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The Atlantic’s David Frum opens this episode of The David Frum Show with a statement about Trump’s Iran strikes. The strikes fulfilled commitments of past presidents, who have long maintained that the U.S. would not allow an Iranian nuclear bomb. David also makes the point that Trump, who has already abused peacetime powers, is now a wartime president, a role that will allow him to wield even larger powers—and do even greater damage.
Then David is joined by the author and editor Tina Brown for a conversation about the disorienting effects of extreme wealth. They discuss how billionaires often become detached from reality, how philanthropy is used to consolidate image and influence, and how Brown’s personal experience with Donald Trump shaped her understanding of his ego and evolution.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show, in an America that suddenly finds itself at war in the Middle East under the leadership of President Trump. My guest today is Tina Brown, the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, author of the Fresh Hell Substack.
I recorded this dialogue with Tina Brown before the outbreak of hostilities. We’re going to continue with it because I think it says a lot of important things by Tina about the political culture of the United States today. But I am recording on the Monday morning after the strikes. I’m in a different location, obviously, as you’ll see from the location I was in when I recorded the dialogue with Tina.
And of course, we’re in a different world, a world in which the United States has struck Iran with air power and which calls for some new thinking and some new approaches.
For many Americans, nothing much has changed politically. They opposed Donald Trump before the war, and they oppose Donald Trump now that he’s led the country into a war. For those of us on the center right or on the Never Trump side, things are a little bit more complicated. Among the reasons that me and people like me opposed Donald Trump was not just—along with our many, many coalition partners spreading across the American spectrum—his disdain for democracy, his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, his authoritarianism, his corruption. We also had very particular political concerns.
The thing that led me and people like me to the political right in the first place was our belief in American global leadership—leadership of willing partners and allies, leadership based on respect, leadership based on mutual benefit, leadership based on commerce and trade. Donald Trump rejected all of those ideas. His vision is one of an America isolated and alone, an America that dominates, an America that may be feared but is not respected and certainly is not liked or trusted, because he’s not liked or trusted. And through his first term and the opening months of the second, that logic prevailed.
But by striking the Iranian nuclear program, in support of Israel at war in defense of itself, Donald Trump did something that is more or less in line with what a President McCain might have done or a President Romney might have done—the kind of action that, had it been done by a President McCain or a President Romney, me and people like me would’ve supported. And so we are in a kind of quandary today: A president whom we fear and reject, and whom we see as a threat to American democracy, has this one time done something in line with established Republican values, established conservative principles, established principles of American global leadership, rather than in defiance and rejection of them.
So what do we do and how do we think about that? Do we forget that this president is unworthy and untrustworthy? Or do we discard our past principles about what America’s role in the world should be, and object to this latest act, which we would’ve supported had it been done by another president, reject it because it was done by a president we reject? So this is the dilemma. So let me just tell you—not to give advice to anybody—about how I think about this. I’ve written a little bit about this for The Atlantic, but I’m going to talk more about it today.
Donald Trump remains a dangerous and unacceptable leader of the United States, an enemy of democracy and an enemy of America’s role in the world, and he’s now leading the country into war. Now, we hope that this war will be brief and decisive. We hope that the strike on the Iranian facilities will be one and done, the facilities will be destroyed, the nuclear program will be terminated (as every president since Bill Clinton has wanted to terminate the Iranian nuclear program), it will be done in a decisive and relatively cost-free way, and that things will now return to the usual programming.
But we have to be ready for the possibility that these hopes do not come to pass. That, in fact, Donald Trump has opened his way into a new chapter in American history, that the Iranians will retaliate, that the situation will become more and more unsettled—the Iranians will retaliate not only with conventional military means, or not only with missiles and barrages, but also by a campaign of global terrorism against American interests and other interests in the United States and around the world, and that we are at the beginning of something, not the end of something. I don’t predict that, but the mind has to be prepared for it. That is a real possibility. Donald Trump may have converted himself into a wartime president for a long time to come.
And if the powers that Donald Trump has asserted in peacetime were unprecedented, en large, think of what he will do during war. In peacetime, he said that people illegally present in the United States, or those who looked like they might be illegally present, they had no due-process rights. People around him have been itching to say that American citizens and American permanent residents don’t have due-process rights either. And in wartime they can maybe make that stick. They have attempted to suppress the free-speech rights of people they don’t like, and of institutions they don’t like, and of universities they don’t like.
Well, in wartime, they may have more ambition against free-speech-like rights of people they don’t like. We’ve seen Donald Trump use bits and pieces of past presidential emergency powers to create a whole tariff system that raises billions of dollars of revenue without Congress, as not an emergency measure but as a permanent measure of presidential one-man revenue without reference to Congress. And in wartime, those powers get bigger still. And again, he’ll have larger powers to raise revenue without Congress.
