2025-10-30 07:00:00
After a months-long trade war between China and the United States, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet Thursday in Korea. Both countries seem to be angling for a truce; over the weekend, they announced a “framework” for a possible agreement.
The negotiations offer an occasion to stop to consider how China went from technological backwater to superpower in less than half a lifetime, and an opportunity for the United States to learn from that success. U.S. companies can work to regain hardware-manufacturing expertise, absorb knowledge and talent from some of China’s best companies, and shift their approach toward AI, encouraging more practical applications and open-source innovation. The United States must accept that we can be better while not relinquishing our strengths.
If America focuses only on undermining its rival, it risks stagnating, and China might end up offering a more attractive vision of the future to the rest of the world than the United States can. What’s at stake is America’s ability to keep innovating and leading in the industries of the future.
In 1896, Li Hongzhang, a diplomat from imperial China, arrived in the United States for the first time. China, then under Qing dynasty rule, had yet to fully undergo the Industrial Revolution. The year before, the Chinese had suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, and the country painfully awoke to its own backwardness. Li was stunned by New York City’s tall buildings, rising 20 stories or more, and remarked to American reporters that he had “never seen anything like them before.” He told them: “You are the most inventive people in the world.”
[Read: China gets tough on Trump]
Nearly a century later, in 1988, Wang Huning—then a Fudan University professor and now the fourth-most-powerful man on China’s politburo—visited the United States and experienced a similar “future shock.” After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Communist China’s GDP was a mere 6 percent of America’s. During his six months in the United States, Wang marveled at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, credit cards, computers, the Discovery space shuttle, and research universities such as MIT. “If the Americans are to be overtaken,” he later wrote, “one thing must be done: surpass them in science and technology.”
These days, it’s the foreigners visiting China who often experience future shock, astonished by the towering skyscrapers, high-speed rail, megabridges, and ubiquitous electric cars, super-apps, and trifold smartphones. China has become an innovation powerhouse. The country now accounts for 70 percent of the world’s granted AI patents, 75 percent of global patent applications in clean-energy technology, 41 percent of granted patents in the life sciences and biotechnology, and more patent applications in fusion technology than any other country. Eight of the world’s top 10 institutions by research output are in China, according to the Nature Index. China is debuting not just pilotless flying taxis but also legions of robots, the Tiangong space station, the world’s largest hydropower project, a leading hypersonic-weapons arsenal, and more. Standing on its streets, as we did on a visit this past July, one can feel the country’s intense desire to leapfrog into the future.
Of course, China’s economic success has not been accompanied by political liberalization—as some expected when it joined the World Trade Organization. The United States became the world’s superpower because of its openness, dynamism, and embrace of capitalism and democracy. American companies have thrived in a free market and under an independent judiciary, with state power diffused among various levels and branches of government. China, meanwhile, has adopted a “state capitalist” system that puts stability ahead of individual freedoms and gives the Chinese Communist Party economic control. That has led to chronic overregulation, which in turn has chilled investment, battered profits, and driven high-profile entrepreneurs out of public view. The Chinese economy, which is still smaller than the U.S. economy, is now battling overcapacity, a prolonged property slump, soaring youth unemployment, and weak domestic consumption.
Yet China has proved surprisingly resilient in the face of these headwinds, amid narratives about its decline. China is the world’s top manufacturer and exporter. It produces more than two-thirds of electric vehicles globally, four in five solar modules and battery cells, and about 60 percent of the planet’s wind turbines, and it processes the great majority of rare-earth minerals, which are crucial for creating technologies as varied as chips and fighter jets. Even as its economy slows, China has continued to make significant technological advances.
The experience of visiting a Xiaomi store is like walking into a supermarket for high-tech gadgets. The first thing you see is the company’s latest YU7 electric sport utility vehicle (which was ordered 289,000 times within an hour of going on sale). White-veneer tables display smartphones and tablets. Then comes an array of smart appliances that can be managed on a phone: rice cookers, robot vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, TVs, and even dumbbells.
When Xiaomi was founded, in 2010, many people derided it as an Apple copycat. Today Xiaomi is one of China’s most valuable companies, with a market value of about $150 billion. It’s become a cult brand for Gen Z consumers who fill their homes with its products, and was one of the first tech giants in the world to actually manufacture a car. Xiaomi launched its first EV in 2024, just three years after its founder, Lei Jun, had publicly claimed that making cars would be his “last entrepreneurial project.” One month before the launch, Apple had announced that it was shutting down its own project to build an EV, which had soaked up $10 billion over the course of a decade.
Xiaomi’s success reflects a distinctive characteristic of many Chinese tech companies: They build their own hardware. Xiaomi can more easily invent new products, because those products can be quickly prototyped, refined, and shipped at scale. The company has invested in some 430 companies; many of them are other hardware start-ups that offer their own manufacturing expertise, including in the core components of EVs—batteries, chargers, lidars, sensors. Xiaomi also built a highly automated factory that the company says can produce a car, the SU7 model, every 76 seconds.
Xiaomi’s success has also been possible because of suppliers, infrastructure, and technical expertise that already existed in China. In China, electricity is cheap, construction happens quickly, and the workforce is skilled across various physical technologies. In a matter of a decade, China has installed nearly half of the industrial robots in the world, more than 70 percent of the world’s total high-speed rail, more than half of the world’s 5G base stations, and an electricity system that has more than double the generating capacity of the United States.
Xiaomi isn’t unique. Huawei has expanded from building telecom equipment and phones to supplying car parts. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, is now developing inference chips for its Qwen series of AI models. XPeng, a carmaker, is starting to test humanoid robots. Not all of these ventures will succeed, but the expertise they cultivate among workers, and the supply chain they put in place, can be transferred to the next industry of the future.
The United States stands to benefit from Chinese companies’ hardware-manufacturing expertise. If Americans want to bring back manufacturing to the country, we need to think of ways to absorb the Chinese talent and firms that want to enter our market and build on our shores.
The buzzword of the year in China is involution, which refers to excessive competition with ever-slimmer profit margins. As a glut of companies has competed domestically, price wars have afflicted food-delivery giants, electric carmakers, solar-panel manufacturers, and even AI-chatbot makers. When we attended the World AI Conference in Shanghai this summer, every company we encountered wanted to expand overseas, including into the United States. But the only path that many Chinese founders see is to keep grinding to compete domestically. In September, Xi acknowledged that involution is a problem. The Chinese government has urged companies to enhance their competitiveness through innovation and quality, rather than price-cutting.
[Read: China is losing the chip war]
Much of the competition in China is engendered by the way that the post-reform economy is set up. In China, provincial and municipal governments work like venture capitalists, trying to lure entrepreneurs to their jurisdictions with preferential policies and tax subsidies. The latest poster child is Hangzhou with its “Six Little Dragons”—a group of tech companies that includes start-ups such as the robot-maker Unitree and a Neuralink competitor named BrainCo, as well as the AI company DeepSeek. Other local governments, such as Guangdong and Shandong, are trying to emulate Hangzhou, which has business-friendly policies and a strong university.
Competition has its drawbacks, but it has encouraged Chinese companies to differentiate, and helped to diversify the tech sector in China. When it comes to AI, China is pursuing more than just the scaling of large language models (in part due to an insufficient supply of advanced chips under U.S. export controls). DeepSeek, for one, has led the way in improving the efficiency of the technical architecture of its AI models, dramatically reducing costs. Many start-ups are focused on embodied AIs that interact with the real world. Others are specializing in sector-specific applications for AI, such as elderly care and police patrol. Meanwhile, research institutes are exploring alternatives to neural networks (models that emphasize learning by ingesting reams of data and recognizing patterns), including cognitive architectures that can reason with only small amounts of data.
Competition has also spurred companies and local governments to adopt AI as quickly as possible. By some estimates, at least 72 provincial and municipal authorities in China have deployed DeepSeek in their daily operations and in providing public services. Hospitals, EV companies, and home-appliance brands have raced to integrate the newest AI models. In August, China’s State Council issued a set of guidelines to local governments about how to implement the national “AI+” initiative, which aims to embed AI across sectors.
The United States doesn’t want excessive domestic competition like China has. But it can take a cue from China’s diversified approach to AI, and to technology generally. Integrating the AI that’s already available into traditional and emerging industries will allow more people to experience the benefits of the technology. The United States should also encourage more unexpected, creative, and practical uses of AI, including in science, education, and health care.
The southern coastal city of Shenzhen, a sleepy fishing village turned bustling, high-tech metropolis, is emblematic of China’s opening up since the 1980s. In February, one of us visited the district of Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen, home to the world’s largest electronics wholesale market, a cluster of multistory malls and open-air street markets with stalls selling every imaginable electronics part. There’s a joke that every lost phone in the world ends up in Huaqiangbei.
Not long ago, Huaqiangbei was closely associated with the term shanzhai, often used to refer to cheap, low-quality counterfeit and copycat products—for example, iPhone lookalikes running Android operating systems. But as more and more electronics were manufactured in Huaqiangbei, thousands of small-scale factories, design houses, and electronics sellers cropped up and figured out how to develop, manufacture, and ship new products at astonishing speeds. Huaqiangbei’s bottom-up, porous manufacturing ecosystem eventually gave birth to some of China’s biggest tech giants, including Huawei and DJI. Compared with just a decade and a half ago, many more stalls in Huaqiangbei now sell domestic brands, as well as more interesting creations—LED backpacks, dancing mini-robots, wearable surveillance cameras.
Today, with so many innovations emerging from Chinese companies, the term shanzhai seems to have lost its relevance.
At the same time, the idea of open-sourcing is very much alive in China’s AI industry, and that has been a boon for China. Chinese companies regularly release information about the weights and training methods used to create AI models—essentially allowing users to download, modify, and adapt a model for free. (Weights are the numerical values that determine how much an AI should consider certain inputs over others.) When DeepSeek debuted, earlier this year, what was shocking was not just that a Chinese model had come close to American models, but that DeepSeek made its weights public. In the months since, China has seen a flurry of open-source AI models released from large companies—Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu—as well as start-ups—Minimax, Moonshot AI, StepFun, and Z.ai.
