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- [00:11]
Charlie Sykes
Welcome to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes, joined by my good friend David Frum from the Atlantic. David, we have not spoken in more than a year. It is good to talk with you again.
- [00:21]
David Frum
Thank you for having me on.
- [00:23]
Charlie Sykes
Well, where do we start here? You know, we talk about whether we're going to invade Canada or not, what's going on with Ukraine, the continuing resolution. But let's start with just the mood of the country right now. We're in the what used to be considered the honeymoon period for a presidency, and yet we're seeing that the markets and consumers are not as jazzed about American greatness as I think the Trump folks had hoped.
- [00:51]
David Frum
We are speaking on a Friday at the end of a week of convulsive economic developments. The stock market, the Dow Jones, has dropped 10% in the past 30 days. And other indicators are also signaling bad news. Consumer confidence has taken a sharp tumble. There are more informal reports that mergers and acquisitions activity, IPO activity has stopped. Obviously we have all these trade disruptions. It needs to be said when Vice President Vance was gave his famous the fundamentals of the economy are sound interview, the reason you don't do that, people remember that John McCain said that in 2008. But the real reason you don't do it is the day after Black Thursday in 1929, a day when the Dow Jones, the only measure that then was, dropped 9% in a single day, single session. President Hoover said the fundamentals, that's the origin of the phrase. The day after the stock market crash of 1929 got a little bit of history to it. But you know, Vance was not unlike Hoover. And Hoover's statement when you read it is very, he's a very intelligent man. He talked about troubles and there are troubles in the construction industry, there are troubles in the farm economy. As of October, November of 2024, the fundamentals of the American economy were sound and we were on our way to more prosperity. The bounce back from the COVID shock, the COVID recession. Then there was the post Covid inflation. And thanks to a lot of good luck and good management, the post Covid inflation was being brought under control in 2024 without a recession. Everything was ready for non inflationary growth in 2025. And then Trump took the wheel. And unlike that famous fire truck photo from his first term, this time they turned on the ignition before they let him have the steering wheel and he proceeded to crash it into a wall with trade wars, with other crazy policies. And Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the treasury, now says there's a 1 in 2 chance of recession in the coming year.
- [02:59]
Charlie Sykes
Now, what is amazing about this is usually there's some outside development or there's a cycle of the economy. This appears to be, and I'm trying to remember the last time anything like this happened. You can help me with the historical references here, where presidential policies unilaterally seem to have led us to the brink. And it is Donald Trump. And again, Donald Trump's with his own fetish and obsession with tariffs, because I don't know that there was a great clamor out in the country for increased tariffs. A trade war with Canada, Mexico, anyone? This is all Donald Trump at the moment, isn't it?
- [03:38]
David Frum
You are so right. Look, there are three major reasons why inflation, sorry, why recessions hit the economy. The first is there's a financial shock. Something goes wrong in financial markets and it feeds back to the real economy. That's the Great Recession of 2008. That's what happened in 1929 and 1931. Then there is the typical recession that most of us remember from when we were going up, which is the economy gets too crazy, prices begin to go up. The Federal Reserve tightens interest rates, and the higher interest rates send the economy into recession. That's what happened with the Jimmy Carter recession in 1980. That's what happened in 1958 with the severest of the Eisenhower recessions. And the third kind of recession is there's some kind of shock in the external world. The oil shock of 1973 causes the recession of 74. The COVID shock of 2020 causes the COVID recession. So those three things, financial crisis bleeding into the real economy, Fed tightening or some kind of exogenous shock like oil or Covid, I don't think we've ever had in American history. Just an example of somebody making a series of ludicrous, unnecessary, stupid decisions that everyone knowledgeable said, please don't do this, and he did them anyway. And completely individually solo operation put the economy into this kind of trouble.
- [05:00]
Charlie Sykes
And then, and that's what's really remarkable about it, is there's no real reason to have it. Now, of course, Trump will argue that, well, the rest of the world has been ripping us off, but there was no, you know, there's no crisis of. There's no industry that was demanding or pounding on on him to do something. It's just like this has been something rattling around in the corners of his brain since the late 1980s or whenever, and he's decided that he's going to impose it. And unfortunately, in our system of government, the president has to impose it. And by the way, rather extraordinarily, Congress just cedes him this power. The Republicans in Congress just voted to turn themselves into potted plants. And so the president unilaterally can raise hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes that are going to be paid for by American consumers.
- [05:51]
David Frum
Yeah. Well, the one grain smidgen of basis for all this is, is a lot of people have been worried over the past 15 years that the United States economy is becoming too dependent on Chinese components.
- [06:03]
Charlie Sykes
Sure.
