Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

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 p