Soon, Chinese AI could become the norm for many parts of the world, especially the global South, in turn attracting more developers to China, increasing the competitiveness of Chinese technologies, and allowing China to shape global technological standards. This will be more consequential than the Belt and Road Initiative, through which China has doled out billions of dollars in infrastructure spending around the world. The Chinese government seems to recognize the power of open-source AI. The AI+ guidelines have a section on open-sourcing that calls for “tools with global reach and influence,” and encourages universities to recognize open-source contributions as degree credits and reward contributions by faculty. We expect China to support the open-source approach in other technology sectors too.
Democratizing access to knowledge has traditionally been a major role of U.S. universities and research labs. Western open-source software has long driven innovation, including in programming languages and web browsers. U.S. tech companies should commit to staying open—collaborating with countries that want to use American technology, and open-sourcing more models and research.
In the 1980s and ’90s, China flung open its doors for foreign firms to invest and set up production, in many cases through joint ventures; the foreign side provided the capital, technology, and export distribution, and the Chinese side opened and staffed the factories. Over time, these companies—including earlier entrants such as General Motors and Johnson & Johnson and relative newcomers such as Tesla—helped transform China into the world’s mightiest factory.
[Read: DeepSeek and the truth about Chinese tech]
After years of learning from the West, China has become the most formidable technological peer that the United States has faced since the Cold War. In 1957, the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite spurred scientific education and research in the United States. Congress created NASA and expanded science funding in schools to stay competitive. And it worked. The United States should be similarly spurred by China’s technological prowess today.
If the United States really wants to reindustrialize, it needs to double down on what it does best, including supporting scientific research, enacting immigration policies that welcome the best talent from abroad, and reducing regulatory hurdles. But the U.S. tech sector also needs to acknowledge where it can do better, specifically when it comes to hardware expertise, the diversity of the AI industry, and the embracing of an open-source approach to tech.
The United States and China will and should continue to compete. But in specific areas, they would benefit from more cooperation. If the United States wants to revive and expand its manufacturing sector, especially when it comes to batteries, automotive parts, and renewables, part of a potential trade deal should allow Chinese companies to license their IP to U.S. businesses. This would allow Chinese companies to train American workers, create more jobs, and in turn bring back advanced manufacturing to the U.S. Chinese companies such as CATL have expressed a willingness to build American plants if allowed to by the Trump administration. The United States could even require Chinese firms to establish joint ventures with domestic firms. Of course, the United States shouldn’t ignore national-security concerns, but it will have to weigh the need to reduce exposure to China with the need to stay competitive.
If the United States succumbs to hubris or animosity and refuses to see what China has done well, America could end up a more insular, protectionist nation, stuck with expensive made-in-America gadgets, high electricity prices, and diminished universities. And we might no longer be the world’s preeminent superpower.
2025-10-30 06:33:00
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Two weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the ongoing government shutdown was “starting to cut into muscle.” Now it appears to be nearing the bone: For the first time in its 61-year history, SNAP, the federal food-assistance program for low- and no-income people, is set to run out of money. If November’s payments don’t arrive in people’s accounts on Saturday, roughly 42 million Americans will need to figure out another way to pay for their meals.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees SNAP, announced in a memo that it would not tap into the roughly $6 billion contingency funding set aside for the program. According to the memo, the reserve is “not legally available to cover regular benefits,” and “the best way for SNAP to continue is for the shutdown to end.” A coalition of 25 Democrat-led states and the District of Columbia is suing the Trump administration, alleging that not only is the administration able to use those funds—it must use them. (When I emailed a USDA spokesperson for comment, I received an automated response saying they had been furloughed and could not respond.) The disruption would be unprecedented; not even the longest government shutdown in history, during President Donald Trump’s first term, interfered with SNAP funding.
The timing of the USDA’s mandate is questionable. Congress set aside that $6 billion for SNAP over the past year and a half. And earlier this month, the agency had a 55-page memo on its website detailing how it might use the reserve for SNAP in the event that funding lapsed, per requirements set by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (SNAP costs the government about $8 billion a month; the OMB is run by Russell Vought, who has used the shutdown to cut into government funding writ large). But the plan has now mysteriously disappeared from the USDA site. The agency’s new memo from Friday contends that “the contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies,” a category for which a government shutdown doesn’t appear to qualify.
Legal scholars and budget experts have largely disagreed with that interpretation. Bobby Kogan, of the Center for American Progress, told me that the administration is employing “the narrowest interpretation you could possibly have” of the law to avoid paying for SNAP, in contrast with the “broadest interpretation” of the law now being used to justify a private donor paying the military during the shutdown. As Dottie Rosenbaum, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained to me, “The idea that SNAP’s contingency funds could not be used for SNAP benefits stands in sharp contrast to what the face of the law says,” as well as previous USDA guidance. David Super, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown Law, put it simply on his blog: “Terminating SNAP is a choice, and an overtly unlawful one at that.”
In other words, it’s not that the administration can’t pay up—it’s that it has chosen not to. Although Republican lawmakers have acknowledged their constituents’ reliance on SNAP, they are focused on taking swipes at the Democrats. In a statement, the OMB blamed the Democrats who “chose to shut down the government knowing full well that SNAP would soon run out of funds.” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Republican representatives yesterday that the “pain register is about to hit level 10” as the shutdown drags on and SNAP cuts go into effect, but urged the GOP to stay the course, according to Politico.
Without a deal to end the shutdown, Congress is limited by its lack of funding. And the executive branch, which still has some latitude to act, has been incredibly selective about which services to fund and which not to. Trump has halted blue-state projects that depend on federal dollars while emphasizing that “we’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work.” However, as my colleague Toluse Olorunnipa recently reported, Trump hasn’t been able to protect his supporters from the shutdown’s impact entirely. Congressional paralysis has been compounding the hurt: Republican Senator Josh Hawley recently introduced a bill to fund SNAP’s November payments, but it likely won’t be put to a vote before the Saturday deadline. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who would make that call, has said “there’s not a high level of interest in doing carve-outs” to fund specific government programs, and that Republicans will block a similar bill from the Democrats.
But food isn’t partisan. SNAP is one of the nation’s largest social-welfare programs, a reliable source of relief for one in eight Americans. On average, the federal government pays each recipient $187 per month, exclusively for food. Many SNAP participants, spread across both red and blue states, are seniors, people with disabilities, and families with young children.
SNAP has survived for so long in part because of a long-standing bipartisan recognition of the program’s importance, in spite of the equally long-standing Republican mission to pare back government funding for welfare programs. Ronald Reagan’s administration made cuts to food assistance, as did Trump’s: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will slash $186 billion from all SNAP-related funding by 2034. But no politician wants to be blamed for halting SNAP altogether.
“Americans don’t like welfare, but they don’t want to see fellow Americans go hungry,” Christopher Bosso, a political-science professor at Northeastern University and a historian of SNAP, told me. This summer, a poll found that 66 percent of Americans oppose cuts to food assistance. SNAP isn’t a perfect program, but such a sudden disruption would have an immediate material impact: Food banks are already signaling that they might not be able to keep up with demand. Friday’s USDA memo declared that states would not be reimbursed for covering SNAP benefits, and few have committed to doing so. The costs are just too high for some states to cover on their own, especially for those with higher percentages of SNAP recipients.
Social welfare isn’t exactly a priority for the Trump administration. The president’s budget proposals have historically threatened to eviscerate food assistance, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to SNAP are the largest in U.S. history. For low-income Americans, SNAP can be a lifeline; for this White House, it’s another political tool.
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Headphone listening—the act of playing a highly personalized soundtrack wherever we go—is a surprisingly radical invention, and we’re only beginning to contend with its implications. The visible barrier it creates between the listener and everyone else is obvious. Less obvious is the invisible barrier: The more time we spend in our own musical echo chambers, the less likely we are to share a collective cultural experience. The power of music has long been its ability to soundtrack a generation—to evoke emotion, as well as summon a specific time and place. Headphone listening not only isolates the listener; it shrinks music’s cultural footprint.
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2025-10-30 06:10:00
Updated with new questions at 6:10 p.m. ET on October 29, 2025.
It’s said that the 17th- and 18th-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last person to know everything. He was a whiz at philosophy, law, logic, science, engineering, politics—the works. But there was also simply less to know back then; the post–Industrial Revolution knowledge explosion killed the universal genius.
Which is to say that I bet Leibniz wouldn’t know the full oeuvre of K-pop if he were alive today. Or at least not philosophy, law, logic, science, engineering, politics, and K-pop. But I bet he would know everything in The Atlantic—which is all you need to answer these questions.
Find last week’s questions here, and to get Atlantic Trivia in your inbox every day, sign up for The Atlantic Daily.
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by Will Gottsegen:
And, by the way, did you know that in 1892, a teenage girl from Ireland named Annie Moore was the first person to pass through Ellis Island, and received a $10 gold coin to commemorate the event? (Did you know America used to do $10 and even $20 coins?)
That’d be about $350 in today’s purchasing power. The last person to be processed through Ellis Island, Arne Pettersen, got only a mugshot; by 1954, the island had converted into an immigrant detention center.
Until tomorrow.
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How did you do? Come back tomorrow for more questions, or click here for last week’s. And if you think up a great question after reading an Atlantic story—or simply want to share a beguiling fact—send it my way at [email protected].
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by David A. Graham:
And by the way, did you know that elephants are either left- or right-tusked, the same way that humans are left- or right-handed? The dominant tusk is usually shorter and rounder, worn down by more frequent use. But elephants are far likelier than people to be lefties, so it’s really a good thing that they don’t often have to use scissors.
Answers:
From the edition of The Atlantic Daily by David A. Graham:
And by the way, did you know that the word chocolate comes from the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, in which it is xocolatl? In the kitchen, Nahuatl also gives us “mesquite” from mizquitl and “avocado” from ahuacatl, and then, of course, where you say “tomato,” they say “tomatl.”
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2025-10-30 03:38:00
Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana—a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism. These descriptions might feel familiar, like an update of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Vance, as it turns out, grew up just an hour down the road.
But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown’s misfortune on its residents, Macy approaches the Urbana of 2023 with an open mind. She wants to understand what happened. Her focus is less on the reason for the decline than on the question of why people—even close family members—stopped talking with one another. How is it that Americans with disagreements are unable even to find the language to converse? With that in mind, Macy seeks to do something seemingly simple but actually profound: talk with people she knows, even if they seem to live in a different reality, and try to find a common humanity.
