2026-11-12 20:00:00
Does Donald Trump mean anything? The question could be asked about the president’s promises, which he usually fails to keep, and his podium remarks, which are devoted to free association. But for conservative politicians, policy makers, and intellectuals, the question has a wider bearing. Since 2016, the right has been trying to figure out what Trump means as a political phenomenon. Presidents are transformative when they stand for an idea: Ronald Reagan was personally popular, but what made him historic was the reorientation of American politics toward Reaganism, an assertive brand of small-government, big-stick conservatism. Trump has certainly been transformative, so it stands to reason that there is such a thing as Trumpism.
Like pornography, we feel that we know Trumpism when we see it, yet after a decade, it’s still remarkably hard to define. That blurriness has been an opportunity for political entrepreneurs who have tried, one after another, to shape Trumpism in the image of their own ideological beliefs. The bidders have included economic nationalists such as Senator Josh Hawley and the economist Oren Cass, who saw Trump shifting the GOP away from free trade and corporate interests; “America First” isolationists such as J. D. Vance and Tucker Carlson, who wanted to put an end to U.S. military adventures, especially in the Middle East; anti-“woke” crusaders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the education activist Christopher Rufo, who saw a chance to get rid of affirmative action and DEI; and Christian nationalists such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the pastor he invited to give a sermon at the Pentagon, Doug Wilson, who rejects all of the works of modern secular society, including women’s right to vote.
Trump delivered something for each of these groups: tariffs for the economic populists, Ivy League lawsuits for the anti-wokers, a weakened NATO for the America Firsters. But every version of Trumpism has eventually foundered on the rock of its namesake. Just as Karl Marx insisted that he was not a Marxist, so Trump has never been a Trumpist—the former because no one understood his theories of politics as well as he did himself; the latter because he has never had a theory of politics. Trump has a few consistent political instincts—above all, protectionism and hostility toward immigration and immigrants—but he has never felt bound by the principles of Trumpism, however defined. Saying “America First” doesn’t mean he won’t start a war in Iran; saying he is pro-worker doesn’t mean he won’t pump crypto and tech stocks.
[Read: The end of Stephen Miller’s recusals]
Events can’t be explained until they’re over, when they turn into history. So it’s only now, as Trumpism seems to be fading as a political force, that its true meaning can be seen clearly. The winner in the fight to define it is the last Trumpist standing: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff. Miller has been there from the beginning, and he is now presiding over the end. He embraced the Gӧtterdӓmmerung atmosphere in the remarks he made on Friday, after his appointment was announced: “Let me tell you, if it wasn’t for President Trump, the United States of America would not exist right now.” He concluded by addressing the savior of the country directly: “I pledge to you, Mr. President, my absolute loyalty, my unwavering commitment, and my total devotion to your success and the success of this country.”
This brief statement encapsulates the two principles of Trumpism as Miller has been formulating it for the past decade, as Trump’s speechwriter and surrogate. The first is that America is engaged in a life-and-death battle with a dangerous enemy. For Miller, the most important enemy has always been nonwhite immigrants, whom he has loathed since the beginning of his political career and even before. (In high school, one classmate recalled, Miller would go around telling Latino students to speak English.) As deputy chief of staff in the second Trump administration, Miller presided over the expansion of ICE and the use of aggressive deportation tactics, including snatching people off the street.
He justified these policies by casting people who want to live in the United States as enemies of the United States, agents of existential destruction. Miller has said that “we are being conquered” by immigrants and that “this country doesn’t have a future if we don’t end birthright citizenship.” In May, he suggested that immigration justifies suspending habeas corpus, which the Constitution allows “in cases of rebellion or invasion.”
Miller’s second guiding principle is that Trump is the only person who can defeat the enemy, so our survival as a country, and even as individuals, depends on obeying him. This saving power does not belong to America or to the presidency as an office, but to Trump personally. As a longtime White House official, Miller must once have taken the oath of office required of all federal employees, which begins, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But the oath he imposed on himself last week was not to a system of government; it was “absolute loyalty” to the ruler.
This kind of vow is foreign to American law and tradition, although it has plenty of precedent in dictatorships. Specifically, Miller’s understanding of politics—as an existential struggle in which the sovereign has unlimited power to command—resembles the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist. In his influential 1932 book, The Concept of the Political, written at the height of the political crisis in Weimar Germany, Schmitt set out a simple, powerful argument: The only thing that matters in politics, the very definition of the political, is the distinction between friend and enemy.
In peaceful, liberal societies, the true nature of politics is disguised, according to Schmitt, because we tend to cast political disagreements as determining whether policies are right or wrong, profitable or unprofitable, legal or illegal. But in moments of crisis, we are reminded that “the substance of the political” is “concrete antagonism” between two groups of people—friends and enemies, my side and the other side. When the opposing sides are two countries, this antagonism takes the form of war; when they are two groups within the same country, it becomes civil war. The concepts of friend and enemy “receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing,” Schmitt wrote. “War is the existential negation of the enemy.” The following year, Schmitt would help put this theory into practice by joining the Nazi Party and drafting legal justifications for its seizure of power.
Since 2016, Miller’s public statements, and the speeches by Trump that he wrote and oversaw, have relentlessly insisted on a similar concept of the political. For Miller, Trumpism means distinguishing friend from enemy and submitting to the leader in a moment of existential danger. This language can be heard in Trump’s 2016 Republican National Convention speech, in which he claimed, “I alone can fix it”; in his first inaugural address, in which he decried “American carnage”; and in his speech on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, in which he told the crowd, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The tone of crisis and combat is still sharper in the speeches that Miller delivers himself. Perhaps the most disturbing example came at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, in September 2025. With Trump in the audience, Miller declared, “We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.” He went on to promise total victory in the coming battle: “The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.”
[Read: A chief of staff who ‘will crack skulls’]
What made this speech an especially good example of Schmittian politics is that Miller did not actually say who “our enemies” were, or how they were responsible for the actions of Kirk’s accused killer, Tyler Robinson. The sovereign power to identify friend and enemy is not constrained by things such as truth and justice, which Schmitt explicitly said belong to other areas of life, not to the political realm. The enemy, Schmitt wrote, can be defined as anyone who “intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.” This is how Miller talks about not only immigrants but also domestic political opponents. In a July 2026 speech, he railed against “the leftist,” vowing to be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
Miller has risen in the administration, while others have left or been driven out, because his interpretation of Trumpism comes closest to the president’s own instincts. Trump has always demanded loyalty and never forgets a grudge; from a distance, that looks like a distinction between friend and enemy. But Miller’s attempt to translate Trumpism into action is doomed to failure, for the same reason as all of the previous attempts: It misreads a character trait as a political principle.
To Miller, the concept of the political is deadly serious. He believes in the existential struggle and rejoices in the negation of the enemy. But that kind of seriousness is alien to Trump, whose popularity comes in large part from his levity. It would never occur to a Trumpist to sweet-talk and joke around with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who represents everything Trumpism is supposed to regard as dangerous. But Trump himself enjoys it because, in doing so, he shows that he is superior even to the friend-enemy distinction.
This is true even when it comes to the issue that both Miller and Trump have been most passionate about—immigration. Just days after appointing Miller chief of staff, Trump offhandedly told 60 Minutes that his administration’s immigration policy—the policy Miller devised, the crowning expression of his Trumpist beliefs—“might be too tough.” For years, Trump has been telling the public that undocumented immigrants are murderers, child abusers, and MS-13 gangsters. Now, as if he were considering the subject for the first time, he observed that much of the public thinks immigrants are actually good for America, “if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes.” If Miller was watching, he must have been thinking the same thing as so many people who have believed in and depended on Donald Trump: With friends like these, who needs enemies?
2026-11-12 20:00:00
No one can mistake me for a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or an apologist on his behalf. Over the years, I’ve published hundreds of articles criticizing him and warning of the great damage he has caused to Israel. My criticism only grew stronger after October 7, 2023, when my entire family was almost murdered under his watch.
Still, in conversations with American friends who share my dislike for Netanyahu, I often find myself rejecting and correcting one line of criticism: “Netanyahu is just like Trump.” The two populist leaders are close in age and share a similar style of politics, but until recently, they were also separated by a major difference, one that Netanyahu, to my mind, deserved credit for: Unlike Donald Trump, he was not an election denier. When he won—and he did, most of the time—he took the win. But when he lost, he didn’t try to throw out the votes of the Israeli people in order to remain in power.
Sadly, this distinction between Trump and Netanyahu no longer holds. Over the past two weeks, Trump has more or less accepted his party’s crushing defeat in the U.S. midterm elections (apart from one social-media post, which I’ll touch on in a moment), while Netanyahu has refused to respect the results of Israel’s election last month and has tried to overturn them in ways that resemble the U.S. president’s role in stoking the events of January 6, 2021.
