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- [00:00]
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Charlie Sykes
Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes, first podcast of September. And as in every previous month, we have a problem of deciding what to focus on. You know, with Trump's dodgy health, his, his corruption, the, the inanity over mail in voting, which I don't even want to get, could devote the entire podcast to the threats to Occupy Chicago and Baltimore, his continuing failure to quash the Epstein story, which we are going to get to the multiple defeats in federal court. So we are joined live from occupied Washington, D.C. by the Atlantic's David Frum. Good to have you back, David.
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David Frum
Hey, good to be back. This is my. Also my first working day in D.C. after a month away, so.
- [01:29]
Charlie Sykes
Well, you return to a different DC So we could start a lot of different places. But I wanna start with this scene out of Beijing where you see President Xi with Vladimir Putin and Modi from India, all of the representatives of the axis of evil, except maybe Iran, showing up there for this massive display of Chinese public power. And it seems a geopolitical middle finger to Donald Trump. And the fact this occurs just weeks after that, the Alaska summit, your thoughts on what's going on in terms of the new world order that Donald Trump has ushered in.
- [02:14]
David Frum
This is a subject that is so important. I've thought about a lot or tried to. When you talk to the Trump people about their ludicrous and sinister partiality for Russia over Ukraine, which is driven by corruption and ideology and all kinds of things. But the ones who are more strategically minded will offer this explanation. The reason that we have to favor Russia over Ukraine is because Russia is such an important strategic partner against China. And what we must at all costs avoid is driving Russia into a closer relationship to China, because that would be so terribly catastrophic. Say, okay, all right, you're very worried about this country with a GDP the size of Italy being literally somewhat bigger than Canada, this very middle level power with this decayed and broken military, you're very worried about driving them into the arms of China. What did Trump just do? Every president since Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, for whom I worked, Barack Obama Joe Biden have all worked on cultivating the US India relationship as a balance to China. This has been a 30 year project under precedence of both parties, an amazingly consistent American point of view. And you would not know at any given year who's in charge. If you just looked at what is going on in military to military relations, diplomatic, you wouldn't know whether Clinton or Bush or Obama was the president. The policy has been the same. Cultivate closer ties with India. And in order to balance China, India, unlike Russia, is a gigantic player. It's a much bigger economy than Russia. It's got a much more capable military than Russia. It's got a naval presence which Russia doesn't have. Build the relationship with India and it's not easy. There are many points of difference and difficulty. It's not in many ways a natural partner for the United States the way Japan or the European partners are, but it's so important. And what did Trump do? He blew it up. Why? Because Modi did not go along with Trump's absurd childish ego story that Trump ended the June fighting between India and Pakistan and Modi refused on the telephone to nominate Trump for the Nobel Prize. Modi, in fact, got quite irked for it from. From this thing for very. Because India had done it. And out of childish vanity, Trump then imposed all these terrorists on India and. And the result is that Modi is there. So a Putin XI relationship is troublesome. But again, it's an economy the size of Italy and both of them are hostile to the United States. India is a friend. It's much bigger than Russia. It's more important. Every president since Clinton has worked on pulling India close to the United States. Trump pushed them away. It is a strategic shock. There's a story on the front page of the New York Times of the international edition by a friend of mine. Capo cam already about how. How difficult this was. This is Trump's work. And what Trump is doing is again and again and again isolating the United States. His people say America first does not mean America alone. Yes, it does. He's smashing. Just the other day, and this is too long an answer. I'm sorry, I'll say one more thing. And then was fine. Pause. The Danes let it be known. Denmark let it be known that the Danish Prime Minister called in the US Ambassador for a dressing down because three Americans were engaged in hostile espionage activities inside Greenland. Now, that's the kind of rebuke that can be given quietly. But it. The behavior was obviously so egregious. The Danes chose to make a public issue of it. So everyone, America is isolated, isolated, isolated. And so much of it is Trump's doing for reasons of both corruption but also childishness.
- [05:46]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's go back to that because it is the childish vanity. And you mentioned the, the narrative that was reported in the New York Times over the weekend that, I mean, let's just go back a little bit. I mean, Modi and Trump seem to be natural allies and they're kind of, you know, both populous demagogues. Right? I mean, there was a bromance between the two of them. There was a bromance between Modi and Elon Musk and Donald Trump. We've seen how that's gone. But point of childish vanity, normally when great powers change the alignment of, you know, the tectonic plates of geopolitics, it's for some reason of national interest. And as you point out, it's childish vanity. It goes back to that phone call where Donald Trump is trying to get Modi to nominate him for a Nobel Prize for something he did not do. It is so inane. It's one of those things where you go, it can't be this stupid. It can't be this ego driven. And, and yet all of the evidence suggests that in fact it was India.