So a presidency that was dangerous before becomes more dangerous still. But the war that he’s begun was necessary, and the things he did were the things that a normal president would’ve done. So we have to find ways to keep true to both our principles about American leadership—and when I say “we,” I mean people who think like me and me, and this is advice also to myself—without abating one bit our wariness of the kind of president Donald Trump is.
Donald Trump always wants personal thanks. He’s always demanding that people say “thank you” to him. And for those of us who support the action against the Iranian nuclear facilities, he wants thanks from us: Thank you, President Trump. So let me just give him what he wants for a second. Thank you, President Trump, for once in your misbegotten presidency doing a right thing, even if you did it in a high-handed and irresponsible way.
I mean, the idea that you would brief the Republican leaders of House and Senate and not the Democratic leaders of House and Senate, as any president before you he would’ve done, that’s just oafish and churlish and rude and insulting and gratuitous because the suggestion here is: We can’t trust Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to keep a secret that we trust Mike Johnson and John Thune to keep. Really? Really? That’s what you want to say as you lead a united country into a conflict, where you’re going to be coming back maybe for supplemental appropriations, and where the work is done by Americans of all points of view, all races, all backgrounds. It’s kind of a small point, but the fact that the secretary of defense couldn’t remember that there was a woman who was piloting one of the B-2s, and referred only to “our boys.” What’s the need for that kind of gratuitous insult?
But we don’t want to lose sight of either of the truths that it is necessary to shut down the Iranian nuclear program and that American leadership is welcome, and the truth that the president exercising this leadership is a dangerous figure. We’ll have to be able to keep track of both, and that’s complicated. But politics is sometimes complicated. And that’s going to be a challenge for me because, like all of us, I get into the flow of discussion. I can get heated. I can overstate things. I can say things one way too much or one way too little the other way.
We are in a situation of conflict. The conflict was necessary. The leadership is unreliable, untrustworthy, and dangerous. And there is now an ever-present and probably growing danger that the leadership of the United States will use this conflict to expand their powers to do illegitimate things in illegitimate ways. And as much as we mistrusted them before, we must mistrust them even more now.
How do you support all of this out? I often cite a parable—or a fairy story—that was written by the American writer James Thurber. And because I don’t want to trust my memory as to how exactly James Thurber said it, I printed it out this morning. It’s quite short, so I’m going to read it. And I think it’s a lesson that applies to a lot of us in our politics. It’s the story of a bear who could take it or leave it alone, and here’s how it goes. It’s just a couple of paragraphs:
In the woods of the Far West there once lived a brown bear who could take it or let it alone. He would go into a bar where they sold mead, a fermented drink made of honey, and he would have just two drinks. Then he would put some money on the bar and say, ‘See what the bears in the back room will have,’ and he would go home. But finally he took to drinking by himself most of the day. He would reel home at night, kick over the umbrella stand, knock down the bridge lamps, and ram his elbows through the windows. Then he would collapse on the floor and lie there until he went to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened.
At length the bear saw the error of his ways and began to reform. In the end he became a famous teetotaler and a persistent temperance lecturer. He would tell everybody that came to his house about the awful effects of drink, and he would boast about how strong and well he had become since he gave up touching the stuff. To demonstrate this, he would stand on his head and on his hands and he would turn cartwheels in the house, kicking over the umbrella stand, knocking down the bridge lamps, and ramming his elbows through the windows. Then he would lie down on the floor, tired by his healthful exercise, and go to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened.
Moral: You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
So that’s the moral we all face. We don’t want to fall flat on our face, and we don’t want to lean over too far backwards. We don’t want to let our mistrust of Trump—if those of you who are on the Never Trump and conservative side, on the American leadership side, on the belief in free trade and American military power and the leadership of global alliances—you don’t want to let your mistrust of Donald Trump lead you to reject this very necessary shutdown of the Iranian nuclear program, a program that was aimed at extinguishing the state of Israel and committing Act II of the attempted genocide of the Jews that Hitler tried in the 1940s.
You don’t want to be led there, but neither do you want to be led by your “thank you, President Trump” attitude to overlooking how dangerous the situation now is, how he will abuse wartime powers in a way that will amplify and extend the abuse of the powers that he’s been doing, and that he will try to create an atmosphere in this country of hostility to rights and due process and free speech even worse than that which just prevailed in the first half of this year, in the beginning of his presidency. We face two dangers, and we have to confront both. It’s not going be too easy. But I’m now going to forget—I don’t want to jumble this quote—but as somebody wise once said, it’s not an easy duty being an American. It just got a little bit harder after Donald Trump’s actions in Iran. So I will now open our dialogue with Tina Brown.
I want to make—I have two other bits of housekeeping to take up. As I said, I’m recording in the conference room of the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario. Thank you to the Royal Hotel for their hospitality. The interview was conducted in my usual recording studio at home in Washington, D.C.
