things, you know, the team, which he said, this is what Trump wants is what Donald Trump wants. He wants to be that kind of leader. And in many respects, that means that's what Putin's got on him, because he knows that Trump needs his respect, his validation. And I saw that over and over again in Trump 1.0, where Trump would want to call Putin because Putin had said something nice about him on international television or, you know, he'd want to talk directly to him. And, of course, those discussions are mediated for Trump and for Witkoffers of all. They don't speak Russian, so it's always through a translator, they hear what's being presented to them. They don't get the sense of the man and how he's making fun of them. And you know, what he really thinks, you know, so this is always problematic. They see what they want to see, which is their own validation in Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin sees that, and he just gives them what they want.
- [32:05]
D
Is it all about that kind of petty vanity?
- [32:08]
A
Of course. I mean, that's at the root of things. I mean, I'm sorry. I mean, it's just, you know, from years of observation of this, Putin knows exactly how to do it. I mean, I, you know, and many others who study, you know, kind of Russia, we've all been subjected to this. There's a famous episode of Putin helping a Russian politician who. There's no reason why he would help him. And I was related this story by the politician himself, who, you know, was done a pretty significant favor by Putin, and this person has actually told the story publicly. But when we asked him why, Putin said to him, you know, when he'd asked the same question, well, you never know who you might turn out to be or when I might need something from you. So this is kind of, you know, Putin plays to vanities, he plays to vulnerabilities. He plays into times of need because he never knows when he might need something. And they act in the same way. I mean, Witkoff, Trump, I mean, they're all kind of birds of a similar feather, but unfortunately, they're not quite as good at this as Vladimir Putin because he's had years of training and honing these skills as a KGB agent and 25 years of being president of Russia in a pretty vicious political environment.
- [33:12]
D
It's like the opening scene of the Godfather. One day, and that day may never come, I will ask a service of you in return.
- [33:18]
A
Exactly right. Exactly right. And the thing is, they all think in similar frames because of where they operated real estate. I mean. I mean, it couldn't be any more similar to the kinds of environments in which Putin operates in. But the thing is, Putin thinks himself as the head of state of a state with millennia of history. He talks of himself in that regard. He's got an idea about being cloaked in the mantle of the power of the state and the church. He sees himself as the heir to all kinds of emperors and even empresses. With Catherine the Great, Trump thinks of just himself. And if it's, you know, he's thinking of American heroes, it's just as he defines them, not as they might define him.
- [33:57]
D
One of the things, if you say it's about vanity, that is kind of. It is disquieting. But all this. There are, of course, all these theories, and I never pretend to know if any of them are true or none of them are true. There are Theories that there is compromise, there are theories that there is bribery, there is. There are theories that Trump is looking forward to some future payoff. And I must say, as contemptible as all of those things would be, they're somehow less pathetic than he's looking for compliments. But when you see Trump in the Oval Office with someone else's Nobel Prize in his greedy little hands, with a smile on his face, as if the stolen cup of apple juice tastes just as good as the cup of apple juice that was intended for you, it occurs to you, yeah, maybe it's just as dumb and pathetic and cringy and embarrassing as that, that he just loves the compliments.
- [34:44]
A
It is cringy. And I felt like that many, many times when I was in his presence with world leaders, I would cringe because he was also making himself incredibly obvious. And that's what Putin is. He's the master of obviously domineering and dominating people. He's the master of seeing the obvious, but he's also the master of digging a bit deeper now in terms of compromising material. We've all got all kinds of information on Trump and the enrichment of him and his family, meme coins. I mean, it's all in plain sight. And so, I mean, what more do we need to know about? We've got the Epstein files and all the scandals about, you know, all of that at the moment. I mean, Putin doesn't need any of that. I remember once saying to one of the Russian ambassadors, because I was supposed to be obviously giving them the kind of equivalent of, you know, day marsh about interference in the United States elections, and he ran off a whole host of different things that different people, Americans had done and said, can you blame us for that, Ms. Hill? And I thought, got me. Of course not. Because we do plenty of things ourselves, you know, that actually lay ourselves open to this kind of manipulation. All the mistakes that we make that turn out to be fateful. And, you know, we can't blame Russia for everything here.
