The David Frum Show: Frum on Gatsby, Trump the Fascoid and What It Means to Be an American

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. One of my favorite recent shows will be Fareed Zakaria. He came on the show a few months ago to talk about the paperback version of his book, Age of Revolutions. We, of course, talked America and Trump, and I was particularly intrigued that Zakaria appeared on another prominent, Internet show, podcast show, the David Frum Show, which is put on by The Atlantic. And, Zakaria was talking to Frum about what it means to be an American. They're old friends. They met at Harvard, many years ago. So I thought we would get David Frum on the show in reverse the question. So, David, welcome to Keen On America. For you, what does it mean to be American? You came here as a as a young man, as a student at Yale University. You grew up in Canada. So will you be celebrating July 4, David?

00:01:28 David Frum: So, I'll give you a back story to our my conversation, Fareed. As you say, I've known him since the middle nineteen eighties. And we're both naturalized American citizens. He's born in India and became American. I'm born in Canada. And, my question to him, for this discussion was whether there were any second thoughts about that decision because we both were pulled into Americanism by a certain idea of America that's been called into question over the past decade. Your question to me about, the July 4 just points the special complexities. The Canadian American relationship is in one way very simple, speak the same language, have many of the same customs, many of the same habits, many of the same institutions, share much the same history. Even the accent is very slightly different. It, an English accent sounds quite different to American ears. It takes some pretty close listening to tell the difference between someone from Ontario and someone from, say, Ohio. But Canada is the product of, an American civil war, which is how Canadians remember the revolution of seventeen seventy six. I spent much of the year in a small town in Ontario, across directly across the lake, which was settled by refugees from the American Revolution. And I in fact, I live on a road called Loyalist Parkway in honor of those refugees who, exited up the Hudson and then across the Mohawk, across Lake Ontario to stay loyal to King and the old country. And I will be that's where I will usually am on the July 4, where the July 4 is an important holiday, but it's also a complicated holiday because it's the birth of Canada as well in protest, against the revolution and in loyalty to the old association across the Atlantic with the common ancestor of both The United States and Canada, Great Britain.

00:03:14 Andrew Keen: So is that your way of saying that what it means to be an American is to be a rebel to go back to Canada and celebrate, losing a civil war?

00:03:25 David Frum: There's a there is indispensably a an inevitably a revolutionary aspect, to the American heritage. President Roosevelt famously said, when he's talking to the daughters of the American Revolution at the time, a lot of, reactionary feelings in that in certain parts of American society. He said to them, never forget that all of us, and you and I especially, are the descendants of immigrants and revolutionists. So there isn't a revolutionary aspect. It's also true that The United States exists because it crushed a counterrevolution, which is what the civil war was. And so there's an aspect of continuity. I think the reason that I thought this conversation was so timely with Fareed, and I timed it for the first anniversary of the show, that's how important I thought the discussion was, was, many of the ideas of what it means to be in America are now in question in the age of Trump in a way that I when they appear they're always in question, but in a very painful way, they're in question. And there's some question whether The United States represents in the world what it used to mean, that there is something both Fareed and I grew up with the idea that America was something more than just another great power, that there its great power was exercised in conjunction and in service to certain ideals. And those ideals are very out of fashion in the age of Trump. As, as you and I speak, The United States is in the throes of a war with Iran. And president Trump has made clear that America's goals in that war, as in his previous wars in Venezuela are purely predatory. He wants to, invade Iran, take his oil, enrich The United States by impoverishing the Iranians by depriving them of their oil, not to bring freedom, not to bring a better way of life, but just to go around plundering like some kind of bandit. That's not the America that I believed in and that I chose to be merge my fate with.

00:05:09 Andrew Keen: So you're disappointed, David, in America. Is that fair? Well, America is

00:05:13 David Frum: a big place full of a lot of people, and, I'm a very small spec. So I think it would be kind of presumptuous. It's not that I have,

00:05:22 Andrew Keen: not many disappointment. It sounds to me like

00:05:25 David Frum: It means that I'm rethinking I'm trying to rethink in service of my own act actions and, commitments. What does it mean? How and how can I do my part to bring the country back to what I think is a better path?

00:05:41 Andrew Keen: Some people might be listening or watching David and thinking, well, here's this guy David Frum. Now he's expressing a degree of disappointment in Trump. You've written a couple of major critiques of Trump. You're not alone there. But you were the guy who came up with the term axis of evil. You worked with George Bush in the in the first series of wars, which are the beginning in many ways of the slippery slope, perhaps, to Iran. How would you respond to that kind of criticism?