- [06:44]
David Frum
As I said, India is a difficult coalition partner for the United States. It's not a natural alignment. And Modi is a very difficult character, as you said, with a quite ugly political history and repressive anti democratic instincts. It's difficult, but every president since Clinton has agreed difficult as it is, it's important because to be done has to be done and we have to find ways to make it work. In the same way, the relationship with Vietnam is difficult, but it has to be done because China, China, look, the United States has faced a number of rivals over the past hundred years, but some of them were militarily capable, like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and some were economically capable. If you think of, of Japan as a rival, which I don't, but many people did, it was, but not since the United States faced the Kaiser more than a century ago, did the United States a rival that was both economically capable and militarily capable. And at least with the Kaiser, the United States was two and a half times bigger in terms of population than Imperial Germany. This time you've got a rival who's economically capable, techno, militarily capable, bigger population than the United States, nearly equal economy. The United States cannot balance China by itself. It needs friends. And some of the friends will be new and difficult friends. And that requires diplomacy and that requires not saying, my supreme goal is President of the United States is to get myself some bauble and right.
- [08:08]
Charlie Sykes
An airplane, give him an airplane, make him go away.
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David Frum
And but this is not that the Indians in this case can't give him the bauble because I did a show on this in, in June with a prominent Indian politician from the party opposite to Modis, Shashi Tharoor, and he made this point. All Indians were united in shock by the Pakistani aggression in June. And India handled that with considerable success, but also some, there were some embarrassing failures. And it became a very important Indian national project to claim that they had handled Pakistan on their own and kept the peace on their own. And the United States was actually not. It did, it did something. It was not that helpful. This is not like Condor, Lisa Rice and Colin Powell brokering peace in 2001 when there was a similar exchange. The United States had a very tentative relationship, but at a time when it was very important for the Indians to insist they did it by themselves. So a non childish government would say, you know what? The small portion of credit that the United States deserves should be put it to one side. Instead, Trump said, I want to convert the small portion of credit the United States deserves into an enormous portion of credit for me personally so I can get a bauble. And I am going to offend this difficult coalition partner whom we need and drive him closer to China. When I say the reason I'm cosseting Putin is because I'm afraid of driving an economy the size of Italy into the arms of China.
- [09:32]
Charlie Sykes
Exactly. Let's stick with China for a moment because it does seem as if there is this sort of celebration of the new Chinese century going on right now, and we've talked about this in the past, that if you were to think about if China is our great global economic rival, how do we counter him? Well, one of the ways would be that you create trade policies that isolate China, that you create alliances again that, that encourage people to ally with us rather than China. You make the United States a more reliable ally than China would be. We have done none of those things. So when you talk about America alone, America alone is not in a vacuum. America alone means that many of the limitations that could have been or that were placed on China are now all being eroded, including just basic American respect and credibility.
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David Frum
Look, the United States, for reasons again of childishness, imposed all these tariffs on Australia. And Australia has long been one of America's most militarily capable partners in the Pacific. I mean, it's not as big an economy as Japan, but it does have but it has fewer qualms and inhibitions about its military tradition. The Australians fought alongside the United States in Vietnam. And but what Americans tend to forget is Australia is not Canada. They seem similar, but Canada has a very tight economic relationship with the United States. Canada, basically I'm Canadian by dual national. Canada has to eat whatever the United States puts in front of it, whether it likes it or not. It has many fewer options. Australia does not do much business with the United States. It is Australia is to China as Canada is to the United States. It is Australian coal and beef and other natural resources. They go to the Chinese market, not the American. But Australia is bound to the United States by ties of sentiment and history. But those are not as strong as economic ties. So you start slapping Australia around, not today and not tomorrow and not next week, but over time, Australians are going to say, well, our economic interests are aligned more with China and the Americans are bad partners and untrustworthy and insulting. We may be going adrift. One more thing that has to be said about all this, this fundamental strategic calculation for China has to be never stop hoping for a good outcome. Never stop hoping that China will democratize, that Xi will someday die and the next leader may be different. It's really important to not allow your just apprehensions and your need to prepare the balancing with other allies to escalate this into premature conflict of America's doing. And so one of the I'm while the rivalry is real, the adversarial relationship may or may not be real. And we can control that. And so a big part of what makes this project also difficult is you have to prepare for the worst in ways that may accelerate the worst. So you also have to work for the best even as you prepare for the worst. And that's a very difficult job. And the President's need for another one of those silver loving cups to put alongside the other gim crack Chinese made Alibaba junk. He's filled the White House with the Oval Office with that. It's so embarrassing, but it's so destructive and awful.