I also want to mention two things leftover from last week’s podcast with Karim Sadjadpour, when we talked about Iran and Iran’s culture. I referenced Karim’s book, but I gracelessly omitted to mention his title. For those of you who’d like to understand better what is going on inside Iran, Karim’s book is Reading Khamenei, named for the supreme leader of Iran, and it is the most insightful thing I’ve ever read about the political ideology, the religious beliefs of the supreme leader of Iran. And that may be a useful thing. Take a look at now: Reading Khamenei, by Karim Sadjadpour.
And I also want to correct a mistake I made in last week’s podcast, where I referenced chess as a Persian invention. So I’m corrected by those who know this history better than I do, that chess originated in India and then spread westward via Persia to the Arab world and from there on onto Europe, all in the Middle Ages. So it’s an Indian invention spread by the Persians, not a Persian invention. And I thank those who corrected me on that.
We are in for some difficult times. I’m hoping you’ll find this conversation with Tina Brown a kind of diversion and tonic in these difficult times. There will be more difficult things to talk about on future episodes of The David Frum Show.
But now my dialogue with Tina Brown, recorded before the strikes on Iran by President Trump.
[Music]
Frum: What a pleasure to be joined today by Tina Brown, who has led one of the most storied careers in journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Her talent was identified early and rapidly as an undergraduate at Oxford. She was given the job of reviving the moribund Tattler magazine and turning it into the prototype of the great glossy magazines we knew and loved in the 1980s and 1990s. From there, she resurrected the defunct title of Vanity Fair and made it into, again, the true American institution it has remained. She hauled The New Yorker into the modern age, adding—this is gonna be a little bit of a shock for those of you who remember the old magazine—she added photographs to The New Yorker, among many other innovations. That, at the time, was regarded as somewhere between blasphemy and heresy, but she survived it and made The New Yorker, brought it into the modern age.
And then she invented Talk magazine, one of the great journalistic innovations of the early 2000s. From there, she created the Daily Beast website, which flourishes, and where I worked for her—a story that I’ll tell in a minute. She founded the Women in the World conference series; wrote six books, including the Vanity Fair Diaries, which I reviewed in The Atlantic; and now she is the author and editor of the Fresh Hell Substack with almost 40,000 subscribers, including my wife and my mother-in-law, both of whom swear by it. They swap it back and forth by email.
It is such a great pleasure to welcome you, Tina, and I have to begin by telling a story of the management secrets of Tina Brown. This is a story you have probably forgotten, but I remember vividly how I was hired. And there’s a story there that I think goes into the book Management Secrets of Tina Brown that I think the world needs to know.
So I had been running for three years a website called Frum Forum, and it had a lot of impact—one of our contributors went on to be vice president of the United States—but it wasn’t very financially stable, and it was becoming more and more at work. And I was reaching that kind of breakdown point. And just at the moment when I said, “I have to change my life,” I got an email, an invitation to lunch with the legendary Tina Brown. And at lunch, she offered me a job at Daily Beast / Newsweek, and she said, Name your price. So I went home and thought about this and decided to take the job. It offered an exit from an intolerable situation, and I thought about, sort of, what I thought my service was worth. I added a little premium to what I thought my service was worth, and I called back and said, I’m delighted to accept, and the figure I propose is X. And Tina, you then said, Would you consider Y? Y being $10,000 a year more than X.
Tina Brown: Oh God. (Laughs.)
Frum: I was stunned. I was stunned. I was so floored by this. And I said, Sure. But what I did not understand was that by accepting Y instead of X, what I’d set myself up for was, at that point, anytime Tina Brown called me at 4 in the morning to say I need 2,000 words by 7 in the morning— (Laughs.)
Brown: (Laughs.) Of course, it was a complete ploy. I had your nuts in a jar, David.
Frum: (Laughs.) But it worked. And I recommended to people that you just top it up a little bit, and then you can ask for anything. And they will do it.
Tina, the question I wanted to ask you was prompted by an essay you wrote in your brilliant newsletter, where you talked about the secret of the plane. And it struck me—and maybe this was always true; maybe we only know about it because of social media—but so many of the leading figures in American business today, the billionaires at the top of so many institutions, seem to be clinically crazy. And you had a theory that explained what was going wrong with them.
Brown: Well, I believe, strongly, that it all starts with the private plane, and it goes from there, okay?
Frum: (Laughs.)
Brown: I mean, you have to have flown on a private plane to understand that and be kind of empathetic to it. I have actually flown on a couple of very wealthy friends’ private planes, and once you’ve experienced that buttery leather, that sinking into that seat, that running to the tarmac, like, No, it’s going to wait for you. There’s no such thing as not getting your plane. It waits for you. And it takes off when you are good and ready. And then the steward comes around and gives you what he knows you like, and it goes on like this until you land, sleepily, not even wearing a seatbelt half the time. You land at some gorgeous place. Out of it, you step into a sort of beast of a motorcade kind of car and get whisked to the boat or wherever it is that you are going.
