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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum argues that President Donald Trump is making a miscalculation in his second term. Instead of consolidating power before plundering the state, Trump has reversed the sequence, imposing massive tariffs that raise prices on ordinary Americans, flaunting foreign wealth, and enriching his inner circle at public expense. Frum speculates that by impoverishing the public before securing control, Trump is exposing himself to serious political risks and that Americans must resist the temptation to be passive, hopeless spectators.

Then Frum speaks with the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice about political violence, the assassinations and upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and what those episodes teach us about the threats facing America today. They revisit the murders that reshaped the era, consider how violence changed the course of politics, and draw out the parallels and differences between then and now: from polarization to technology to the shifting role of institutions.

Finally, Frum closes with a book talk on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, reflecting on its enduring power and dark insights into human nature.

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 Geoffrey Kabaservice, a great historian of American life in the 1960s and 1970s, and we’ll talk about how the shocking recent events in American life—the tumults and the threats of violence—compare and contrast with America’s experience of polarization and violence in the 1960s and 1970s. In the space of the years from 1968 to 1972, we saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King [Jr.], Bobby Kennedy, and the attempted assassination against George Wallace. How does our time compare to theirs? What is different, and what, what is done and how people react?

Before my conversation with Geoffrey Kabaservice, I want to offer some few preliminary thoughts about a way to feel about the dangers that everyone who cares about free institutions must be feeling during this Trump era. Every week, it seems, brings some new outrage, some new attack on the essential institutions of a free society by the president and his supporters. It’s easy and maybe even natural to succumb to some kind of feeling of despair, hopelessness. What can be done? What, if anything, will matter? So I’m not here exactly with an action plan. That’s not my topic this week. I want to instead talk a little bit about the psychological mood we should bring to the crisis of our times.

Hopelessness is a resource for the tyrannical. Hopelessness is a resource for those who seek to abuse power, and hopelessness is a great danger. As long as we retain our capacity to feel shock at what is being done, there is some hope, and I want to talk about what that hope would look like.

Now, as I observe President Trump in this first year of a second term, I see him making one big mistake. And it’s a mistake that is going to have him, and is going to exact, I think, a very big price. Look—there’s a basic recipe for anybody who’s trying to convert a formerly free society into a less free society, and that is: Consolidate power first. And only after you have consolidated power, plunder the state and impoverish the subjects. If you get the order wrong, if you do it backwards, you’re in danger of losing power before it can be consolidated. Now that’s exactly the program that [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán did in Hungary. He achieved a lot of economic benefits for the ordinary Hungarian early in his tenure, and that became the basis for his consolidation of power. And by the time things began to go wrong for the ordinary Hungarian, it was a little bit too late for anybody to raise their voice. You can tell a similar story about [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and other kinds of people who’ve converted more free into less free societies, as Donald Trump seems to be wanting to do in the United States.

In Trump’s first term, Trump mostly got it right. Trump made important economic mistakes. He got into trade wars with China that crashed the stock market in the second half of 2018. Between the fall of 2018 and the early winter, the Standard & Poor’s index lost almost 20 percent of value. During Trump’s first term, Brazil definitively overtook the United States as the world’s largest exporter of soybeans and other important agricultural products because of Trump’s trade wars with China that resulted in Chinese power and American retreat. But most people remember that at least the first three years of Trump’s term—first term—as good years, and that created a lot of permission for him to do a lot of bad things during that first term. And that created the possibility for him to—and that memory of the three good years before the catastrophe of COVID, which he made so much worse by his mismanagement, that memory became a powerful aid to Trump’s bid for return to power in 2024. And this time he returned to power with a really clear understanding of what to do and how to do it. This time he surrounded himself not with people who got in his way, as happened often in the first term, but with enablers, people who are determined to wreak his will and more than his will on anybody who stood in his way. And those enablers have done a lot of things for him. In the areas of mass media, in the areas of the courts, we have seen this striking again and again and again.

But Trump has been a much worse economic manager in the second term than in the first. He, early, introduced massive tariffs, which are massive tax increases on everybody and have driven prices higher and higher and higher. In the present quarter of 2025, we can see that the American economy is seriously weakening. We’re not in a recession yet. Although it may feel that way to many Americans, the economy has been buoyed by massive investment in artificial intelligence. And that investment may continue, and the benefits to the economy of that investment may continue, and we may be able to avoid a technical recession. But for the typical American, things don’t feel so good right now. The job market is softening, prices are rising, and people are noticing the effect of Trump’s tariffs in their grocery bins. They’re feeling that upon themselves—and they know that Trump did it and did it on purpose. It wasn’t a miscalculation. It wasn’t the unintended consequences of other acts. Trump is deliberately making things more expensive in order to transfer the tax burden from those best able to pay to those least able to pay.

A way to dramatize this point, a figure that I try to keep in mind is, this no-tax-on-tips gimmick that you’ve heard about, that expires in 2028. Over the life of the gimmick—from today until to the end of 2028—it purports it will deliver approximately $30 or so billion of relief to Americans who get the benefit of the tax break over the entire period from today to the end of 2028. In the month of August alone, Trump’s tariffs extracted that much money—the same amount of money as the whole tax-on-tips benefit in one month, August, of this year—and he extracted that overwhelmingly from middle-income and lower-income Americans, who are paying more for so many different things, and as we enter the Christmas season, who will pay more for many more things than that. Every kind of gift, every kind of decoration. Even their clothes, the Christmas trees, everything: They’ll be paying more for all of it. And Trump did that on purpose in order to make them pay the cost of the other benefits he’s getting. So he began the process of plundering the state and impoverishing the people before he had consolidated power.

Now, how you stop him from consolidating power, that’s a trickier matter. But Trump is casting a lot of hostages to fortune. This big, multibillion-dollar digital-coin thing he’s doing—people don’t maybe understand exactly what these coins do or how they work, but they are aware that the president is a vastly wealthier man than he was before he took office. And a lot of that money is coming from foreigners. And a lot of those foreigners seem to have received other kinds of benefits from Donald Trump. They notice, and they’ve heard of, that he got a gift of a plane from a foreign emirate, that foreign emirates are pouring money into his pocket, in the pockets of his children, of other people in his administration, his negotiators. And they know they’re paying more. Trump did it in the wrong sequence, and I think he’s in real danger of losing at least the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate. And it may be a wave too big to rig. Although certainly there are projects to gerrymander and to use the military in a way to suppress the vote.

He’s doing it in the wrong order, and he’s exposing himself to tremendous risks. And as he makes these mistakes, we all need to keep in mind: We’re not spectators to this drama. Every one of us has some potential to be an active participant in the drama. There was a saying in the first Trump term: LOL, nothing matters. But the truth is: Everything matters. There’s just a lot of everything, and it’s up to each and every one of us to do our little part, whatever that is. To say, You know what? We don’t accept what is being done.