She visits with family and old friends, some of whom share her view of the world and, more important, others who see things very differently. At one point, Macy is interviewing her sister Cookie, who believes the 2020 election was rigged, when Macy’s older child, who is gay, comes up. Cookie quotes a line from scripture: A man “shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Macy tells her she’s not invited to her son’s wedding. When members of Macy’s high-school graduating class try to put together a reunion, tensions between old classmates that grew during Trump’s first term bubble over, one organizer drops out after receiving a death threat, and “friendships built over sixty years dissolved,” Macy writes. “Some of my oldest friendships seemed on the brink of dissolving too.”
Macy doesn’t reserve her disappointment for those she disagrees with politically. One Christmas, her sister-in-law, a Yale-educated poet, grumbles about Macy’s siblings, all of whom voted for Trump. She tells Macy, “Your people don’t want my people to exist.” Reflecting on the accusation, Macy writes, “How could I not love the relatives who took care of my demented mother when I live seven hours away, including my brother-in-law John, who flings around the word ‘deplorable’ at me but also resets Mom’s TV every other day, or the sister who takes her to every doctor’s appointment?” She tells her sister-in-law, “My people don’t hate your people; they don’t even know your people.” In Paper Girl, Macy does what most opinion essays and social-media posts don’t even try to do: She gets out of her bubble.
In 2017, a couple of weeks after Trump’s first inauguration, I interviewed J. D. Vance at an event sponsored by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. I have trouble reconciling the thoughtful person I encountered at the time with the vengeful, snarky incarnation of today. Back then, when Vance despaired over Trump’s hateful rhetoric, he talked about Americans’ “inability to cross ideological boundaries in our conversations.” He referred to the country’s “massive geographic segregation of opportunity” and noted that “it’s really hard to be compassionate with somebody you don’t actually know.” Macy actively conjures up that compassion as she tries to reacquaint herself with those she considers her people. As she notes, she doesn’t “want to write them off.” And she doesn’t want them to write her off, either.
One of Macy’s most resonant discoveries is the loneliness and isolation of so many in Urbana. The town’s residents are not only alienated from the rest of the country, they’re also disconnected from their own neighbors. She notes that midway through the school year, 27 percent of students in the district were considered “chronically absent” from one of the primary institutions where they might find community. In the past six years, Macy writes, the number of children homeschooled in Urbana has doubled. This was made possible, in large part, by a law passed by the Ohio state legislature in 2023 that gutted guidelines for homeschooling; home teachers are no longer required to submit curricula to the school district’s superintendent. The town’s school board also voted to allow LifeWise Academy, a religious program, to operate in Urbana’s schools. During one recent school year, LifeWise pulled 55 first and second graders out of the classroom to bus them to a nearby church for “Bible-based character instruction.” As the philosopher Kenneth Conklin, whom Macy quotes, has written, “The easiest way to break apart a society long-term without using violence is to establish separate educational systems.”
Moreover, the community has almost no reliable local sources of information. The city’s newspaper, the Urbana Daily Citizen, is now printed only twice a week and produced by a staff of two. A group of journalists created the Ohio Capital Journal, an online newspaper. But, as Macy writes, “no one, save my former Urbana newspaper editor, had even heard of it.” Without the glue of shared schooling or the sense of unity engendered by a common source of information, it’s no wonder that people pull away—or are pulled away—from one another.
[Beth Macy: What happened to Ohio?]
At the center of Paper Girl is the moving story of a young man, Silas James, Macy’s present-day doppelgänger. When Macy was growing up, her mother worked in a factory and her dad was known as the town drunk. Her family struggled financially, and so in seventh grade she began delivering the newspaper to her neighbors to make extra money (her customers called her “paper girl”). Like Macy, Silas is smart and ambitious, from a hardscrabble family. But Macy is struck by how much harder life is for Silas than it was for her, and not just because he’s transgender. While he’s in high school, Silas’s father, who had multiple health conditions, dies of a methadone overdose, and his mom is jailed on drug charges. Homeless, Silas is forced to couch surf with friends. “This was a reality I could not have conceived of in Urbana forty years before, when I knew of no homeless people and certainly no one who’d lost a parent to overdose,” Macy writes. Yet Silas’s story also underscores the notion that if you get to know someone up close, you’re more likely to challenge your preconceptions. A decade earlier, the town had canceled its Memorial Day parade because it didn’t want to let an LGBTQ float participate. Yet, when Silas is about to graduate from eighth grade and tells the principal that he refuses to wear a dress to the ceremony, the principal, who has come to know Silas, responds, “I’m not going to make you.” The parents of Silas’s boyfriend, the reader learns, leave their church because of its rejection of homosexuality, and join a more open-minded congregation.
Macy’s book feels unique in part because she knows her interviewees—she has deep, long-standing ties to many of them, and you sense her contending with that fact. In a time when people are cutting off family members and friends, Macy is pleading with readers to talk and listen, and to hold on to those relationships as best they can. But even she would admit it’s not easy. While in Urbana, she reconnects with an old boyfriend who, in his 20s, had been a politically liberal free spirit. Now, disillusioned with the Democratic Party and much of the media, he is, Macy writes, an “ardent fan of Vladimir Putin” who is “intrigued” by QAnon. Macy concedes that there are “chunks of truth” in some of his grievances. For instance, she writes, he condemned President Barack Obama for breaking his promise to change bankruptcy laws in order to help struggling homeowners during the 2008 recession, even as he bailed out big banks and auto manufacturers. Nonetheless, her ex’s rage overpowers everything else. “You guys continue to lie to people, but fewer people are being fooled by your wordplay bullshit every day … You can dupe Americans, but the rest of the world sees you for what you are,” he emails her at one point. “You people are fucking liars. I can’t be nice about it no more …” Macy backs off.
Many of Macy’s interactions have the quality of alternately pushing and easing up—expressing herself honestly and then knowing when to cool off. Human connection, never mind persuasion, is rarely a matter of a single conversation, but rather the work of months or years, maybe a lifetime. And sometimes it means putting ourselves out there, strangers talking to strangers. I’m left thinking about the words of James Baldwin that Macy cites: “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.”
2025-10-30 02:30:00
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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the new Trump administration’s pattern of “politicized stupidity”: the willful refusal to understand abuses of power, including the destruction of the White House’s East Wing and the perceived sale of government influence disguised as private donations.
Then Frum speaks with his Atlantic colleague Tom Nichols, an expert on civil-military relations and a longtime scholar of U.S. defense policy, about President Donald Trump’s efforts to turn the military into a personal instrument of power. Nichols explains how the capture of the Justice Department, the firing of Pentagon lawyers, and the use of the National Guard against civilians are eroding the rule of law, and how a president can launch wars without congressional consent.
Finally, Frum closes with a reflection on Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, a parable about conformity and courage, and what it means to remain human in a world where everyone else is turning into beasts.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be my Atlantic colleague Tom Nichols, and we’ll be discussing civil-military relations in the United States as troops march in American cities and as the United States appears to be sliding toward a unilateral, unapproved-by-Congress war in the Caribbean.
My book this week will not be a book at all; it will be a play, Rhinoceros, by Eugène Ionesco. Please stay to the end to hear a discussion of that play.
But first, some preliminary thoughts about the week just past and the week ahead. There’s so many outrages in the Trump years, there’s so many abuses that maybe it’s petty to fix on minor irritants, but there is a minor irritant that got caught in my craw, and I just want to ventilate a little bit about it. One of the more annoying and more pointless aspects of the Trump era is what I call politicized stupidity. Politicized stupidity is a kind of aggressive not getting the point by people who are otherwise perfectly well equipped to getting the point. Genuine stupidity is a misfortune and is distributed by God, but the politicized stupidity is chosen, and it’s chosen for reasons.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. So President [Donald] Trump has just demolished the East Wing of the White House. He did this without any form of consultation, as if the White House were his personal property, and in order to build a giant ballroom that there’s no demonstration of need for and that, again, he’s treating as a point of personal property. He’s choosing the design; there’s no process of respect for historical or cultural integrity. And he’s financing this whole project. We have no idea how much it will cost—or President Trump originally said $200 million; now he’s suggesting $300 million. But who knows what the cost will be. There weren’t drawings. There weren’t plans. It’s being done on a kind of ad hoc basis, and the cost could well climb beyond the startling figure of $300 [million] to much more.
And he is proposing to pay for this project—that is chosen entirely by himself with no consultation—by accepting donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. He has people who have business before the government, who seek favors before the government: Some of them have mergers that they’re hoping for approval. Others are in the crypto industry that has received a massive government favor in the form of the GENIUS [Act] and who are hoping for more favors. Others of whom are in business with members of the Trump family. If the country needed a ballroom, then there should have been a review process, a design process, and Congress should pay for it out of public revenues because it’s the People’s House, not Donald Trump’s house.
Okay, you get that. But there are people who insist on not getting it. There are people who say, Well, are you against ballrooms? Don’t you think the White House ever needs renovation? Other presidents have renovated the White House in the past. The point is not that you are for or against renovations, of course; the point is you are for or against not treating the White House as a person’s property. But there’s a kind of deliberate refusal to get the point, and you see this in many places in our public media. It’s the same when Donald Trump delivers a pardon to a crypto criminal, a convicted crypto criminal, who has helped to enrich his family.
Now, there have been other doubtful pardons by presidents in the past, and President [Joe] Biden apparently used an autopen to sign some of his pardons, and maybe that’s not ideal. But no one has ever pardoned people because they gave money to his family, his sons, his relatives. No one has ever delivered pardons because he just seems to have a general attitude of being pro-white-collar criminals. No one has ever said, I’m pardoning this convicted fraudster congressman because he always voted for my political party and always supported me, and that is the one and only grounds and basis of my pardoning this figure. But people insist on not getting that point: Biden used an autopen; isn’t that the same? No, it’s not? Well, I refuse to understand why it’s not.
Or, most recently, other presidents have applied tariffs in the past. And some of those tariffs have been discretionary, where the president uses powers delegated to him by Congress to impose tariffs too, and sometimes the motives are not great. Now, when I was in the Bush administration in 2001 and 2002, and one of the reasons I left when I did was because I knew my next job—I wrote economic speeches—my next job was gonna have to be to write speeches defending President Bush’s imposition of tariffs to protect the steel industry, which he was doing for domestic political reasons, and I just couldn’t do it, and that’s one of the reasons I left when I did, one of the most important reasons why I left when I did.
