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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 protecting Jewish students from abusive action by anti-Israel demonstrators. That does not justify the administration saying, Okay, we’re coming after you using the process of law, we’re disrupting funds to cancer research, all unless your faculty agree to say the following list of things that we command them to say.
I can be concerned by the things that the universities are doing that are bad without having to come up with some clever, counterfactual, counter-imaginative justification for things that are obviously outrageous. We’re all going to like something, but we have to keep our sense of proportion. We have to understand that the main thing is the main thing. And, as I said, if God inflicted stupidity on you, it’s not your fault, but don’t choose it. That’s just annoying.
And now my dialogue with Tom Nichols. But first, a quick break.
[Break]
Frum: Tom Nichols is an expert on U.S. military policy who taught first at Dartmouth College, then at the U.S. Naval War College. A lifelong Republican, Tom Nichols has distinguished himself since 2016 as one of the first and truest of the Never Trump Republicans. Since his retirement from academia in 2022, he has been a colleague at The Atlantic. You’ve seen him also on Morning Joe and many other TV shows.
Three things you may not have known about Tom Nichols: First, Tom was a five-time Jeopardy champion. Second, he made a guest appearance as a bloviating cable news talking head on the fantastic TV show Succession. And finally, he earned his early living as a disc jockey, an accomplishment that qualifies him as an especially welcome and cherished guest at Frum family karaoke nights.
Tom, welcome to The David Frum Show. (Laughs.)
Tom Nichols: (Laughs.) Thank you, David.
Frum: So you wrote this very important article for The Atlantic about the coming crisis in civil-military relations. This is a subject you’ve devoted so much of your academic life to. I wanna ask you to sit on the other side of the table for a moment. Imagine yourself—I don’t know that such a thing could ever happen—but imagine yourself a malign and criminally intended president who wanted to remake the U.S. military as a tool of personal power. How would you go about doing it?
Nichols: In this system of government in the United States, the first thing I would do is seize the Justice Department. And by seize, I don’t mean being elected and nominating an attorney general; I mean flushing out all of the people committed to the Constitution, the rule of law—you know, the lawyers. It’s almost a trope now to do the Merchant of Venice line, but you start with getting rid of the lawyers, if you’re going to do these kinds of things, and you replace it with your cronies. You replace it with people that are going to be loyal to you. You basically undo everything that’s been done with the Justice Department over 50 years.
Frum: So the first move at the Pentagon is not at the Pentagon; it’s across the river at the Justice Department.
Nichols: Exactly. Because if you’re a military officer, the people that you’re gonna want an opinion from are lawyers—which is the next step, which is you not only get rid of the lawyers at the Justice Department; you do what Trump’s already done: You get rid of the top lawyers of the Pentagon.
And look, the rule of law requires lawyers and people to interpret the law, and the first people you have to get rid of are anybody who says, My loyalty is to the rule of law, the statutes as written, the Constitution, and not to Donald Trump.
Frum: Because our hypothetical military officers will want advice about what is illegal and what is an illegal order, and—
Nichols: They’re already asking.
Frum: —and who do they turn to? If you have—
Nichols: Yeah, that’s already happening.
Frum: If you’re a three-star or a four-star general and you have a question, Is this a legal or an illegal order?, who do you ask?
Nichols: Well, you would ask the top legal service adviser in your branch, but [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and Trump have fired them all. So now you’ve got guys—there are people doing that job, but you and I both know from working in government, when your boss has been canned and you’re the acting guy, or you’ve been suddenly elevated because people above you have been fired, that’s not a signal to you to be brave and innovative and daring about standing up for the Constitution. You’re sitting in a desk that somebody else had who tried that and got fired. So you might ask them—I can imagine some of these very senior officers are talking to friends or family attorneys or somebody. Because what’s going on, we’ll be talking about—I guess this is the hand-wave “all this”—but all of this, I think, is not legal.