00:06:11 David Frum: I'm not again, I think it I'm not gonna insert my own personality too much into this. George W. Bush, I think, is a president very much in the American tradition. The United States was struck on 09/11, by terrorist enemies. The United States had been dealing for twenty years with the, with Iraq because of the after the unsettled aftermath of Iraq's war of aggression against Kuwait in 1990. The fuse to the Iraq war of two thousand three is lit because after Iraq invaded Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, they were repelled in 1991, and they made certain commitments as the condition of the peace they got from The United States and the global coalition of the United States led. And then and Saddam Hussein's Iraq then over the next dozen years violated again and again the terms on which it had made peace. And so that was a, an endless series of near confrontations. Bill Clinton nearly returned to war with Iraq in 1994. He struck Iraq with devastating air strikes in 1998, all because Iraq was violating the terms of that 1991 armistice. In 02/2003, president Bush, in the aftermath of nine eleven, in a time when America was more impatient, more anxious, less willing to hope for the best. He followed in that path. He's when he went to war, he did so in the name of the very ideals that, I'm lamenting we do not observe in the time of Donald Trump. That it wasn't just go—as Donald Trump criticized George W. Bush, that he didn't go to Iraq to steal Iraq's oil. He went to Iraq, with a view of overthrowing a dictatorship and bringing about a more stable democratic future for Iraq. That project was not successful. Although Iraq today is an emerging, stable country and is in better shape than it was, before, before the war, although at a terrible cost along the way. But Bush, I think, is very much a tradition a president in the American tradition, and Donald Trump is very much a president against the American tradition.

00:08:06 Andrew Keen: In that conversation with Fareed, about what it means to be an American, he said when he came to grad school or undergraduate, he was attracted with the idea of America, you both came at the same time, that you're able to be yourself. Do you think that's true? And then what would that mean to be David Frum?

00:08:31 David Frum: Well, that's a mighty question. Can I have it in more digestible bites?

00:08:39 Andrew Keen: Well, deal with the first one about being yourself. Do you think that many people came late twentieth century to America to quote, unquote, I'm quoting Fareed. I mean Yeah. You didn't say it. To be oneself. I'm not sure what that means because I'm never sure how we determine what ourselves

00:08:58 David Frum: are. Well, look, mo most of the millions of people came to The United States first from across the Atlantic and then from all over the world came to better their economic condition. And one of the reasons you could better your economic condition was that until very recently, life in America was much more fluid than life in other places. And until very recently, this was a less class bound society than other societies. And there are more opportunities to self reinvent, not only economically, but in all kinds of other ways, artistically, culturally, personally, that people could have a kind of degree of personal individual sexual freedom that was that was that was difficult to have in other societies. I'm not sure that claim is still I'm not sure that America now is so very different from other advanced countries. I'm not sure that there's that much more opportunity to be yourself in today's America than there is in today's Germany. But maybe just the scale of it, and the variety of ways there are to live. I mean, there's just more different ways to be an American than there are different ways to be a German because America is so very, very much bigger. It's a continent. And I think, you know, we, just the very act of migrating creates a new opportunity. But I think it's also true that here as everywhere else, we are we are products. One of the my probably, I have a series of views from most conservative to least conservative. And I'm not sure this is one of my least conservative or my most conservative views. But I do think a lot of who we are is determined before we're born. It's our genetic inheritance. One of the things I'm very conscious of is, I come from a family with, bad health. My mother died young. My daughter died young. I've never I'm in my sixties. I've never spent a night in a hospital. So the gift of that random gift of health, I didn't deserve that. I didn't earn that. I just got it. My mother didn't deserve. My daughter didn't deserve what happened to them. They just got it. And all that was decided at the moment of conception, I think. And we then are the, unlucky victims of bad luck or the more or less fortunate beneficiaries of some different fortune.

00:11:11 Andrew Keen: Although, of course, Machiavelli famously wrote that, fortune favors the brave. Coming back to David Frum, the second part of the question about being oneself, do you think that you've spent all your adult most of your adult life here. You've had a few years in The UK, you've been backwards and forwards to Canada. But do you think that, you have, so to speak, realized yourself in this country? You've done many different things, some with more success than others, but you've been a very prominent and mostly successful public figure.

00:11:50 David Frum: You know, I don't do a lot of that kind of temperature taking. I'm I'm sorry to say. I so I'm going to be a very in, inadequate answer to that question. It's it's not really the it's not the way I think. I don't evaluate myself. I don't compare myself. I see very much a path in front of me of things that I want or need to do, things I feel it's my duty to do, things it's my, fate to do. I just do them. And I don't I think one of the great ways one of the things I know I a piece of advice I give to people who write is, there are three re if you're having trouble writing, and you're and you're you've you've got the skill, you've worked out it, there were usually three reasons why you have trouble writing. The first is, that you have not organized your thoughts as well as you think you had. You pitched something in speech. You said I wanna do this or that. And but the level of mental organization you need for speaking is less than the degree of mental organization you need to do for writing. And what you discover when you start writing is you didn't think this through as clearly as you persuaded your editor you had when you talked about it. So that's reason why. You haven't thought it through clear clearly. Reason number two is, actually, you haven't done the research, that you find that you're going to argue something, and you just don't know enough about the subject. And so the first is a kinda organization problem, the second is a research problem. You think, oh, I was gonna write, you know, the history of the tennis ball, and I don't know as much about the tennis ball as I thought I did. But the third reason and the reason most that most afflicts people who are who write a lot is self consciousness. They sit down, I'm gonna use an old fashioned image because I'm an old fashioned person, at the typewriter with a blank piece of paper. And instead of seeing the blank piece of paper and the and think and focusing on the thoughts in their head and the process of transference from head to paper, they be they become aware of themselves. They become subject to an external eye, and they see themselves at the typewriter. Again, I'm an old fashioned person using an old fashioned image. And they think, is this what I should be doing? Is this who I am? Is this me? And that self consciousness is crippling. And I try not to succumb to it. So, I, I'm in the process right now. I've been working for a while on a memoir, and memoirs of things I've seen, of things I've done, of people I knew, of what, what it's meant what the changes I've seen in, the world over the past half century. But I don't spend a lot of time thinking about who I am and how I fit in because that's just not the way my brain's organized.