This is something new. When Netanyahu lost reelection in 1999, after his first term as prime minister, he accepted defeat without challenging the foundations of Israeli democracy. He did the same when he led the Likud party to its worst-ever result, in 2006. After his return to power in 2009, he won two more elections, but in 2019 and 2020, he failed three times to win a majority in a series of deadlocked elections. In none of these elections did he try to dispute the results, even though they were uncomfortable for him.
The gap that once existed between Netanyahu and Trump was most obvious in 2021. In the first week of that year, Trump’s refusal to accept Joe Biden’s victory, and his cries of a stolen election, paved the way for an armed insurrection. Netanyahu lost power six months later, when Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid succeeded in creating Israel’s short-lived “government of change.” Unlike Trump, he didn’t deny the results or incite his supporters to question the legitimacy of the election. Instead, he moved to the opposition benches of the Knesset and staged a comeback the following year, when the Bennett-Lapid government collapsed.
Some fellow Netanyahu critics would point out, correctly, that when Netanyahu lost power in 2021, Biden was in the White House, and therefore any attempt to stage an illegal power grab would have run into strong headwinds from Washington. This is true, but until recently, I believed that even without the threat of a harsh American rebuke, Netanyahu still would have done the right thing and allowed for a peaceful transition of power. The events of the past weeks have convinced me otherwise.
On Monday, Trump put up a social-media post in which he questioned for the first time the validity of the midterm results. America mostly shrugged. For now, the president has shown no sign of the dangerous urgency with which he disputed Biden’s victory in 2020. Trump’s original response to the Republican Party’s collapse—he distanced himself from the results (“I wasn’t on the ballot”), blamed specific lawmakers for their losses, and said that the Iran war was worth the electoral shellacking—seems more authentic than his rant about how wrong the polls turned out to be.
Israel, however, faces a real crisis that has received relatively little coverage by American media, which has been singularly focused on the midterms.
This crisis began in the days leading up to the October 27 election, when public-opinion polls predicted that Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up approximately 20 percent of the country’s population, would be voting in historically high numbers. In the previous election, in 2022, just over half of Arab Israeli voters cast a ballot, while just over 70 percent of the overall voting population did. The parties representing the Arab population won only 10 seats out of the Knesset’s total of 120.
Before this year’s election, Yousef Makladeh, the top pollster surveying Israel’s Arab population, estimated that approximately 70 percent of Arab Israelis would vote this time, and that the parties representing them would receive at least 17 seats. Because the seats in the Knesset are allocated to parties based on their proportion of the vote, Makladeh’s prediction (which ended up being too cautious) meant that the bloc of parties supporting Netanyahu—his own Likud party, the ultra-Orthodox parties, and the far right—had no chance of winning a majority as it did in 2022.
[Gal Beckerman: The bursting of the Tel Aviv bubble]
On Friday, October 23, four days before the election, Israel’s Channel 12 aired a news report stating that Likud was preparing to dispute the results of the election with unfounded claims of widespread irregularities in Arab cities and villages. Israel doesn’t allow early voting of any kind, except for diplomats stationed abroad and soldiers serving on remote bases—which means that this news item was broadcast before a single vote had been cast in any Arab polling station anywhere in the country.
Netanyahu’s party “is examining a list of possible complaints regarding irregularities in the Arab vote, ahead of election day and afterwards,” the report said. “These include women voting with veils, voting hours in Bedouin communities, and the ages of election workers at the polls.” The same report also noted that Likud and Religious Zionism—a far-right party in the pro-Netanyahu bloc—“will dispatch 2,000 election-integrity overseers to polling stations in the Arab sector.”
Just as Trump’s claims of fraud in 2020 began appearing before the election and intensified once it became clear that he had lost, Netanyahu was laying the groundwork for a similar scenario. But unlike Trump, he found willing accomplices within the very institutions tasked with protecting the integrity of the election.
On the morning of the election, hours before the polls opened, the Israeli police announced that it had arrested three activists affiliated with the United Arab List, one of the two main parties representing Arab voters, on suspicion of “election bribery.” The statement included grainy photos of envelopes that were found in the activists’ homes, supposedly containing thousands of shekels that were meant to be distributed to citizens in Arab towns in return for their votes.
Netanyahu’s campaign pounced on the news, bombarding the airwaves and social media with angry and apocalyptic statements about an attempt to steal the election. My Haaretz colleagues Bar Peleg and Omer Benjakob calculated that Netanyahu published or shared more than 70 posts on election day warning of the high Arab turnout and the threat of the election being stolen.
Eleven years ago, during Israel’s 2015 election, Netanyahu tried to energize his base by publishing a panicky video statement in the middle of election day, warning that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” That video was strongly criticized at the time by the Obama administration, Democrats in Congress, and parts of the American Jewish community, leading Netanyahu to issue a rare apology after the election and host several Arab lawmakers in his office for a lengthy conversation on the needs of their constituents.
Compared with the bluntly racist content that he shared on this year’s election day, the 2015 video looks like a polite infomercial. “Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood are storming the polling stations and stealing the election,” he wrote in one post. “You have to watch this,” he wrote in another, sharing a video showing Muslim women with their faces covered outside a polling station in southern Israel. Three hours before voting ended, a journalist thought to be close to Netanyahu reported that Likud had filed more than 700 complaints about “irregularities” in the Arab sector with Israel’s Central Elections Committee.
[Graeme Wood: Netanyahu goes into full panic mode]
When the dust cleared on the morning of October 28, two things became obvious. First, that the Arabs had indeed arrived “in droves” this time, breaking every previous record and securing an unprecedented 19 seats for their political parties. Second, that Netanyahu’s campaign had been effective, to a point: His scaremongering drove up turnout in Likud strongholds, bringing the party to a surprisingly positive result of 27 seats.
Even so, Netanyahu has no path to forming a government. The Zionist parties that oppose him won 48 seats (one is held by my father, who ran as part of Naftali Bennett’s “Together” list). Combined with the 19 seats that the Arab parties won, this would be more than enough to keep Netanyahu very far from any possibility of assembling a coalition.
But instead of recognizing the results and accepting the fact that his bloc of parties had shrunk from 68 seats in the outgoing Knesset to only 53 in the new one, Netanyahu doubled and then tripled down on the stolen-election narrative, just as the Channel 12 report before the election had predicted he would do.
The place to watch this campaign of lies take hold in real time was Channel 14, the country’s most pro-Netanyahu television outlet. When Trump denied the results of the 2020 election, Fox News largely cooperated with his unfounded claims, specifically the conspiracy theory involving voting machines (which ended up costing the network hundreds of millions of dollars). Channel 14 played a similar role for Netanyahu, with endless broadcasts about the “stolen election” and the use of the term polling-sites terrorism to describe the Arab public’s participation in Israeli democracy.
In some ways, Channel 14 went even further than Fox. After all, in 2020, the Fox News Decision Desk, led by the analyst Arnon Mishkin, first placed Arizona in Biden’s column, ruining Trump’s plan to declare victory on Election Night before most votes had been counted. Channel 14’s pollster, by contrast, continued to show the pro-Netanyahu bloc winning a majority for long hours on election night, even when all other Israeli channels were predicting the exact opposite. When the final results resembled those channels’ exit polls and not Channel 14’s prediction, a useful explanation emerged: The Arabs had cheated and stolen the election.
A dramatic headline came out two days after the election: Israel’s Shin Bet, the intelligence agency responsible for, among other things, protecting Israeli democracy, was investigating an alleged attempt by a foreign country to influence the election by bolstering the Arab parties. The investigation began before election day but was made public only after the results had been published.
The current head of the Shin Bet is David Zini, a former general with close ties to those in Netanyahu’s orbit. He was handpicked for the job by the prime minister despite having no prior intelligence background, and despite being opposed by almost every living former chief of the organization. Zini has faced public criticism over the fact that one of his brothers has been charged with smuggling goods worth hundreds of thousands of shekels into Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza.
On election day, Zini gave a short statement at the headquarters of the Central Elections Committee, alongside Noam Sohlberg, a conservative supreme court justice who serves as the head of the committee. Zini said that the election had been “safe, proper, and supervised,” seemingly contradicting Likud’s claims of widespread irregularities. But a day later, he met Netanyahu and presented to him raw intelligence pointing to the possibility of foreign intervention on behalf of the Arab parties. According to reports in the Israeli media, only after sharing the information with Netanyahu did Zini update Sohlberg on his explosive suspicion.
Sohlberg gave Zini a formal letter permitting the Shin Bet to broaden its investigation into the allegations. Shortly afterward, that letter was leaked to the media, and was immediately followed by a bombastic Likud statement that the elections had been “stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism.” Netanyahu’s party accused the Arab parties of using “bribery, violence, threats, and cheating” to alter the election results. Never before in Israel’s history had a political party—certainly not the ruling one—issued such severe allegations against its political rivals.