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Charlie Sykes
It's also embarrassing. So speaking of embarrassing, let's just go back two weeks, two weeks or more to that big summit, that dramatic one on one meeting between Trump and Putin, which now, in retrospect, correct me if you have a different take on that, accomplished absolutely nothing except to embolden Vladimir Putin, to validate Vladimir Putin and to buy him more time but, you know, I described it as Munich for idiots, because we're also learning more and more about Trump's chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, who clearly, you know, is not only out of his depth, but does not understand at all even some of the things that, that he claimed Russia was offering. So where are we at? I mean, there's seems to be no progress toward peace in Ukraine. And where do you think the United States stands right now?
- [13:51]
David Frum
Yeah, the summit in Alaska accomplished nothing. If you believe that Donald Trump's goal is to move toward security for Ukraine and a peace that favors Ukrainian independence. But if you think what Trump's goal is is to create a lot of stage business while he does nothing, this endless increment of two weeks, in two weeks I'll make a decision about sanctions. And then in two more weeks. So about the sixth or seventh time you say in two weeks I'll make a decision about sanctions, people start saying, I don't think you're serious about this. Well, what if there's a summit? Doesn't that, that buys me another two weeks. Remember, in Donald Trump's business career, until he struck it rich in the meme coin business with using the office of the presidency as a money raising thing, his goal for the past 20 years has always been to keep the creditors at bay for the next 48 hours by any means necessary, whatever lie, whatever works to keep them away from his door. So he's been doing that with, with the members of the Republican Party who don't want to see Ukraine abandoned. He is. Trump is in the process of abandoning Ukraine, but he needs to distract them and give them something to buy himself two more weeks. And the summit did that. We are again, we're in the middle of or the beginning of September, months into the Trump term. There has been no. Trump keeps promising sanctions on Russia, new ones. There haven't been any, no secondary sanctions. And, and meanwhile his Pentagon keeps turning off the arms and flow of intelligence abruptly to Ukraine sometimes. It's on right now. Something seems to be flowing. The new Republican budget bill. I was proposing $800 million of military assistance for Ukraine over the next fiscal year. That's less than Trump is proposing to spend to fix up the, the jet that he wants to get from Qatar. $800 million is a lot of money, but it's not much money in the context of helping someone fight an industrial war.
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Charlie Sykes
Yeah, so let's, you know, this is a good segue, but you're talking about his powers of distraction, the changing of the Subject. As you and I are speaking, there's a press conference at the Capitol of Epstein survivors. Epstein victims. It strikes me. And again, you know, through the month of August, we moved on to other things. The Epstein stories seemed to be sagging and now Congress is coming back and you're having a fight on the floor of the House of Representatives releasing the documents, but the. And the survivors are speaking out. Very, very dramatic footage. This strikes me at this point the one time that Donald Trump has absolutely failed to distract, to change the narrative from a story that he won. And number two, it may be one of the most spectacularly unsuccessful cover ups in political history because the COVID up now has become, I mean, you know, has become the consuming story. So if you don't want people talking about Trump and Epstein, we. What have you done? You have succeeded in making that, you know, a 24, 7 story. And it's back. Here we are in September and it's back.
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David Frum
Well, let's consider for a moment why the Epstein story is so damaging to Trump. CNN had some polling and I believe it that Epstein is not considered one of the top two or three stories by most Americans. And I think that's probably right. You know, most people are dealing with higher prices and economic uncertainty. For most people, politics and the doings in Washington is very far away from lives. But the Epstein story is intensely important to Donald Trump's most ferocious supporters who told themselves a story and they've been telling it for a while, goes back to Pizzagate. This is the same story that child abuse is not something that is happening inside the home. It's not done by stepfathers and stepbrothers. It's not done by coaches and trusted religious leaders. It's not something that each of us needs to have an awareness of and a protective impulse toward the young people in our lives. It's not a personal problem that happens without regard to families, which is the truth. All of that, what I just said is the truth. They believed in a fictitious story, which is child abuse is exclusively done or almost exclusively by an international network of important, powerful people, all of them liberals and Democrats. No Republican child predators, only liberal and Democratic child predators. And they're people you don't know. They're far away. They're not the stepbrother, the stepfather, the trusted religious leader, the coach. They're not that person. They're these. And Donald Trump said, yes, you are absolutely right. And my presidency is going to be all about exposing and punishing those people by extrajudicial means. We're going to torture them, we're going to send them to Guantanamo, we're going to kill them, we're going to have show trials and we're going to prove that all the people you hate for ideological reasons are also guilty of these terrible crimes. Them and only them, not the coach. And people were fool enough to believe that. And meanwhile, I mean, everyone who, everyone who wasn't a QAnon crackpot knew, you understand, that Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump were best friends for 20 years. And in fact, the only photographs in which Donald Trump ever seems to be authentically smiling are his pictures of Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, Jeffrey Epstein was not only his best friend, his only friend over a long period of time. And when they broke up, it's not because of this obviously untrue story about Trump, about Jeffrey Epstein taking a young woman from Donald Trump's employ. Donald Trump had cared about that. He could have interceded at the time and said to that girl, don't do this. I know this man. He's dangerous. You know, how is. What did he offer you to make him come work for you? $8 an hour more than you're paying me, sir. Well, make it 10. Stay with me. You know that story can't be true. I think the falling. I think it makes much more sense to believe the falling out was about the piece of property in Palm beach that they both coveted to flip. But whatever the exact details is, it's just been obvious to everyone who's not in the cult. Well now Trump has made it impossible even for his own cultists to avoid noticing that Trump and Epstein were so close and that Trump's story is not true and that Trump was involved in this in some mysterious way and that Trump is now engaged in an act of apparent cover up and that the central offer that Trump made to his most fervent supporters is now being withdrawn. That doesn't affect Mr. And Mrs. America as they go through the aisles at Walmart marveling at everyday higher Trump prices. But it does matter to the core group who have been with Trump through thick and thin.