00:14:21 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You told me when we met a couple of weeks ago in DC, at a book party, you mentioned that book. But you also said that you were, and correct me if I'm wrong, a little ambivalent, unsure if you really wanted to well, part of it's been written, but if you really wanted to publish it to Yeah. As opposed to the David Frum show, it'd be the David Frum book. Do you are you pretty confident that it'll come out eventually, David?

00:14:46 David Frum: There's a there's a story. I hope it's true. I've never had the heart to check it, that, Bess Truman, Harry Truman's wife comes downstairs, and they're living in their retirement house in Independence, Missouri, and she sees Harry Truman burning all her old love letters. And she said, Harry, what are you doing? And he said, I'm sorry. I've gotten this backwards. It was Bess was burning them. It was Bess was burning Harry's letters. Oh, okay.

00:15:09 Andrew Keen: And I've been of them. Was it a liar?

00:15:12 David Frum: They were they were they were very devoted

00:15:13 Andrew Keen: to them.

00:15:14 David Frum: They were, and this the story goes. Anyway, this may not I again, this is the oral tradition, and we're not gonna look too hard into the footnotes. The story goes that, Harry Truman said to her, best, why are you burning all my old letters? Think of history. To which she replied, I am thinking of history. She didn't want other people reading her letters. So I write I there are some parts of this book where I write it down and think, you know what? This needs to go into a lead lined box into the basement of the Smithsonian until everyone involved is dead. So I don't know. I haven't decided that part of it, but I know I'm going to finish it and then decide.

00:15:44 Andrew Keen: Coming back to this idea of lucky, you noted earlier that you fell you don't do a lot of self. You're you're not a particularly introspective person, but you do consider yourself lucky in comparison with

00:15:57 David Frum: No.

00:15:57 Andrew Keen: I your mother, for example. You've lived pretty well. You've never got sick.

00:16:01 David Frum: That's exactly I'm introspective. I'm not, but my introspection is not temperature taking. That is I don't ask myself how am I doing. I think I think a lot about what I what should I do, but I don't think a lot about, did I am I a very good boy? That's not the way I think about it. I think about I'm I'm inward a lot, but I'm I'm I'm, action directed rather than self evaluation directed. So your question to me I was bristling a little bit about those.

00:16:30 Andrew Keen: Right now, I take your point. But I wanted to try and square the circle, the David Frum and America, connection. Do you think that America historically has thought of itself as lucky? I mean, the conventional colonial British narrative is that these Europeans stumbled onto this promised land of abundant nature and resources, and some people would argue they screwed it up or they exploited it. Some people say they realized it in a religious or economic sense. But do you think that the fact that Americans or America thinks of itself in the context of luck, is that one way of thinking about the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary?

00:17:17 David Frum: Well, I think the phrase the lucky countries usually apply to Australia, not The United States. And, I think the there's an easy refutation to the idea that America was somehow destined to achieve everything it achieved. And that's the counterexample of Argentina, where Mhmm. Sim what why is Argentina not a more successful country? It's because of choices that were made along the way. And I'm I've always been fascinated with the history of Argentina. This here is a country that had so many advantages. In many ways, it's like the bookend to my native Canada. A more benign climate than Canada, slightly different agricultural situation, but still abundant land, lots of natural resources. Very lightly settled indigenous population that, there were crimes committed by the settlers against the indigenous people of the Argentine. But, the populations were relatively small, and so it's not like what happened East Of The Mississippi where, you know, millions of people were displaced. The numbers in Argentina were a lot less. And yet Argentina has been a society that has not realized itself in the way that I think most Argentines would Argentines would wish, and why not? The American story is one of, tremendous human achievement, both physical to develop this land and institutional. And, I don't think you can call a society that went through traumas like the American Revolution. I mean, there's the colonial Williamsburg story where it all you know, it's with the little hats and the wooden guns and all seems very harmless. The American Revolution was I'm I'm I think if I remember this right, relative to the population, the bloodiest war America ever fought. And then the horrific trauma of the civil war and the long agony of slavery and the ordeals of reconstruction and depression and two world wars. Americans have been through a lot, but they've they've built something, and that's been a benefit not just to them, but to the this is the part I really believe, and this goes back to the my feeling that Bush is in the American tradition and Trump is not. Something that has been a gift, not just to themselves and to their own posterity, but to all the planet. I think, the course of American history has made the whole planet a better place. And that part of the responsibility of being an American, is realizing that with the extraordinary achievements of The United States come, comes has come the claim of leadership, and with the claim of leadership has come the responsibilities of leadership.