So you capture the Justice Department, you fire the military lawyers, you insist on loyalty from the top commanders—which Trump thinks he has, apparently, with somebody like [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General] Dan Caine—and then you make sure to neuter the intelligence community so that foreign threats or plots or any other things that could interfere with elections in your favor are left undiscovered or uninvestigated.
Frum: Yeah. So you don’t have to remake the officer corps from top to bottom. You don’t even have to start looking for sympathetic two-star generals to replace the three-stars and sympathetic three-stars to replace the four-stars. You just cut them off from information and rely on natural bureaucratic inertia to make them obey you?
Nichols: And the chain of command. Because remember that officers are required to begin from the presumption of legality with an order. The system is designed to make sure that the chain of command functions effectively so that if you’re a colonel or a one-star or a two-star, you have to assume that if the order has come down from the president to the secretary, the advice of the chairman—the chairman’s not actually in the chain of command, but he gives advice—and by the time it gets to you, the assumption is: Well, this must be legal because all these other guys wouldn’t have ordered me to do it.
Frum: So if you get an order to blow up a fishing boat in the Caribbean or the Pacific, you would start with, Well, somebody must have signed off on this. They must have—
Nichols: Somebody signed off, exactly. And the place it should have stopped, of course, is: The attorney general, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should all be standing in the Oval Office, saying, You can’t do this. This isn’t legal. This is a violation of both American and international law. And if the president says, Well, go ahead, just do it, well, by the time it gets to that lieutenant commander in a helicopter or piloting a drone, he or she’s already saying—well, as you just said, David—Somebody must have signed off on this.
Frum: Well, the president of Colombia has charged that at least one of the destroyed boats was a fishing vessel with completely innocent people aboard. Now, the present president of Colombia is kind of a flaky character and certainly someone with strong anti-American feelings, so take that as it may. On the other hand, it would be a pretty bold lie to tell, that it’s a fishing boat, because the United States could refute it. And President [Gustavo] Petro in Columbia is operating in an unsympathetic Colombian political system. He’s quite unpopular. Colombia is a country that normally tilts toward the right, that values cooperation with the United States, where public opinion would be not inclined to be super nationalistic about the United States killing even Colombian national drug traffickers, if they really are. So it would be a bold lie to tell if it is a lie; maybe it’s a lie. But if it’s true, if the United States has killed at least one innocent boat with these, so far, eight—at least that we know of—attacks, what are the legal implications of that? What are the consequences that would follow?
Nichols: Well, this is where I take pains to point out I am not a lawyer. But in international law, if it’s proven, then normally what would happen is the president of the United States says, Oops, our bad. Here is an apology and restitution. Because we have had incidents like that, where we shot down an Iranian airliner in a war zone where a ship skipper misread the signs—
Frum: Nineteen eighty something?
Nichols: Eighty-eight. It was the [USS] Vincennes shooting down—and we said, Mm, here’s some restitution, without going too deep into whether we were right or wrong about it. So the international consequences aren’t—I mean, we’re the United States; we defy these things kind of at will, and we have—
Frum: Okay, but I don’t wanna talk so much about the international implications here. The domestic system. So now you’re the operational commander with responsibility for the Caribbean, and you have an idea that at least one of the eight boats you killed was completely innocent and the people aboard were innocent, and maybe you’re not so sure and you don’t really have great information on the other seven, and now you’re asked to kill a ninth with all aboard.
Nichols: That’s where I think it gets interesting, yeah.
Frum: What does that operational commander do?
Nichols: (Sighs.) The problem is that when it gets down to the level of the operational commander, once again, he says, Well, somebody must have figured this out. The question is, why isn’t this being stopped at the three- and four-star and CJCS [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]?
Frum: Who should be the person who is raising—is it a four-star? Is it the commander of the Joint Chiefs? And we know what Trump is, and unfortunately, we also know what the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is. And I guess it would be originally Pete Hegseth’s job, but if the secretary of defense and the president—and I call him the secretary of defense because that’s his title in law.
Nichols: Yes, thank you.