- [35:57]
D
It's not a question of blaming them.
- [35:59]
A
No question of blaming them for finding information, for using that, because, again, we've. We're producing plenty of, you know, these, you know, scandalous episodes and, you know, problems ourselves, and they just know how to use them. So I'm just saying that I'm not. I've never been really convinced that Putin had something that was so off the charts in terms of its radioactivity that could bring Trump down, because so many other things, you know, have failed to do.
- [36:23]
D
So why can't Trump see that Putin is less powerful than he was three years ago.
- [36:28]
A
I think it's because of his frame from the Cold war in the 1980s. I think it's still that idea, and he said it many times in relationship to Ukraine that Russia was just a big power. He thinks of it as just as.
- [36:40]
D
Putin did, but it's not. I mean, that's the thing I find baffling. The Soviet Union certainly was, and from in the first decade of Putin's reign, Russia looked that way, whether it was or not. But it doesn't look that way now.
- [36:54]
A
Yes, but it does to Trump because he doesn't really listen to the assessments of you, me or anyone else on this score. You know, for him, it's the size of the country. Some. We're getting back to what we were talking about before. Why does he want Greenland? Because it's 2% bigger, 10,000 square miles bigger than the Louisiana Purchase. You know, so it's with the biggest real estate deal in history, who's got the biggest real estate in the world? It's Vladimir Putin. You know, it's kind of. He's been, you know, sort of described as, you know, the richest man in the world by everybody from Elon Musk, who clearly is, you know, not Vladimir Putin. He's not going to cash out and, you know, kind of run around the world, you know, behaving like a tech mogul. But everybody thinks of this still in terms of it's just, just its size and the weight on the world stage.
- [37:34]
D
And the animosity to Ukraine and Zelensky. Is that personal? Is that a grudge about 2019 and Zelenskyy not doing what Trump wanted for the election? Is there something more going on there?
- [37:45]
A
That's all the.
- [37:46]
D
It seems to be a real antipathy. And in Vance's case, I get that. It's ideology. He's connected. Vance wants to bring far right powers to, to rule in Europe, and Zelensky's success would validate the liberal parties. But Trump, it just seems very. What is it?
- [38:04]
A
It's those things that you've laid out completely. But I think there's also a little another edge to it that gets back to what we've just talked about. I think he's envious in some respects about Zelenskyy, though he would never ever say this because Zelensky's got all the accolades, rightly so. Being a real wartime president. I mean, it being somebody who didn't back down, you know, in the face of attempts to push him out he's also a small guy, and Trump thinks in a small country, though, you know, in territorial size, Ukraine isn't a small country. And he's somebody who has been given the wartime mantle of a Winston Churchill, and Trump hates that. It's just like Machado getting the Nobel Prize. I mean, it's all just, you know, and Zelensky just hasn't backed down. And Zelensky's had the temerity to take him on, you know, on a number of occasions to push back. He hates that.
- [38:53]
D
I know talking in the way I'm about to talk would get me thrown out of a National Security Council meeting for moralism and so on, but is there an issue that just. That Trump is wicked and cowardly and he hates people who are good and brave?
- [39:05]
A
It's. It's. Yeah, I mean, that look, that's a cartoon, you know, version of it, but I mean, obviously, one would, you know, kind of say, yes. I mean, in some cases, that is the case, but not in all cases, because there are, you know, sometimes when he does express admiration for something that somebody's done, but it doesn't necessarily directly affect him. I think that's kind of the problem is when somebody takes something that he thinks is his. A Nobel Peace Prize, the attention of the world as a. As a wartime president or somebody who's at the statue of Winston Churchill, you know, kind of literally. Then he was soured on Churchill for a while when everyone kept calling Zelensky or comparing it to, you know, kind of Zelensky to. To Churchill. So I think it's. It comes into that frame in which his own personal validation is at stake. But I think that he can admire, you know, other people, because I've seen that. I mean, he isn't a cartoon character. He's complicated and complex even.