These experiences sort of change you for life, and you think, There is no one that I wouldn’t bribe, betray, sleep with to be freed from the armpit of mass transit. I mean, this is the thing. So once they’ve experienced this, they can never go back. And it gets more and more important to them. I mean, their families all want to be on it. They want to take their friends to the guest villas on it. It sort of starts to dominate the life.
So this, of course, makes corporate executives, for a start—that is always a major part of the negotiation in their raises. So whatever bonus they get, the major thing they have to have is, And I also get to have the private plane, not just a couple of times a year to go to a conference but whenever I want this private plane, with whoever I want on this private plane, and also that I can use it during my vacations. And it goes on and on and on. So finally, this private plane is dominating everything.
A major [mergers and acquisitions] negotiator said to me that one of the things that happens in mergers is the thing that will allow—you know, there’s two CEOs. One of them has to go. It’s easy to get rid of the one who wants to go if you allow them to deal with, quote, “the social issues,” it’s known as. And the social issues is: You get the plane whenever you like. You can step down. You won’t be CEO, but you get use of the plane. So that, I think, is one of the beginnings of it all.
And then of course, with presidents—ex-presidents—the first thing they have to think about is, when you had Air Force One, I mean, that’s the ultimate private plane. So they start thinking about six months before they go, Who’s gonna fly me private? I mean, and actually, I would argue that the people who made the cut on Obama’s, you know, ill-fated 60th birthday party, when he suddenly found he had to cut the list, it’s worth looking at that list and seeing how many of them could provide the Obamas with wheels—wings, rather—because that has become a major factor in the Obamas’ life. Obama won’t even kind of cross the road without a private plane at this point. It just takes over.
Frum: I’m not going to use names, because it seems invidious. Also, there’s some litigation risk. But we have seen this, if you follow social-media platforms, happening in real time, where people start off being the usual kind of CEO with CEO attitudes, the usual kind of rich man with rich man attitudes. And then—maybe it was COVID, maybe something like that—between 2020 and 2025, a lot of people who didn’t seem especially crazy before have descended into paranoid madness.
And one of the things I was really struck by—you had this moving recent review, evocation, of your friend Barry Diller’s book, and he seems to have been immune to this disease. We can name him as one of the people who’s, like, on the other side of this. There’s something about him that he seemed to remain levelheaded and morally centered at a time when so many people in his class and category have gone off the rails. Is there some secret there we can learn about why billionaires go crazy?
Brown: Well, I mean, I think in Barry’s case, first of all, he has a very strong, sort of ironic sense of humor. Secondly, I think he’s always felt something of an outsider, because as we know, as he’s now revealed to the world—everyone knew before, but now he’s revealed it personally—that he was gay. And that was not something he’d come out about but kind of changed, I think, his outlook a bit to the world, and the sense that he always felt a little bit on the outside, so that he never quite became as complacent as people do when they’re superrich. And I think, thirdly, because he’s always done the work. He loves the work itself.
I think that most of these kind of high-flying billionaires, as soon as they can kind of extricate themselves from the actual work—the sort of nitty-gritty, grungy process of making a buck, as it were—and that’s when they really start to lose it. Barry’s always liked the actual work of making films, making deals. He actually likes the work. I think it keeps him grounded. That is my theory. I think, obviously, we saw someone like a Warren Buffet. He never lost his sense of sanity.
I think what’s really made them all crazy recently is the numbers, the size of these digital fortunes. There was a huge amount of, I think, wealth envy. Always—there’s always been wealth envy. I think, actually, journalists are particularly afflicted by wealth envy because they spend so much time in the company of and reporting on people with so much more money than they have. Now, of course, journalists are now basically walking around with tin cups, seeing if they can get a few bucks here and there, so they feel, particularly, rage at how much better off everybody is.
But I think with, say, bankers, for instance—they always had, you know, massive amounts of money. Earlier in the century, there were people with $1 billion and people with $40-million-a-year bonuses and so on. But these digital fortunes, of the likes of Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg and all of them, are in such a different level. They make everybody feel impoverished. So now they’re all completely obsessed. I mean, $1 billion is no longer a sort of an attainment. It’s got to be double-digit billions to feel that you are remotely in that class with those people.
Frum: Well, I have a thought to cheer up the journalists, because one of the things we have learned from this age of social media is: When people have tired, wearied of the work that Barry Diller is doing—when they’ve made unimaginable amounts of money; when they are truly permanently, generationally rich; when they’re so rich that their great-grandchildren will be still among the richest people in America—when they get there and can do anything, what do they want to do? They want a shitpost on Twitter. (Laughs.) That’s what they want to do. And if you’re a journalist, wait a minute—this angry billionaire who has 175,000 followers, he looks at your 525,000 followers and says, That guy, he’s the problem.