- [20:26]
Charlie Sykes
Well, but there are some MAGA folks who are willing to buy the idea that somehow Ghislaine Maxwell has now exonerated Donald Trump. They dangled a pardon and front of her. We've seen now her the bizarre interview that she had with Trump's handpicked lawyer in this particular case. And now they've dumped a bunch of. The House Republicans have dumped a bunch of documents, 97% of which appear to be public documents that we've seen before. Thomas Massie, you know, conservative Republican, libertarian Republican, working with Democrats, is putting a discharge petition on the floor of the House which would force the release of more documents. The White House apparently is threatening that anyone that joins him is going to be cast, you know, into the darkest circles of MAGA hell. So once again, the story is bubbling up there. The Trump people are in the position of sort of putting out irrelevant chaff and trying to convince their Fox News base that it's true. But again, what is your sense this story? My sense is going to be bigger a week from now than it was a week ago. I mean, well, we go was not a big story, but I mean, it wasn't. I'm sorry, it was out.
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David Frum
So I look, I want to be very careful about circumspection, about what we know and what we assert, that there's a lot about the story that remains very mysterious, very uncertain. And Donald Trump's role remains very mysterious and uncertain. But. And it may be that what's going on here. Norman Mailer had a theory about the John F. Kennedy assassination and the CIA's role, which is one of the things that was in the John F. Kennedy. It is very clear that Oswald acted alone. Right. And yet this agencies of the US Government in the immediate aftermath of the shooting acted in ways that suggested that they had they knew more than they were letting on, which they did not. But Mailer theory was the CIA had been involved in so many bizarre activities in the late 50s and early 60s, it did not itself know whether there was a connection between Oswald and somebody having to do something with the CIA. So they prophylactically suppressed information, thinking there may be something here that's embarrassing to us because we just like at the end of Burn before reading what the hell did we do? I don't know. That great ending scene. Yeah. So they covered up without knowledge of whether there was anything to cover up. And it turned out there wasn't, but that by the time they were sure that they were in the clear and that no one connected with them had been, it was too late. So there may be something like that going on. On the other hand, it may also be true that there's there's a big story there, but certainly Trump is behaving consistently in a way that has to alarm all but the most gullible of his supporters.
- [23:24]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. And unfortunately there are tens of millions of those. But you know, it's interesting because when this first started bubbling up, I was talking to some people who had were you know, who are very involved in the story and close to some of the victims. And I asked, well, what would the effect be? What would the effect be if they pardoned, you know, Ghislaine Maxwell in return for exoneration? And the sense was. The sense I got was this would be very demoralizing to the ser. Survivors, to the victims who would just, you know, you know, basically, you know, go back into the tall grass. Well, they haven't given a pardon to Ghislaine Maxwell, but clearly the survivors and the victims are not going back, are not staying silent. They feel emboldened. And I think in many ways, that feels like kind of the decisive development. If you had to put your finger on one development in this story, the fact that they are willing to come out because it makes it so much harder for. For Donald Trump then to distract from it, but also to say there's nothing there, that it's all a hoax.
- [24:26]
David Frum
Look, there are a lot of gullible MAGA supporters, but I think you'd have to be pretty gullible to accept an exoneration of Donald Trump given by this notorious sex criminal after she gets a pardon, or if she gets a pardon, after she exonerated. I think that he may be like, there may be. There may be people willing to. Who make a living saying it. Like, will Charlie Kirk continue to repeat these lines? I think he will. Even Charlie Kirk believe it? I doubt he will. He'll say it, but will he believe it? And then will the people listen to Charlie Kirk? Will they? I mean, you know, it just looks like you gave her the bag of cash, she gave you the stolen car, and you say that the bag of cash and the stolen car had nothing to do with each other. I don't know. That's like asking a lot to ask me to believe. Believe that.