- [06:04]
David Frum
And so there, there has been a lot of people have talked and this has become a broad, and maybe even we've, maybe we've even overdone it, but a broad bipartisan consensus that we need to sort of friend shore or nearshore somehow depend less on China, especially for strategic components, especially in these days of artificial intelligence and maybe autonomous vehicles coming and electric batteries. There's, there's. So you can imagine Joe Biden did this. You could imagine a more hawkish Republican saying, I want to make us our economy a little bit more steely against Chinese influence. But that means you need to work more closely with other partners. That means you need to work more closely certainly with Canada and Mexico. You need to work more closely with Japan and South Korea and Australia. You need to, because China is just so big and powerful. The United States alone cannot balance China. It needs to assemble a kind of coalition against it. Well, Trump has applied steel and aluminum sanctions against Australia, the most militarily capable state in the Indo Pacific, America's ally not only in World War II and not only in Korea, but in Vietnam as well. And a thing that Americans, I think, are losing sight of Australians know this, Americans forget is Australia is now much economically closer to China than to the United States. It does nearly four times as much business with China as with the United States. It's bound to the United States by values and by history, but by interest, it's increasingly bound to China. So if you say, okay, our trade war against China starts by slamming Australia, you're pushing Australia into the Chinese zone and you say, okay, well, that's one fewer friend for us, one more. And the Trump people often seem to think the only allies in this world they want are Russia, Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.
- [07:44]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's come back to that in a moment. Can we just talk about Canada for a while, how we got this? Because, and again, you have ties there, I guess in the beginning. I remember doing a Sirius XM radio show up in Canada. And I said, don't take this seriously. He's just trolling. And yet he keeps coming back to it. He. So he keeps coming back talking about why we need to have a trade war with Canada, but also why we need to absorb Canada as a 51st state. So when did, what did you Canadians do to us, David, to make us so angry? Where did the U.S. canada war of 2025 come from? What is it about?
- [08:32]
David Frum
Well, my private suspicion is that what it was about, was it one of the G7 meetings? I think in England in 2018, Justin Trudeau was caught on a hot mic making fun of Donald Trump to an audience of Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson. And Johnson and Macron were laughing, but Trudeau was making the joke. And I think a lot of this is about that incident. I think it's also about Elon Musk working out some vendetta against his ex wife. Elon Musk passed through Canada on his way to the United, United States. The mother of the single largest grouping of his children is a Canadian citizen who I think, I believe still lives in Vancouver. I think that's a big part of what this is about, is Musk's anti Canadian animus. Part of it is that Trump delights in the exercise of power. And of course, the United States is much more powerful than Canada. So it can be overbearing. It's also a situation where he can be much more overbearing with Canada because Canada has serious political constraints on what it could do. Like, for example, if you're the president of Mexico and the United States does these various things, one thing you can do is invite a Chinese destroyer to stop at one of your ports, sends a message, we have options. Well, in Canada, you can't do that because the Canadian public would never allow it. The Canadian public deeply identifies with the Western world. It's not going to play a game of block against block. It belongs with the democracies. And a Canadian prime minister who tried to do otherwise would get into a lot of trouble as just by the way, Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre Trudeau, would play this game with Cuba in the 70s. And it was very politically expensive for him in Canada. Canadians did not like it. He did it in a way to do his counter troll of Richard Nixon. But Canadians didn't like it. They said, we belong in the camp of the democracies. And there's not a lot of room for politicians to play games with that as there would be for a Mexican president. And so the reaction in Canada has been One of real people don't think it's funny. The societies are so integrated, and there is this deep common history, and there are these relationships that depend. The first Canada began, of course, as a British colony. So most of the early treaties involved Britain and the United States, not Canada and the United States. The first Canadian U.S. treaty deals with. Dealt with migratory birds, because that's just one aspect of what it means to live together on a continent. Well, the birds migrate. How are they going to be protected? They're, you know, Canadian. They deal with practical problems. Keeping the Great Lakes clean, fighting acid rain, keeping the.
- [11:07]
Charlie Sykes
Shared needs.
- [11:08]
David Frum
Yeah, shared needs. Well, you know, you're from a northern state. I mean, how do you keep the bridges and tunnels open between, you know, the crossing from Michigan to Ontario? How do you make that work? What happens if a truck breaks down and half the truck is on the Canadian side of the line and half the truck is on the American side of the line? Who pays for the towing? And times a trillion. And so the whole idea that you have someone who says, okay, the answer to this is to start a trade war and to treat people like enemies is just baffling.