And it was all symbolized by Elon Musk’s blue-check-mark revolution, that he destroyed Twitter because he was so mad that people who were correspondents for The New York Times or Washington Post had blue check marks, and his billionaire friends who were check-posting away to their 12,000 neo-Nazi followers didn’t have blue check marks, and he wrecked Twitter, wasted $40-plus billion all to make a revolution of the blue check marks.
Brown: Yeah. I think they’re also obsessed with profile too. I mean, people always want what they haven’t got, so it’s not enough just to be an obscure billionaire, you know? You also want to have a podcast that someone listens to. I mean, they put out their own YouTube interview things and, like, their Christmas-card list listens to it, if you know what I mean. I mean, it’s nothing; nobody listens.
And that is, for them, I think, a very galling thing. Of course, it’s even more so when they think about going into politics, because, as we saw with Mike Bloomberg—bam! If you are a billionaire who goes into politics, all of a sudden, you are grounded with a total sort of jolt because people are finally telling you what they think about you, right? I mean, nobody ever tells you what you think about them if they’re really, really rich.
I did actually ask a billionaire friend of mine—who I like very much, who’s actually very smart, very sort of low-key, whatever—I just said to him, How did money change you? Because I’m rather obsessed with this moment. Like, what is the pivot moment when they lose it, when a person who is a very hardworking, driven guy turns into this other creature. And I said to him, What was the tip? What was the thing that really changed—money changed for you? And he said, It wasn’t that money changed me. It changed them. He said, It changed the way people responded to me, and that was the difference. It’s like, Now everyone I meet wants something from me, and I know that the conversation is really concealing what they really want from me, which is something, which is not just my conversation, my company, my whatever. It’s, I really want you to give me money for my charity, my this, my that; get me a job. So I think that makes them feel extremely insecure, and that makes them only want to mix with one another too.
Frum: Yeah, so you have this phenomena where, Yeah, I’ve worked hard; I’ve done these things. I mean, it’s nice if they have real achievements delivering real goods and services. This is where Jeff Bezos is a kind of different cat from some of the others. I mean, the world really is a better place because of Jeff Bezos. I’m not sure the world is a better place because of Mark Zuckerberg, and I’m pretty sure that the world is a—
Brown: Oh, my God, no.
Frum: And I’m pretty sure the world is a worst place because of all the crypto billionaires.
Brown: Yeah, without doubt.
Frum: So there are actual social negatives, unlike Bezos. Unlike people like the people who built iron and steel. But then they arrive at the point where they say, I’ve got some thoughts about Ukraine. I’ve got some thoughts about the origin of the COVID virus. I’ve got some thoughts about how universities should be run. And most people listen, and they think, You’re full of shit. You don’t know anything.
Brown: Yes, but they don’t tell them that. They don’t tell them that.
Frum: Your thoughts are worthless. You got a C in grade 10 chemistry; don’t tell us where the COVID vaccine virus came from. You can’t possibly—even if you’re right, it’s just a lucky guess. You have no thoughts worth hearing on Ukraine. Your thoughts are negatively worth hearing. And they get angry: Why don’t people listen to me, and what’s the point of all this money if I can’t get people to listen attentively and respectfully to my stupid views?
Brown: But you know what? The only other thing that just really makes me nuts, actually, is if I just feel that these billionaires have no respect, essentially, for what we do, for instance. They have no respect for it, and in the same way that Trump has absolutely no respect for what people do in these agencies or in these—it’s like they just have no respect for it. They have respect for someone who may be an absolute sort of fool but who has $150 million, which he then makes into $1 billion, but they have no respect for someone who understands science or health or who writes great sentences or whatever. Journalists are really at the—and writers—are at the bottom of the pyramid in terms of having any respect from the digital fortunes in Silicon Valley, as far as I can see.
Frum: I don’t care whether they respect me or not. I don’t care what their opinions are—my feelings are hard to hurt. But what happens with a lot of these people—Trump is an example of this—is you’ve got the world’s leading expert on gravity in front of you, and maybe he’s not a billionaire, so you don’t respect him, and you lift a bowling ball over your head and say, I’m about to drop this bowling ball, and watch it float over my head.
Brown: (Laughs.)
Frum: And the world’s leading expert on gravity says, That’s not what’s going to happen. Release that bowling ball. It is going to fall on your head and inflict brain damage.
Nonsense, you don’t have a billion dollars. Your opinion is not worth hearing. Watch me hoist this bowling ball. And that is what Trump has been doing on tariffs. That’s what his henchmen have been doing on vaccines. I mean, this administration, one of the enduring consequences of the Trump administration is they have paused research on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s at a time when we’re about to make huge breakthroughs, I’m told by people who do know what they’re talking about. Huge breakthroughs in these areas.
And look—from the point of view of 80 years from now, no one 80 years from now will care whether the cure comes in 2030 or 2040. But if you’re one of the people who is fated to develop the condition between 2030 and 2040, it’s going to matter a lot to you that Trump shoved off the discovery of the cure by eight years or a decade.