Frum: He can call himself the secretary of war; he can call himself the secretary of partying, the latter title equally accurate. But the statute that Congress laid down in 1949 says that it’s the Department of Defense, the secretary of defense; you have a quarrel with that, go rename it at the congressional level—it’s a statute. But the secretary of partying, as he might be called, he’s the person who should have this mission, but if he fails, who is the next person to say, I think we may be killing some innocent people here.
Nichols: I would think it’s the chairman—it’s the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He is the president’s top military adviser. That’s why he’s there. He is supposed to be the most senior military officer in the United States advising the president on these issues. He is not actually in the chain of command anywhere.
This came up when Mark Milley got everybody together during January 6 and said, Now, we all understand our jobs, right? He wasn’t ordering anything, but he was convening his colleagues to say, As the president’s top adviser, we all understand what we’re doing here. That should be General Caine.
Now, the thing is, Donald Trump learned—as we painfully know—he learned from his first term. He’s making sure that there isn’t going to be anybody in that room who’s gonna say, Mr. President, it’s a bad idea. What you’re doing isn’t legal. And I suppose the other person that should be there, given the branch having to carry this out, is the secretary of the Navy. But as we know, the secretary of the Navy has never been in the Navy, has no military experience. These people were all chosen to say, Yes, Mr. President, whatever you think is appropriate. And the problem, David, is, to go back to your point about the domestic environment, is that the chain of command, it’s really not supposed to get to some lieutenant colonel or commander on a ship to say, Wait a minute, wait a minute—I don’t think this is legal. I don’t think this is constitutional.
Frum: How does the National Guard fit into the chain of command? We remember in [his] first term, Trump wanted to use the National Guard or other military personnel to shoot lawful demonstrators. He suggested shooting them in the knees. Now we have National Guard patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C. They were in Los Angeles. I don’t know if they’ve all been withdrawn from Los Angeles; I think most have. They’re in Chicago supporting ICE, which is on a kind of lawless rampage. There is talk of sending them to San Francisco, although maybe that’s off the table. How do they fit into the chain of command? Who has the mission of saying, The National Guard should not be shooting demonstrators?
Nichols: Once again—and we know this, again, from the first term—in the first term, it was the secretary of defense and the chairman, again, walking in and saying, Mr. President, don’t do this. This is a bad idea. The National Guard answers to the governor of the state they’re in until the president orders them federalized. And, of course, that’s been the source of multiple court cases, some of which the Trump administration keeps losing or running into injunctions—
Frum: Because you can’t just do it as an act of power. You have to show some basis—
Nichols: Right. You can’t just say, Today, I feel like nationalizing our federal guard—the National Guard, excuse me. However, even in the past, back in the ’80s, Massachusetts—I used to work on the Massachusetts National Guard issue, so it’s kind of this little bit of lost history—Massachusetts tried to tell the federal government, No, our guys are not going to go down and do training that could possibly be involved with the Contras and the Sandinistas and all that stuff. And they were overruled. They said, If they’re in federal training, the governor of Massachusetts can’t decide where they train or what they do. The president has huge amounts of latitude here, which is why he’s going after the National Guard because, obviously, when he talks about using the regular military, then he has to talk about—I mean, we’ve run into Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act. That’s why, I think, he’s talking about invoking the Insurrection Act.
Frum: Because one of the long-standing principles of the United States is the military does not do law enforcement.
Nichols: Right.
Frum: And this was grounded in a series of statutes. The Posse Comitatus, the present law, I forget when it was passed, but it’s quite an ancient law, right—
Nichols: Mm-hmm, yep.
Frum: —Civil War era or something like that?
Nichols: Yep. It’s an old American tradition—let’s face it, David, going back to the Founders—it’s an old American tradition not to have a big standing army. That’s a 20th-century innovation. Before World War II, American soldiers were training with sticks because we would mobilize and then demobilize. So this notion that we have this large standing army would already be kind of making the Founders jumpy. But the idea that you just put them into the streets at will because you’re pissed off is completely antithetical, it’s complete anathema to the American experience.