- [11:37]
Charlie Sykes
Well, it is baffling. And I'll say, when I asked what made him so mad, I thought you might mention that picture of Melania and Justin Trudeau, where she obviously found him much more fetching than Donald Trump. So I'm not sure whether that's a factor. But this thing about making it a state and the constant insult. I mean, you saw what he said the other day. I mean, just read a transcript here. To be honest with you, Canada only works as a state. It doesn't. We don't need anything they have as a state. It would be one of the great states anywhere. This would be one of the most incredible countries visually. He means the greater, uber United States. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the U.S. just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago. Many, many decades ago. It makes no sense. It's so perfect. As a great and cherished state, a part of me hears him talking about Canada the way Putin would talk about Ukraine.
- [12:38]
David Frum
Yeah.
- [12:39]
Charlie Sykes
I mean, it is really an extraordinary moment where generally you understand why there's a rivalry between powers. There's a history of it. There is no history of animus between the United States and Canada, except in the mind of Donald Trump. Let me talk a little.
- [12:58]
David Frum
Talk a little bit about that border, because I sort of live on the border much of the year. So I have a house in Ontario in the part of Ontario, by the way, originally settled by refugees from the American Revolution. That's how Canada got its start, because the American Revolution was a Civil war. And about a third of the people backed Independence, about a third of the people backed. Backed the king, and about a third of the people sort of vacillated in between. This is John Adams estimate at the time. And many of the one third who backed the king took it so seriously that when the king lost, they. They traveled to Canada and took. They got land grants from the Crown to compensate them for their economic losses from the Revolution. So that's where I, I actually live on a road called Loyalist Parkway, and my wife and I keep a little boat and we keep it in one of the. A town nearby that opens onto Lake Ontario. And when you bring your boat back into, you can draw, then pilot your boat easily across either the lake or the St. Lawrence river to New York. And that's where the Thousand Islands are. There are a lot of interesting tourist attractions. And when you pilot your boat back, there's a big sign that says, you are alert. You are entering an international harbor. If you have anything to declare, please telephone 1-800-FIGHT there's a number you can call to say, I picked up some caramels when I was on the American side and I guess you need to know about this, right? Except no, no one, no one would.
- [14:20]
Charlie Sykes
No one would be doing that. No.
- [14:21]
David Frum
Yeah, so. So that's the nature of, of the relationship. And, and it has it. There's a lot of economic integration, there's a lot of security integration. When Donald Trump talks about things like the Five Eyes arrangement, in which Canada's a part.
- [14:38]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. Which is serious.
- [14:40]
David Frum
So Donald Trump has an image that the Five Eyes is the United States gets all this information and it gives it to Canada. Now, this is a little bit obsolete in the age of the space satellite, but until very recently, there are massive US Listening posts all over the Canadian Arctic. A lot of the Five Eyes information came from listening posts in the Canadian Arctic. Now, maybe that's a little less relevant today than it used to be, but Canada and the United States are also bound together in something called the North American Air Defense Treaty. So every Canadian piece of military aviation, the line of command runs through Colorado Springs that if you, you know, you get, of course, an order from an immediate superior officer, but that superior officer, superior officer, superior officer, is in Colorado Springs at norad. They command all Canadian air assets, ultimately that are integrated into the defense of the continent. And remember, when that, that spy balloon came, it crossed the Chinese spy balloon, it entered, entered Alaska, traveled through British Columbia and entered the United States. So all of this is completely, you know, that balloon was tracked with by the NORAD radars, tracked it all the way through Canada. And it would have seemed very strange to people in Canada if it were done any other way. So, again, there's just something about this that is so destructive. But I have to say it's not as dangerous strategically as what Donald Trump is doing in Ukraine and Panama and Greenland. It's dangerous economically. It's very upsetting. It damages the relationship. But I think there's a part of Donald Trump's mind that is considering unilateral military action against Panama. Is considering unilateral military action against Greenland. There are only 80,000 people in Greenland. You can sort of conquer it if you play, if you're an imperialist minded person. And of course, there is the ultimate question of will Donald Trump betray the fight in Ukraine, which he clearly shows every sign of desperately wanting to do.
- [16:32]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's go through that because clearly he's got this map in his head. And again, we always struggle with, do you take him seriously? Literally? What do we make of these comments? But there's part of me that thinks that Donald Trump looks at North America and sees the greater United States with Greenland, Panama, maybe Canada, I don't know. And, and then, you know, he sees the hegemony that Vladimir Putin will have in Europe, sees China being the hegemon of Asia, really sees the world being divided up between these great powers. I don't know what his imagination is. But you actually do think that there's a possibility that he would engage in military action against Greenland. And how would the world respond to that? What would that be like?