Likud ministers and members of the Knesset quickly began demanding that the election be nullified altogether. Netanyahu stopped short of this but shared several videos on social media calling to annul the results and hold a new election instead. This message was then repeated endlessly by Channel 14 and other pro-Netanyahu media outlets. Netanyahu’s far-right allies, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, also joined the call.
On January 6, 2021, the U.S. Capitol Police stopped an insurrectionist mob from taking over Congress and derailing the election-certification process. Federal and state judges played key roles in blocking Trump’s attempts to overturn the election with fake electors and other schemes. Last but not least, Trump’s vice president at the time, Mike Pence, refused to go along with the real-life plot against America.
[Joe Biden: What Trump did on January 6 ‘should follow him to his grave’]
In Israel, the plot fell apart once the courts and the attorney general got involved. The case against the three activists who were arrested on election day, supposedly on their way to deliver envelopes full of cash to potential voters, collapsed within days, when a judge pressed the police for evidence and discovered that little to none existed. The activists were released to house arrest and later had all restrictions removed. Multiple Israeli news outlets reported that the tip that had led to their arrest came directly from Netanyahu’s chief of staff, bypassing the chain of command in order to manufacture dramatic headlines just before the polls opened.
The Shin Bet investigation has also run into a dead end. Zini’s original suspicion, as presented to Justice Sohlberg, involved tens of millions of shekels that had supposedly been funneled to Israel’s Arab parties illegally. However, he has been able to show only one suspicious transfer of funds, to a retiring lawmaker, worth several hundred thousand shekels. The allegation is notable and must be investigated, but it is a far cry from the headlines that conquered the national agenda two weeks ago, when Sohlberg’s letter authorizing an investigation was published.
Israel’s attorney general and a senior police team that has been tasked to work with the Shin Bet on this investigation remain highly skeptical of Zini’s claims and, more crucial, of his motives. After igniting a public firestorm, Zini has so far failed to present any evidence to back up his accusations. Sohlberg, a religious justice who lives in a West Bank settlement and is respected by both liberals and conservatives in Israel, announced last week that the investigation will have no impact on the election results—and indeed, last week the Central Elections Committee officially ratified them. On Tuesday, a new Knesset was sworn in, including the 19 lawmakers from the Arab parties.
Netanyahu failed, but his fight is not over. He still hopes to remain in power and force another election on Israel. He’s likely counting on internal conflicts to sink the so-called change bloc, which now has a clear majority in the Knesset, but is divided over ideological questions. By peddling lies about a stolen election, the prime minister is trying to erode the legitimacy of any political cooperation between the Zionist opposition and the Arab parties. That way, he can discredit the results, even without having them overturned.
2026-11-12 20:00:00
Although the full Nvidia story is still emerging, the most alarming revelation may not be that Jensen Huang, America’s most influential AI executive, was involved with a suspected Chinese spy. It may be that senior administration officials were warned about the danger and nevertheless continued relying on him to guide the United States’ technological future. American strategy has come to depend, to an extraordinary degree, on powerful private-sector actors whose incentives the government cannot simply assume will align with the national interest.
In May 2025, Huang was photographed dining in Taipei with Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese Ministry of State Security asset with whom he had a romantic relationship. This past May, President Trump flew to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In flight, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly briefed Trump on the intelligence. But that shocking information did not stop Trump from bringing Jensen Huang on the trip or treating him as a key adviser.
At a refueling stop in Alaska, Huang rendezvoused with the delegation. He chatted with Elon Musk in a cabin usually occupied by the president’s senior aides. On the table in front of Huang sat the White House–branded chocolates given out to guests: Hershey’s Kisses. When the group arrived in Beijing, Huang emerged from the plane to walk the red carpet alongside Trump, Rubio, and other top officials, a powerful symbol of Huang’s closeness to the president and his influence on the administration’s China and AI policy.
[Read: A scandal at the center of the economy]
Trump’s instinct was to stand by his man. The revelations did not shake the president’s apparent conviction that Nvidia’s leader was indispensable. But as of this writing, the Wall Street Journal has reported that the Nvidia board may be preparing to oust Huang. The administration is facing major questions about its handling of the issue: Bloomberg has reported that in late summer 2025, Nvidia’s general counsel contacted senior Commerce Department officials about the company’s investigation into Megaspeed, and lower-level Commerce employees faced unusual restrictions on how they could pursue inquiries involving Nvidia. Asked on Sunday whether he should have acted on the warning, Trump replied, “No, I don’t think so.”
Huang is what we might call a “double dove.” He famously said the “China hawk” label was a “badge of shame.” When the CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria asked Huang if it matters whether the United States or China wins the AI race, he said, “I don’t think it does.” Similarly, Huang dismisses warnings about catastrophic AI risks. These views contrast with those of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who is a “double hawk,” seeing China as a crucial national-security threat and warning that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity.
Both men insist that their positions reflect their understanding of American national interests and AI’s future. But their disagreements also align with their commercial interests. Nvidia profits from selling chips to as many customers globally as it can, and Huang has lobbied against American restrictions on the sale of advanced AI chips to China. By contrast, Anthropic benefits from keeping Chinese firms as far behind the frontier as possible. Ironically, the two men’s businesses are intertwined. Anthropic, like many other leading AI developers, uses Nvidia chips.
The AI race is generally understood as a competition among firms and between nations, but it is also a battle of ideas. At its center is what I have called the dream of “AI primacy”: the conviction that advanced AI could give the United States a permanent advantage over its rivals, restoring an era of unchallengeable American dominance. But that vision depends on the questionable assumption that technological power accumulated by American companies can be reliably converted into power exercised by the American government.
American and Chinese leaders speak of two rival technological systems, but those systems are in fact not entirely separate. They are interdependent, entangled through the movement of technology, capital, information, and people. Beijing has officially refused to import the large quantities of Nvidia chips that the Trump administration has approved for sale—but Megaspeed and similar companies operate on a business model that demonstrates how reliant Chinese AI firms remain on computing power from abroad. Some use data centers in Southeast Asia to get around U.S. restrictions. Silicon Valley executives, for their part, talk of a zero-sum race between America and China even as American AI companies rely on talent from China. These interdependencies create economic opportunities but also avenues for espionage, coercion, and manipulation. And the more the AI race depends on sprawling networks of companies, customers, and governments, the more influence accrues to the handful of individuals who sit at their intersection.
[Rogé Karma: Democrats have no coherent plan for AI]
Technological supremacy and national power do not always pull in the same direction. A remarkably small circle of executives and officials make the decisions that will shape AI’s future and the geopolitical competition around it. The power of these individuals is fast escaping the reach of the institutions responsible for guarding against technological and geopolitical risks. The Information suggests that Alice Huang exploited her access to Jensen Huang to help Chinese companies obtain billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips. Meanwhile, the Commerce Department reportedly delayed action against Megaspeed, even as other agencies pressed for restrictions. Axios reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confronted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last week about why Megaspeed had not been added to a government list of restricted entities, following months of interagency warnings about the company.
The unanswered questions now extend well beyond the affair itself: Did the relationship influence Nvidia’s commercial decisions, causing the company to allocate products to Megaspeed rather than American firms? Did Nvidia’s political influence compromise the government’s ability to enforce its own rules?
Some leaders of the AI race speak as though their inventions will allow humanity to transcend its limitations—and perhaps give one country power over all others. Yet the people guiding this transformation remain vulnerable to the oldest weaknesses of human nature: ambition, vanity, fear, greed, desire. The era they are making is defined by the collision between superhuman ambitions and human frailty.
The lesson of this scandal is not simply that these people are fallible. It is that we need institutions capable of checking their influence and managing the consequences of their mistakes before these individuals become too powerful to be held accountable.
*Illustration image sources: Joel Saget / AFP / Getty; Feng Li / Getty; Finn Gomez / Getty; Sean Gallup/Getty.
2026-11-12 07:06:00
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Sometimes a news story is important because it reveals information for the first time. Other times, it’s a big deal because it confirms what many people already suspected. The latest development in the story of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang falls into the second category.
As news of Huang’s extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy rocks Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street, President Trump has pleaded ignorance. In particular, he has said he was unaware of the relationship between Jensen Huang and Alice Huang (no relation) when he traveled to China this past May. “No, I didn’t hear about it then,” he told reporters on Monday.
Almost immediately, The New York Times reported that in fact Trump had been warned by Marco Rubio, the national security adviser and secretary of state, while headed to China on Air Force One, just before Jensen Huang boarded the plane for a state visit. (In fact, Trump may have been told even before then: The paper previously reported that Trump was notified about intelligence findings on the relationship last year as well.) The new White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, wants to crack down on leaks; he clearly has his work cut out for him.
A few important features of Trump’s approach to the presidency are on display here. First, he has abandoned the pretense of being tough on China, a major talking point during his first presidential run and term. Second, he ignores any intelligence findings that contradict his instincts. Third, this is the latest evidence that, as I wrote last January, Trump does not care about U.S. national security. That doesn’t mean he’s actively hostile to it, or a saboteur; he’s just indifferent to anything but his own interests. In the nearly two years since I first laid out this argument, the president has repeatedly bolstered the case.