So presidents have done it before, but no one has made it the basis of his policy. And no one has ever said, I’m imposing tariffs on one of America’s closest allies, Canada, because I’m upset that they made a TV ad that implied that Ronald Reagan was a better president than I am. And indeed, Donald Trump is not 1/1,000,000th the president Ronald Reagan that was, and so it, obviously, it cuts to the bone. But again, there are people saying, Well, foreign countries shouldn’t criticize American policy on American TV. They don’t get the point. The stupidity is politicized.
Now, where does this come from? Well, part of the, I think, the reason for not getting the point is because the actual point is too big and too scary. Nobody wants to face what Donald Trump is and what he’s doing to the United States. Even those of us who talk about it all the time, we don’t wanna face it—it haunts our nightmares. But even though the point is big and scary, the point has to be faced and not denied through clever evasions.
Sometimes people don’t get the point because their boss demands they not get the point. If your job depends on writing an editorial saying that the destruction of the East Wing and its replacement by a ballroom financed by favor-seekers is just the same as President [Barack] Obama replacing the wiring and water in the main White House with money appropriated by Congress, if your boss says you have to do that or lose your job, there are people who, unfortunately, will do as told rather than lose their job.
Sometimes the politicized stupidity originates in a kind of purist, ultraleftist politics that is engaged in a quarrel with the mainstream Democratic Party so overwhelming, so all-encompassing to the people involved in it that they can’t see anything else. They’re engaged in a petty factional dispute of ultraleft against mainstream, and that is the only thing they’re aware of or care about; everything else is just too far away.
And sometimes, unfortunately—and this is where it most irks me—the politicized stupidity originates in the need of a writer to seem clever within some tiny, invisible media clique, where this is a different thing than all that writer’s friends are saying, and so they say it to seem smarter than everybody else, to seem a little not as caught up in the true drama of our times, to be able to have that kind of superior attitude to everyone else: You all are overreacting. I alone take the true measure of events. As I say, it irks me.
Now, it’s just going to be true that in an administration that is doing thousands of things every year, hundreds of things every week, dozens of things every day, no matter how opposed you are to this administration, some of the things they’re going to do are going to be things you don’t necessarily object to. I can give you a list of things that this second Trump presidency has done that I don’t object to, and some of them, I support. I mean, yeah, there were genuine governance problems at America’s elite and prestige universities: genuine problems with free speech, genuine problems with protecting Jewish students from abusive action by anti-Israel demonstrators. That does not justify the administration saying, Okay, we’re coming after you using the process of law, we’re disrupting funds to cancer research, all unless your faculty agree to say the following list of things that we command them to say.
I can be concerned by the things that the universities are doing that are bad without having to come up with some clever, counterfactual, counter-imaginative justification for things that are obviously outrageous. We’re all going to like something, but we have to keep our sense of proportion. We have to understand that the main thing is the main thing. And, as I said, if God inflicted stupidity on you, it’s not your fault, but don’t choose it. That’s just annoying.
And now my dialogue with Tom Nichols. But first, a quick break.
[Break]
Frum: Tom Nichols is an expert on U.S. military policy who taught first at Dartmouth College, then at the U.S. Naval War College. A lifelong Republican, Tom Nichols has distinguished himself since 2016 as one of the first and truest of the Never Trump Republicans. Since his retirement from academia in 2022, he has been a colleague at The Atlantic. You’ve seen him also on Morning Joe and many other TV shows.
Three things you may not have known about Tom Nichols: First, Tom was a five-time Jeopardy champion. Second, he made a guest appearance as a bloviating cable news talking head on the fantastic TV show Succession. And finally, he earned his early living as a disc jockey, an accomplishment that qualifies him as an especially welcome and cherished guest at Frum family karaoke nights.
Tom, welcome to The David Frum Show. (Laughs.)
Tom Nichols: (Laughs.) Thank you, David.
Frum: So you wrote this very important article for The Atlantic about the coming crisis in civil-military relations. This is a subject you’ve devoted so much of your academic life to. I wanna ask you to sit on the other side of the table for a moment. Imagine yourself—I don’t know that such a thing could ever happen—but imagine yourself a malign and criminally intended president who wanted to remake the U.S. military as a tool of personal power. How would you go about doing it?
Nichols: In this system of government in the United States, the first thing I would do is seize the Justice Department. And by seize, I don’t mean being elected and nominating an attorney general; I mean flushing out all of the people committed to the Constitution, the rule of law—you know, the lawyers. It’s almost a trope now to do the Merchant of Venice line, but you start with getting rid of the lawyers, if you’re going to do these kinds of things, and you replace it with your cronies. You replace it with people that are going to be loyal to you. You basically undo everything that’s been done with the Justice Department over 50 years.
Frum: So the first move at the Pentagon is not at the Pentagon; it’s across the river at the Justice Department.
Nichols: Exactly. Because if you’re a military officer, the people that you’re gonna want an opinion from are lawyers—which is the next step, which is you not only get rid of the lawyers at the Justice Department; you do what Trump’s already done: You get rid of the top lawyers of the Pentagon.
And look, the rule of law requires lawyers and people to interpret the law, and the first people you have to get rid of are anybody who says, My loyalty is to the rule of law, the statutes as written, the Constitution, and not to Donald Trump.
Frum: Because our hypothetical military officers will want advice about what is illegal and what is an illegal order, and—
Nichols: They’re already asking.
Frum: —and who do they turn to? If you have—
Nichols: Yeah, that’s already happening.
Frum: If you’re a three-star or a four-star general and you have a question, Is this a legal or an illegal order?, who do you ask?
Nichols: Well, you would ask the top legal service adviser in your branch, but [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and Trump have fired them all. So now you’ve got guys—there are people doing that job, but you and I both know from working in government, when your boss has been canned and you’re the acting guy, or you’ve been suddenly elevated because people above you have been fired, that’s not a signal to you to be brave and innovative and daring about standing up for the Constitution. You’re sitting in a desk that somebody else had who tried that and got fired. So you might ask them—I can imagine some of these very senior officers are talking to friends or family attorneys or somebody. Because what’s going on, we’ll be talking about—I guess this is the hand-wave “all this”—but all of this, I think, is not legal.
So you capture the Justice Department, you fire the military lawyers, you insist on loyalty from the top commanders—which Trump thinks he has, apparently, with somebody like [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General] Dan Caine—and then you make sure to neuter the intelligence community so that foreign threats or plots or any other things that could interfere with elections in your favor are left undiscovered or uninvestigated.
Frum: Yeah. So you don’t have to remake the officer corps from top to bottom. You don’t even have to start looking for sympathetic two-star generals to replace the three-stars and sympathetic three-stars to replace the four-stars. You just cut them off from information and rely on natural bureaucratic inertia to make them obey you?
Nichols: And the chain of command. Because remember that officers are required to begin from the presumption of legality with an order. The system is designed to make sure that the chain of command functions effectively so that if you’re a colonel or a one-star or a two-star, you have to assume that if the order has come down from the president to the secretary, the advice of the chairman—the chairman’s not actually in the chain of command, but he gives advice—and by the time it gets to you, the assumption is: Well, this must be legal because all these other guys wouldn’t have ordered me to do it.
Frum: So if you get an order to blow up a fishing boat in the Caribbean or the Pacific, you would start with, Well, somebody must have signed off on this. They must have—
Nichols: Somebody signed off, exactly. And the place it should have stopped, of course, is: The attorney general, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should all be standing in the Oval Office, saying, You can’t do this. This isn’t legal. This is a violation of both American and international law. And if the president says, Well, go ahead, just do it, well, by the time it gets to that lieutenant commander in a helicopter or piloting a drone, he or she’s already saying—well, as you just said, David—Somebody must have signed off on this.
Frum: Well, the president of Colombia has charged that at least one of the destroyed boats was a fishing vessel with completely innocent people aboard. Now, the present president of Colombia is kind of a flaky character and certainly someone with strong anti-American feelings, so take that as it may. On the other hand, it would be a pretty bold lie to tell, that it’s a fishing boat, because the United States could refute it. And President [Gustavo] Petro in Columbia is operating in an unsympathetic Colombian political system. He’s quite unpopular. Colombia is a country that normally tilts toward the right, that values cooperation with the United States, where public opinion would be not inclined to be super nationalistic about the United States killing even Colombian national drug traffickers, if they really are. So it would be a bold lie to tell if it is a lie; maybe it’s a lie. But if it’s true, if the United States has killed at least one innocent boat with these, so far, eight—at least that we know of—attacks, what are the legal implications of that? What are the consequences that would follow?
Nichols: Well, this is where I take pains to point out I am not a lawyer. But in international law, if it’s proven, then normally what would happen is the president of the United States says, Oops, our bad. Here is an apology and restitution. Because we have had incidents like that, where we shot down an Iranian airliner in a war zone where a ship skipper misread the signs—
Frum: Nineteen eighty something?
Nichols: Eighty-eight. It was the [USS] Vincennes shooting down—and we said, Mm, here’s some restitution, without going too deep into whether we were right or wrong about it. So the international consequences aren’t—I mean, we’re the United States; we defy these things kind of at will, and we have—
Frum: Okay, but I don’t wanna talk so much about the international implications here. The domestic system. So now you’re the operational commander with responsibility for the Caribbean, and you have an idea that at least one of the eight boats you killed was completely innocent and the people aboard were innocent, and maybe you’re not so sure and you don’t really have great information on the other seven, and now you’re asked to kill a ninth with all aboard.
Nichols: That’s where I think it gets interesting, yeah.
Frum: What does that operational commander do?
Nichols: (Sighs.) The problem is that when it gets down to the level of the operational commander, once again, he says, Well, somebody must have figured this out. The question is, why isn’t this being stopped at the three- and four-star and CJCS [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]?
Frum: Who should be the person who is raising—is it a four-star? Is it the commander of the Joint Chiefs? And we know what Trump is, and unfortunately, we also know what the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is. And I guess it would be originally Pete Hegseth’s job, but if the secretary of defense and the president—and I call him the secretary of defense because that’s his title in law.
Nichols: Yes, thank you.
Frum: He can call himself the secretary of war; he can call himself the secretary of partying, the latter title equally accurate. But the statute that Congress laid down in 1949 says that it’s the Department of Defense, the secretary of defense; you have a quarrel with that, go rename it at the congressional level—it’s a statute. But the secretary of partying, as he might be called, he’s the person who should have this mission, but if he fails, who is the next person to say, I think we may be killing some innocent people here.