Brown: Well, I think it might actually be affecting us in 80 years, only because you lose a whole generation of talent. I know that scientists, particularly, are feeling this, that these people who’ve now just been scattered to the winds, you don’t just get them back. You don’t just blow a whistle and say, Okay, Trump era is over. Come back. Reassemble. To sort of really crater these institutions, it’s really hard to rebuild them.
I mean, any of us have seen that with anything, even in the entertainment industry. If you completely trash HBO, you know what I mean? It’s like, that was a crown jewel of television, and to reassemble this amazing cadre of people that was, like, one person at a time, one person at a time. This person who was a foil to this person, this person who really balanced that person. It’s a very delicate calibration when you build a talent empire, as it were, and I think it’s very hard to bring it back.
Frum: You may get back the person at the peak of his or her career who’s migrated to the University of British Columbia or gone to France.
Brown: Right.
Frum: You may be able to summon them back, but the person who is today 23 or 24, just finishing a star undergraduate in biology and is deciding where should they apply their talent? Should they apply them to pure research, or should they go and work, make a better antihistamine for a big pharmaceutical company? Not that making a better antihistamine is not a valid way to spend your life, and it certainly pays more. But the purpose of government funding was to say, In addition to antihistamines, we also need cures for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and here’s a very satisfying, maybe not as lucrative, but very satisfying and fulfilling career with enormous recognition at the peak, should you succeed. And those people will make different choices.
I want ask you—slightly different topic. You were there in the days when—I remember this from the Vanity Fair Diaries—when Donald Trump was fun, speaking of people who have changed. And Danielle and I had—my wife, Danielle, and I had—a brief experience. She sat beside him at a dinner in 2006, just before The Apprentice, and described him as a lot of fun. I mean, kind of a creep and a jerk, but a lot of fun. Where did we lose that? What did we do to forfeit fun Donald Trump?
Brown: Well, I mean, look—he was this big brash, kind of, like, caricature New Yorker. Gold towers, big. I mean, first time I met him was at a lunch that his wife, Ivana at the time, had given. It was some kind of her seasonal holiday lunch. And I was next to Trump. We had a person in between each other—like, he had a boring partner for lunch, and I had a boring partner—so we ended up sort of talking across at each other. And he was going like, Oh, you know, I went to the opera. You know, Ivana dragged me to the opera last night. I mean, never again. Pavarotti, who cares? You know, It was five hours. And he made me laugh. It was funny. He was saying the things—which he’s always been good at—that people think but don’t say, right? Trashing the opening of the Met with Pavarotti, some might not want to do that in that circle of people, but he didn’t care, and he was sort of shouting across the table. So he was entertaining.
But things began to change, I think, with him, first of all, the first time the finances started to go south, when he had his first bankruptcy. I mean, our coverage, which, until then, had been of this funny, glitzy—like one of those magazine pieces about the life and times of Donald Trump, with the gold interior decoration, and the parties and all the rest. And we assigned Marie Brenner to go do a piece about him at that moment of bankruptcy, and she wrote a very tough piece, and she actually had the wonderful detail that keeps getting brought out even now, which is that he had a copy of Hitler’s speeches. And he hated the piece—absolutely hated it. And we were all at this dinner at Tavern on the Green, and she was sitting there in an evening dress, and as he passed by behind her, she felt something cold happening. And she turned around, and Donald Trump had emptied a glass of wine down her back.
Okay, so that was a moment when you saw how incredibly, outrageously vindictive he could be when crossed, and he gave her this terrible look. I do actually think that the real darkness set in—and people have said it before—but I was there that evening, and I saw I saw it when Obama roasted him at the famous White House correspondents’ dinner just before he really decided to run. I was sitting behind Trump that evening, behind his table, and I saw his neck go from pale salmon to sort of flaming magenta in his absolute fury. And I think that what really angered him was not just this elite cool, effing—you know, Obama, like, bringing him down—but just this room full of what, as he saw it, the liberal media, all laughing. All laughing at him, you know? And with Obama.
And I think he went back to his hotel, and I think he just pounded the pillows and he went, I mean, bananas, I’m sure, that night. Because he has such a wound in him, from God knows what—hideous potty training and parental abuse. But there’s a real wound in Trump when it comes to humiliation. I mean, he is so fragile when it comes to that sense of being humiliated, which perhaps came from school. I mean, he went off to that military school, and maybe he was constantly bullied. Who knows? I don’t think we’ve really got to the bottom of, as it were, the real rosebud of Trump’s huge vulnerability to any kind of criticism and how he goes into a crouch position if he sees anything coming at him that he views as disrespect.
And I think that’s sort of really when he went really seriously dark, and he’s got darker and darker because he essentially then needed to find his tribe once and for all. And that tribe was people who felt like him, who felt humiliated. And that was obviously the MAGA genesis. Those people who had been humiliated, they felt, by the elite who were constantly condescending to them. I think they’re not wrong. And once he’d found his tribe, I think that he saw the actual political opening to exploit that tribe, as he has gone on to do ever since.