When Trump was informed that China had infiltrated a tech company that is widely regarded as essential to the health of the global economy as well as a crucial force for maintaining American power and national security—such that the U.S. bans exports of its most powerful chips to China—Trump opted to do nothing and pretend he hadn’t heard. We can only speculate on the reasons. Trump enjoys closeness with titans like Huang and wouldn’t want to endanger that. Huang clearly relished putting Trump on speakerphone during a podcast taping in September. (A serial philanderer himself, Trump said in recent days that Huang “probably has an excuse for” the affair.) The president may have also worried about the risk to the economy of any Nvidia turmoil—both because of the midterm elections and because his own portfolio has grown enormously during the AI boom.
Trump was similarly indifferent to the national-security risks of the war in Iran. (Some of his advisers reportedly understood this but did little to dissuade him.) The administration couched the war in terms of eliminating the threat of a nuclear Iran, but given that U.S. intelligence had deemed the program moribund, and given that the Trump administration had claimed to have destroyed the program in 2025, the justification made little sense. And by embarking on a war with no clear strategy or planning, the U.S. has badly depleted its stores of missiles and other munitions, which will spell danger in the event of another conflict. The war has created divisions among American allies and shown that the United States is unable to win a war or guarantee freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, all of which weaken its long-term strategic positioning.
Not every decision is as consequential as the Iran war, but Trump has repeatedly chosen personal or short-term political gain over American security and national priorities. Accepting the gift of a 747 from Qatar was neither ethical nor a wise security choice—as became clear when Trump had to do his Turkish tarmac turnaround and board a safer plane in August. The president chose his own interests—both flattery and a splashy if minor diesel-fuel deal—in once more embracing Vladimir Putin and distancing himself from Ukraine in October. And as I argued in September, Trump’s decision to treat Venezuela as a vassal state and stifle the popularly supported María Corina Machado is likely to harm American regional interests over time while yielding limited benefits now.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who would choose some short-term personal benefit over long-term national interest may end up losing both. If Trump hoped that overlooking Huang’s liabilities would prevent turmoil, the bet didn’t pay off. The Wall Street Journal reported this evening that Nvidia’s board is preparing to oust Huang, after a report late today of another affair, this one with a subordinate. Huang’s behavior has become both a political scandal and an economic liability, after Nvidia’s stock slid over the past few days. What harm this whole incident may have done to national security may not be clear for months or years to come.
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The Stealth Friendship Killer
By Olga Khazan
Scientists have identified the three leading killers of mom-friend plans: the never-ending day-care virus, the sitter who bailed, and the mysterious vortex that is “out of town.” The first two are unavoidable, but the third is a choice that society, collectively, seems to be making more and more. Out of town is where all of your friends are when you’ve finally decided to host a playdate. Out of town is where everyone is for the entirety of August. Want to grab a drink? I would love to, but I am, well, you get it.
Several caveats apply. We don’t know whether Americans are actually making more weekend trips; the most recent large-scale, comprehensive assessment on the topic was conducted in 1995. The most common reasons that Americans gave last year for not spending more time with their friends were their own mental-health issues, not having enough money, and being too busy; travel didn’t appear anywhere in the top six. And going away is not an entirely bad thing.
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Read. What Remains, a new book by the Galician writer Brais Lamela, chronicles the drive that many have to touch history, no matter how elusive it is, Lily Meyer writes.
Explore. Kelsey Ables traces how ugly metro sweaters became chic.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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2026-11-12 03:15:00
On Election Night, Representative Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, described one agenda that congressional Democrats could pursue over the next two years: investigating the “Trump Crime Family,” as his office put it in a statement. His message was, “Lawyer up.”
This tack would be a mistake. The new Democratic majorities should instead take advantage of the fissures now emerging between President Trump and his party to pursue their own legislative goals. Following their electoral wipeout, Republicans are beginning to see Trump as a liability. Trump, for his part, has had little interest in GOP priorities beyond tax cuts, immigration, and Supreme Court appointments, and now is even less wedded to the party’s agenda. During the Republican primaries for president in 2016, Senator Ted Cruz’s pitch to become the party’s nominee was to claim that Trump had no loyalty to the GOP and would cut deals with Democrats whenever it suited him. The Democrats should put this premise to the test.
The core terms for such dealmaking are straightforward: Democrats should exploit the whims of the most transactional president in modern American history to secure durable policy gains in areas with broad public support, such as health-care reform (to expand Medicare, reverse cuts to Medicaid, and restore subsidies for the Affordable Care Act), and electoral reform to limit dark money in politics. Deals should also include measures that at least some populist Republicans say they support, such as policies to lower energy costs, cap credit-card interest, and break up monopolies in the health-care sector. Even immigration reform seems to be on the table. To exploit Trump’s awareness that his hard-line approach has hurt him politically, Democrats could offer a deal that appeals to his self-perception as a leader uniquely capable of solving intractable problems. Democrats should convince Trump that promoting these policy priorities will benefit his legacy and burnish his self-image as dealmaker in chief.
In exchange, Democrats will need to bank the righteous anger that’s been mounting among leftists for a decade and offer to curb investigations of Trump’s family and close associates. This will not be easy, particularly after the White House counsel’s provocative claim that such investigations would be “a clear abuse of power” and “an affront” to the rule of law. But the opportunities afforded by this moment demand some restraint. The party should also allow the president to build his monuments to himself—the ballroom, the arch, the renovations for that golf course. Trump’s ostentatious, gold-plated aesthetic—classified by some as “dictator chic”—offends many of the taxpayers footing the bill for all this glitz, but his architectural flourishes are largely harmless, and anything he builds can be changed down the road anyway. Democrats would be wiser to focus their efforts on persuading Trump to sign legislation that will outlast him.
Chief executives and world leaders have learned how to leverage Trump’s need for adulation to their advantage. Remember those Swiss executives who showed up at the Oval Office last year with a gold Rolex watch and an engraved gold bar and saw their tariff rates plummet a week later? Democrats should do the same: pander to Trump’s ego and avarice, and get something big in return. This has worked before, as evidenced by Trump’s willingness in his first term to work with the Democratic congressional leaders, “Chuck and Nancy,” on a budget deal, and his surprising openness to being charmed into partnering with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on building more affordable housing—and it can work again.
[Nick Clegg: Getting too close to Trump was a mistake]
Ironically, working with Trump may even be a way to restore the political norms he has eroded and reverse the Trumpification of the American government. The incoming Congress could pass new disclosure rules, new limits on self-dealing, and whatever guardrails on executive pardons and emergency powers might survive the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Democrats might entice Trump to sign these reforms by making them take effect in 2029, after he leaves office. One can even imagine Trump relishing the thought that his successors will be bound by norms and rules he openly defied.
The most distasteful part of the bargain is the one Trump may value most: that in exchange for these statutes, Democrats won’t seek justice against the president and his family. For lawmakers horrified by the Trump family’s crypto deals and the president’s acceptance of huge gifts from business executives and foreign leaders, such as the luxury jet from the Qatari royal family, this would be a considerable sacrifice. But the trade-off should be clear: On one side is the emotional satisfaction of seeing Trump’s family squirm under questioning from Congress. On the other are transformative and lasting policy reforms.
Moreover, congressional Democrats should be realistic about what might even be achieved from the aggressive strategy that Garcia has promised. The Supreme Court has made it difficult to hold Trump accountable personally, and Trump’s Justice Department is unlikely to initiate prosecutions. Trump is almost certain to make liberal use of his pardon powers, and hearings will not claw back the money that Trump and his children have made off the presidency. Voters have already repudiated Trump and his politics. Democrats should translate this anger into the reforms these voters say they want. If Americans come to believe that Democrats accomplished little beyond scoring points for inside-the-Beltway grudges, they may well swing away just in time for the next election.
A deal need not mean that Democrats give up on holding anyone accountable for the misdeeds of this administration. Trump is loyal to his family, but he is happy to discard underlings once they stop being useful. The law firms, tech companies, crypto exchanges, and other corporations that participated in or capitulated to Trump’s lawless impulses are all fair game, as are various bit players within the administration. Democrats should stifle their instinct to seek retribution from the top and freely proceed against the rest—as long as this doesn’t detract from the party’s legislative priorities.
[Rachel Maddow: The collapse of America’s most consequential institution]
Getting significant legislation through Congress will be difficult. Even if the Democrats end up with 56 Senate seats, as appears likely, a handful of Republicans will still be needed to overcome a filibuster on substantive legislation. But the electoral thrashing should make some GOP senators more amenable to compromise, especially on matters of affordability and public corruption, both of which had broad support in exit polls. If Republicans prove obstructionist, Democrats can focus on the kinds of legislation that can pass with a simple majority in the Senate, such as trade agreements, measures that can be attached to budget bills, and judicial nominations. Democrats should propose their own slate of nominees, particularly for posts other than the D.C. Circuit, where they may trigger less opposition because they are not regularly involved in cases touching on executive power.