- [17:31]
David Frum
Let's talk about Panama first, because that may be the single place of greatest danger. And it has to be said that in some of these cases, there's a real problem. So the United States turned, as you know, Panama is a creation of the United States. It was originally part of Colombia. When the United States considered building a canal across the isthmus, it negotiated with the Colombians. There was a treaty signed, but the Colombian Congress rejected the treaty because it didn't like the financial terms. And the United States, instead of renegotiating then, in one of the less creditable aspects of stories of American history, paid a bunch of Panamanian dignitaries to declare independence. It set a couple of cruisers to fortify it. And the distance from the main Population centers of Colombia to Panama was very great. And the United States declared, recognized the independence of Panama and then signed a treaty that carved out this middle of Panama and created a zone that was under American sovereignty. This act was so embarrassing that as early as 1914, the United States signed a treaty with Colombia apologizing for this action, paying Colombia the then huge sum of $25 million, saying that Colombian ships would always travel free of charge through the Panama Canal. I think this was the first apology tour in American history. But the Panama canal zone was US soil. John McCain was born there. And in the late 70s Panama began to agitate for the return of the Panama Canal Zone. And the United States considered this, and this is maybe technical, but it's worth going to considered it for two reasons. First was the Panama Canal was too narrow for the kinds of war of aircraft carriers that the United States was beginning to deploy at that time. So it was going to have to be widened which would have take which required a lot of investment and that was going to require a lot of security. And second, there are guerrilla insurgencies going on at the time in Guatemala and El Salvador. There was an unfriendly government in Nicaragua. And the United States was worried that such an insurgency could get going in Panama too. So in order to cool nationalist feeling in Panama and to create the security to widen the canal for the next generation of warships, the United States signed a treaty with Panama and returned sovereignty over the Canal Zone to Panama during the Carter administration. Now in recent years, what it was.
- [19:54]
Charlie Sykes
I mean, Ronald Reagan made a big issue of that during the campaign.
- [19:57]
David Frum
William Buckley had a great line. He said Ronald Reagan could not could become the nomin Republican nominee only because he opposed the Camp Panama Canal Treaty. But if he had succeeded in his opposition, he would never been president because there would have been a guerrilla insurgency in Panama and it would have been his fault. So. So he had exactly right. He opposed the treaty, but he was unsuccessful in stopping it. And Panama became remained completely tranquil, even as Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua were scenes of violence. But Panama in recent years has been a little too open to Chinese investment. And Americans are understandably concerned about the Chinese presence in the Panama Canal Zone. So that's the core of truth in what Donald Trump is saying. And in the modern world, you deal with that through diplomacy. And maybe you need a little muscle behind the diplomacy. Trump really wants to take back the old Panama Canal Zone. And it's so strange that this person who exists to foment nationalist grievances in the United States. It never occurs to him, you know, maybe other countries have nationalism, too. Maybe if you were to send the 82nd airport to seize the Panama Canal Zone, that you might have some trouble. How do they get out again? What happens if there's an insurgency? And that's, I think, the way he's thinking about Greenland, too. It would look impressive on the map. There are already American troops in Greenland. There have been American troops in Greenland since the 1940s, since before the United States entered the First World. Sorry, before the Second World War. It's the only military force in Greenland. You could raise the American flag, but what would that accomplish? And what would it accomplish that you can't get through a friendly understanding with the very friendly people of Denmark and the Danish territory of Greenland?
- [21:34]
Charlie Sykes
Well, it would be a way that he could flex his muscles, show that he was a strong man, show that he could sit at the same table with Vladimir Putin and President Xi.
- [21:42]
David Frum
Right, right. But it would mean the shattering of the American relationship with Europe. I mean, Denmark is an EU member and Greenland is a Danish territory. So you'd be. You'd be creating the most severe diplomatic incident with the eu. It would be the bust up of NATO. It would be an act of war of one NATO.
- [21:58]
Charlie Sykes
He doesn't seem to care about that, though. Right. I mean, he's already made it very clear that he's prepared to switch sides when it comes to NATO and Russia. So let's talk about that, because clearly that's not one of his main concerns. And let's talk about where we're at with Ukraine. Initially, he began negotiating directly with the Russians. Then he humiliated President Zelensky. Now he's come up with a ceasefire proposal which Vladimir Putin appears to be rejecting. Donald Trump doesn't seem to care about it. So give me your sense of the state of play, of the. Of the abandonment of Ukraine.
- [22:39]
David Frum
Well, I think the point of the ceasefire proposal was to create something that was unacceptable to the Ukrainians, that they would then refuse, that would then give them a pretense for a pretext for cutting off aid. Through skillful Ukrainian diplomacy, the ceasefire was made a little less objectionable than it otherwise was, and the Ukrainians did accept it, and they took away Donald Trump's pretext. And because it didn't give the Russians everything they wanted, and I guess they expect more from him, they are so far not answering. And there is no pressure on Trump, from Trump, on the Russians, none to sign it. And. And anyway, the issue here is not how do we stop the war As a lot of people other than me have said, if you stop calling it a war and call it an invasion, which it is, then that clarifies how do we stop the Russian invasion. Well, you stop the question. If that's the question. You don't blame. You don't ask the Ukrainians, what are you going to do to stop the Russian invasion? What are the Russians going to do to stop the Russian invasion?