00:19:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Coming back to Fareed's point about as individuals being able to be oneself, could one broaden that, generalize it, and talk about America realizing itself, being itself for most of its history? Are you suggesting that today, Trump's America is somehow foreign to itself?

00:19:54 David Frum: I just think, when you have political leaders, like this America's America became a great power in the early twentieth century, and it became the supreme great power during and after the second World War. And, the years since the second World War and especially since the cold war have been years where, American leadership, not alone in working in conjunction with partners, have brought an ever widening system of prosperity and freedom and peace to more and more of the world. And while we're always transfixed by these horrific struggles that break out, the historians tell us that relative to the denominator of the world's population, that the past thirty years have been a comparatively peaceful time compared to some other certainly compared to the twentieth century. And that was that was an American achievement, and it was done because American leaders have the wisdom to understand. It's just to go to war to steal oil. It's just a stupid thing to do. The cost of the war is so much greater than the if you want the oil, go buy it. You want you wanna do develop more oil wells, invest in them. That Donald Trump's vision of plunder is not the way America has led the world, which is to say to everyone, we can that we can all be better off if we trade if we live in systems of collective security, if we trade in freedom, everyone's better off. And by the way, the poorest people will get better off faster, but that's okay, because America's wealthy enough. It will get better off too, just not as fast as other people. But everyone's better off, including Americans themselves.

00:21:23 Andrew Keen: So it is this foreignness that Trump is somehow in or Trump or Trumpism, what you call the Trumpocracy has somehow invaded or taken over this country. Well, that's,

00:21:39 David Frum: it's obviously not an invasion. It's, that Trump has achieved Trump has broken a lot of laws in power, but he has come to power, by more or less legal means. There was, some dirty pool in his first election. I, I think the evidence is that he consciously accepted, Russian help to become president. I don't know how decisive it was, but he consciously accepted it. I don't I don't think he sought it, and I don't think he dealt he did. He was in a conspiracy with the Russians, but the Russians helped him and he knew it and he didn't repudiate it. But he came to power by legal means and with the votes of tens of millions of people. So it's not an invasion. It's not utterly alien. There's something there. America's always been a struggle. There were two sides to the civil war. There are two sides to reconstruction. It did it wasn't just a tiny handful of a few. And one of the critiques I would make of, some of the progressive politics of our day, and not just the progressive politics, is that some people are inclined to think when anything bad happens, it's because of a tiny cabal of sinister connected people. And not to understand, you know, when bad things happen, they usually they typically happen because of something that is universally present in human beings. That's and that the whole work of politics is to overcome those negative tendencies in human beings and speak to what Lincoln called the better angels in our nature and remind human beings that being generous, being tolerant, being peaceful is the wisest course in the long run for the most people.

00:23:11 Andrew Keen: Some people might, again, be listening to something. Well, no one's a great fan of what you call this Trumpocracies, an annoying person invading other countries or claiming to invade other countries. But taken in the broader scheme of American history of slavery, of the massacre of native peoples, of Jim Crow, of some of the cold war wars, particularly in Vietnam, Trump is a minor affliction. Do you think that's wrong?

00:23:42 David Frum: I think it's not interesting. Is Trump worse than slavery? No. Is slavery today's problem? No. You get the problem that's in front of you. I think of this when, you know, I think there's isn't there some joke? I think some comedian has a joke about the errant husband who tries to excuse his errant behavior by reminding his wife of some tremendous historical catastrophe. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, the Battle of the Somme does not excuse you stepping out the way you did. The Battle of the Somme happened. You still had your choice. It's on you. And so, yeah, Trump is Trump is our dilemma today. Slavery is in the American history books. It shaped American society. It's obviously a much greater crime than anything Donald Trump has ever done. But he's done his own crimes, and he doesn't get off the hook by pointing to some greater crimes that have occurred at points in the past.

00:24:35 Andrew Keen: In your conversation with Fareed, he talked and he talked to me about this. He's written books. We've all written books about this, about the loss of faith in American elites, which has somehow triggered Trump and the Trumpocracy that you described. Do you think that's true? And then in that sense, as you as a graduate of Yale, very prominent figure, on the East Coast, I'm not saying you're responsible, David, but all of us, my tech people in San Francisco, your intellectuals on the East Coast, we all have a degree of responsibility for what's gone wrong with America.