If Democrats want to prioritize legislation over investigation, they need to settle on that strategy soon. The tension between Trump and his party will likely crest over the next few months, and then everyone’s attention will turn to the 2028 campaign. Democrats can spend the next two years seeking justice for past wrongs, or they can set their eyes on the future. If Trump believes that everything is a deal, Democrats should take him at his word.
2026-11-12 02:00:00
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on how President Trump will behave after suffering a humiliating defeat in the 2026 midterms. David warns that the final two years of Trump’s term could be filled with multiple constitutional crises.
Then David is joined by Bob Inglis, a former Republican representative, to discuss what it’s like to lose an election, the mindset of the defeated Republicans in 2026, and whether Republicans will do some real soul-searching after being wiped out by a blue wave. Frum and Inglis also talk about the future of faith-based politics in the GOP.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the novel All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, a story of a German family living out the end of the Second World War.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Bob Inglis: And I believe that’s what we’re going to see over the next two years. I think that the product is going to be so grotesque that Republicans say, Oh, how did we ever do that? And, Let’s find something new. And it is all about finding that new presentation that is able to say, No, no; we can actually help people, and we won’t just be about power and transactional nature. We’ll be about actually caring for people.
David Frum: Welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week is former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis, and we’ll be discussing the experience of defeat and what it does to a person to go through the kind of defeat that so many Republican members of Congress, so many Republican officeholders, have undergone in the past days.
This week’s book will be a novel by the German writer Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing, a story of a German family living out the end of the Second World War on its estate in East Prussia and the imminent destruction of the world they knew.
But before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the world Americans face after the election of 2026.
The question that I think will haunt many of us is, given the new political facts in Washington: What is President Trump’s next move? How will President Trump respond to the seeming closing in of the walls and the seeming constraint on his power? Over the past decade, Americans have seen that again and again—when Donald Trump is faced with some form of constraint, he acts out in some way. His power to act out has been reduced, but not eliminated. What might he do?
And one of the reasons this is so concerning to me is I think that—I include myself in this—we’ve never had enough imagination of what Donald Trump is capable of. Who thought, as you worried about the second Trump presidency, that roadside executions of peaceful protesters might happen? Who imagined that the United States would find itself on the verge of a war with Denmark or with Canada? These things seem to come out of nowhere, and they came out of constraints on the president’s ego and will. Now, they came at a time when he had the backing of majorities in both houses of Congress, and so a certain amount of impunity. And although one would like to believe that a new Congress and some constraints on his power will make him behave better, in the first presidency—when he lost the House of Representatives in 2018—he behaved worse. He staged his attempted coup against Congress in the overturning of the 2020 election after 2018. He didn’t behave better; he behaved worse.
You don’t appoint Stephen Miller as your White House chief of staff if your plan is to work with the Democrats on matters of mutual interest, if you’re going to pursue some kind of immigration deal, or if you’re going to try to balance the budget. That’s not the guy you hire for that job. Stephen Miller is your choice if your plan is to go to the wall: to refuse subpoenas, to refuse cooperation, to deny information, to fight, fight, fight with everything you have.
There are resources that remain at the president’s disposal. He still has considerable unilateral tariff power. He has, of course, his powers of war and peace. He still controls ICE and can deploy that force at his command. And while Congress has the power of the purse, the president can even weaponize that against Congress.
We are approaching in the spring of 2027, once again, the ritual of the renewal of the lifting of the debt ceiling. The United States has this strange practice where Congress votes the spending, Congress votes the taxes, and, if there’s a gap that must be covered by borrowing, Congress has to vote again to allow the borrowing to happen. This has often been a pretty automatic process, but again and again in the past 20 years, especially when Republicans have control of one or both houses of Congress, we’ve seen attempts to weaponize the debt ceiling—to say to the president, for Congress to say to the president, especially when there’s a Republican majority, We won’t raise the debt ceiling with all the catastrophic consequences that will follow, unless you do this or that. What we’ve not seen is a president try to weaponize the debt ceiling and say, I won’t sign a raising of the debt ceiling unless you do this or that for me. Presidents don’t usually do that. This is a different kind of president who’s capable of weaponizing anything, including the tools that previous Republican Congresses have used against Democratic presidents. There’s no inherent reason why it couldn’t go the other way around.
We might see President Trump abuse powers of war and peace, or powers of flows of information, to give Putin more, to give the Chinese more. We might see President Trump absolutely go on the rampage against Congress, even trying to extend the methods used against Ilhan Omar. But that technique, once pioneered against Omar, might be used against other people, too. Could you imagine a dozen investigations, a dozen attempted indictments against members of Congress whom Donald Trump doesn’t like? Kash Patel still leads the FBI. Congress cannot impeach everybody, and it certainly can’t remove everybody. Each of these provocations might be a way of starting an impeachment fight against someone other than the president in order to have a battle over that.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party will have to make some very difficult choices. Does it try to rebel against Donald Trump? Or does it say, We still need this guy. We have to preserve whatever remains of our unity after this defeat and continue to fend for him and protect him?
I think we may be in for two years of unfolding constitutional crises of kinds I’ve just suggested to imagine, but of many kinds I can’t imagine. It’s a frightening scenario. And I think although many people who have been critical of this president will breathe a little easier knowing that there’s now a check on him—and such a powerful check—no one should imagine that this story has in any way reached its finale or in any way even reached its most discordant passages.
There are a lot of bumps ahead. And we’re all going to need our coolness and our courage to get through them and to remember that the American system is not a system of checks and balances. It’s not a system of institutions that work without regard to the people in them. The institutions are the people. And just as you used your vote to try to check the president in November of 2026, you’re going to continue to need to be civically engaged to make sure this story ends in the least catastrophic way possible. There are going to be a lot of bumps before the story is over, and that story is not over.
Now, my dialogue with Bob Inglis.
[Music]
Frum: My guest today is former Congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican who represented South Carolina’s fourth district, the Greenville-Spartanburg area, in two stretches: first from 1993 to 1999, and then again from 2005 to 2011. He arrived with the Republican wave led by Newt Gingrich and promised to serve only three terms.
He kept that promise, and ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate against Fritz Hollings. In his second stretch in the House, he broke with his party more often, especially on environmental and climate issues. In the Tea Party year, 2010, he lost a primary to Trey Gowdy for insufficient fealty to the party line. Bob has gone on to found RepublicEn, with a capital E, which promotes free-market answers to climate change. In 2016, he said he could not under any circumstances vote for Donald Trump. In 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris, calling Trump a clear and present danger to the Republic, but he is still a Republican and still in South Carolina.
Bob Inglis, thank you so much for joining The David Frum Show.
Bob Inglis: So great to be with you, David. Thank you.
Frum: So assuming there’s enough scar tissue that I can ask you this question without causing personal pain. We’ve seen a lot of Republicans lose their seat in this past cycle. Just on a human level, what’s that like? What are they going through?
Inglis: It’s like the political equivalent of a divorce, David. It’s people who have hugged you around the neck and told you they love you and are voting for you, and then they’re not. That’s what happens when you lose a primary. You know, that’s the worst. It’s not quite so bad when you lose a general. I’ve suffered the ignominy of losing a primary, you know? That’s where literally people that have told you that they love you, they’re praying for you, they hug you around the neck. Next time you see them, they’ve got the other guy’s sticker on them, you know? That’s really painful.
Now, if you lose a general, it’s not quite so bad. Because they’ll invite you to speak at the next Lincoln Dinner, because you fought the good fight against the blue enemy, and you lost, came up short, but you fought the good fight. When you lose in a primary, though—which explains why people are so afraid of losing primaries—there’s no invitation to the Lincoln Day Dinner, because you’re now a person without a home. You’ve literally been divorced from the party. That’s why I think so many have been so fearful of losing those primaries.
Frum: So let’s now talk about this as more of a collective than a human experience. So, Republicans have lost power up and down the ballot: House, Senate, states. The Republican Party as we’ve known it over the past two decades has not been a great learning institution. It finds it hard to absorb messages. Do you see opportunities or impediments to Republicans facing honestly what happened in 2026? Or are they going to, as has happened in the past, retreat into dream worlds and excuses?
Inglis: I think we have a chance of there being “no education in the second kick of a mule,” as Senator Fritz Hollings used to say. In other words, you don’t stand around and wait for the second kick of the mule. You move out of the way. And, so yeah, I think we have a chance of Republicans having learned something. And here, David, I’m talking not just about elected officials; I’m talking about the party itself, because that’s where we all complain about members of Congress. We say, They don’t listen to us. They’re not listening. No, no, that’s the problem. They listen very, very carefully, and they don’t want to offend us, the voters. And so what they had listened to—because of that fear of losing the primary, as I was describing—is they listened to the party faithful, and the party faithful were basically in the mood of, Yeah, let’s just follow Donald Trump wherever he’s going. And so that became the standard. And so I think now there’s a chance of a rethink.