Nichols: I would think it’s the chairman—it’s the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He is the president’s top military adviser. That’s why he’s there. He is supposed to be the most senior military officer in the United States advising the president on these issues. He is not actually in the chain of command anywhere.
This came up when Mark Milley got everybody together during January 6 and said, Now, we all understand our jobs, right? He wasn’t ordering anything, but he was convening his colleagues to say, As the president’s top adviser, we all understand what we’re doing here. That should be General Caine.
Now, the thing is, Donald Trump learned—as we painfully know—he learned from his first term. He’s making sure that there isn’t going to be anybody in that room who’s gonna say, Mr. President, it’s a bad idea. What you’re doing isn’t legal. And I suppose the other person that should be there, given the branch having to carry this out, is the secretary of the Navy. But as we know, the secretary of the Navy has never been in the Navy, has no military experience. These people were all chosen to say, Yes, Mr. President, whatever you think is appropriate. And the problem, David, is, to go back to your point about the domestic environment, is that the chain of command, it’s really not supposed to get to some lieutenant colonel or commander on a ship to say, Wait a minute, wait a minute—I don’t think this is legal. I don’t think this is constitutional.
Frum: How does the National Guard fit into the chain of command? We remember in [his] first term, Trump wanted to use the National Guard or other military personnel to shoot lawful demonstrators. He suggested shooting them in the knees. Now we have National Guard patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C. They were in Los Angeles. I don’t know if they’ve all been withdrawn from Los Angeles; I think most have. They’re in Chicago supporting ICE, which is on a kind of lawless rampage. There is talk of sending them to San Francisco, although maybe that’s off the table. How do they fit into the chain of command? Who has the mission of saying, The National Guard should not be shooting demonstrators?
Nichols: Once again—and we know this, again, from the first term—in the first term, it was the secretary of defense and the chairman, again, walking in and saying, Mr. President, don’t do this. This is a bad idea. The National Guard answers to the governor of the state they’re in until the president orders them federalized. And, of course, that’s been the source of multiple court cases, some of which the Trump administration keeps losing or running into injunctions—
Frum: Because you can’t just do it as an act of power. You have to show some basis—
Nichols: Right. You can’t just say, Today, I feel like nationalizing our federal guard—the National Guard, excuse me. However, even in the past, back in the ’80s, Massachusetts—I used to work on the Massachusetts National Guard issue, so it’s kind of this little bit of lost history—Massachusetts tried to tell the federal government, No, our guys are not going to go down and do training that could possibly be involved with the Contras and the Sandinistas and all that stuff. And they were overruled. They said, If they’re in federal training, the governor of Massachusetts can’t decide where they train or what they do. The president has huge amounts of latitude here, which is why he’s going after the National Guard because, obviously, when he talks about using the regular military, then he has to talk about—I mean, we’ve run into Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act. That’s why, I think, he’s talking about invoking the Insurrection Act.
Frum: Because one of the long-standing principles of the United States is the military does not do law enforcement.
Nichols: Right.
Frum: And this was grounded in a series of statutes. The Posse Comitatus, the present law, I forget when it was passed, but it’s quite an ancient law, right—
Nichols: Mm-hmm, yep.
Frum: —Civil War era or something like that?
Nichols: Yep. It’s an old American tradition—let’s face it, David, going back to the Founders—it’s an old American tradition not to have a big standing army. That’s a 20th-century innovation. Before World War II, American soldiers were training with sticks because we would mobilize and then demobilize. So this notion that we have this large standing army would already be kind of making the Founders jumpy. But the idea that you just put them into the streets at will because you’re pissed off is completely antithetical, it’s complete anathema to the American experience.
Frum: So I wanna go back: Who has the mission? So the South Carolina or Texas National Guard is called up, sent to a blue state, and is told something like, We think a lot of the people in this lineup in this swing suburb are probably illegal aliens. And we think they should be detained for 12, 14, 16 hours, or ’til whenever the polls close. Your order is to go detain these people we believe are illegal aliens—I mean, they’re Democrats; they might as well be illegal aliens—detain them and hold them until the polls close. Who has the mission to say, That sounds like kind of an illegal order to me?
Nichols: Well, but they’re being much more clever about it than that. The mission to detain those people and to disrupt those operations goes to ICE. And then the president says, This being a federal agency, I’m not using the military to detain any of these people. I’m simply using the military to protect these other federal agencies while they do their job—
Frum: —of detaining everyone in the voting line—
Nichols: Of detaining everybody in line. It’s very clever. They say, We’re not doing domestic policing. We’re simply securing federal installations, protecting federal employees because the state or the local municipality either can’t or won’t do it.
Frum: Right. Now, I think a lot of this—and I’ve been arguing this; I’ve written this for The Atlantic, and now I hear Democratic politicians talking about it—the game has always been to disrupt the 2026 elections.
Nichols: I think that’s right.
Frum: Because Trump is doing stuff that is so illegal and exposes them to so much jeopardy, personal jeopardy: reaching your hands into the till and taking $230 million out and putting it in your own pocket; tearing down the East Wing and then putting a collection plate around to people who have business before the federal government [that] says, Who wants to build me a ballroom? The TikTok—I keep going on about this—I think TikTok is being sold for something like one-third to one-quarter its actual market value, the 80 percent stake in TikTok USA is being sold to insiders at two-thirds, three-quarters off, an instant windfall.If there is ever an effective Congress again, these things are going to be publicized. There could be all kinds of jeopardy, including personal legal jeopardy.
So he can’t have that. And it’s a two-seat margin in the House of Representatives, and so, yes, you can gerrymander. That’s limited effort. The real prize is to find some way to disrupt the elections in the places where you are most at risk. And then repeat the 2024 experience, or 2020, of saying, Well, there’s so much doubt; well, let’s seat the congresspeople we’re sure of, who are our congresspeople, and let’s put the others in abeyance for weeks or months until we settle all of this.
And the last thing that, as I’m sure you know, is there is this precedent from the 1980s that, when all else fails, when you have a contested seat in Congress and all else fails, the person who ultimately makes the decision whether to seat it is the speaker of the House. And the speaker of the House decides because the courts will not interfere; it’s a political question. They will not interfere in the ultimate question of whether this candidate or that candidate is the true winner. The House is the judge of its own qualifications, says the Constitution.
So we have a big sort of illegal project being built. Is there any check interior to the system that will prevent this project from being carried out?
Nichols: I often think that the states and the cities can say, with a show of force, to say, Our police have this. We’re good. We don’t need you here, that our state cops—we’re good. Because I think part of Trump’s project here—and the way they’re just dragooning people into ICE who have no qualifications, really, is another tell and creating this kind of paramilitary goon squad out of ICE. I always thought of myself as an immigration hawk, and I’m kind of reaching the “Defund ICE” level at this point.
But I think part of Trump’s plan is simply to have these military forces during the elections so visible that people just stay home, that they’re just intimidated out of the public square, that you don’t even have to arrest them. You don’t have to have a big display of force. That the goal of all of this political activity, the goal of everything Trump is doing, is to drive people out of the public square, to say, The Wi-Fi is still working. There’s still 150 channels on TV. Beer is cheap. Gas is affordable. I don’t wanna deal with this. I don’t wanna deal with all of this, and it doesn’t really matter. ’Cause the other thing, I think, that’s the undertone of all this is, Look—it doesn’t really matter who’s in office. They’re all bad. Everybody’s corrupt. And so rather than use the military to inflict violence to stop the elections—you know, gerrymandering and voter suppression work in marginal elections, not huge-turnout elections. And so what they’re really trying to avert is a large Democratic turnout in places where they can pull that off. And I think you’re right. Look at what’s going on right now with this representative from Arizona, [Adelita] Grijalva. The speaker’s just saying, If I have to keep Congress closed to not seat this person, that’s what I’m gonna do.
And I’ll just add one more thing, David. You talked about this kind of orgy of lawlessness here, and it’s a cliché, but it really is just out of control. I actually think a huge part of this is about the [Jeffrey] Epstein files. I really do. I think that when this first became a thing, that’s when Trump went into hyperdrive about throwing things against the wall just to see what sticks, what could distract us. And I hate that. I never thought the Epstein files were important until Trump started acting like they were important.
Frum: What could be in these files that is worse than what we already have?
Nichols: That’s the only part of this that gave me pause. I figured he’s beyond shaming. The man, his shamelessness is his superpower. And this is why initially I said, The Epstein files, who cares? They’re terrible, and everybody knows they’re terrible, and everybody knows these guys were friends. But he’s the guy—it’s kind of like, why did we think Saddam Hussein had WMD [weapons of mass destruction]? Because he was acting like it. Why do we think the Epstein files are radioactive? Because Trump’s acting like it. Maybe they’re not.
But I think this, along with the tariffs going wrong, the economy in the wrong direction—and I think you’re right; I think he knows that if, and this is actually a hopeful sign, he knows that one election in 2026 could be the beginning of the end of all of this. And for them, that’s an existential threat; for Trump and his people, that’s existential. And that’s why he would say, The military is the one institution that has to do what I tell it. Now, that’s not true, as we know, but I think, in his mind, he thinks of the military as toy soldiers.
Frum: Well, let’s revert to this conflict in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Trump has mused about taking it to land. And Venezuela seems to be target A; Colombia has also been indicated as a target. Before Trump became president, there was a lot of talk from Trump allies, including the vice president—in fact, Trump was kind of more cautious on this [than] some of his allies—of doing strikes inside Mexico. And it is true there are cartel operations of different kinds in all of these countries. How much legal authority would a president need to start carrying out land targeting of cartel operations?
Nichols: More than he has now. I was never a fan of these AUMFs, right—the authorizations for the use of military force—that guided us through the, or that were the, in theory, the constraint on the global War on Terror. But at least it was something. It was the president going to Congress and saying, Here’s what I wanna do, and I would like your authorization for it because now I’m gonna spend money to do these things—that’s the other part of it—and because you are the Article I power, and we need to be coordinated as the United States goes to war. Trump is arguing that I can simply determine a threat, point the military at it, and say, “Destroy this.” That is not what Article II says. That is not what the Constitution says.
And I think, first of all, can we just step back and say, What happened to the guy who said, I’m not gonna start any more “stupid wars” like all my predecessors? We’re talking about invading Central America, Latin America? It’s bonkers. But I don’t think that he has anything like the legal authority to do this—but that would require a Congress that actually meets and functions as a Congress.