- [23:45]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, they don't seem that interested in doing it. What do you see as the end game here?
- [23:53]
David Frum
I think the only card that Putin has is the so called trump card with a capital T and a lowercase T, where he hopes that he can deploy the trump card to get his terms in Ukraine either to actually win outright or to create a kind of frozen conflict the way the Russians have over the past 30 years created in a number of post Soviet republics where you can turn on or off the violence at the Russians whim anytime. And of course, if Ukraine does not get security guarantees, how does reconstruction begin? Ukraine is badly, badly damaged. They're going to need hundreds of billions of dollars of international investment to rebuild their housing, to get their economy working again, and that investment is not going to flow. If people feel insecure about the future of Ukraine, you need to get some kind of credible security system in place to allow for the peaceful reconstruction after the war. So if Putin can stop the security guarantees, he can stop the reconstruction of Ukraine, perpetuate the misery that he created, and hope that unemployed, damaged housing, no future, that people will either emigrate or and the remainder will drift slowly into the Russian orbit as the only game in town.
- [25:08]
Charlie Sykes
So you recently wrote about the Trump splainers, the people who are seeing some sort of a master plan at work here behind the Trump doctrines and everything. So talk to me a little bit about why you're not buying the global explanations for the Trump strategy.
- [25:28]
David Frum
Well, I actually have quite a number of specific people in mind. When I wrote that article, I didn't want to traffic in personality, so I just described types of people and types of arguments. It was inspired because I had just been at a conference in Norway and had been on a platform with an eminent trumpsplainer and we had this awkward thing where I said there are people who will say A, B and C, don't listen to them. And then the person immediately after me seem to say A, B and C. And. And I thought, you know, actually I'm glad I went first because otherwise I would have sounded very rude because I didn't know that this person was going to follow me immediately. But let's take one, an argument you hear from some Trump is the reason we need to abandon Ukraine is so we can focus our attention on China. We need to pivot to the Pacific. We are in, we're over committed to Ukraine and we need to focus America's limited resources on deterring China. Okay. Okay. So when the Chinese see that you have abandoned your Ukrainian ally and the Russians have won the war because America is weak and inconstant, are they more impressed or less impressed with American credibility? And the other countries of the region who might seek American protection when they see you abandon Ukraine, are the Vietnams, the Philippines, the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, are they going to be more impressed or less impressed? I think this argument is, I compare it to someone who says, I'm very anxious about paying my mortgage. I want to show the mortgage company that I'm very ready to pay the mortgage and therefore I'm going to default on my cable bill, I'm going to default on my heating bill, I'm going to default on my child support, I'm going to default on my car payment. And that way I'll have so much cash, the insurance company or the mortgage company say, see, he's really ready to pay. I think they're going to say, this guy's a defaulter. He won't pay anything. You can never count on him to pay. He defaulted on the heating bill, he defaulted on the car. He's going to default on the mortgage too, when the time comes. Solvency is universal. And what you do above all when you do this, selective betrayal is one of the reasons the United States has been so solvent in national terms is that it has many, many capable wealthy allies. But the allies see these causes as linked. When the prime minister of Japan made his most recent appearance before a joint session of Congress, he spoke about Ukraine and he talked about Ukraine as integral to the defense of Japan. They're very far away. But he understood that what underlay both was the ultimate credibility of the American security guarantee and the larger system of alliances that rests on that guarantee.
- [28:05]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I just wonder whether anyone believes that Donald Trump would come to the defense of Taiwan if China moved on him at this point. I mean, is there any reason to believe, even if he abandoned Ukraine, that our guarantee or our support for Taiwan would be in any way credible?
- [28:22]
David Frum
Well, he said twice during the 2024 campaign, he said in two separate interviews, one with Bloomberg, one with I'm now going to forget which. But a kind of right wing podcaster so he said it twice in the same day. He would not come to the defense of Taiwan because he was mad at them for making such excellent chips at such favorable prices and thus creating a Taiwanese chip industry. As president, he has not gone that far, but he said a lot of things where his trademark we have to see. He has indicated that the defense would be unforthcoming. And meanwhile, as I say, he's put sanctions on Australian trade, an indispensable partner in any counter to China. And, you know, the Taiwan and other partners. Your security problem in the Pacific, in the Atlantic, you work with fellow democracies with a lot with which the United States has a long history with countries with very similar legal systems. It's not difficult for the United States to get along with Britain, Germany and France and Italy. It's more difficult to get along with Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, the countries you need to balance China. There's less. There's less in common. So you have to be much more clear and specific and much more credible. And those countries, which are not bound by history and values to the United States, but are bound by interests, are going to say, if you abandon Ukraine, we really doubt that you would stand up for Sri Lanka.