- [25:20]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, so let's. Let's move on to two other things. I mean, obviously, I mentioned earlier that you're in occupied D.C. the, the president's made it clear that he's itching to send troops into other cities, including Chicago and Baltimore. Interestingly enough, you had a federal judge just the other day ruling that he's. He was illegally deploying troops in Los Angeles. We'll set that aside. Just give me your sense, though, of how this is, how this is playing out, because you have a lot of defiant rhetoric from the mayors and the governors who are saying there is not a crisis of crime. Look, I worry about the authoritarian streak that you're seeing here with Donald Trump turning the military into his own political play thing. But I do also worry the Democrats are going to try to whiteboard this and dismiss any concerns about crime as opposed to saying we, we also want to fight crime. We also have a plan. Your thoughts?
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David Frum
Well, there's also a crisis here of the National Guard. The National Guard is not the professional military. These are not people who've served up, signed up for three years or whatever it is to do, go anywhere and do anything. These are people who have other lives, often families, they're young, they're older, not younger. And they, they're often and they're disproportionately drawn from first responders, police, firefighters, emt. So they provide important services in their own states. And they have lives. They gave a weekend a month to make a little extra money, but above all to be good citizens. And they, they the National Guard operates in a world in which they are welcome. When there's a tornado and there's wreckage and the National Guard people are so grateful. So that's your experience as a Guards person. Most of the work you do, people are so thank God you are here at last.
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Charlie Sykes
They're like the cavalry. Oh, thank you.
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David Frum
We're so glad you came, that you were here. They're here with the water and the hot meals and the blankets and the sandbags and they're saving you from the flood, they're saving you from the hurricane or, you know, the last, when they were here last time in D.C. in big numbers after 9, 11. I remember that very vividly. They're the, they're there on every street corner and merchants are coming out with waters and sodas and cookies saying thank you, thank you for protecting us against what we fear may happen next. So you have got people who are, who could quit at any time who are saying, I am taking now week, not one weekend a month or not a short period in a national emergency or in an emergency in my own state where there's a flood or a hurricane. I'm here picking up trash in D.C. missing my kids, piano recital, leaving my wife or husband to do all the housework for what? I didn't sign up and people aren't happy to see me. I didn't sign up for this. I signed up to protect my community and to be perceived as someone protecting my community. So I am worried that we're going to see first a trickle and soon a flood of resignations from the Guard, which is an institution that is obviously vital to the security of the United States because people don't like the work they're being asked to do because it's obviously unwelcome and stupid.
- [28:31]
Charlie Sykes
Now, so far it hasn't happened. But I do wonder what happens when you have, for example, a police force that is ordered to resist the efforts of the feds in, in some way. I'm not saying that we're getting close to a civil war, but you can certainly imagine with these dueling jurisdictions, particularly with different.
- [28:52]
David Frum
I think the trend to the dramatic is, is, is misleading here. I, I don't think we're gonna have the police because look, a lot of the cops are themselves National Guards people on the weekend. Yes. So they, under these, these two and a lot of the National Guards people are cops. They, they understand each other and they're not, they're not gonna, there's not gonna be a war between the Louisiana National Guards. But look like what there are going to be, I think, is a lot of people from Louisiana saying, why am I, I missed the piano recital to pick up trash in D.C. really? They can't pick up their own trash? Why am I here?
- [29:29]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. So let's, let's, let's, let's talk about, let's talk about a story that you wrote in the Atlantic earlier this, this week about your own personal dealings with tariffs. It's kind of funny. This is one of those things that's now bubbling up in conversations where, you know, people talk about, you know, lived experience of, of the, the tariff thing. But, but I think a lot of people who, you know, are sending packages back and forth, small packages back and forth between the United States and other countries, which was a routine thing, are now experiencing the, well, what's going on here? So just tell us your story and, and why, why it's going to play out in some of the court cases that are out there.
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David Frum
Well, it's both ridiculous and really irritating and with a fundamental constitutional principle at stakeholders. So on August 22, I went online and made a small purchase from a British company. The purchase was to be delivered by dhl, the big German or European freight company. DHL had stopped delivering large, large value packages to the United States in April, but as of August 22, they were still delivering small value packages. It turned out that by pure chance that was their last day since, since August 22nd. No more DHL deliveries of any kind of package to the United States from Europe.
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Charlie Sykes
We're just cut off.