And I’ll substantiate that with a visit that I had last week in Dahlonega, Georgia, at the Lumpkin County GOP. Go there with me, okay? So you got this civic space, probably I guess it’s some kind of a hospital space or school space, auditorium. They’d nicely set up red, white, and blue tables, and there’re about 47 people I counted there. Nicely decorated with balloons and everything. Some people had made some chili. I was greeted very warmly, even though a quick Google search would find out the things you just said, that I was [part of] Republicans for Biden, Republicans for Harris.
But I was greeted very warmly. And the people were very nice, and somewhat deflated and also somewhat confused. And if you’ll permit me, I’ll tell you—one, for example, an evangelical Christian, standing near the prints of a portrait that was going to be given away or sold in a silent auction, of Jesus in the center handing what appears to be the U.S. Constitution to a child surrounded by the populace.
And so I’m talking to him about what he’s experiencing. He says, You know, the country is just going to pot, he says. And, It’s just terrible what’s happening. And I said, So how about here in Dahlonega? And he says, Well, it’s just so much growth here, you know? They’re chopping down trees. I’m thinking, Well, okay, so you’re a conservationist apparently. You don’t like that idea. They’re chopping down trees. He says he doesn’t like that.
And then he says, You know, and we’ve just got to follow Trump, because he’s something of a prophet. And that stopped me. I said, Wait, wait a minute. You’re a Christian? And he says, Yeah. And I said, How can Donald Trump be a prophet? Tell me, how? And he says, Well, we’ve got to fight fire with fire—something that he repeated after my remarks. He followed me out, and he said, See what happened to Charlie Kirk. You’ve got to fight fire with fire. And I said—so now I was really ready to confront the guy. I said, Is that what Jesus said? I thought he said something about “turn the other cheek.” And you could tell this guy was completely in—
Frum: Did this guy believe that Charlie Kirk had been killed by anyone other than the assassin who killed him?
Inglis: No, I don’t think he was into that. But he was just basically saying you’ve got to fight fire with fire. That in this whole fight, fight, fight thing, this whole us-against-them thing. And it was really—you could tell the dissonance that was happening in his head about how, well, it didn’t work for us. And so I said to him, You know, in my remarks I had said the way I was greeted here tonight, isn’t that the way the Republican Party should be? Warm, welcoming.
Like you said on a recent show, if you can show that you’re trying to help people’s problems and solve them, then people will like you, and they’ll vote for you.
Frum: So one of the things that I think the whole country and the whole world has had its eyes lifted to is South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia. These are places deeply integrated into the world economy. In South Carolina, you have the extraordinary investment by BMW. Georgia, is again, a knowledge center. It’s got one of the largest airports in the world. And the idea of these as lands of textile mills and shoe factories that respond to a message of protectionism and isolation of the world economy, and foreigners are to blame for all of our problems, misses what has happened in the past quarter century or 30 years in that Southeastern Atlantic seaboard.
Inglis: Yeah. Oh, it does. I’ll take you back to an encounter in Hartsville, South Carolina, earlier this summer. I sat down with four farmers—and this is all on behalf of RepublicEN.org, you know, our outreach to conservatives on climate—and so they were unwilling to say that the conditions we were experiencing in South Carolina was climate change. But, wow, were they disappointed with Donald Trump about the tariffs, because one of them had invested heavily in peanuts and had developed a really entrepreneurial way of processing the peanuts and servicing other farmers. And then he said, The tariffs meant that we lost China as a customer, and now they’re buying from Argentina. And this guy had invested serious money in this.
Interestingly enough, David, they weren’t really—the four farmers I was sitting with—weren’t ready yet to break with Trump. But I wonder now, after Darline Graham has lost the Senate race in South Carolina, whether they’re now more emboldened to say, Hey, this really is a wrong direction to go.
Frum: That’s my question about learning. So, I mean, you’ve watched the Republican Party go through a lot of things, and South Carolina such a bastion for a long time of Republican strength. Describe a little bit how that ebb and flow works—the resistance to learning, and when learning begins, what does learning look like?
Inglis: Yeah. It’s really a timely question, because this is what we really need. Republicans who want to bring the party back to itself. We really got to think through this, about how to approach these folks.
And so, again, at Dahlonega, Georgia, the other night, what I decided to do was—it was a veteran’s theme. And I found it very interesting that they played a little video clip of Veterans Day. And there were two presidents—and of course, you would expect I made a big deal of this in my 10 minutes’ or 15 minutes’ worth of remarks—two presidents’ voices were on that. One was Ronald Reagan. The other was JFK. They didn’t have Trump on that video. What would he have said that would be remarkable, or to be willing to be worth being heard, in the context of celebrating veterans? Answer: almost nothing.
And this is an indicator, David, I think of something good happening. And really, that learning is possible. I was preceded by two College Republicans at the Lumpkin County GOP in Dahlonega, Georgia, and they spoke of how we’ve got to bring Georgia together, even though the previous introducer of them had said, basically, We’re really going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, we’ve now got a Democrat governor. We got a Democrat senator reelected. You know, he was saying that. The two College Republicans stood up and said basically, No; we have to bring this state together. We have to show that we’re a party of solutions. We have to—
And that really encouraged me. So as you can imagine, I really tapped into that in my 15 minutes’ worth of remarks, because I think there is an opportunity to learn.
Frum: Let me ask you about the intensifying radicalism of your own seat. How does that process work in that particular district, and where does that district stand now?
Inglis: Well, in the no-education, the second-kick-of-the-mule category, Greenville County, South Carolina, went blue in the Senate race. Greenville County, a majority of Greenville County, voted for Annie Andrews for the U.S. Senate and against Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed, of course, after Lindsey’s untimely death. And so, wow, something happening there that Greenville County—
Frum: What’s the social basis of that? So who is the person who would have voted for you, voted for [former Representative] Trey Gowdy, and then either stayed home, or—is that someone who benefits from the global economy? Is that a retiree who’s worried about inflation? Who is that person who’s either flipped or abstained?
Inglis: There’s two different categories. I think one is the stay-at-home, and I noticed this at the precinct. I live in a rural part of Greenville County, and I noticed all kinds of trouble about whether Should we vote early? Should we— Well, it turns out that we had to vote on Election Day. So off I go to the poll, walked right up to the voting thing and voted. It took me about seven or eight minutes. And I thought, Whoa, low turnout. Low turnout in this area. This is probably bad news for Darline Graham and good news for Annie Andrews, the Democrat.
Turned out to be, that’s the case. I think low turnout in some places that were just a little bit like: This is weird. Why are we talking about renaming Lake Ontario? Why are we talking about taking over Canada? Why are we talking about all these things? Why are we… I mean, I think that’s the—so the low turnout.
And then the other, David, is, yeah, I think the great success that you were citing in a place like Greenville, South Carolina, or Spartanburg, South Carolina, is: It brings some people that now are thinking, This isn’t working for us. They were leaving Trump and voting for a Democrat for the U.S. Senate. And I think it signals the ability to learn and an openness to, Hey, show us some ideas. Show us something that’ll work, and please stop talking the way you talk. You know, this nastiness.
Frum: We’ve seen, in parts of the Republican Party, an intensification of xenophobia and resentment, especially against Indian Americans. There have been some spectacular instances of that. I don’t know how representative those are. As a party shrinks, it becomes more extreme. And there’s a kind of spiral that can happen—you shrink, you get more extreme, and that makes you shrink some more, and you get more extreme still. Is there a way out of that, or is there only an exit through more defeat and more pain?
Inglis: Yeah. That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? Whether, you know, for example, in the aftermath of this Darline Graham loss, there was a Spartanburg, South Carolina, GOP chairman who called the GOP in Greenville County—you know, sister counties, a little bit of competition there—called them “extreme.” And that’s actually, probably could be proven. And so there’s some awareness, I think, among people of goodwill, and there are people like that in the Republican Party who realize, Gee, this has just been a mistake, hadn’t it?
For example, in Dahlonega, I was followed out into the parking lot. That’s a little bit, unnerving, you know? I was followed out into the parking lot by a guy, I’ll call him B. He starts telling me about how we’ve been robbed by a lot of fraudulent voting at the Texas border, you know, in this last 2026 election. And I bluntly told him: Hey; too big to rig. Too big to rig. There’s no way it could be that. And so he sort of fell off of that. And then I said, Hey, let me ask you something, B. If I had come here tonight and said, “You people suck. This county sucks. This state sucks. I alone can fix it.” He got the connection. And I said, Why do we put up with that from Donald Trump?