Frum: Well, the world changed around him. I mean, Donald Trump has been running for president since 1987.
Brown: Yeah.
Frum: He seriously explored running in 1988. He took out those big ads in all the newspapers about how we were being ripped off by foreigners. He thought very hard about it in the year 2000. In 2011, people forget this, but he was going into the 2012 cycle for a brief moment—not such a brief moment, a few weeks—the front-runner ahead of Mitt Romney, the man who eventually prevailed. And I think it was in that cycle that he went with the birther lie, and that’s what provoked Obama’s derision. But it wasn’t that he hadn’t been thinking about it to that point.
Brown: Right.
Frum: He didn’t think about it very hard.
Brown: No. He had.
Frum: Then he decided against the 2012 cycle. He didn’t decide it against facing an incumbent, and then entered in 2015. And the world was ready for him. Again, what we forget about that 2015 cycle—he declares in, I think, June of 2015. By mid-July, he’s in first place—July of 2015. And although all the wise people, including me, said, This can’t last. This is too crazy. He’s too absurd, he stayed in first place through the whole race, except for one brief period in the late fall of 2015, when Ben Carson was briefly in first place (was also not a very plausible choice either). But there was no point in the 2015–2016 cycle when the leadership of the party was not in the hands of someone who, a generation ago, had been regarded as laughably unfit to lead a party into a presidential election.
Brown: Absolutely. But I think some of that, as well, is the complete switch into the entertainment culture that America now is, right? Of which he played a big role, in a sense, with The Apprentice. But I think in those years, America became more and more addicted, if you like, to the reality shows—the Kardashians, all of this kind of celebration of glitz that he represented.
You know, I remember when his first kind of Republican convention, when we’d had Hillary Clinton: amazing, every star in the world. It was an incredibly sort of glamorous [Democratic] convention. And his kind of convention was such a—he couldn’t even get any big stars to perform, and so on, and it looked like it was this kind of hokey, pathetic, Republican convention. But the Trump plane lands, and streaming across the tarmac is the Trump family with him. And there they all are with their long, blonde hair and him with his red tie and their plane saying Trump.
And I just thought, Oh my God. He’s going win, because in a sense, they were like what everybody wanted to be in that moment. I mean, Hillary Clinton’s fans sort of thought that every woman wanted to be essentially like a Hillary Clinton, you know, hardworking. No, a lot of women want to sit by the pool in dark glasses, like Melania. I think more women want to be like Melania than they probably did want to be like Hillary Clinton. That’s what they’re looking to be. I mean, if you’re lucky, you get that money, and you have that plane, and you have a husband who’s got big shoulders and a red tie.
And the whole thing was just such a kind of fantastic sort of stereotype of a certain kind of aspiration. And it was very powerful to see actually.
Frum: It’s like a nightmare version of a kind of star power. Like, to many, it’s repelling. You were the great student of American star power, and you’ve written very vividly about what it felt like when even pre-presidential Bill Clinton entered a room, that you suddenly knew that someone was in the room. Do you, as you look around the world today, see in the realm of politics, people in the nonincumbent sphere who have that kind of light-up-the-room star power.
Brown: I mean, the only one I think who’s got any real charisma actually is a woman. And that’s Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny.
Frum: She’s constitutionally ineligible, unfortunately.
Brown: Well, unfortunately she is, but oh my God. I interviewed her in London, in May, and I really didn’t feel I’d met anybody that charismatic since Princess Diana. I mean, she’s like this column of alabaster, with this fire-and-ice kind of feel, that she’s both warm and absolutely sort of sensual in one level and yet also fiercely steely in others, and dressed in this incredible pale, sort of dark blue designer suit. She’s 5’11”. I mean, my God, she’s absolutely extraordinary. But no, the idea that she will become president of Russia is very, very remote.
In terms of the others, as it were, I haven’t seen anyone. I was quite a fan of Macron, but ever since his wife slugged him in the face, his kind of charisma has diminished, as far as I’m concerned. (Laughs.)
We haven’t really seen any star power. I guess Justin Trudeau at a certain point did have it, but now, again, he just feels like, so yesterday’s man. He couldn’t maintain it.
Frum: In this country, anyone that you see that makes your Spidey sense tingle?
Brown: I mean, I haven’t seen it really. Actually, I was watching the rather good, actually, CNN documentary about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. And I was looking at it and thinking, Oh, Admiral McRaven, why did you never run for office? He is somebody who—he is now a little too old, I think, but talk about charisma. I mean, the guy—and you see him in his white dress suit, and he’s got this baritone voice, but he’s got this incredible, steady, noble, masculine, but not horrible macho, which is quite different from masculine attributes. So I’d love to see somebody like him. But I don’t see that, unless there’s a sort of Admiral McRaven sort of brewing in some place that we don’t really know.