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David Frum
We're just cut off. It's like self, self embargo. But my package made it under the wire so it arrives on August 29th and I get a note from DHL. You owe an extra $26.05 in import duties above and beyond anything you saw on the screen when you made your. Your purchase. So I give them a credit card number and I pay. And then a few days after that, the the D.C. circuit affirms the United States Court of International Trade that said my $26.05 was exacted illegally. That president, that this is a tax that President Trump imposed without consent of Congress. Ha ha, ha. Very funny. Very amusing. So if there is a core principle in the Anglo American constitutional tradition, it is that the executive cannot tax without the consent of the Parliament or Congress. Charles the first got his head cut off because he imposed taxes without the consent of Parliament. And James II was driven into exile when he tried the same thing. And the American Revolution was about the same principle. Can the executive exact taxes without the consent of Congress or Parliament? So my 2605 is an illegal tax. How do I get it back? Well, that's a complicated problem. In the first six months of 2025, the United States collected $90 billion in tariff revenue. Now, not all of that money was illegal. Not all that money was new tariffs, and not all that money was illegal. But the vast majority of it was new tariffs. And the vast majority of it is probably, depending on what the Supreme Court says when this case goes to the Supreme Court, probably illegal. Now, in my case, I have visibility into the 2605 because I did pay it directly to DHL, which remitted it to the United States government. But most people who have paid most of the illegal taxes have no clarity into it because they're integrated into the prices of things, and it's passed up and down the value chain, not like a VAT with where there's a receipt. It's just, you know, everything is more expensive. And Trump has collected $90 billion of, or most of which since from January to end of June, most of it illegal. What happens to that money and what happens to his fiscal plans if his reliance on hundreds of billions of dollars of illegally exacted taxes is taken away from him?
- [32:53]
Charlie Sykes
Well, what's the answer? What do we. What do we know? I mean, this is one of the arguments that the administration's making, right. When they go to the Supreme Court. Courts say that if, in fact, the court goes along with the appeals court, that these were illegal taxes, it creates just absolute chaos. And you judges don't want to do that. Right. Because that will be messy.
- [33:14]
David Frum
So that's the defenses. You have illegally taken someone else's Money. Yeah. But it would be very inconvenient for me to give it back, therefore I should keep it. Charles the first, I'm sure Charles the first thought it was very, it would be very inconvenient to give back the ship money. That's how his head got cut off. He tried to keep it and eventually, you know, it doesn't work. There's going to be a lot of litigation and I don't know, maybe there'll be a safe harbor created. But it is important to understand this, this has to stop. And I. And it will not stop without chaos because dhl, which has exited the American package market because it was just too much trouble. It was too unpredictable, too crazy. Trump is saying to dhl, oh, by the way, one more thing on the way out, you know all that money you paid in order to tax David from the 2605 illegally, now you have to refund him the 2605. And DHL, like we, we, the reason we quit doing business in the United States is because in your banana republic, we don't know what the laws are. We don't know what the taxes are. So we want to go to some normal jurisdiction like Slovakia where at least you know what the taxes are. Exactly.
- [34:30]
Charlie Sykes
So this is, this also the. Raises the question this, this chaos, this, you know, economics, tariffs by, by, by whim is part of a pattern. There's been a lot of writing about this lately. You know, how Trump. Let's just say that you and I are both old enough to remember when conservatives and Republicans actually claim to believe in the free market. There is nothing free market about the Trump administration. You know, from the, you know, picking winners and losers, the imposition of massive taxes without congressional support, taking a share in intel, demanding golden shares from US Steel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What have. You've been in this world for a long time. What happened to free market ideal? The free market idea? Was it really just confined to the quarters of a few libertarian think tanks? Because it appears to be. Absolutely. In a piece yesterday, I said it's believe becoming free market. Ideology is like the language Latin. It's a dead language, deeply respected but spoken by no one. Anyway.
- [35:37]
David Frum
Yeah, well, look, it was true that we had for certain aspects of the market, we had a broad consensus among people, paid a lot of attention and most people didn't understand it. It was alien to them. But they said, well, gee, the party leaders all seem to agree on this. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to Argue, but it depended on a degree of like part of this is, and this is when you sort of, this is how politics is supposed to function. There are a lot of ideas that seem counterintuitive but are kind of true. And let me just give you one. So Trump is always saying our problem is the trade deficit. We have too big a trade deficit. The answer is, I've got all these commitments that may or may not exist for a lot more capital investment in the United States. And that's my big win. Now, I don't expect that everybody who pays, you know, has normal lives to live to know this. But the way trade deficits work is an accounting definition. The capital inflow must exactly equal the trade out, the balance of trade outflow. The bigger your capital inflow is, the bigger your debt. Trade deficit outflow is going to be. It, it's like gravity. It just has to be true. So if you, if Trump, whatever number he's made up, 11 trillion, if you look at 11 trillion of capital inflows, you're going to have 11 trillion growth in the balance of trade deficit. So if you think the balance of trade deficit is a big problem, what you want to stop, you want to stop, those are a problem. And I don't expect the person on the street to understand this exactly. I don't even expect the politician in Congress understand this exactly. But what used to happen was every administration and every congressperson had a staff that would say, you understand that these two things have to balance. It's like again, it's not something, it's not my opinion. It's just like God decided this, this is the way accounting works. It just has to be true. You know, I worked for a while for the late Bob Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and he had an observation, which is the place on earth with the biggest trade deficit with the rest of the world was the island of Manhattan. Bananas and couches and flat screen TVs, they all flowed into Manhattan. And there was not a single good that flowed out of Manhattan. And yet Manhattan somehow purchased all of these things. And how did it do that? It did it because of the capital account made up for the merchandise account. And we used to know that, and presidents used to be surrounded by people would know that when the President wanted to say something that would, they might say, well, sir, you're, you know, you're cutting it a little fine here, but if you say it this way, it's, it's true enough, I suppose. But just remember all of that Policy process seems to be completely out the window.