- [40:00]
D
Who have you seen him admire? Who does. Who. Who have you seen him admire? Who deserves admiration?
- [40:04]
A
I was sort of thinking that it's. It's often, you know, people who are not necessarily, you know, kind of world figures now, somebody who has actually even done something, you know, unspeakably good for. For people, somebody who's been really brave. You know, he's often, you know, kind of put himself out there for, you know, some of the hostages, not just to get accolades for bringing them back. You know, there have been times when he's done something that, you know, won't necessarily, you know, give him, you know, popular acclaim all the time. And, look, there are a couple of issues that, you know, I think he has to be given, you know, some credit for. He's not the kind of person who wants to preside over mass slaughter, even though it might look like it at times when we, you know, we see what's happening, you know, currently in the country. But he is appalled by what the. The Ironians are doing. He's appalled by what Putin's doing. He was appalled by what Assad did, and he wanted to do something, you know, kind of about it. He's not somebody, you know, who, you know, wants to have the carnal or the charnel houses, you know, filled with mountains of skulls. That's not him. The other thing is that he genuinely wants to see an end to the risk of nuclear war, nuclear Armageddon, just as Biden did. I mean, the same age group, he's been, you know, pretty consistent on this. He really did want to finish off the efforts that were started in the 1980s. And this is what's ironic at the moment, because, of course, we're in a bit of a pickle because the New START Treaty has now lapsed. But he really did want to have those big arms control arms negotiation talks, not just with Russia as the former Soviet Union, but also with China, with Iran, with North Korea. He does actually want to make the world a safer place from a nuclear perspective. And I feel that's the tragedy because, you know, he perhaps could have done something to that if he'd been more disciplined and more focused and less worried about whether he was going to get all kinds of accolades for it. That was what he was trying to do in Helsinki, you know, back before that disastrous press conference and his first proper meeting with Putin. And he's. I mean, I think it's a genuine sentiment on. On his part.
- [42:02]
D
So that does decartoonify things that, that. So you.
- [42:05]
A
You can give him that absolutely look, and you still get lots of people saying, look, he's warm, he's charismatic. You know, I've seen flashes of that, but, you know, that's not sufficient, in my view, to normalize a person who is doing an enormous amount of damage. And the other thing is that just like Putin, he's a patent breaker, but he's even more of a pattern breaker than Putin, which actually means, you know, he does obviously see all of the problems that we're facing. He's identified them all, I think, extremely well. He's broken the pattern, but he's just not somebody who. Beyond real estate, he's actually really building something. And because his tendency is to. Towards dividing everyone and conquering them Again, like Putin, he's not bringing people together to do things which, you know, perhaps, perhaps he could have done. So I think it's almost Shakespearean for me as that, you know, you have the hero, the person who's the hero in their own telling of the tale, but their own flaws prevent them from doing the things that they actually think that they want to do and for actually addressing the issues that they have correctly identified as being the key ones.
- [43:07]
D
Yeah, it's part of his self image. He would like to be a peacemaker if it just didn't require so, so much reading.
- [43:13]
A
Yeah, well, it requires patience and some strategic thinking. It requires working with others and not short circuiting the process, which is what he often does and declares peace, you know, when it hasn't. Hasn't actually happened, which then enables, you know, the people like Putin and others to come back around again, you know, and take advantage of the situation.
- [43:31]
D
That's. That seems to be what's happening in Iran as you and I speak. He made a promise he didn't mean to keep the promise became embarrassing. So he declared that the killing had stopped when it obviously had not stopped.
- [43:41]
A
Right. I mean, look, and we can list all the different places where that has particularly happened. I mean, we all know that, you know, creating and building peace is very difficult. What we call it building and, you know, it's not the same as building a, you know, wonderful tower or, you know, kind of a real estate portfolio. There's so many other elements of it. And, and again, Trump's view, getting back to where we started from, is dealing with just a group of guys and then thinking that everything gets done from that direction. I think he does believe that Rome can be built in a day.