Frum: I think something people forget about these authorizations to use force: Before 1945, when the United States used military force on any scale, there was a declaration of war—although there were a lot of police actions, especially in Central America. And there are some that continue, like the Philippines insurrection was pursuant to the powers that the president got from declaring war on Spain in 1898, and then there was the aftermath, which was this long insurrection in the Philippines. But he used the powers that were left over—first President [William] McKinley, then President Teddy Roosevelt—left over from the initial declaration of war.
I think one of the reasons they went out of style after 1945 was declarations of war gave the president too much power, and the Congress of the ’50s and ’60s said, Look, we’re not fighting the Soviet Union; we’re fighting Soviet proxies. Yes, we wanna give you certain military powers, but we don’t wanna give you the power to nationalize the entire civilian economy the way you would have if we did a proper Declaration of War, whether it was Korea or Vietnam. So here’s a much more limited grant of military power that is intended to protect the rights of the citizens from the vast powers the president gets with a declaration of war.
But now that game has gone into reverse. We have now a situation where presidents are asserting these—or this president is asserting powers with no basis of any kind, and Congress has not been asked even to give him any kind of authorization. And innocent people may be being killed.
Nichols: Well, in the past, the other way that presidents got around this was to say that they were exercising force in accordance with treaty obligations. And that is a legal out, right? How do you go into Vietnam, for example? You say, Well, we are members of SEATO, Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. This is an alliance obligation. Treaties are the law of the land; the president executes the laws—
Frum: There was also an authorization, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
Nichols: Right, there was a resolution. But the president can always say—God forbid, there had been a World War III, he [could have] said, I can send troops in under my obligations as America as a signatory to the NATO treaty.
There is no treaty. There is no law. There is no—I feel like I’m about to go all Al Gore—no controlling legal authority here that tells the president that he can just go kill people because he happens to think they’re bad for our country. Why not counterfeiters? Why not bootleggers? Why drug black marketeers? Why not just start killing anybody that you happen to think is doing something bad to the United States? And I think he’s doing this—well, I think the link between what he’s doing overseas and the link to domestic politics is very clear. He’s trying to establish the precedent that the military will do what he says, kill the people he wants killed, and undertake the operations he wants undertaken, no matter where they are.
Frum: And I think with the drug case, he’s also trying to make Americans falsely believe, as he often does, that their domestic problems are the fault of foreigners.
Nichols: Of other people, right.
Frum: One of my favorite drug war stories is a story that is told both by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and by George Shultz in their respective memoirs. But the story is that Daniel Patrick Moynihan—you probably know the story—was the first federal drug czar in the Nixon administration. That is, Nixon created an office in the White House, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Moynihan was put in charge, and he became known as the drug czar. And in 1971, the United States executes the largest—in cooperation, I think, with the French police—the largest drug bust in the history of the world to that date: the famous French Connection that became the basis of the Gene Hackman movie—
Nichols: Popeye Doyle, baby.
Frum: So Moynihan is very excited when he gets word, and he commands a helicopter to take him to Camp David to brief the president personally about this tremendous victory, and as he gets into the helicopter, there is Secretary of Labor George Shultz, with the big helicopter earmuffs, reading the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. And Moynihan, over the helicopter communication device, just gushes with enthusiasm: We’ve just completed the biggest drug interception in the history of the world. And Shultz, utterly uninterested, says, Congratulations. Nice job. You don’t understand, says Moynihan. This is the biggest drug bust in the history of the world.Good, [says Shultz], congratulations. And Moynihan’s a little hurt, a little crestfallen. And then he remembers, before Shultz went into government, he taught economics at the University of Chicago: George, I imagine you think that so long as there’s a demand for drugs in the United States, there will be a supply from somewhere. And Shultz now looked up interested for the first time and said, There may be hope for you after all.
Nichols: Yeah, I actually hadn’t heard that story.
Frum: Oh, it’s in both their memoirs, and—
Nichols: It’s a great story.
Frum: —and the point is, Americans were dying in very large numbers from fentanyl overdoses in the teens. It came to a peak in 2020. And then, thanks to different policies, thanks to the availability of drugs that interfere with drug overdoses, those numbers have come down a little bit. But it remains an article of faith to Trump and the people around him and especially to Vice President [J. D.] Vance: This is something that bad foreigners have done to Americans, not that Americans are doing to themselves. And if we can only punish the foreigners enough, virtuous Americans will not be lured into drug dependency. But that’s, of course, not how it works. It’s the demand that brings forth the supply. It’s a domestic problem.
Nichols: There was a great quip, and I’m trying to remember who said it on social media, where somebody said, Yes, we’re in danger from drug traffickers the way that my cholesterol levels are in danger from Dairy Queen. This is something that we seem to learn over and over again. You and I are both old enough to remember the first War on Drugs, the French Connection, then the War on Drugs in the ’80s, and then the War on Drugs in the ’90s, and all it did was drive up the price of drugs and make it more profitable. But the heroin epidemic of the ’70s, you know how that ended; it ended when a lot of people died from taking heroin. That’s what snuffed it out.
Frum: The War on Drugs—I think we didn’t use so much War on Drugs analogy—the logic of the “Just Say No” campaign that was publicized by Nancy Reagan was, that was an attempt to address demand. It’s a triangle—there are three basic remedies, or outcomes, to the drug problem. One is you attack supply. The second is you attack demand. And the third is you learn to live with the drugs. And all of them are evil, right? Learning to live with the drugs means Americans suffer and die in preventable numbers. Dealing with the demand means that Americans go to prison because you punish both the low-level dealers and the users. And the supply means that you end up at war with the rest of the planet and trying to put your fingers in infinite numbers of holes in dikes as the drugs flow in. All of them are imperfect, and sound policy begins with some kind of balance.
But the Trump policy is to say, Look, we are going to blame entirely suppliers, and not only suppliers, but foreign suppliers, and we’re going to kill them, and we are going to imagine that this is doing something, when, of course, as George Shultz will tell us—
Nichols: That’s because it’s not about drugs. I’m convinced that this policy in Central America is not about drugs, David. I think it’s about—
Frum: Training the military to do bad things.
Nichols: Right. I don’t think Donald Trump cares a whit about fentanyl and drugs coming into the United States. I think Donald Trump lives in a world where everything is graded in terms of How does this affect me and help me and help my political fortunes? And other people—J. D. Vance knows better. He tried to set up a nonprofit about this and then kind of walked away from it. Everybody knows that this is not the game. And I think it’s not just to blame it on foreigners, which, of course, is a classic kind of MAGA world grievance issue, right? If you’re unemployed, it’s because of the Chinese. If your kid is in the basement playing video games all day, it’s because of evil programmer somewhere. If your kid’s taking drugs, it’s ’cause of the Mexicans.
Frum: Yeah, or they also like to blame women: If your kid’s in the basement, it’s because no girl will marry him, and we need to punish women some more to make them marry your feckless son.
Nichols: Right. And then the next step is and the answer to this is always to militarize the problem. Every time Trump seems to run into something he can’t solve, you can almost see him saying, Well, maybe the Army can do this.
I think there’s two reasons for it. One is, he is childlike; he is fascinated by displays of military power in the way an 8-year-old is. But also he’s figured out, the whole rest of the federal bureaucracy can slow-roll him, can object, can rat him out to Congress. He is really counting on the military to be the people who keep his secrets, execute his orders, do what they’re told. I would really like to know why this four-star in charge of Southcom retired early. If it was under protest, I think he should tell the nation.
Frum: Does that person have some kind of moral duty to be public? Because the military creed is: You go quietly and keep your counsel. Maybe you talk to your fellow four-stars. Do you think he has a duty to do more?
Nichols: I would say under most circumstances, yes, but not now. We are in an extreme situation, and if you’ve resigned because you think that you’re killing people illegally, then your duty as an American citizen supersedes—remember what George Washington said? “When we took up the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.” You are, first and foremost, a citizen of the United States, and if people are getting killed, if the president is turning the military into a hit squad, you need to say something.
And I’ve been really upset about the fact that there’s been a lot of that—and I don’t wanna call out generals, because I have never been a general. That’s a tough job; I wouldn’t wanna be responsible for hundreds of thousands of human lives. On the other hand, when these people enter the political sphere, I think they have a responsibility to speak up.
One of the things that really bothered me—and this was a bad sign in civil-military relations—years ago, [former Secretary of Defense] Jim Mattis was testifying before Congress, and [Senator] Tim Kaine was pressing him on an important issue, and Mattis said, Well, Senator, I’m not a political guy. Well, I’m sorry, but once you’re a Cabinet secretary and the secretary of defense, you’re a political guy. You don’t get to hold up the four-star flag and say, That’s not me. I’m just an operator. I’m just a problem-solver. No, if you have gone before the U.S. Senate wearing civilian clothes and been confirmed as the secretary of defense, you’re a political guy after that.
Frum: Well, there was a reason why there used to be a law that said former generals could not become secretary of defense—
Nichols: It was a good law.
Frum: —because of just this reason.
If there are air strikes on the Latin American or South American or Mexican mainland, innocent people are certain to be killed because air strikes are so imprecise, even the best. Trump, from the beginning of his administration, began flying drones over Mexican territory without notifying the Mexicans. This was reported by CNN. The Mexicans found out from American news media. And then, because of the enormous pressure on the Mexican government, they hastily gave permission for something that they didn’t know about.
But the drones they are flying are Predators, which can be armed and may be armed. Now, so far, there have been no strikes, and so far, the reports are that the drones remain, to date, not armed. But that may or may not be true, that may or may not be up to date. And sooner or later, there may be a Predator drone strike inside Mexico. There may be a bomber strike inside Colombia, maybe one inside Venezuela. At that point, we’re into a bigger conflict. Well, is there anything inside the military that says, I need to see some paper here, sir, from Congress, from somebody?
Nichols: I think we’re past that point, David—
Frum: Mm-hmm, they’re going to do it—
Nichols: —I think we passed that point—
Frum: They’re going to do it.
Nichols: —eight boats ago. But now—
Frum: They’re going to do it.
Nichols: —the thing is, if you strike an unmarked boat in international waters, you can sort of slip under the kind of, like, Well—you can hand-wave away a lot of stuff—it’s piracy. They were bad guys. We thought they were gonna shoot at us. You can make up a lot of stuff.