- [38:18]
Charlie Sykes
No, it does. And I guess, you know, what do you make of the. The silence of the business community about some of this? I mean, they. They recognize exactly what you're talking, but they all know it. Are they just simply frozen by that. That sense of fear or favor that. Okay, this.
- [38:33]
David Frum
Yeah, this is.
- [38:34]
Charlie Sykes
This is bad economics. But I can still profit by the bad economics, and I'm going to at least keep my powder dry until maybe I get some of the cronyism thrown my way.
- [38:45]
David Frum
Most business, and I'm not talking about the crypto guys, but like most business leaders, it's 10% greed and 90% fear. I did an interview on my podcast with an important CEO who said something very flattering about President Trump on the show. And I interrupted him and dissented from. Made a little joke about it. And he then said, are you trying to get me in trouble? But we talked about it afterwards. He's really worried about. He's vulnerable to retaliation in both his business and his personal. He's really worried about it. And you know why? Jeff Bezos, we think of him as one of the most powerful men in the world, and in most respects, he is. But he's not more powerful than the President of the United States. So he paid a $40 million sweetener to the family of Donald Trump for a documentary movie about Melania Trump that looks like it will never be made. Right. Probably was never intended to be made, because, you know, Bezos, I believe he's still the largest single shareholder in Amazon. He was the company he built. He's responsible for a lot of people. It's not just. It's not just for him. There are a lot of people who he has to protect. He's responsible for. And if $40 million in a gratuity to the wife of the president is what it takes, if stopping the newspaper you own from criticizing the President of the United States is what it takes, you know, there's a lot at stake, and this President Trump is.
- [40:07]
Charlie Sykes
Everybody else is doing it, right? I mean, everybody. Everybody else is caving in and playing that game. Then you don't want to be the one guy sticking, you know, sticking up and.
- [40:16]
David Frum
In Trump 2 versus Trump 1, Trump this time seems to understand much better how the mechanics of government work. He knows how to retaliate. In Trump 1, he'd tweet @ you and maybe the stock market would punish you. But this time, he's really, you know.
- [40:31]
Charlie Sykes
The Trump administration, quote, about the Velociraptors you know, figuring out exactly the doors this time, and, boy, did that turn out to be true.
- [40:39]
David Frum
The Trump administration is asserting a right to seize people without due process, detain them, and send them to third countries. Now, they say we can only do this to foreign nationals, but we have no duty to check whether a person is a foreign national or not before we seize them and send them to a third country. So what if you just get it? Jeff Bezos may think he's an American citizen, you know, for people around, but when we're not social, we're just grabbing him on one of our immigration raids, and we'll find, you know, we don't know. And we have. Now, he's probably powerful enough that he can't do that. But you have an administration that is not respecting due process, that is imposing, that is seizing 10% of people's companies, just confiscating it or extracting it, saying, you know, like, Tony Soprano did that with the sporting goods store, right, where they made. He made. He had a degenerate gambler who got into his clutches, and he made him sign over the sporting goods store. That's, you know, if you're a CEO with responsibilities, you have to be aware of these things. And so, yes, they are very, very, very frightened and getting more frightened all the time.
- [41:41]
Charlie Sykes
It is that extraordinary moment where you see somebody like a Tim Cook from Apple coming in, basically bringing in gold, tribute to the master, and you realize these are the most powerful companies, but this is what we found out, and maybe that Donald Trump understood more instinctively than we did that the richer you are, the more vulnerable you are. The more you have to lose, the more leverage I have over you. And the reality is that I'm trying to imagine sort of the country club where a guy comes in, he's humiliated, humiliated himself in the Oval Office, and everybody looks at him and goes, you know, what is wrong with you? You are such a wimp. But that's not what's happening. What's happening now is, you know, boy, you know, smart move. You did the right thing. You paid off the right people, and as long as they're all doing it, then it's a sucker's game to stand up. Which is why you look around and there is. And this is something that I. I never thought that I would see the, you know, watching, you know, civil society grow so fearful of criticizing government that you would have this sort of great silence fall.
