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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the strange and revealing controversy over Donald Trump’s rumored commemorative coin and what it says about the culture of flattery and self-abasement now defining MAGA politics.

Then David is joined by former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for a candid look at the crisis in American education. Spellings, a key architect of No Child Left Behind and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, explains why U.S. test scores began to stagnate years before COVID and why the pandemic only deepened an accountability collapse already under way. They discuss the successes in states like Mississippi, the wasted billions in federal relief funds, and the political backlash against testing that, Spellings argues, has left millions of children behind.

Finally, Frum turns to art and history with his discussion of The Judgment of Paris by Ross King, a story of how the impressionists overturned the art establishment of their time, and what it teaches us about how the future judges the present.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Margaret Spellings, who served as U.S. secretary of education from 2005 to 2009. We’ll be discussing the ominous downward drift in U.S. student achievement, not just during COVID but even before. And we’ll talk about the importance of testing as the best and surest way to improve student achievement and reverse the decline that the United States has suffered in the achievement of its students in recent years.

In the book segment at the end of the show—and I hope you’ll stay to hear or view it—I’ll be talking about a book called The Judgment of Paris by Ross King, a story of the origins of impressionist art in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s.

Before I get to all of that, though, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about a strange recent development in Donald Trump’s America.

Now, some of you, if you are active on social media, may have seen that a right-wing commentator a few days ago released an image of a purported $1 coin, which featured a profile of Donald Trump on one side and then a full figure of Donald Trump clenching his fists in the aftermath of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, with the words Fight, fight, fight engraved on the other side of this purported $1 coin. And when you first saw it and you saw who was issuing this image—I mean, you saw, actually, the kind of cheesy, low-quality version of the image—you thought it had to be a kind of spoof way of trolling the libs, making people upset with some kind of stupid joke. But the image and the tweet were reproduced by Brandon [Beach], who’s the U.S. treasurer, the man in charge of the U.S. Mint and Bureau of Engraving, and he tweeted about this image: “No fake news here. These first drafts honoring America’s 250th Birthday and @POTUS are real. Looking forward to sharing more soon, once the obstructionist shutdown of the United States government is over.”

So the man in charge of the Mint validated that at least the drawings are coming from the government or are in some way authentic, that there really is some kind of plan somewhere in the U.S. government to make a $1 coin for 2026, the 250th anniversary of 1776, with Donald Trump on one side in profile and Donald Trump in full figure on the other.

Now, as I think everyone understands, this would all be completely illegal. There are laws prohibiting the use of any image of any living person on U.S. coinage—and not only any living person, but you have to have been dead for two years before you’re even allowed to use the image of a dead person. So it’s illegal. It’s also shocking and un-American. The idea of putting a ruler on the coinage? The American Revolutionary generation, the people whose revolution we commemorate the 250th anniversary of in 2026, were reacting against a system where King George III’s picture appeared on their money. There could be nothing less American than the image of a serving president—a still-living human being—on an American coin. So it’s illegal.

Now, illegal things happen every day in Donald Trump’s America. It is illegal to detain and arrest people without a warrant; that happens. It’s illegal to blow up ships on the high sea without any kind of authorization by Congress; that happens. So mere illegality is not enough to stop it. But I think this case is—it’s so gross that I think I’m going to put this in the category of things I’m not worried that they’re actually going to happen, that there will actually be a Donald Trump coin issued next year. But what I’m interested in is the mentality that produced, even, this discussion. What led a right-wing influencer to propose such a thing? What led someone to make an image of the coin? And what, even more astonishingly, led the treasurer of the United States—I mean, it’s not such a grand office, but it does come with a big title and nominal authority over the U.S. Mint—what would lead such a person to issue a statement on Twitter suggesting there is some validity to the project of putting the image of a living president on a coin?

I think there’s something in the MAGA movement that identifies sycophancy, cringing as real proofs of loyalty. The way you show you are a real Trump supporter is by abasing yourself as a human being and by finding new ways to grovel toward this figure, not as the leader of a party but as some kind of ruler or emperor above you.

Now, again, a lot of this is kind of a spoof. They know that it upsets decent, patriotic Americans for people to behave in this way. And they enjoy upsetting decent, patriotic Americans, and that’s fun. There’s a lot of sociopathy in the Trump movement and especially in the Trump movement as it appears on social media, and so just making people upset is an important end in itself. But I think it also becomes a real test of in-group loyalty to see who can outcompete in slavishness the other members of the circle, who are also competing to be slavish. That’s why you get these strange [phenomena] like Donald Trump’s physicians claiming that he’s the most physically vigorous president ever.

Now, even when Donald Trump was younger, he was a big man, but he was never a great athlete. And now, as he approaches his 80th birthday, he’s obviously not physically fit. As president, he’s not more physically vigorous than Barack Obama and certainly not than George W. Bush. These were people who worked out every day, lifted weights, mountain-biked. Obama played basketball very skillfully, could sink a shot from a great distance; you saw that—there’s video of him doing it. Why would you feel the need to say—you could believe in Donald Trump in all kinds of ways and believe that he was a great dealmaker, you could believe that he’s rich and powerful, but that 70-plus-year-old Donald Trump is the healthiest physical specimen ever to be president of the United States? Why do you feel the need to say that?

Well, it’s precisely because it’s not true. It’s because it shows—any observant person can say that a fit president is fit, but to say that an older and overweight president who does no exercise, that he’s physically fit, that’s a real sign that you’re committed to the cause. The fact is, you’re not just willing to tell a lie, but tell a lie that abases you, that makes you look foolish, that makes you look like you don’t care about yourself at all, that you only defer to the leader. That’s the real sign of loyalty. It’s flattery that is not meant to be believed but functions as a kind of system of in-group recognition.

And the surest way of proving your loyalty is to let Donald Trump steal from you.