If you attack a sovereign nation and its territory, it’s an act of war. I know there’s a lot of divided opinion about whether we should have struck Iran. Of all the places that I have supported going to war, I have always been really reticent about bombing a country of 92 million people that, basically, many of whom would be on our side, given the chance. Same thing here. You could argue that Iran’s a one-off. We did it under, again, some kind of nonproliferation regime that gives us a kind of pushed open door in that region.
Attacking Venezuela or Mexico, there is absolutely nothing, no legal cover for that. And I don’t know how Americans would respond to a president who said, I’m gonna keep us out of war, and I don’t know how the military is gonna respond to a president who said, I’m gonna keep us out of war, and now I’m ordering you into combat as a war of discretion to take out people who are not—I’m gonna sound like a political-science professor here for a minute—people who are not actually state agents. These are attacking nonstate actors in some way ’cause they’re drug dealers, right? They’re not the Venezuelan military or whatever.
But what Trump, I think, will do, and I think there’s two things that will come out of this; he’ll say, While the Venezuelan military was in our way, or they tried to obstruct us when we were—because you can make the argument that terrorists, ’cause remember, Trump has declared these people terrorists. So there is this Shultz doctrine that says if they’re in a third country and that country can’t or won’t do anything about them, you have some grounding for going after them, which is why I think he declared them that.
But I think, going back to the domestic environment, the election will come up next year, and Donald Trump’s gonna say, How can you dare criticize me or anybody else when this country’s at war and our brave boys are overseas fighting the drug lords like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Seagal hitting the beaches in Commando?
Frum: I wrote a dystopian novel a long time ago in which the background of the novel is this long-running war inside Mexico that no one can quite remember how the United States stumbled into, but it can’t find any way to get out of. And as Americans have discovered, these kinds of conflicts are easy to start, hard to end. It’s hard to define an end state.
There’s also, I think, a risk that is being very underplayed, which is, the major drug cartels have had a practice—I’m no kind of expert, but you can observe it—of not hitting back, and certainly not hitting back on American territory, that it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. And they try to avoid tangling with Americans. You’ll remember an incident that happened two or three years ago where a group of Americans were intercepted by a drug gang at the border. The drug gang thought they were Haitians who were trying to cut into their drug-smuggling business. They killed two, but they realized the survivors were American, and they released them and then volunteered a bunch of low-level narcos, saying, We’re so sorry. We did it. We turn ourselves in to the Mexican authorities. They don’t want to tangle with the United States.
But they have some capabilities if they ever did want to. They could let off car bombs in the streets of Texas and California pretty easily. They don’t, and maybe they never would, but it’s the kind of thing that, if you had a process, somebody would be saying, Have we considered what the other party’s countermove to our moves are? And it doesn’t look like that kind of process is happening at all.
Nichols: I was talking with friends who have to teach this stuff at both military and civilian institutions, and it’s like, how do you teach the American national security process now? There isn’t one. It’s whatever Donald Trump—it’s all vibes, right? It’s whatever Donald Trump feels at any given moment. And the problem is that he has—it’s a problem for us; it’s an advantage to him—that he surrounded himself with people who say, I am anticipating that he wants to do this. I will always have a plan ready to say, “You bet, boss. I got a plan for striking Venezuela.”
And I don’t think they’ve thought it through. I don’t think they care about thinking it through, David. I think they wanna be able to say, America’s at war. Anybody who opposes the president is a traitor.
Frum: Last question before I let you go, with gratitude for your time: Greenland. The United States must have a plan for invading Greenland. American troops are deployed to Greenland in March of 1941, before the United States entered the Second World War, to secure Greenland against use as a German U-boat base. They operated with the approval of the local Greenland authorities. Denmark was then under Nazi occupation, so the Danish government was surely not displeased. And during the Cold War, there were always war games about, Well, what if the Soviets made a move on northern Greenland? So there must be these plans now. What happens if you tell an American officer, I wanna carry out a military attack on the territory of a NATO ally? Do they raise an eyebrow, or do they just do it?
Nichols: (Exhales.) I think you’ve finally gotten to a scenario that is so crystal clear—and maybe years of teaching military officers has made me too optimistic—I have to think that there are, even at lower levels, there are gonna be officers who are gonna say, I’m not doing that. I’m not killing—
Frum: Because they understand a treaty is a law in the United States.
Nichols: Well, also, they’ve trained with these guys. As you pointed out, look, we had plans during the Cold War—the GIUK gap, remember, the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap. This was gonna be where the Soviets were gonna come pouring through—
Frum: Or northern Norway. That was another—
Nichols: Right. We were worried about having to secure Iceland, Greenland, and Norway rather than let that fall. In fact, the Tom Clancy book Red Storm Rising, right, big attack on Keflavík, right? Iceland becomes the pivot upon which the world turns, you know? But it wasn’t that dumb an idea, because that’s a really strategically important place. But the idea that, somehow, the government of Denmark would say, Thank you for your invitation to join Greenland; we have declined it, and the president says, Seize all these cities, and—small though they are—seize these bases. Put the military—there are gonna be military guys—I’ve had Danes in my class, Danish officers sitting in my classroom. You’re gonna tell Americans, Hey, that captain that you trained with, you’re gonna have to blow ’em outta the water if they approach. I want to believe that an attack on a NATO ally would spark an internal revolt within the United States and the U.S. military. I want to believe that. Will it happen? It depends on how many people are watching TV at any given moment, I guess.
Frum: I’ll leave you with this thought. Secretary of the Treasury [Scott] Bessent recently gave an interview, I think, on one of the financial channels where he talked about the American strategy on dealing with China, and he said, We’re going to mobilize our allies to work with us. Mobilize our what? Our what? You don’t have very—there’s El Salvador; there’s maybe Israel; there’s maybe Russia. Everybody else is waiting for the United States to attack them.
Nichols: (Laughs.) Yeah.
Frum: It’s dismal. Dismal—
Nichols: Well, we’re getting to the point, I hate to say, that—I used to take pride—so much of this has been humbling for an Atlanticist and an American exceptionalist like you, like me. It’s humbling to say, I used to take pride in the fact that the Russians had no friends in the world and the Americans had plenty, right? Part of the reason Russia was always, even after the Soviet Union, Russia was always in the mess it was in: because they don’t have friends; they have clients. It’s all very transactional.
We’re becoming that. We’re becoming this kind of friendless, powerful state that just has clients rather—I mean, I kept a NATO flag in my office because I felt like this was not just an alliance of convenience; I felt like this was a fraternity of free and democratic nations committed to an idea that they were willing to die for. And this president—and I still think, David, I wanna believe it—I still believe that when this man leaves office, if he leaves office, that we can come back to that, we can recover our senses.
But right now, the president—and this is a problem for civil-military relations—the president is saying, We don’t really have any friends. You have me. I’m the commander. And if I tell you to attack somebody to whom we are bound by history and treaty, you’re gonna do it anyway. Remember when he was asked about torture in the first election, and he said, Well, if I tell the generals to do it, they’ll do it. Well, the military pushed back and said, We won’t do that. And I think, to this day, he didn’t like that answer.
Frum: Yeah. Let’s continue to believe it. Let’s continue to hope for it. Tom, thank you so much for making time for me today.
Nichols: Thanks for having me, David.
Frum: Bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Tom Nichols for joining me this week on The David Frum Show. I am so grateful to him for joining and to you for watching.
As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is not a book at all, but a play: Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco. Ionesco was a Romanian-born writer who lived much of his life in France and wrote mostly in French. He lived through the Second World War in both Romania and France, the first half of the war in Romania and then, in 1942, in France. He witnessed in the 1930s the rise of communism and fascism and Nazism and other extremist ideologies, and then he lived the experience of military occupation and dictatorship. In 1959, he wrote a play to make sense of the personality changes he had seen among the people he knew in the terrible era of the 1930s. That play was Rhinoceros.
I’ll start with the plot of the play and then tell you a little bit about my encounter with it. The play is set in a small French town by the sea. One by one—and with no more explanation than that—one by one, the people of the town begin transforming into rhinoceroses: thundering, trumpeting, mindless beasts that move in herds, that carry out destruction, and have no regard for human life or human decency, human values. Somehow—and for, again, no explained reason—the town drunkard, Bérenger, is exempted from this transformation, even as more upstanding citizens become rhinoceros beasts. Eventually the human population of the town is reduced to just two people: Bérenger and the woman he loves, Daisy. But even Daisy admires the rhinoceroses; she sees them as beautiful and mighty. And she comes to lose respect for Bérenger because he alone is standing against them. The lovers quarrel, Bérenger strikes Daisy, and with that, she abandons him, and in her anger, she too goes off to join the beasts. Whether she’ll actually become a beast or not is left ambiguous, but she is with the beasts, and Bérenger is left alone.
I first saw this play as a boy in my mid-teens in 1974 or ’75. The play I saw was the movie version—you can still see it on YouTube and other platforms—starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as Bérenger. During the Trump years, I found myself thinking about this play more and more often because it often seemed that long-standing friends of mine were turning into rhinoceroses: mindless, trumpeting beasts. And sometimes people were not becoming rhinoceroses who quite surprised me, like Bérenger, the very last person you would think would be a person of integrity and resistance. I too saw this among some of the people I knew who I was genuinely surprised—I did not think it would be them, but it was them.
I read the play in text, and I was reading it again just a little while ago because I had somebody very particular as in mind in the rhinoceros category. When you read the play, as opposed to watching the Zero Mostel–Gene Wilder version, there’s something very striking. In the Zero Mostel–Gene Wilder version, Bérenger gives a final speech in a mood of defiance. He climbs to a tall building, he addresses the world, and he shouts his resistance. It’s much more ambiguous in the text of the play, and let me read you the concluding portion of the final monologue.
Bérenger is alone; Daisy’s abandoned him. And he says, “I’ve only myself to blame; I should have gone with them while there was still time. Now it’s too late! Now I’m a monster, just a monster. Now I’ll never become a rhinoceros, never, never! I’ve gone past changing. I want to, I really do, but I can’t, I just can’t. I can’t stand the sight of me. I’m too ashamed!” And he’s been looking in the mirror here. He turns his back on himself in the mirror, and he says, “I’m so ugly! People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end.” And then he gives his final oration, and you can imagine this being delivered in many different ways: “Oh well, too bad! I’ll take on the whole lot of them! I’ll put up a fight against the … lot of them, the whole lot of them. I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!” Now, you can play that defiantly, as Gene Wilder did. You can play it with resignation. You can play it with cynical humor. I think it’s an ending that speaks to all of us in these dark times. “I’ll take on the whole lot of them. I’ll put up a fight against them to the end. I’m the last man left, and…” I’m sorry; I beg your—“I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them. I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!”