- [42:44]
David Frum
It was also the Tim Cook thing. It was just struck me as it's like a science fiction story. Where the emissary from the advanced civilization say, I have here in my hand, in my palm, a device that contains all the knowledge in the universe and can instantly communicate with any person anywhere on the planet, both by audio and by video. But you wouldn't understand that. So for you, I've got a rock and a piece of shiny glass that you will value much more highly than this object. You would never understand. I mean, it's like the primitiveness of the mind. Silver is just a rock, gold is just a rock. Glass is not even that. It's just glass is just sand under high heat. Like the idea that this. But it's shiny. So it's like that ridiculous Oval Office that he's got, which looks like.
- [43:34]
Charlie Sykes
Have you seen those pictures? How would you describe that?
- [43:38]
David Frum
I would describe. Well, I described the proposed addition to the White House as looking like the White House Casino and Convention center in Las Vegas. If they did a kind of, you know, end of the Roman Empire themed. What I'm also always struck by with Trump design, and you see this in his own house, and you see it in the design for it is they never get right the ratio between the height of the ceiling and the width of the columns. No, that there actually is like the Romans and Greeks spent a lot of time working on this problem. If the columns are too stumpy, everything looks terrible. But Trump's columns, and maybe there's some significance, like in his apartment, the columns are too stumpy. And so it does seem like a metaphor, doesn't it? And the White House, what does it now look like? It now looks like in a Las Vegas hotel, the reception room for the mid level rollers.
- [44:32]
Charlie Sykes
Designed by Liberace. I can't decide whether it's this like late stage Ceausescu or, you know, just sort of, you know, down market Liberace or something. But every time I see the Oval Office, you're kind of startled by it. Like he actually did that. He, he goes in and look, every president's gonna put their own touch on the Oval Office, right? Every president's gonna put their own signature on the White House. But. But generally they don't go in and vandalize it in such an inane way as Donald Trump. And the gold is just. I mean, if people have not seen this is the Oval Office. Most presidents have understood that they're temporary residence in something that's bigger than them. That is not the case with Donald Trump.
- [45:15]
David Frum
Well, it's funny and ludicrous and as you say, but it's also something Else, there's a famous speech by Winston Churchill about how the Houses of Parliament in Britain should be rebuilt after they were bombed during the war. House of Commons was badly damaged, and Churchill argued for rebuilding it exactly the way it was. And the justification he gave was, first we shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us. So it's funny that the center of presidential power in the United States now looks like, like the cavern of some second tier dictator. But it's also sending a message to everyone who comes in the room about the kind of president this is and the kind of country the United States has become. That the reason for the pervasiveness of the classical, really, the Georgian architectural style through Washington has been. That's an architecture that the Americans who first adopted it associated with the modesty and restraint of a classical republic. This is not the style of kings and monarchs, that it was not built in the baroque style. It was built in this style of architectural restraint to indicate the power here is restrained. The president is restrained. The president is a magistrate, not a king. He's the highest ranking public servant. He's a government employee like anybody else. And every aspect of the architecture is supposed to reinforce that message about the modesty of the President's role. And when Trump busts out of that and says, I want to look like Ceausescu, it's funny because the taste is so bad, but it's also every way he can, he is telling you, I do not accept the historic, legal and constitutional limits on this office. How could I be more clear about how I want to use this office and the kind of person I am? And if you people are fool enough not to get it, that's on you, not on me.
- [47:04]
Charlie Sykes
No, I think that's exactly right. There's nothing subtle about Donald Trump, who insists on telling us over and over and over again what he values, values and who he is. David Frum, thank you so much for all your time today. It is always great to talk with you. You can find David's work in the Atlantic, and he's got his own. He's got his own TV show now, so he's. He's gone Hollywood on us. So thank you.
- [47:26]
David Frum
Learn from the master. Bye bye.
- [47:29]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sex. You know why we do this, why we're going to continue to do this? Because now, more than ever, it is absolutely crucial that we remind ourselves that.
- [47:40]
David Frum
We are not the crazy ones. Thanks.
- [47:55]
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David Frum
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- [49:32]
David Frum
Hmm, it's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.
- [49:35]
Charlie Sykes
Could you be more specific?
- [49:37]
David Frum
When it's cravinient. Okay, like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right down the street at am, pm Or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at a.m. pM.
- [49:46]
Charlie Sykes
I'm seeing a pattern here.
- [49:47]
David Frum
Well, yeah, we're talking about what I.
- [49:49]
Charlie Sykes
Crave, which is anything from A and pm.
- [49:51]
David Frum
What more could you want?
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David Frum
Drinks are perfectly craveable and convenient.
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David Frum
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