00:25:14 David Frum: I would say this was a livelier conversation in 2016 and 2017 than it is in '26 2026. I think, we can certainly point to in the period after the Cold War, when America was came out of that Cold War and had great deal of self confidence, and there's a lot of consensus among the, the overlapping circles of finance and technology and politics about what's the right thing to do? I mean, I think probably from the years 1993 to 2007, American powerful and influential Americans agreed with each other more over that period than ever before since. And they made that group, that overlapping group, had a lot of opinions about things, some of which proved very badly wrong. The decisions that led to the financial crisis of two thousand seven, the deregulation of certain aspects of finance, those proved very badly wrong. The thinking that led to the Iraq war, that proved a serious misjudgment. And so, a lot of the so those circles did discredit themselves, and Trump sort of arose, yes, partly in reaction to those misjudgments. That was a decade ago. So we went from government by a consensus that was maybe a little smug and complacent by very smart and knowledgeable people to government by over the past ten years by people who are the dumbest, the worst, and the crookedest in the country. And their record is not so it's not like the switch from this the best and the brightest, the dumbest and the worst and the crookedest has yielded better results. United States is mired now in a war in Iran that there's no one quite knows why it was done in the first place, unlike the Iraq war of two thousand and three where president Bush went to congress, explained what he was doing, got a vote, went to the United Nations twice, had a merit large buy in from the American people, had a program, had a goal, didn't work, but it wasn't a completely whimsical adventure to now, to the, inflation, to the mismanagement, to the tariffs, to the scale of corruption and plunder at the top of the system. So I think that I think the time for that, you know, I'm gonna I'm just blanking on the name. Who is, Bill Clinton's incredibly distinguished secretary of the treasury? His name, I've just forgotten. Right. That you know? Okay. We're We're done with him. Let's have let's have let's try idiocracy instead. I think I think the time is to say, you know what? We have just discovered over these trump years why we ask for some expertise. You know, when the Trump as you and I speak, Trump has just abandoned this. Trump briefly proposed as his director of national intelligence, the central coordinating official in the entire intelligence bureaucracy. There are dozen and a half intelligence agencies that produce conflicting reports. The office of the DNI is to, bring about some kind of human unity and harmony and perspective. And Trump appointed just a goon, to run that office. And he's like, you know what? Smug is bad. Goons are bad. And we've been doing we've been doing goons for a decade. Now it's time maybe to reverse to and try to go back to the way things were and do a better version of what we had before rather than living forever under this goonocracy.

00:28:26 Andrew Keen: So if that loss of faith in elites is an a rather stale conversation now, what should the conversation be in 2026? You were a Republican. You resigned your membership, I think, or you burnt your card. You're not really a Democrat. You're a centrist, maybe a conservative centrist rather like Jonathan Rauch. I know he's a very good friend of yours, very good friend of mine and in the show. What kind of con conversation should guys like yourself be having in June 2026?

00:29:02 David Frum: Well, there's an immediate conversation and a long term conversation. The immediate conversations is how do we, make American governing institutions work again in an honest and effective way? How what do we do about this? We've had plundered I people sometimes say Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, and I always chafe at that because there's no runner-up. There's nothing like this. If Donald Trump were president of The Philippines or Belorussia or Nigeria, he'd be the most corrupt president in the history of The Philippines, Belorussia, or Nigeria. [AK, off-mic: “Or Marcos?”] Donald Trump has in he's now been in the second term in office for about fifteen months, if I if I'm doing the math right. He's accumulated he's collected about $4,000,000,000 in payments from paper seekers [unclear; likely “favor seekers”], domestic and foreign. He's inserted in he's he's purported to insert into, this sham litigation he did with the Department of Justice, agreement where he and his family will be exempt from tax audit for the rest of their lives, which means that their taxes are essentially voluntary. He, he has been, apportioning American foreign policy. He sell he sets tariffs according to gifts to him. He changed the tariff rate for Vietnam because the Vietnamese approved a Trump family golf course. So, it's it's just it's nothing like this has ever been seen is has ever been seen in American history, and it's pretty shocking even by the standards of some less developed countries. So how do we get through this, and how do we rebuild institutions in an honest and effective way? What is going to be the [unclear] twenty-twenties equivalent to the burst of reforms that we saw after Watergate that tried to put American government effectively did back on a more functional course and tidy up some of the abuses in the extremes and maybe bring even bring some of the guilty people to some kind of justice. All of that said, once you've gotten past that, one of the things that most depresses me about the Trump years has been ten years of wasted time for a series of problems that are deeper and enduring from, the collapse in the birth rate to climate change, to the challenges of making sure that, the new possibilities of computer technology serve human flourishing and don't destroy us. There's so many real problems that are not being met, bringing structures of peace to more and more of the world, making sure that, we continue to have a relationship with China where we hope for the we prepare for the worst, but hope for the best and never cease holding up the hand of friendship to China to bring it into the club of responsible nations, but also being prepared for the possibility they may not choose to join the club of responsible nations. There are so many deep real problems, and there's been no progress on any of these things for a decade while we've been wracked with how do we stop the president from stealing the furniture.