- [44:12]
D
Last topic area and then I'll let you go. Thanks for your generosity with your time. Nothing lasts forever. And while Trump speaks of wanting a third term, that will be difficult even assuming his health permits, which is another question mark in whatever post Trump world means, it's pretty clear Russia's put some deep grip on the American political right. The Trump's next in line is even more anti Ukraine than Trump himself. And there are all kinds of influencers and others in the Trump orbit or the pro Trump world who have received all kinds of benefits from the Russians. And their propaganda messages do seem to shape a lot of the dialogue on the right hand side of the spectrum. Do you think that outlasts Trump? Is that a phenomenon of Trump's special affinity for Russia, or have they discovered some technology to influencing right of center parties in the United States and Europe.
- [45:02]
A
Well, it's definitely the future of technology. I think. That's absolutely right. In just all the constant innovations that we have in technology that make it much easier to propagate information and to get the same ideas seeded on larger and larger groups of people than they could have done previously. But in terms of the form of this, we could have said the same about the American and the European left during the Soviet period.
- [45:26]
D
I mean, we could. And we did.
- [45:28]
A
We did. There you go. Right.
- [45:30]
D
And we did. Because it was true.
- [45:31]
A
It was true. Exactly. And the thing is, but what was going on there was, there were, in many respects they were, as you know, was termed at the time, fellow travelers. Sometimes they intersected, but they were all developing their ideas in parallel. And what really was useful to the Soviets at the time was that all of these groups are thinking the same way. And that's, I think, what we're seeing again now. We've, we've moved around to the, the views of the right are now in parallel with the views of Russia and of other, you know, of other states. And I think it just makes easy they become Farrell travelers and sometimes, you know, they get on not just on the same bus, but right in the, you know, the seat next to each other. And, and, and of course, that did not completely fared away because you still see the ties that come out of the old French Communist Party and Italy, you know, for example, and in eastern Germany that still bond with Russia on the left, even though Russia is very much over here on the right, although we all talk about that horseshoe in which, you know, the politics have, you know, bent around. So, you know, it's not, I think, self evident that this will continue, you know, post Trump, but it will certainly, you know, I think it's now shaped very much these politics of the future. And the real challenge will be, you know, how to find a way back again to some central or other, you know, definition of our politics in which this trend is neutralized just as what happened over time in Europe and, you know, in America on the left.
- [46:59]
D
And, and this phenomenon seems to be as advanced, if not even more so, in Europe and England than it is here.
- [47:06]
A
Well, I don't think it's more advanced than here, but I think that the United States is playing a role in.
- [47:11]
D
Advancing that, in advancing these kinds of pro Russian, far right authoritarian people like.
- [47:15]
A
Nigel Farage and others have had to kind of repudiate, you know, their links with Russia in the, you know, current European environment. But Farage and GB News, of course, are just, you know, joined at the hip with Truth Social. Farage is, you know, very much, you know, driven by his relationship with Trump. And so it's been quite difficult. You've had the head of reform from Wales in jail from actually accepting money from the Russians.
- [47:39]
D
Reform is the new right of center party that is overtaking the Conservatives in support in the United Kingdom.
- [47:44]
A
Correct. UK Independence Party successor with Nigel Farage at the top, shifting from pushing for Brexit, for the UK's removal from the European Union, now using immigration. And now they're trying to also pick up the same sets of issues that has been shaped here in the United States rather than in Russia per se. But, you know, we've seen funding from Russians. We're now seeing, you know, quite a lot of efforts from the United States. And, you know, ironically, it's both the US and Russia that are shaping a lot of the thinking of these right wing movements and parties, as you said, in the UK and in Europe. At the same time, you're getting quite a lot of popular and political revulsion to not just what Russia is doing in Ukraine, but what the United States is doing with Greenland, et cetera. So I think this is going to be pretty messy.