Frum: So I wanna go back: Who has the mission? So the South Carolina or Texas National Guard is called up, sent to a blue state, and is told something like, We think a lot of the people in this lineup in this swing suburb are probably illegal aliens. And we think they should be detained for 12, 14, 16 hours, or ’til whenever the polls close. Your order is to go detain these people we believe are illegal aliens—I mean, they’re Democrats; they might as well be illegal aliens—detain them and hold them until the polls close. Who has the mission to say, That sounds like kind of an illegal order to me?
Nichols: Well, but they’re being much more clever about it than that. The mission to detain those people and to disrupt those operations goes to ICE. And then the president says, This being a federal agency, I’m not using the military to detain any of these people. I’m simply using the military to protect these other federal agencies while they do their job—
Frum: —of detaining everyone in the voting line—
Nichols: Of detaining everybody in line. It’s very clever. They say, We’re not doing domestic policing. We’re simply securing federal installations, protecting federal employees because the state or the local municipality either can’t or won’t do it.
Frum: Right. Now, I think a lot of this—and I’ve been arguing this; I’ve written this for The Atlantic, and now I hear Democratic politicians talking about it—the game has always been to disrupt the 2026 elections.
Nichols: I think that’s right.
Frum: Because Trump is doing stuff that is so illegal and exposes them to so much jeopardy, personal jeopardy: reaching your hands into the till and taking $230 million out and putting it in your own pocket; tearing down the East Wing and then putting a collection plate around to people who have business before the federal government [that] says, Who wants to build me a ballroom? The TikTok—I keep going on about this—I think TikTok is being sold for something like one-third to one-quarter its actual market value, the 80 percent stake in TikTok USA is being sold to insiders at two-thirds, three-quarters off, an instant windfall.If there is ever an effective Congress again, these things are going to be publicized. There could be all kinds of jeopardy, including personal legal jeopardy.
So he can’t have that. And it’s a two-seat margin in the House of Representatives, and so, yes, you can gerrymander. That’s limited effort. The real prize is to find some way to disrupt the elections in the places where you are most at risk. And then repeat the 2024 experience, or 2020, of saying, Well, there’s so much doubt; well, let’s seat the congresspeople we’re sure of, who are our congresspeople, and let’s put the others in abeyance for weeks or months until we settle all of this.
And the last thing that, as I’m sure you know, is there is this precedent from the 1980s that, when all else fails, when you have a contested seat in Congress and all else fails, the person who ultimately makes the decision whether to seat it is the speaker of the House. And the speaker of the House decides because the courts will not interfere; it’s a political question. They will not interfere in the ultimate question of whether this candidate or that candidate is the true winner. The House is the judge of its own qualifications, says the Constitution.
So we have a big sort of illegal project being built. Is there any check interior to the system that will prevent this project from being carried out?
Nichols: I often think that the states and the cities can say, with a show of force, to say, Our police have this. We’re good. We don’t need you here, that our state cops—we’re good. Because I think part of Trump’s project here—and the way they’re just dragooning people into ICE who have no qualifications, really, is another tell and creating this kind of paramilitary goon squad out of ICE. I always thought of myself as an immigration hawk, and I’m kind of reaching the “Defund ICE” level at this point.
But I think part of Trump’s plan is simply to have these military forces during the elections so visible that people just stay home, that they’re just intimidated out of the public square, that you don’t even have to arrest them. You don’t have to have a big display of force. That the goal of all of this political activity, the goal of everything Trump is doing, is to drive people out of the public square, to say, The Wi-Fi is still working. There’s still 150 channels on TV. Beer is cheap. Gas is affordable. I don’t wanna deal with this. I don’t wanna deal with all of this, and it doesn’t really matter. ’Cause the other thing, I think, that’s the undertone of all this is, Look—it doesn’t really matter who’s in office. They’re all bad. Everybody’s corrupt. And so rather than use the military to inflict violence to stop the elections—you know, gerrymandering and voter suppression work in marginal elections, not huge-turnout elections. And so what they’re really trying to avert is a large Democratic turnout in places where they can pull that off. And I think you’re right. Look at what’s going on right now with this representative from Arizona, [Adelita] Grijalva. The speaker’s just saying, If I have to keep Congress closed to not seat this person, that’s what I’m gonna do.