00:31:53 Andrew Keen: So you remain cautiously optimistic. Is that a fair way of putting it, or have you given up?

00:32:00 David Frum: No. Again, that's that goes back to this temperature taking. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic because that means having opinions about things where it would be where it's where it's unknowable. I don't know what the future holds. I know what we have to do. I know what I want to do.

00:32:17 Andrew Keen: How What do we have to do, David? It does it require new political parties?

00:32:25 David Frum: The mechan first, we figure out what we have to do, then we figure out the mechanism to do it. So what we have to do is we have to have a new era of political reform like that of the nineteen seventies, where, we said that Donald Trump he broke some laws, but in other cases, he just discovered that laws that weren't written down. No one had ever written down a law that said the president can't operate a profit making business while serving as president. That's not against the law. It should be, but it's not. No one has ever said it's against the law to make it and this is a new problem. Fake AI advertising in which you represent your political opponents saying and doing things they never said or did. That's not a law, but maybe that should be a law. So we, and other things where it is against the law, and it's against the law for the president to accept gifts from foreign governments. He can't the president can't accept a free airplane for the Emir of Qatar, but he did it, and we don't have mechanisms to stop him. So in some cases, we need new laws. In some cases, we need new enforcement. But that's and how we get there, that will require there are some mechanism questions. Do the Republicans cooperate with that or not? But once you're on the other side of that, that's where the hard work begins because we have a twenty first century that has real responsibilities and challenges that we've wasted a decade not meeting.

00:33:44 Andrew Keen: What about you mentioned technology. Is that the problem or the solution? More and more people seem you know, coming back to this idea of America being a being itself, America was always optimistic, forward looking. More and more young Americans in particular no longer believe in the future and are very, very suspicious at best of new technologies like AI.

00:34:09 David Frum: Well, I lived through a period of maybe undue technological enthusiasm in the nineteen nineties where we believe the technology would make the world a better a better place in a way that machines can't do. And now I'm on, and I think I'm chasing a little bit by that experience that the Internet was supposed to bring us all together. You would see these ads if you watch TV in 1997. You would see a little boy in Boston playing chess on the computer with a little girl in Shanghai, and the Internet was going to bring us all together in peace and unity, and that didn't exactly happen. The Internet gave us the return to polio and measles because it spread anti vaxx propaganda. So it wasn't as good as we thought it would be in the nineteen nineties. I tend to think it's, a lot of the anxiety about AI now is a little over torqued on the on the other side. These are tools. Human beings have to master them. Human beings have to write rules for them. Human beings have to discipline ourselves. Technology always creates temptations. And there's some especially destructive temptations in AI. AI allows us my biggest worry about AI is not that the robots will kill us all, but that the robots will create a dream allow us to retreat into a dream world. We can be you're gonna interact with people who are much more amenable, much more pliable than or seeming people with you can have a conversation that's much more amenable and pliable and deferential to your wishes you'll ever get from any human being. And people may retreat away from interactions with real human beings into these fake interactions with machines. But those are just dreams. They're not realities. But we have to be equal to it. And we've gone through. I'm old enough to remember when, it was a conventional view that human beings wouldn't survive the nuclear bomb. That technology seemed certain to wipe out all of humans out of civilization in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. We found ways to bring some order and regularity to it, And, we have not we have not had the nuclear holocaust that was so widely feared when I was young. And we can, with the same degree of wisdom, make sure that AI and the other new technologies serve human beings and not harm them.

00:36:14 Andrew Keen: David, when historians look back at this period, particularly what you call this Trumpocracy, how are they gonna describe it? Our mutual friend, Jonathan Rauch, uses the f word. He wrote a controversial piece for The Atlantic, saying, yes. It's fascism. Where are you on this? Do we need new language to describe what's happened in the last fifteen years?