- [29:51]
Charlie Sykes
And reasonably so. All right, so let's switch to domestic politics for a moment. I did a podcast before I did this with the Talking Feds podcast, and the phrase that came up was the penumbra of fear. The way in which the Trump administration is moving through the various institutions of civil society, spreading anxiety, whether it is the legal system going after law firms or the news media or universities. We've talked a lot about the authoritarian threat or the threat to democracy of the Trump administration. But it strikes me that here we are in the middle of March, and it has moved faster and more aggressively than I think even some of us more vocal critics had expected, but also that the resistance has been so much less. Just give me your take on all of that, because it does seem as if the playbook that you saw in a country like Hungary, where you had the surrender of one institution after another, a voluntary surrender, in many cases, is playing out here much more rapidly than I think many Americans ever would have imagined.
- [31:08]
David Frum
Well, in 2017, Donald Trump's bad qualities were restrained by a series of factors. First, he didn't know what he wanted to do. Second, he didn't know how to do it. Third, he had surrounded himself by people he thought would like him. He assumed that because he endorses violence in all its forms, that the generals of the U.S. army must like him because aren't they very violent? He assumed that, well, he's a big fat guy. Rex Tillerson's a big fat guy. He would like me. So he surrounded himself with all these people and, and then he discovered, no, the people he thought were his allies actually regarded him as a threat and menace. And as Grex Tillerson said, a fucking moron. And finally, the Republicans in Congress weren't that enthusiastic about his project either and didn't think they owed him much because they had all won their victories. The House in 2010, the Senate in 2014. Trump had not done that well in 2016. And a lot of, and these were older senators, older generation, they thought, you know, we're happy to have, you know, if you sign the bills we send you, that's great, but we're not here to work for you. So all of those conditions are different in 2025. This time he knows what he wants completely. He knows better how to do it. He is surrounded. He is not making the mistake of getting respectable people like General Mattis. He's, he surrounded himself. He's got Pete Hegseth inside of General Mattis. He's got Marco Rubio, who is not, I think, a person of ill intention, but is a person of weak character instead of Rex Tillerson, the formidable self made half billionaire head of ExxonMobil. He's always got weak people, he's got deformed people. And then he's got a Congress that is terrified of him. So the restraints are less, the knowledge is greater. Now, the story's not over that Trump has spent a lot of political capital on giving Elon Musk permission to rampage through the federal bureaucracy, firing people at will, as if he has the legal power to do that. Courts are beginning to say Elon Musk does not have the legal power to do that. All of this will be litigated. And if Trump continues, he's lost twice. If he continues to lose. One of the things that we may be saying in four months time is Trump spent almost all his political capital in the first three months doing something that was illegal and that was reversed.
- [33:37]
Charlie Sykes
And was unpopular as well, and was.
- [33:40]
David Frum
Unpopular, but not as unpopular as what Elon Musk wants to do next, which is tell everyone who receives Social Security. If you have any problems, log onto our website, sign up for two factor authentication, and talk to artificial intelligence. But the idea that you can call a 1-800-number and you just think, do they know anyone on Social Security?
- [34:08]
Charlie Sykes
Well, this is the thing about why it is so hard to dismantle various programs is because we have a political culture where you have people with vested interests. And Elon Musk has gone rogue. What could possibly go wrong? He has no idea and he doesn't give a shit. And this is a political problem for a political party that has now joined itself at the hip with him because he is dismantling these things and creating conversations that frankly, I didn't hear people having back in 2020 or even in 2024 about the chaos, about the damage that he's causing. So when you talk about, you know, running through his, his political capital, it is an extraordinary moment to watch. To watch as, I mean, you know, look, we've seen administrations before that over overreach or overplay their mandate, but nothing really at the scale that we're seeing now.