And I’ll just add one more thing, David. You talked about this kind of orgy of lawlessness here, and it’s a cliché, but it really is just out of control. I actually think a huge part of this is about the [Jeffrey] Epstein files. I really do. I think that when this first became a thing, that’s when Trump went into hyperdrive about throwing things against the wall just to see what sticks, what could distract us. And I hate that. I never thought the Epstein files were important until Trump started acting like they were important.
Frum: What could be in these files that is worse than what we already have?
Nichols: That’s the only part of this that gave me pause. I figured he’s beyond shaming. The man, his shamelessness is his superpower. And this is why initially I said, The Epstein files, who cares? They’re terrible, and everybody knows they’re terrible, and everybody knows these guys were friends. But he’s the guy—it’s kind of like, why did we think Saddam Hussein had WMD [weapons of mass destruction]? Because he was acting like it. Why do we think the Epstein files are radioactive? Because Trump’s acting like it. Maybe they’re not.
But I think this, along with the tariffs going wrong, the economy in the wrong direction—and I think you’re right; I think he knows that if, and this is actually a hopeful sign, he knows that one election in 2026 could be the beginning of the end of all of this. And for them, that’s an existential threat; for Trump and his people, that’s existential. And that’s why he would say, The military is the one institution that has to do what I tell it. Now, that’s not true, as we know, but I think, in his mind, he thinks of the military as toy soldiers.
Frum: Well, let’s revert to this conflict in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Trump has mused about taking it to land. And Venezuela seems to be target A; Colombia has also been indicated as a target. Before Trump became president, there was a lot of talk from Trump allies, including the vice president—in fact, Trump was kind of more cautious on this [than] some of his allies—of doing strikes inside Mexico. And it is true there are cartel operations of different kinds in all of these countries. How much legal authority would a president need to start carrying out land targeting of cartel operations?
Nichols: More than he has now. I was never a fan of these AUMFs, right—the authorizations for the use of military force—that guided us through the, or that were the, in theory, the constraint on the global War on Terror. But at least it was something. It was the president going to Congress and saying, Here’s what I wanna do, and I would like your authorization for it because now I’m gonna spend money to do these things—that’s the other part of it—and because you are the Article I power, and we need to be coordinated as the United States goes to war. Trump is arguing that I can simply determine a threat, point the military at it, and say, “Destroy this.” That is not what Article II says. That is not what the Constitution says.
And I think, first of all, can we just step back and say, What happened to the guy who said, I’m not gonna start any more “stupid wars” like all my predecessors? We’re talking about invading Central America, Latin America? It’s bonkers. But I don’t think that he has anything like the legal authority to do this—but that would require a Congress that actually meets and functions as a Congress.
Frum: I think something people forget about these authorizations to use force: Before 1945, when the United States used military force on any scale, there was a declaration of war—although there were a lot of police actions, especially in Central America. And there are some that continue, like the Philippines insurrection was pursuant to the powers that the president got from declaring war on Spain in 1898, and then there was the aftermath, which was this long insurrection in the Philippines. But he used the powers that were left over—first President [William] McKinley, then President Teddy Roosevelt—left over from the initial declaration of war.
I think one of the reasons they went out of style after 1945 was declarations of war gave the president too much power, and the Congress of the ’50s and ’60s said, Look, we’re not fighting the Soviet Union; we’re fighting Soviet proxies. Yes, we wanna give you certain military powers, but we don’t wanna give you the power to nationalize the entire civilian economy the way you would have if we did a proper Declaration of War, whether it was Korea or Vietnam. So here’s a much more limited grant of military power that is intended to protect the rights of the citizens from the vast powers the president gets with a declaration of war.