I think Wes Moore is very charismatic, but I fear maybe too lightweight. It’s not enough to have just the magnetism. However, if I had to choose magnetism over, Oh, he’s brilliant behind closed doors, but unfortunately, he is not great, forget about it, as far as I’m concerned, because this is an entertainment culture. So if you can’t get up there and get that room magnetized, just don’t even consider it. Like, go to work at the Brookings. Just get out of my face, is what I feel.
Frum: Well, there’s also the problem, as we’ve learned from the Biden experience, when people say of someone, Oh, he’s brilliant behind closed doors, two things may be true: One is he’s genuinely brilliant behind closed doors and it doesn’t show in public, and the other is he’s surrounded by people who lie about him.
Brown: (Laughs.) Well, that’s completely, absolutely true. But think about it. I mean, they always—they said it about so many people, though. Like, it’s funny about Mitt Romney: When you get him off stage, they’ll say. Or Al Gore, He was so different. He wasn’t stiff at all off stage. You know what, it is too bad. I mean, what we’re all looking at is you on stage, pal. And if you don’t have it, don’t run.
Frum: Well, we all watched the Mitt Romney documentary and saw how winning and charming he indeed could be in private. But there’s a problem, which is: We have this bias that the private self is the true self, and the public self is a construction. But if you’re seeking a public career, your public self is a true self. So, you know, it may be that some of these people around Trump are inwardly conscientious, decent people, which is lovely for their families and loved ones and those who rely on them personally. But if in your public role, if you behaved in an unethical way, if you lie in public, then from a public perspective, that’s who you are, not the person in private. That’s just a matter of interest to your intimates.
Brown: Yeah, I think that’s so true. But I mean, I also do think, though, the performative stuff, you’ve really got to now be very good at it, indeed. I mean, better than you ever—I mean, obviously, we’ve known ever since the sort of JFK–Nixon debate how important it is to be able to be good on television. But now you’ve got to be good in every way. You’ve got to be good at all of it. You have to have that sort of wit that can really genuinely write your own tweets, as it were, because that’s the voice that people believe in. It’s not going to feel true if it’s being written by some sort of campaign aide. You have to be able to do it.
I mean, actually, to go back to Alexei Navalny again. Talk about a charismatic leader. He had these incredible performative skills, and he was able to use social media, deployed video. He was a multi-platform, gifted user of the media, essentially. And that’s what I’m sort of looking for. It’s almost like I feel we could teach him about geopolitics. You can have an adviser on the side who tells you that, but you’ve got to be able to sell it to somebody.
Frum: Well, also, one more thing: He was a genuine hero. And that is something you can’t synthesize, right? Maybe you can teach someone to be charismatic, but you can’t teach someone to be brave and to be great.
I’m going to end, actually, with—that reminds me of something I want to say about the Tina Brown school of management at the end, which is: I remember one of your sayings about training journalists, and you said, I can teach you to write a lede. I can teach you to write an ending. I can teach you how to edit, but I can’t teach you to see.
Brown: Right.
Frum: And I have thought—I have thought about the sentence a thousand times. I’m sure it’s more than that. And whenever I see young journalists and I’m trying to give them advice, I quote that and just say, You either see things or you don’t see things, and if you don’t see them, you’re never going to learn.
Brown: Right.
Frum: And look—accounting is a stable, well-regarded-for, respected profession. You don’t have to do what we do, because not only is there no money, but there’s, in fact, no glamor. (Laughs.)
Frum: Tina, thank you so much. It has been one of the joys and honors of my life to know you.
Brown: Thank you. Such fun.
Frum: Thanks for joining the program.
Brown: Loved catching up with you. Thank you, David.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Tina Brown for joining me today—recorded, as I said, before the strikes on Iran by President Trump. If you appreciated this conversation, I hope you will consider supporting our work by subscribing to The Atlantic, which is the best way to support my work and that of my colleagues at The Atlantic and America’s most important magazine, more important than ever. I hope you will consider joining us there.
Thank you to my friends at the Royal Hotel in Picton, Ontario, for allowing me the hospitality of their board room here. And thanks to all of you. I hope you will like the podcast, subscribe to it, share it in any way you can.
And one more personal note: You may have noticed that here in Picton, as in the studio in Washington, over my shoulder, there are always flowers. Those are thanks to my wife, Danielle. Danielle Crittenden Frum, who grows them, cuts them, and arranges them. She’s done that again for me today, and I’m so grateful to her for that, as I am to you for joining this and, I hope, future episodes of The David Frum Show, brought to you by The Atlantic.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
I also, before we sign off, have to make a correction, an error I made in the last podcast. I referred to Secretary of Defense Esper, who served in the first Trump term—, I referred to him by, gave him his first name as Michael. It is in fact, Mark, and I regret that mistake and I correct it here.
And thanks, thanks to all who brought it to my attention.
That’s it for The David Frum Show this week. Please join us again next week for another episode of The David Frum Show.
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