- [35:04]
David Frum
Yeah, I don't think we've seen an administration strike so hard at its own core constituencies. So farmers are historical Republican constituency. And Donald Trump did especially well with farmers in 2020. So until the first Trump presidency, the United States was the largest exporter of soybeans in the world. When Trump began to wage trade war against China, one of the ways they retaliated was by pivoting their soybean purchases from the United States to Brazil. And Brazil is now the largest soybean exporter in the world. It was a talking point of J.D. vance's, especially in 2024, that the United States used to be the world's largest exporter of food and now under Biden, were a net food importer. And that was true. But the reason it was true was because Donald Trump gave away the soybean export market. Now he begins his second presidency. He said to American farmers, get ready to sell more at home, because we're going to be giving away other markets too. So along with after soybeans, there's going to be, there's corn, there's wheat. Now some of the, some of the corn crop is turned into ethanol, which is consumed at home very irrationally, but at least it's a market for the farmers. But wheat moves in global markets and other important crops and pulses and things like that, and the meat. The livestock supply chains move back and forth across the Canadian border. Pigs and cows often. If you make that border more permeable, you're going to upset the whole livestock industry in North American continent. It's going to have to all be rejiggered because this slaughterhouses are located in places where they can serve the big pasture lands on both sides of the border.
- [36:40]
Charlie Sykes
Right well, and here in Wisconsin, we import a lot of our fertilizer from, from Canada. So all of that happens. So talk to me a little bit about potash.
- [36:49]
David Frum
Potashes. There's no potash in the United States. And potash is Canadian export. You put a, you put a 25% tariff on potash, and that is, it's every devastating blow to American farmers.
- [37:00]
Charlie Sykes
So let's talk about Elon Musk. Is there any parallel in American history for the kind of power that Elon Musk has right now? I mean, we've had the robber barons in the past, we've had the Henry Fords, but nobody playing the role that Elon Musk is playing right now as kind of deputy president.
- [37:18]
David Frum
The closest I can come up with, given that we're all supposed to be back in love with William McKinley again, not me, but is Mark Hanna. Mark Hanna was a very successful businessman from the Midwest who didn't personally finance the McKinley campaign, but gave a lot of money to the campaign and raised a lot of the funds. McKinley had the best funded campaign ever seen by president for president before. And to that point, the way you financed a presidential campaign was you got kickbacks from government workers and put them in the party treasury. There had always been some corporate contribution, but never like in 1896 when that became the main. There had been some civil service reform. You couldn't, you couldn't get the kickbacks the way you could in the 1870s and 80s. And so he, but Hanna had this worshipful attitude toward McKinley. He really thought McKinley was a great man sent by God to govern the United States. And Hannah saw his job as helping McKinley to be the best possible. McKinley.
- [38:13]
Charlie Sykes
Right.
- [38:13]
David Frum
Although he certainly had opinions. And Hannah was a big protectionist too, as McKinley was. He didn't tell him what to do. And he, and it was very much, you're the boss, I'm here to help you. I don't think we've had a case where we've had a campaign contributor who so obviously thinks of him, has such a higher opinion of himself than he does of the person he made president and is rampaging through the government without any regard whatsoever to the President's even medium term political interests.
- [38:41]
Charlie Sykes
Part of the calculation that Trump is making in this term is that nobody cares about perceptions of conflict of interest or concerns about corruption, any of that, because, I mean, the graft and the grift is right out in the open. This past week we had this extraordinary scene of Donald Trump turning the White House into a car dealership. Touting Teslas, which I thought was an extraordinary moment. You have average Americans losing hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market. The stock market's crashing, and the President chooses that day to bail out the world's richest man by selling his cars from the White House. And then within that same news cycle, we find out that Musk is pumping another hundred million dollars into Trump's political campaign. And again, it's like basically, Trump has decided and Trump and Musk have decided that nobody cares. Right. And we'll find out whether that's the case.
- [39:36]
David Frum
Well, I think people tend not to care in good times, but they care a lot in bad times. That's interesting. In good times, there's a kind of American attitude. American politics has historically been more corrupt than that of Germany or Britain or other peer to peer. If you were to take the G7 countries and stack them for political cleanliness, you'd have Canada and Britain and Germany at the top, Italy and Japan probably at the bottom, the United States there with France and Italy in the middle. So. But Americans have always thought, you know, I want to get paid, you want to get paid, everybody gets paid. There's a kind of godfather sensibility in American politics. In good times, if I'm getting paid, then I don't care so much that the guy at the top is also getting paid. But if I am not getting paid, then things are very different. And what Trump did with Elon Musk and the car, although pretty shocking, that didn't come out of anybody's pocket. But what Trump is doing with the crypto industry and the meme coins that is coming out of people's pockets, people are being duped into investing in worthless Pokemon cards. And Trump's people around Trump, who want to take tens of billions of dollars and invest it in a bailout for the bitcoin industry. A way to think about how big is this thing. There's one bill in the Senate about the bitcoin, the bitcoin bailout. That is a senator from Wyoming has a bill that proposed that the United States buy a million units of bitcoin over the next five years. 200,000 units a year for five years. So the price of bitcoin is down, but at the peak, when Trump was talking about this, most, that would have cost $100 billion over five years. Tax money of tax money directly into the pocket of the crypto industry. To give you an idea, we throw around these sums. So Trump, Elon Musk had previously suspended the PEPFAR program that fights HIV in Africa, but can't afford it. PEPFAR costs $6 billion a year. So for 20 years, the Bitcoin bailout would cost 20 years of PEPFAR. The United States has spent about 120 plus billion dollars helping Ukraine. But not all of that was cash folding money. It spent. The bitcoin bailout would be more than has been spent in cash folding money on aiding Ukraine. So it's a big, big money grab that is directed at holders of these strange assets that are constantly in danger of losing all of their value. Because it's very hard to think of what the business case for a cryptocurrency is.