But now that game has gone into reverse. We have now a situation where presidents are asserting these—or this president is asserting powers with no basis of any kind, and Congress has not been asked even to give him any kind of authorization. And innocent people may be being killed.
Nichols: Well, in the past, the other way that presidents got around this was to say that they were exercising force in accordance with treaty obligations. And that is a legal out, right? How do you go into Vietnam, for example? You say, Well, we are members of SEATO, Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. This is an alliance obligation. Treaties are the law of the land; the president executes the laws—
Frum: There was also an authorization, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
Nichols: Right, there was a resolution. But the president can always say—God forbid, there had been a World War III, he [could have] said, I can send troops in under my obligations as America as a signatory to the NATO treaty.
There is no treaty. There is no law. There is no—I feel like I’m about to go all Al Gore—no controlling legal authority here that tells the president that he can just go kill people because he happens to think they’re bad for our country. Why not counterfeiters? Why not bootleggers? Why drug black marketeers? Why not just start killing anybody that you happen to think is doing something bad to the United States? And I think he’s doing this—well, I think the link between what he’s doing overseas and the link to domestic politics is very clear. He’s trying to establish the precedent that the military will do what he says, kill the people he wants killed, and undertake the operations he wants undertaken, no matter where they are.
Frum: And I think with the drug case, he’s also trying to make Americans falsely believe, as he often does, that their domestic problems are the fault of foreigners.
Nichols: Of other people, right.
Frum: One of my favorite drug war stories is a story that is told both by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and by George Shultz in their respective memoirs. But the story is that Daniel Patrick Moynihan—you probably know the story—was the first federal drug czar in the Nixon administration. That is, Nixon created an office in the White House, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Moynihan was put in charge, and he became known as the drug czar. And in 1971, the United States executes the largest—in cooperation, I think, with the French police—the largest drug bust in the history of the world to that date: the famous French Connection that became the basis of the Gene Hackman movie—
Nichols: Popeye Doyle, baby.
Frum: So Moynihan is very excited when he gets word, and he commands a helicopter to take him to Camp David to brief the president personally about this tremendous victory, and as he gets into the helicopter, there is Secretary of Labor George Shultz, with the big helicopter earmuffs, reading the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. And Moynihan, over the helicopter communication device, just gushes with enthusiasm: We’ve just completed the biggest drug interception in the history of the world. And Shultz, utterly uninterested, says, Congratulations. Nice job. You don’t understand, says Moynihan. This is the biggest drug bust in the history of the world.Good, [says Shultz], congratulations. And Moynihan’s a little hurt, a little crestfallen. And then he remembers, before Shultz went into government, he taught economics at the University of Chicago: George, I imagine you think that so long as there’s a demand for drugs in the United States, there will be a supply from somewhere. And Shultz now looked up interested for the first time and said, There may be hope for you after all.
Nichols: Yeah, I actually hadn’t heard that story.
Frum: Oh, it’s in both their memoirs, and—
Nichols: It’s a great story.
Frum: —and the point is, Americans were dying in very large numbers from fentanyl overdoses in the teens. It came to a peak in 2020. And then, thanks to different policies, thanks to the availability of drugs that interfere with drug overdoses, those numbers have come down a little bit. But it remains an article of faith to Trump and the people around him and especially to Vice President [J. D.] Vance: This is something that bad foreigners have done to Americans, not that Americans are doing to themselves. And if we can only punish the foreigners enough, virtuous Americans will not be lured into drug dependency. But that’s, of course, not how it works. It’s the demand that brings forth the supply. It’s a domestic problem.