00:36:37 David Frum: Well, I had a proposal that was not widely accepted. In fact, accepted by almost nobody, but I and it's maybe too fussy, but I liked it, which is I said, you know, in science, you we use the word o I d the ending o I d oid to describe something that's like something else. So an alkaloid is not an alkaline. It's like an alkaline. It's an alkaloid. An asteroid is not is it something that's like a star, like, you know, the Latin word for star, but it's not a star, so it's called an asteroid. And so I propose we call what Trump is doing, fascioid, because there's a lot of points of similarity to fascism of the nineteen thirties, but all other important differences. And the most, important differences are, one, the fascism of the nineteen twenties and thirties was very much a reaction to the experience and horrors of the first World War. People who had been through the first World War came back from that experience not valuing human life very highly and having a high tolerance for violence of its most intimate form, not just like violence on a screen, but actually taking a truncheon and beating somebody to death right in front of cracking the bones and cracking the skull right in front of your eyes. They'd seen it happen on in the trenches, and they're ready to they'd done it, and they're ready to do it again. Without the experience of that horror, you're not going to get the same thing. Fascism was a movement of mass mobilization. We live in less of a mass society. And fascism is above all, a philosophy of organized violence. Well, we live in a society that is where the center of gravity is dem is middle age, not young. And middle age people are much less difficult to mobilize to violence than young people are. So we're not gonna get what you had in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, but you can see some points of similarity. The structure the politics based on lying, the politics based on, authoritarian reaction, the politics based on cults of leadership. So it's similar, but it's not the same. And we needed language. My proposal was a little too, maybe artificial, to capture it. So I think we have something that's fascism like, but it's not the same thing as the fascism in the nineteen thirties. One other problem with the word. When I use the word socialism, people understand I'm describing something. And I can also use socialism as an insult, but mostly it's mostly a category, a way of organizing political thought. Whereas fascism, it should be that, but for most of us, we use fascism as an insult, the soup Nazi from Seinfeld. And because of that insult laden quality of fascism, that the idea that you're I'm I'm not actually making a pejorative here. I'm trying to do something analytic when I use the language of fascism. That's that's not, again, a natural way to speak. So it's a heavy word, but I think we need to draw on its insights even if we don't use the word itself in exactly its plain form.

00:39:30 Andrew Keen: And, of course, Orwell made that point in his English, in his, politics in the English language, his very influential essay just after the second World War in which he talked about the significance or the centrality of language in politics. Your, interview with Fareed, you ended, by recommending I'm I'm not sure how separate these two things were, but you ended by recommending one of my favorite books, Calvino's, Invisible Cities. You reminded everyone of the importance of literacy and politics. Is that also something, David, that's gone wrong in terms of addressing that we need to read more, maybe not just Invisible Cities, but books rather than tweets or Instagram posts?

00:40:17 David Frum: I talk about this a lot. I do this in my podcast. I end every episode with a, a book recommendation, sometimes long, sometimes short, sometimes more serious, sometimes less serious. Because I, I think in our age of digital media, it's really important to discover the, to remain committed to the work the experience of text. And one reason it is so important is anyone who reads a lot quickly discovers that you have to develop, some mistrust of the narrator. And most works of great literature, whether the narrator is, uses the is the first person an I, or whether the narrator purports to be a third person and impartial, you realize you can't always trust the narrator. And so the experience of reading makes you, a critical makes you critically engaged with your world. One of one of the books that Fareed and I grew up together on and both loved was The Great Gatsby, which everyone reads when they're these days, I think, when they're quite young and we all love it and it's so romantic. And, Nick Carraway is such a compelling personality. That's the narrator. And you're sometime along the way, you're gonna discover, you know what? Nick Carraway is a shifty and untrustworthy person who tells a lot of lies. And suddenly you read the book at this the book now opens up in a completely different way. What how do I read this thing if I realize I can't trust Nick? Well, short form video as we consume it on Instagram Reels or TikTok is a very naive medium. I mean, it's highly artificial, but it is designed to entice us into forgetting the presence of the narrator, the creator, and just immersing ourselves in the emotional experience. And, look, not that isn't a lot of fun, and not that can't be great art. I think someday there will be great TikTok and great Instagram artists. And, it there it may take some time, but we'll discover this as an art form, and it'll it'll have its own merit. But right now, if you consume a lot of that, it makes you more gullible. And if you read more, it makes you less gullible. And in the Internet age, we could all use with a little less gullibility.

00:42:20 Andrew Keen: Finally, what book then you brought up Gatsby. Is that the book you'd like all Americans to read? Maybe what Invisible Cities, of course, is a book about the many different views of Venice, thinking about it in all sorts of different ways, different perspectives on Venice. He carries, Venice around in his head. What's the book that Americans should be reading? Is it Gatsby this July 4 or maybe another book? I mean, everyone has read or at least knows about Gatsby. I'm I'm intrigued, by the way, on your notion of Carraway being so slippery. What was his biggest lie, do you think? Or what do you most suspect about his narrative? Well,