- [48:33]
D
Yeah. Last question, then. I'll let you go. The tsarist regime looked enormously strong until it unexpectedly collapsed. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union looked terrifyingly strong until it abruptly collapsed. Do you see any possibility of a similar kind of collapse of Putinist power?
- [48:48]
A
Sure. I mean, you know, we're only, you know, one step away from all kinds of uncertainty with his health as well. You know, as Bill Burns said some time ago, former head of the CIA, unfortunately, he seems extremely healthy. You know, he's had his health scares like, you know, most of us do, you know, but he's in his 70s now. He's heading towards his mid-70s. He was born in October 1952, so he's not quite 75 yet. But, you know, this year he's 74. You know, you don't know how long people are going to continue with all of their faculty. I mean, Trump, of course, turns 80, you know, this year. So, you know, anything where Putin looks like he might be losing his grip, any, you know, singular disaster within the Russian economy or, you know, something else, that is a major setback. I mean, look how fragile things appeared to be when Yevgeny Prigozhin started his march on Moscow. We don't know what could trigger things off. It's all about events. There is a great deal of uncertainty here in this current geopolitical climate, as you've already laid out. And, you know, the economy isn't doing as well as it is. You know, what if the Europeans suddenly get a backbone in the spine? What if there's a change of heart or a change of government, you know, here in the United States? What if President Xi of China suddenly starts to feel that, you know, maybe this close association with Russia is not benefiting in the way that they thought they might need to nudge Putin and Russia in a different direction? I think it's going to be very hard for Putin to contemplate peace for all of the reasons that we talked about before. He's purely now a wartime president. He came into office against the backdrop of the war in Chechnya in 2000s as a wartime president. It's been the hallmark of his presidency for 25 years. He could have done something different, but there's still, you know, kind of all of that risk because he's chosen war over peace, that things could go wrong.
- [50:31]
D
Fiona Hill, thank you so much for your insights and for your service.
- [50:35]
A
Thank you so much, David. Great to be with you.
- [50:44]
D
Thanks so much to Fiona Hill for joining me today on the David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is a travelogue by the great novelist and essayist VS Naipaul. The book is among the Believers, published in 1981. It's VS Naipaul's account of journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in the years 1979 and 1980 that is in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution that has now misgoverned Iran and has come to such bloody spasms in the days and weeks just passed. Naipaul wanted to understand how it was that a country that's seemingly on its way to modernization, as Iran had been in the 1970s. Iran under the Shah Retsa Pahlavi had been one of the fastest growing economies in the world. How a country seemingly fast forwarding toward modernization could have taken the giant step backwards that it took with the Iranian revolution. He interviewed people in the city of Qom, which is the center of the Ayatollah Khomeinis, the first supreme leader of Iran's religious power. And he interviewed everyday, ordinary people as well. There's no big moment of reveal in these encounters. They're very everyday. They're very perceptive. He is a brilliant novelist and he can make a character come to life with a few strokes of a pen, but he did have one guiding insight that he repeats a couple of times in the course of his visit to Iran in 1979, 80 and his travelogue in 1981. And it's really worth thinking about today as we try to understand how the Iranian Revolution of 1979-80 went so disastrously wrong in every way for the people of Iran. Naifwal's observation was that the new religious leadership of Iran, although they took a step backward in terms of human rights, women's rights, human autonomy, they did not want to give up the good things, the power, the tools of power. I shouldn't say the good things. They were prepared to. They were prepared to get rid of music, but they didn't want to give up the instrumentalities of wealth and power of the modern world. They didn't want to stop the oil from being pumped by modern oil pumping technology. They didn't want to give up buying weapons and surveillance technology. They wanted all of those things. And he was baffled as to how people who turned their back on the culture and civilization that could produce these good things still wanted and still believed they could wield these instrumentalities. And he discusses this at two or three points in the course of the book, and let me quote just a couple of them here as guides to Naipaul's thinking. One of the things about Naipaul's career as a writer, I should say, was he was a famously kind of dyspeptic and even misanthropic person without any kind of regard for the niceties of human existence that made him a very difficult person to be around. And those people, people who knew him, have all kinds of harsh stories about how. How difficult it could be to know