And he said some very important, very helpful words to my thinking. He said, Yeah, he is all about himself, isn’t he? And you could tell he’s starting to think. And so I parted with him by saying, Why don’t we go back to what we learned in kindergarten? You know what I mean? What you learned in kindergarten is, you don’t want to hang out with somebody who goes around saying, You suck, and I’m the only one that can fix you. He actually said, Yes, you would’ve been thrown out of here tonight if you’d said that. I said, Why do we put up with that? And so I think people are starting to realize: How did this happen? Why do we come to put up with that stuff?
Frum: Do defeated members of Congress stay in touch with each other, or does each go his or her own way?
Inglis: You stay in touch with your closer friends. And that’s been a blessing for me, to have some friends that I keep up with. Interestingly enough, David, the weird thing is you don’t have any great way to stay in touch, because you always contacted through your schedulers. They had the contact information. So you don’t end up with a lot of other members’ cellphone numbers. But your friends, you do have their cellphone numbers.
Frum: But you can’t form like a kind of AA chapter of defeated Republicans who can say, You know, we’re all out of work because of that guy. Maybe we should all band together and do something about that guy. Maybe he should be out of work, not me.
Inglis: I think that’s a good idea. Let’s start that. Let’s start that. I think that that really is—I think there’s some power in that. Of people who could come together and say, You know, we just took a wrong turn. But it must be done. Seems to me, David, it’s not just the former members of Congress; it’s those people in Dahlonega or the people in Hartsville, at the GOP in Hartsville, South Carolina.
It’s being able to say to them—not go to them and say: Well, you dumb-dumb, why’d you do this? You know, Why’d you follow him? Not that at all. It needs to be: Okay, so we made a m—not even, don’t even say “mistake.” Okay, so that was then. Let’s figure out a new path. In other words, give them some grace, because most people are not able to say, I made a mistake. They’re not going to be able to say that.
Frum: We’re seeing early indications of 2028 interest from, obviously the vice president is thinking about it very hard. Maybe Secretary of State Marco Rubio, probably Senator Ted Cruz, and there’s certainly a lot of noises from [Florida] Governor Ron DeSantis. And they’re all looking for ways to say what went wrong. DeSantis and, interestingly, Vice President Vance have been the first and most emphatic out the gate. And DeSantis has been making noises that it’s all about corruption.
Do you have a sense of whether one of those other messages is likely to prove more powerful with the people that you see?
Inglis: It depends more on presentation than on the substance of the message, actually. I think it depends on the feel of it. And I think those two individuals you just mentioned have made the mistake of patterning after the current style of Donald Trump, in their bellicosity and their in-your-face kind of stuff. This is my theory. Call me back in 2028, and let’s see if I was right.
I think the next is going to be a Jimmy Carter–esque person. Not to say that Jimmy Carter’s a great president. I’m a Republican, and I don’t believe Jimmy was such a great president. But there’s something authentic about Jimmy saying, This is my house. You know, it’s a three- or four-bedroom ranch house here in Plains, Georgia. I go to church right back here at Maranatha Baptist Church, and I teach Sunday school over there, and I’m a peanut farmer.
In other words: somebody really down to earth, completely not a Mar-a-Lago, gold-gilding billionaire. Not that. I think that’s the next.
And so we change presidential styles in America the way we change clothes styles, you know? Bill Clinton wore baggy suits. Barack Obama wore tight suits, you know? And so we change styles. Even when it’s a pleasant transition, for example, Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush. George H. W. Bush said he was going to be a kinder, gentler nation.
Frum: But when we make those changes, there’s always an implicit critique. George H. W. Bush in 1988 said, I’m going to keep some things about Ronald Reagan, and I’m going to change others. And then there’s a question about, well, which are the things?
So Vance and DeSantis, especially, are both saying: We need to change something about Trump. And Vance is saying, Too much Israel, but we’re going to keep the tariffs, keep the crackdown on immigration, defend ICE. So no change in that kind of style and tone of politics, but we’re changing the foreign policy. And DeSantis’s message has been, We don’t need to change the foreign policy so much. What we really need to do is, less corruption.
So those are two theories about what needs to change. So you can’t change unless you have a theory about what needs to change, because you can’t change everything. Some things will continue. And it’s a big question, which is: What?
So how does the Republican Party decide what was the thing that we think was wrong, and what is the thing that we think we need to change? Is Vance right? Is DeSantis right?
Inglis: I think what they should all do is listen to your show recently, where you talked about what happened in redistricting after the legitimate win in 2010, and the decision to go gerrymander the way we wanted to create districts the way we wanted. And then, as you said in that show, what you end up with is people who aren’t serving and aren’t taking care of the needs of their people. They’re trying to create a power structure. And people figure that out.
And I think that that’s why I would say the two people you mentioned, Vance and DeSantis, have that problem of sounding that way. Of sounding about, I’m just going to get power, and we’re going to stuff it down their throats. I think eventually people figure out that, Hey, could be my throat next. Or it’s just so yucky, and they don’t want yucky.
And so this was an election where they—at the end of the Senate race in South Carolina where Darline Graham made the terrible mistake of going into some profanity-laced statements, it was not her. There was some consultant, told her to fight, fight, fight or something. And it was a dumb thing to do, because Annie Andrews, meanwhile, stayed the pediatrician who’s trying to help people. And so that’s the affect that we—that I think the GOP—should try to develop and learn from this. And say, Not Trump; not this thing again.
Frum: Let me revert to your story about the signage you saw of Jesus Christ handing down the Constitution to the populace. You’re active in Christian life. You’re serious about it. Change your aperture from “Where do Republicans go from here?” to “Where do American Christians go from here?” Trump really connected to American Christianity—especially evangelical Christianity, especially white evangelical Christianity—in a way that more intensely than anybody, more intensely even than Ronald Reagan. How does that community feel? Where do they go?
Inglis: Yeah. I surely hope that that’s where we definitely need to have “no education, the second kick of a mule,” is that. I don’t know so, David; I can just hope so. That there’s some maturation there, some awareness that: Hey, this has just been a wrong path to take.
Frum: Why did it work in the first place? I mean, it seems when Trump appeared in 2016, it was very obvious he had never read the Bible, had no idea even of the names of the chapters. I think in 2016 again, maybe it was 2020, he was asked: Have you ever asked God for forgiveness? And he said, No, not especially. And so these are pretty fundamental—I mean, man needing forgiveness from God is a pretty basic Christian doctrine. Knowing the names of the chapters of the Bible is something that I think Christians would be surprised if their leaders didn’t have. And yet, where did that connection come from?
Inglis: I think it came from fear. It’s all about fear. It’s in Dahlonega, Georgia, at the Lumpkin County GOP. He’s just fearful that the world is falling apart, and that he doesn’t have a place in this future world. That’s what really—he was fearful. And so they sort of thought, Well, we need a strong man, somebody who will say it like it is, and won’t be diplomatic. And so that’s what they went with.
And I think there’s still a percentage out there—let me not overstate my optimism—there is a percentage out there, and it must be around 35, 37 percent, I don’t know, that still like that style. That still believe that that’s the way it should be. And so that’s going to be the challenge, is how do you overcome that 37 in a primary? If you cede that 37 to a Ron DeSantis, or a J. D. Vance type, if you want to be sounding like Brian Kemp, let’s say, of Georgia—or try to get [Kentucky Governor] Andy Beshear to get some crossover—how do you deal with the fact that you’re starting with a 37 percent problem?
David, I’ll predict this for you. In the next two years—we got two more years, as the expiration date, the shelf life of Trumpism, comes to its end. That article on the shelf is going to start looking more and more moldy. I mean, it’s going to be clearly—clearly—at the expiration date. I mean, it’s going to be like the bread with some mold in it. And I think that’s when it’s going to look worse. And Stephen Miller being appointed as chief of staff, I think that’s great, because it’s going to fill it up. Fill it up, Donald. Go ahead and fill up the cup.
Frum: Well, let me test a historical analogy on you, and tell me if you see any merit to this and if there are any lessons from it. So in the first two decades of the 20th century, evangelical churches north and south mobilized on behalf of a cause. And the cause was alcohol prohibition. And they won. They got national alcohol prohibition. And it was put into effect. And the result of that—this Prohibition was, of course, a disaster—but the result from the evangelical churches was they saw a collapse in male interest in evangelical religion.
And part of it was the Depression and the war and those social changes. But if you were a young man in 1940, you were a lot less likely to go to church than if you were a young man in 1910. And that caused, in the generation—and again, the Depression and the war are as much a part of the story as Prohibition, so I don’t want to oversimplify—but we saw a real withdrawal of evangelical churches from the political activism they’d had in the two decades before Prohibition.
From 1930 to 1970, they’ve become very depoliticized. A lot of that is the personal influence of Billy Graham, who’s very opposed to church participation in politics. And then they go in, in a big way, and they have many successes. Roe v. Wade is overturned; other things. But they get Donald Trump, and now they have once again this extraordinary secular generation where churchgoing, especially among men, is really radically on the wane, as compared to what it was 20 years ago.