00:43:06 David Frum: this is not his biggest lie, but this is his most important lie. One of the things that he would have you then I know we're gonna one of the things that Nick would have you believe is that he is not dazzled by Gatsby's gangster glamour, that he sees through to a true Gatsby, a deeper Gatsby, and his infatuation with Gatsby is driven by deep values. And he famously shouts at one point, you're worth the whole damn lot of them. But there are a lot of clues in the book that actually Carraway is seduced by the gangster glamour of Gatsby, and that he is he comes up with these moral explanations of Gatsby to justify to himself, an attraction that he knows he shouldn't feel. One of the points where he most go he, he has this big scene where he, is talking about how, the how horrified he is by all of this gangster glamour. And the very next morning, Gatsby invites him for a ride up in Gatsby seaplane, which is parked on the Long Island Sound, and Nick is very excited to go. And in 1920, whatever it is, a very unusual experience for a person to go up in a privately owned seaplane, but Nick is thrilled. He loves it. And so Nick, Nick, by once you question Nick, you are on your way to a darker view of who Gatsby is and what he's all about, which the narrator has in mind for us to hold. Gatsby is a criminal. And Gatsby is also the symbol of America. Gatsby is no doubt that Gatsby is a standard for Fitzgerald's view of America. Gatsby is a self invented person, but he's, you know, his whole life story, his name Jay Gatz, he tell he wants you to believe he's German. He's almost certainly Jewish, or very probably Jewish. And he's got he's got a whole backstory. And he's he comes to the world of bootlegging and other organized crime. And, we're all seduced by this, and we shouldn't be. We should we should see through it more clearly. And at the end of the book, this fantastic scene where Nick Carraway is lying on Gatsby is now dead, and Carraway is alone on the estate. And he talks about imagines the first people to see the new world and especially New York Harbor and to meet something commensurate with man's capacity for wonder. And that's this great evocation, And this is one of the most beautiful sentences in American literature or paragraphs in American literature. But it also invites us to keep wondering and not just to trust the artifact that's been put into our hands, but to think more deeply on it. What are books that I think everybody should read? Look, there are things that are part of the common heritage of what it means to be an American. I don't think, I think an American, whether you're a religious person or not, needs to have a pretty good grounding in the Bible. You can't understand American rhetoric and history, without, you know, having a deep grounding of that. You need to read the fundamental texts, including the Federalist Papers. The great there are great classics, that is widely shared of American literature, Moby-Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, poems and songs, hymns. Hymns are really important parts of American literature. We don't, we don't pay as much attention to them as we did, but for Americans in the nineteenth century, the hymnal, was a great source of literature. One of my Trump books, I used the words of an old Methodist hymn, as my dedication.

00:46:12 Andrew Keen: One, Trumpocracy or the other one?

00:46:14 David Frum: I'm I'm now going to I'm now going to forget. I think it was the Trumpocalypse, the first one. [as spoken: “Trumpopolis” — Frum's books are Trumpocracy (2018) and Trumpocalypse (2020); the hymn dedication appears in Trumpocracy] I quoted a Methodist hymn, that said, when all were false, I found thee true. And the hymn is, of course, directed to God, but I directed that to those Americans who kept faith with the American idea during those difficult first years of Trumpism when so many people I'd known had pledged their faith, their not their faith, but had made their bet on Donald Trump when all were false are finally true.

00:46:43 Andrew Keen: Yeah. But finally, David, I wonder whether your reading of Gatsby is a Canadian one. Doesn't it require being American? Yeah. A degree of belief that Carraway rather than looking for Carraway, which is what you're doing as a Canadian, we need to share his romance, which is what being American is, believing in things that may not actually exist.

00:47:09 David Frum: Yeah. That's quite a profound question because one of the, things we do in Gatsby and we're with Nick. We want, we with Nick, we go to Gatsby. Gatsby is, of course, in love with Daisy Buchanan, and he stares across Long Island Sound at the lights from Daisy Buchanan's and her husband Tom's mansion. And that's and that's how we think of Gatsby maybe most of us is staring across the water with longing at these bright lights. And I think one of the things that, is very Canadian, especially if you grew up as I did in Toronto, which is right on, Lake Ontario, is to look across the lake at the bright lights of the American shore, so much more glittering off in the Canadian. I spend I still spend a lot of time in Canada. I have a house on the North Shore Of Lake Ontario, in a small town called Wellington, Ontario or near it. And we look across the way, and it just it's a straight shot. And there's there's there's the American shore, the shore from which the people settled this area came fleeing violence, looking for refuge, and the shore at which they've looked back because there was something magical on the on the other side. So, yeah, that may be I think maybe the thing that Fareed and I were saying is there's something about knowing America. There's something beautiful and powerful about knowing America from the inside, having American thoughts, thinking no other thoughts, but there's also something maybe it helps you to be an analyst of American life, to see it a little bit from the outside and to, have that certain critical distance that comes from experience in a growing up in a different society, even if it's one as similar to The United States as Canada is to The United States.

00:48:37 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The David Frum Show without even going to the Atlantic website. I think, David's autobiography may not be out yet, but he's revealed something about himself. There's still an element of the Canadian about you, David. Wonderful conversation. And I absolutely insist that when that book comes out, you need to come back on the show. Thank you so much.

00:48:59 David Frum: And happy for everybody.

00:49:01 Andrew Keen: I assume you're not gonna be watching baseball or eating hot dogs on July 4.

00:49:06 David Frum: No. I will actually be in, on the Canadian side of the lake, and, I'll be probably sitting on my deck looking across the water at the great Republican, wishing well to American democracy and all those who support and believe in it.

00:49:21 Andrew Keen: And reading, The Great Gatsby, of course.

00:49:23 David Frum: No. No. I'll be reading, right now, I'm reading a, big fat history of the city of New York that I'll probably still be working on. It's very it's a thousand pages long, so I'm sure I'll still be working on that come the July 4.