One of the things that struck me as I reread this monologue just before preparing this talk was there’s no action plan here. One of the things that we’re often asked in the Trump years is, Okay, okay, got it. What’s our plan? And what Ionesco tells us is, before the plan, there’s the moment of decision, and unlikely people are going to have to make that decision, but they have to decide, I’m not capitulating. And once that decision is made, only then can the plan appear. But, again, it begins as a moral choice, and that’s a moral choice I’m counting on more and more Americans to make, even those who, for a time, spent some time among the rhinoceroses or as rhinoceroses.
Thanks so much for watching or listening to The David Frum Show this week. I hope you’ll join us again next week on whatever platform you choose, video or audio. Remember, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you’re minded to do so, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That supports my work and that of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic. You might also consider signing up for a David Frum alert on The Atlantic site, which will let you know when I post a new article.
Again, thanks so much for being with us this week, whether you are listening or whether you’re watching. I’m David Frum. See you next week. Bye-bye.
[Music]
2025-10-30 01:50:26
Part of the fun of asking someone what movies scare them is that the answers tend to be unpredictable. Fear is individual, specific, and deeply felt: A person made anxious by the ocean may not be able to bear watching Jaws but be totally fine with the monsters-loose-on-an-island premise of Jurassic Park. Sometimes, a frightened reaction is inexplicable. But the most terrifying films are the ones that force us to question why we’re so afraid at all—and what makes the image or moment on-screen so effective.
The nine movies below do just that. They illuminate our unease in the way only cinema can. Stylistically and tonally, they run the gamut—some evoke a creeping sense of dread, and others offer more blunt provocation. Some find the dark contours of comedy; others masterfully deploy pathos. The one quality they share: They really, truly scared us.
Batman (1989, directed by Tim Burton)
I was a latchkey kid with an older brother, and so growing up was regularly terrorized by age-inappropriate movies. But the most indelible by far was Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, which I watched at the age of 6 or 7 and proceeded to lose sleep over for the next half decade. Unlike Cesar Romero’s Joker from the child-friendly TV Batman, cheery and inane, Jack Nicholson’s version is fully monstrous—sneering and sadistic, his dead eyes obscene next to his rictus grin. But the quality that terrified me the most in the Joker was his unpredictability. He’s an unexploded bomb, a hyena with a machine gun. His art form is chaos, and the unrestrained fear that chaos can provoke. (The Joker’s supermarket stunt, in which he tells the people of Gotham that their toiletries will kill them, but not which ones, exploits exactly that sense of tumult.) I’ve grown up enough to be able to appreciate Batman as a work of cinema but am still regularly terrified by volatility. — Sophie Gilbert
How to watch: Stream on HBO Max
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, directed by Robert Zemeckis)
Squint and it might seem like a film for kids. I’m guessing that’s why one of my first moviegoing memories is watching, from behind my fingers, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In truth, it’s a nervy noir about humans living alongside toons in not-so-perfect harmony, a world where twisted zeal and greed hide shocking secrets. Live action and animation come together in mind-bending ways, in service of the titular mystery. What really got me was the movie’s last act, which exposes a conspiracy involving the villainous Judge Doom and a paint-thinner-ish goo called Dip that’s lethal just to toons. The implication of the goo was terrifying: It meant that the toons, those physics-defying ink-and-paint characters that could seemingly survive anything, were, in fact, mortal. I didn’t understand then why that scene was so chilling, but now I recall it as the first time that I saw a film’s form—in this case, the mixed-media approach that makes the toons’ vulnerability so clear—completely transform my emotional response to a story. — Jane Kim
How to watch: Stream on Disney+
Scream (1996, directed by Wes Craven)
As a preteen who was just starting to get into movies, I was unmoved by the meta-textual part of Scream’s premise—that it is an ironically faithful send-up of the horror genre itself. I didn’t care that the masked murderer was operating by the storytelling “rules” of slasher movies; I was just alarmed that he could break into your house with a knife. Such is the brilliance of Wes Craven’s self-aware spin on serial-killer tropes, which manages to both mock a generation of teenagers raised on the campy likes of Friday the 13th and deliver honest scares in its own right. The opening sequence, in which a teen (played by Drew Barrymore) is terrorized by the Ghostface killer while she is home alone, is the most unsettling scene Craven ever delivered in a storied career: an extended, torturous guessing game by phone that makes the audience sit in the tormentee’s sense of terror. It awakened me to the unsettling permeability of our homes, ostensibly our safest spaces—any window or door could be breached by a bloodthirsty stranger in the night. — David Sims
How to watch: Stream on Paramount+, Peacock
[Read: 25 of the best horror films you can watch, ranked by scariness]
Akira (1988, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo)
I love Akira, despite the distressing lesson it taught me: that a movie could induce an intensely physical reaction. The 1988 cyberpunk anime is far from a realistic tale; Tokyo, in 2019, is still recovering from a psychically induced cataclysm three decades prior. As the government works to capture anyone with telekinetic powers capable of such devastation, gang violence and corruption overrun the city. This dystopia is entrancing on-screen, thanks to meticulous animation; the film is rightfully considered one of the medium’s most impressive feats. Unfortunately for the squeamish 12-year-old me, the lifelike fluidity intensifies the story’s body-horror elements. Over the course of the movie, a psychically gifted teen breaks down under the weight of his abilities—most viscerally in a sequence in which his body, seemingly completely out of his control, mutates into an ever-growing mass of flesh. Akira luxuriates in the scene’s nauseating sounds, and the visual transformation is almost tactile. Twenty years after I first watched it, I still swear I can feel phantom pains. — Allegra Frank
How to watch: Stream on Crunchyroll
Pet Sematary (1989, directed by Mary Lambert)
At 14, I was on what already was a years-long project of devouring most of Stephen King’s work (my reading stamina owes everything to The Stand, unabridged), and I firmly believed horror movies no longer held sway over my dreams. I was wrong—after watching Mary Lambert’s adaptation of Pet Sematary, I couldn’t sleep for days. In the film, a cat is hit by a car and resurrected via a secret burial ground. It returns to its family, alive but not quite right. When the family’s youngest child dies, his father feels that he has only one choice: to bury his son in the same cursed place, knowing full well the consequences. The situation devolves from there, in a sort of micro-zombie apocalypse. The desire for loved ones to return after their death is deeply human, driving mourners so far as to hallucinate the deceased into existence. King’s unshakeable ghost story doubles as a thesis for the genre’s existence: I think we see ghosts because we want to believe that the dead can be revived, and we fear ghosts because we know they can’t. — Boris Kacha
How to watch: Stream on Paramount+
Battle Royale (2000, directed by Kinji Fukasaku)
Battle Royale, the dystopian thriller in which junior-high students must kill one another as part of a state-mandated “game,” is perhaps best known for having extremely limited distribution outside Japan for years because of its violence. But when I watched it at age 8 off a bootleg Chinese DVD, I was most disturbed by how easily the characters—played by a cast of young adults themselves—descend into emotional cruelty: the way best friends fall apart over small misunderstandings, how trivial gossip foments lethal paranoia and resentment. Teenagedom, as a result, terrified me. I entered high school determined to be liked; by peppering natural, often unexpectedly earnest dialogue with sudden bursts of brutality, the director Kinji Fukasaku so effectively conveyed the horrors of juvenile angst that I feared angering the wrong peers, and the real frictions of growing up. Yet that depth is what makes Battle Royale so haunting. It’s more than merely a horror classic; it’s a coming-of-age one too. — Shirley Li
How to watch: Stream on Prime Video
[Read: 10 ‘scary’ movies for people who don’t like horror]
The Blair Witch Project (1999, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez)
Most of the mythos that launched The Blair Witch Project to cult status—its use of supposed found footage, a marketing campaign that involved faux missing-person posters—had faded by the time I first watched it, around 2013. But watching the three students, armed with a shaky camcorder, hunt for the titular spirit, I found my assumed familiarity fading into dread. The film asserts itself as the remaining record of the filmmakers, who disappeared; what was then an eerie idea is now an unnerving reality. The internet has existed for long enough to be littered with artifacts of the missing and dead—photos, videos, posts. The Blair Witch Project, with its pseudo-documentary conceit, portended today’s digital voyeurism: I knew that things would end badly for these young people, but I also couldn’t look away. — Elise Hannum
How to watch: Rent on Prime Video and YouTube
Saw (2004, directed by James Wan)
The woman with a reverse bear trap locked around her jaw lives on in my mind: Bulky and menacing, the metal contraption threatens to snap shut unless she can find a key that will unlock it. It’s a striking visual; even thinking about it makes the corners of my mouth itch. It’s also exactly the kind of image that most people remember about Saw, the 2004 movie that spawned about a gazillion grisly sequels. But the original film’s scares succeed because of their tension—how the story drags out the inevitable over nearly two excruciating hours. The main characters, who wake up chained to pipes, quickly realize amputating their own foot is the only means of escape. It takes much longer for their other efforts to fail, one by one. In Saw, the strongest fear may not be the threat of an outside villain endangering your life but how far you may have to go to save it. — Serena Dai
How to watch: Stream on Hulu
Click (2006, directed by Frank Coraci)
Underneath this Adam Sandler comedy’s goofy jigs and fart jokes is a compilation of emotional horrors as potent as any jump scare. At a Bed, Bath & Beyond, Sandler’s protagonist happens upon a remote control that can manipulate the universe—which he uses to fast-forward through minor inconveniences such as traffic jams and to anticipated milestones such as work promotions. In the style of a Greek tragedy, the film goes on to depict protracted, ever-escalating scenes of misfortune: Sandler’s character skips over decades of his life, missing his kids’ childhoods and the everyday texture of his marriage. When I watched this movie in elementary school, it introduced me to an existential terror of living life on autopilot, to the harrowing brevity of human existence, and to the real cost of chasing goals at the expense of nurturing relationships. — Valerie Trapp
How to watch: Stream on Hulu
*Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Artisan Entertainment / Everett Collection; Buena Vista / Everett Collection; Dimension Films / Everett Collection; Everett Collection; Lions Gate / Everett Collection; Mary Evans / Toei Co / Ronald Grant / Everett Collection; Paramount / Everett Collection.