Does this kind of history have any parallel? Do you see something like this going on? Are evangelical churches able to learn? You know, when we commit to a candidate, we ride our fortunes with that candidate. And if that candidate’s fortunes fall—and they always do fall—our message is discredited, and we lose people, men or women.
Inglis: Oh, yeah. I think it’s totally discredited. And the means of discreditation will be a guy named [Senator-Elect] James Talarico, I think. As he gets more and more airtime. You know, for example, I have a daughter who—well, David, I tell you. If you ask my five kids “Nastiest people on the planet?”—they’d say Christians involved in politics. Because they’ve seen what happens. When you couple faith and power, you end up with trouble. That seems to me, in my five trips to Iraq and four trips to Afghanistan, that’s what I saw. You couple faith and power, you corrupt the faith faster than you corrupt the state. And it ends up in just a grotesque mess, right?
But one of my daughters just told me yesterday that she spoke positively. She said, Yeah, if the Democrats could present like a Christian Democrat message—wow, that could work. In other words, somebody that actually cares for people. You know, somebody that says, No, we’re going to try to solve this problem. We’re going to deal with health care. We’re going to try to somehow figure out how we deal with the fact that we have enormous wealth disparities.
I mean, how are we going to deal with that, you know? Somebody that comes with some sort of moral framework to that, rather than the Trumpism. Which, my biggest problem—or the reason I got on that list in 2016. There was a circulated list of former members of Congress who wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. I said: Get me on that list. I want to be on that list. I want to be at the top of that list, because I want my children to know I was on that list. I wanted all of them to know I was on that list.
And my main problem with him—the person of Donald Trump—is his transactional view of life. That life is a transaction. And to be 80 years old and to not know that life is not a transaction—that it’s about deeper, more meaningful things than that—just shows the shallowness of the man and his incapacity to govern a nation. I mean, you need somebody at the top who understands better what the human condition is. And to think that somehow it’s all a transaction is just such a perversion.
And so, David, what I’m hoping is that as the shelf life gets truly to the end, the expiration date of Trumpism, and the bread in the wrapper really starts to look moldy—and it will—that those pastors who might have been sort of saying, Yeah, we’ve got to fight fire with fire, or something like that, will be saying, Uh, let’s look again at some of these passages about actually loving people and caring for them. And find that to be a winning message.
Frum: That’s still engagement. That’s a different question from what—the question I asked is, when do the pastors say, You know what? We shouldn’t be telling people, talking to people about how to vote at all. We should be talking about how to live.
Inglis: Yes, exactly. That’s the big message that I hope they get. Is that, Gee, this has been such a mistake. And those statistics you just cited, yes, should help them to see—because, you know, everybody’s got a constituency. Politicians have a constituency, journalists have constituencies, and pastors, rabbis, imams have constituencies. If they start seeing that decline you were just documenting, I think they’ll figure out that, Hey, we’re off message here. The message that works is something deeper in the human soul, not this thing that is about raw use of corrupt power. Particularly as the corruption becomes more clear.
You know, as now there are going to be some investigations. Perish the thought that Democrats would actually impeach Donald Trump. I hope they don’t make that mistake. But to look into the corruption and then to realize that, gee, not only is the bread, the shelf life, it’s gotten to the expiration date—but it is really rotten in there. That’s when maybe there’s some real education among those pastors, that: Wait, we took the wrong path. We shouldn’t have been talking about power. We should’ve been talking about love and the beauty of faith and the forgiveness and loving your neighbor. That’s what we should’ve been talking about.
Frum: There is this ironic question that a lot of this breakthrough has been so centered in the Southeastern states, which have so often been thought of as the most conservative part of the country. From the cradle of the old Confederacy, conservative vote in the ’70s and ’80s, and now. Alabama sort of is an outlier, but Georgia, North and South Carolina, Texas. If you were to speak about what has happened to the region, are there true generalizations we can offer about the South of the 21st century, and how it has been different from the South of the 20th?
Inglis: Well, yes, I think that it’s a different day now. And I was just hearing recently about the shift in demographics in a place like Georgia or Texas, South Carolina. I mean, we have a tremendous inflow of people. There was some thought that that is—I mean, I have two conflicting thoughts that hopefully somebody at The Atlantic can sort out for me. On the one hand, it’s “birds of a feather flock together”; you know, the Big Sort that could be happening. But on the other hand, it seems that there’s a diversification of the population that’s going on by some other numbers. And those numbers are the one I’ve heard most recently. In a place like Georgia, it’s a very diversified state now, and it’s becoming more so. Asian population, Latino population really on the increase.
And so in Dahlonega, Georgia, the other day, what I said to them was—you know, on the climate-change thing, I said, You know, right now it’s been a “hoax and con-job” story. But, I told them, you know, that didn’t work on Tuesday in the Atlanta suburbs. And it’s not going to work in 2028 in those suburbs.
And so what we, I told them, what we as Republicans have to do is figure out: How are we going to get a message that works in those places? Because the reality is Georgia is different than it was. South Carolina is different than it was. Greenville County, South Carolina, went blue in 2026.
Frum: Where do you see your region in 10 years? Do you think that the changes that we saw in ’26, do they hold? Or are they still up play, up for grabs? How could all of this reverse if it does reverse?
Inglis: I think it can reverse—by the product on the shelf I keep referencing—getting so grotesque-looking that people really turn away from it. And I believe that’s what we’re going to see over the next two years. I think that the product is going to be so grotesque that Republicans say, Oh, how did we ever do that? And, Let’s find something new. And it is all about finding that new presentation that is able to say, No, no; we can actually help people, and we won’t just be about power and transactional nature. We’ll be about actually caring for people.
But it’s going to be—it’s a big switch that’s going to have to happen. But I think we’ve seen that shifts do happen. And, so, I got a lot of hope-so, not know-so here, though, David. That’s what I surely have.
Frum: Thanks so much for joining me today.
Inglis: Great to be with you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Bob Inglis for joining me today on The David Frum Show. This second week in November is a time heavy with historical anniversaries. November 11th, the anniversary of the armistice in the First World War, Veterans Day in the United States, Remembrance Day in Canada, marked all through the English-speaking lands. November 9th, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the great pogrom in Germany that marked the beginning of murderous violence against the Jewish community, already the subject of discrimination and exclusion. The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of so many other important events in German history: the proclamation of the German Republic after the First World War, and the crushing of the German hopes for a liberal Germany in 1848.
I thought it fitting to mark this heavy week of anniversaries with a German novel, All for Nothing, published by a great German writer, Walter Kempowski, in 2006.
The novel was the last of Kempowski’s life. Kempowski lived a life that was full of all the tragedies of the 20th century. He was born in Germany during the Second World War. He was a member of the Hitler Youth. He was arrested after the war and spent years in a communist prison. He eventually was released and began to reconstruct a kind of life as a writer and an archivist. And All for Nothing, his last novel, draws on both his own experiences and the things he observed. It is the story of a world about to end.
We are in 1945 in East Prussia, on a manor house owned by a family that has lived there for generations. And so much of what is normal in their life continues. The family is living in a kind of denial, just refusing to accept that all of this could be about to end, that everything they know could ever have been destroyed. We hear about their postage stamps. We hear about their plates. We hear about their meals. We hear about the continuity of their rural way of life, so similar to country-house life everywhere in Europe before the Second World War, before the First World War. But also now built on crime and atrocity and murder and invasion, and all about to end.
The central character in the novel is a boy, drawn, one assumes, from Kempowski’s own experience, who understands and does not understand what is happening to the adults around him, who picks up on the sense of dread but doesn’t quite understand what there is to dread. The novel will come to a culmination with a series of catastrophic events that claim the lives of central characters and end in a kind of catastrophe, and leave those characters who do survive wondering what all of this was about. Because they were really too young to understand it, except to understand the magnitude of what was lost.
What is lost to them is not the same as what was lost to others. They were not the victims of invasion. They were the invaders, and yet they also had the capability to be disoriented, to be displaced, and to suffer and to think about what they did it for. All the crimes, all the evil—what was all of that for? How did all of that end? It’s a haunting question told in a very simple, matter-of-fact way, a very undramatic, gentle way of writing. But each word lands with greater impact because it is so unemotional in the telling. The effect of the emotion culminates at the end from the experience we have lived through together in this quiet way through the pages of the novel.
I find it a greatly moving book and one of the great books about both the universal experience of dislocation and destruction, and a very specifically German experience of an end of the war, and the end of a way of life.
Thanks so much for watching and listening to today’s David Frum Show. As ever, if you are minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic to support the work of all of my colleagues. I hope you’ll consider it. We will see you soon, I hope, on future editions of The David Frum Show. That’s it for now. Bye-bye.