him. But it also meant that he was utterly free from, from can't and euphemism in a way that will maybe seem a little startling in the world of 2026, when can't and euphemism surround us so so often. He described the affinity of the revolutionary groups in Iran for these Western technologies. He, he says, he says, and I'm quoting the beginning of a sentence here, Western technology. That's not in the quote. Western. And here the quote begins, technology surrounded us in Tehran, and some of it had been so Islamized or put to such good Islamic use that its foreign origin seemed of no account. The hotel taxi driver could be helped through the evening traffic jams by the Quranic readings on his car radio. And when we got back to the hotel, there would be mullahs on television. Certain modern Goods and tools, cars, radios, television were necessary. Their possession was part of a proper Islamic pride. But these things were considered neutral. They were not associated with any particular faith or civilization. They were thought of as the stock of some great universal bazaar. And as he gets to the end of his trip, he returns to this observation and this time he turns it into kind of the conclusion or the thesis of his whole section of the book. I won't discuss the parts on the other countries, but the whole section of his book on Iran under the Ayatollah. He describes the Ayatollah Khomeini, the maker of the revolution, as self perceiving himself as an interpreter. And this is the quote begins, interpreter of God's will, a leader of the faithful. He expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith. The confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of great encircling civilizations. That civilization couldn't be mastered. It was to be rejected. At the same time it was to be depended upon. Now, in the years since 1981, it's become apparent that these tools of technological power can be developed by societies that reject Western ideals of freedom and individuality. China is for all practical purposes, a technological peer of the Western world, without absorbing or preserving many of these Western ideals of individuality and freedom and autonomy. So it can be done. But in the core of the Islamic world, and especially in Iran, it was not done. And Naipaul challenges to think, why not? Why couldn't the Islamic Republic achieve what China achieved? Some kind of self sustaining capacity to run a modern state in an effective way. They had the oil, they had the money. Yes, they had extreme plans of aggression. They poured hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of wealth into building the kind of empire aggression aimed at Israel, but also at other states in the region. They built an empire that reached at one point all the way to the Mediterranean, all the way to Afghanistan, and they paid a lot of money for that. But they were never able to develop, despite the extraordinary skills of Iranian hackers that we see of Iranian computer culture, any kind of properly functioning technological, economic system. Something went terribly wrong and that has been the trigger for this revolution. Because for Iran, maybe unlike China, that encircling world, you're either in it or you're not in it. And one of the messages of the tumults we have seen in Iran is that people, even people who maybe reject some of the values of the Western world. They want its benefit. That project of getting the benefits of Western civilization without its freedom and rights, that's one that has vexed tyrants all over the world. Some of them have somewhat succeeded, like the Chinese, the Iranians, like the Russians have failed. And that failure is having enormous political consequences. And all of us who watch these horrible events in Iran from afar have to wish this brave and courageous people every success on their way to rediscovering, reclaiming what should be theirs. And we who have watched this also have to deal with the feelings of terrible shame that the United States made such promises to them through the mouth of its president. Promises that, at least, as I record, have not been honored and that have led many to tragic and perhaps unnecessary and avoidable deaths. Thank you so much for watching the David Frum show this week. As ever, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of my colleagues at the Atlantic is by subscribing to the Atlantic. I hope you will consider doing that. I hope you'll consider following me on social media, especially Instagram x Twitter at both places. I'm avidfrom. I will see you and talk to you next week on the David Frum Show. Thanks so much for listening and for watching. Bye bye. This episode of the David Frum show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdes. It was engineered by Dave Grime. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abayad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.
- [58:58]
B
I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid, and maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year to make sure their opponents can't win.
- [59:30]
A
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.
- [59:36]
C
We could win, but. But we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual, reporting on the.
- [59:46]
B
Sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of autocracy in America, available now.