- [42:12]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I mean, and obviously if you're also at the same time cutting, you know, talking about cutting veterans benefits or laying off veterans or endangering any of these other programs, it would seem to be relatively easy to message that. You may admire a billionaire, but if a billionaire is perceived as being part of, you know, enriching themselves at the expense of the average American, that seems problematic. The question is whether or not the Democrats have the political skill to message that way.
- [42:44]
David Frum
One more story that the Wall Street Journal had just two days ago, which is Trump's children are in talks with the head of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, a person who's a convict, that, that the Trump family would merge its crypto interests with this convicted felon.
- [43:05]
Charlie Sykes
It's not subtle. Yeah.
- [43:07]
David Frum
And as part of the deal. Part of the deal would be a pardon from, from, from Trump to the crypto convict.
- [43:15]
Charlie Sykes
Well, he got away with January 6th, so why would we think he wouldn't get away with. With. With that as well? Okay, so here's a political question, and I don't. No one knows an answer to it. There's no definitive answer. But Elon Musk is increasingly politically toxic. And I'm looking at polls about his approval ratings. The question is whether or not Trump, and I'm guessing that Trump thinks that he is. That he stands alone, that he is not, that he could jettison Elon Musk, that his popularity is not tied to Elon Musk. Is he right about that? I mean, how interrelated are they right now? Can Trump stay popular if Elon Musk becomes radioactive?
- [43:58]
David Frum
Is what I'm getting at, I think, and I don't know, this is. We're now in the realm of pure speculation. I think probably today he could. If he severed Elon Musk today, he could certainly bounce back because there's time. This is all against the countdown of November of 2023. But if Elon Musk succeeds, for example, in eliminating 1, 800 assistance at the Social Security Administration and every pensioner who has a problem has to go to the website and use two factor authentication to talk to artificial intelligence, then at that point you're joined forever. Because once it's done, it's going to be quite hard to then to undo. And I have an older relative who every time she has a problem with Facebook, she says, well, let me call the 800 number. And it's sort of hard to explain. Facebook doesn't have an 800 number.
- [44:47]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah.
- [44:47]
David Frum
And this is a very cogent person. And she knows that, but she can't quite believe it. How is it possible that you can run a business and not have an 800 number? Well, when you say the Social Security Administration no longer has an 800 number, there's no one to call. You have to do it on the site. What if your vision isn't that good?
- [45:05]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and what I think a lot of people don't fully understand is, and I say this as somebody that is, you know, is on Social Security, that their customer service is really quite outstanding. It is, it is a, was a big surprise and a revelation to me that in fact there are human beings and they will spend time with you and they are competent and they will be creative and they will actually call you back if they have answers to say, which I, by the way, never would have thought thought of if I had not experienced it myself. So Elon Musk has no clue what he's.
- [45:38]
David Frum
I will share with you as we're getting close to our time, I will share with you my idea that would have won the election for either Biden or Harris. And I still think this is, I think, I still think this is like a revolutionized American politics question, which is that Biden should have announced the creation of an 800 number called 1-800-USA-HELP that anyone with Social Security number could call and get asked questions about Social Security. Yeah, sure. But also ask, how do you load video onto your Facebook page? Why isn't my app, why isn't my Scrabble app working? Like there. There would be teams of Generation Z people. There are a lot of underemployed Generation Z males and they'd be all hired. They could play video games while this and they'd be there to answer any technology related question of any kind. And with none of this thing like you, like the people at Apple Care, if you call them up the Scrabble app, they say it's not our department. 1-800-USA-HELP. You could call about Apple. You can call about the Scrabble app. You can call about video on Facebook. You call about Social Security. I think Biden should have campaigned on that.
- [46:37]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I think Democrats are going to need a lot of probably going to need a lot of good constructive suggestions over the next couple of years since their their ability to market and to message is, shall we say, suboptimal, as we've discovered over the last couple of months. David FROM thank you so much for joining me and coming back on the podcast. I appreciate it. Hopefully get you back on over the next few months as well. Thank you so much. And thank you all for listening to to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We do this several times a week because it is now more important than ever to remind ourselves that we are not crazy.