Nichols: There was a great quip, and I’m trying to remember who said it on social media, where somebody said, Yes, we’re in danger from drug traffickers the way that my cholesterol levels are in danger from Dairy Queen. This is something that we seem to learn over and over again. You and I are both old enough to remember the first War on Drugs, the French Connection, then the War on Drugs in the ’80s, and then the War on Drugs in the ’90s, and all it did was drive up the price of drugs and make it more profitable. But the heroin epidemic of the ’70s, you know how that ended; it ended when a lot of people died from taking heroin. That’s what snuffed it out.
Frum: The War on Drugs—I think we didn’t use so much War on Drugs analogy—the logic of the “Just Say No” campaign that was publicized by Nancy Reagan was, that was an attempt to address demand. It’s a triangle—there are three basic remedies, or outcomes, to the drug problem. One is you attack supply. The second is you attack demand. And the third is you learn to live with the drugs. And all of them are evil, right? Learning to live with the drugs means Americans suffer and die in preventable numbers. Dealing with the demand means that Americans go to prison because you punish both the low-level dealers and the users. And the supply means that you end up at war with the rest of the planet and trying to put your fingers in infinite numbers of holes in dikes as the drugs flow in. All of them are imperfect, and sound policy begins with some kind of balance.
But the Trump policy is to say, Look, we are going to blame entirely suppliers, and not only suppliers, but foreign suppliers, and we’re going to kill them, and we are going to imagine that this is doing something, when, of course, as George Shultz will tell us—
Nichols: That’s because it’s not about drugs. I’m convinced that this policy in Central America is not about drugs, David. I think it’s about—
Frum: Training the military to do bad things.
Nichols: Right. I don’t think Donald Trump cares a whit about fentanyl and drugs coming into the United States. I think Donald Trump lives in a world where everything is graded in terms of How does this affect me and help me and help my political fortunes? And other people—J. D. Vance knows better. He tried to set up a nonprofit about this and then kind of walked away from it. Everybody knows that this is not the game. And I think it’s not just to blame it on foreigners, which, of course, is a classic kind of MAGA world grievance issue, right? If you’re unemployed, it’s because of the Chinese. If your kid is in the basement playing video games all day, it’s because of evil programmer somewhere. If your kid’s taking drugs, it’s ’cause of the Mexicans.
Frum: Yeah, or they also like to blame women: If your kid’s in the basement, it’s because no girl will marry him, and we need to punish women some more to make them marry your feckless son.
Nichols: Right. And then the next step is and the answer to this is always to militarize the problem. Every time Trump seems to run into something he can’t solve, you can almost see him saying, Well, maybe the Army can do this.
I think there’s two reasons for it. One is, he is childlike; he is fascinated by displays of military power in the way an 8-year-old is. But also he’s figured out, the whole rest of the federal bureaucracy can slow-roll him, can object, can rat him out to Congress. He is really counting on the military to be the people who keep his secrets, execute his orders, do what they’re told. I would really like to know why this four-star in charge of Southcom retired early. If it was under protest, I think he should tell the nation.
Frum: Does that person have some kind of moral duty to be public? Because the military creed is: You go quietly and keep your counsel. Maybe you talk to your fellow four-stars. Do you think he has a duty to do more?
Nichols: I would say under most circumstances, yes, but not now. We are in an extreme situation, and if you’ve resigned because you think that you’re killing people illegally, then your duty as an American citizen supersedes—remember what George Washington said? “When we took up the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.” You are, first and foremost, a citizen of the United States, and if people are getting killed, if the president is turning the military into a hit squad, you need to say something.
And I’ve been really upset about the fact that there’s been a lot of that—and I don’t wanna call out generals, because I have never been a general. That’s a tough job; I wouldn’t wanna be responsible for hundreds of thousands of human lives. On the other hand, when these people enter the political sphere, I think they have a responsibility to speak up.
One of the things that really bothered me—and this was a bad sign in civil-military relations—years ago, [former Secretary of Defense] Jim Mattis was testifying before Congress, and [Senator] Tim Kaine was pressing him on an important issue, and Mattis said, Well, Senator, I’m not a political guy. Well, I’m sorry, but once you’re a Cabinet secretary and the secretary of defense, you’re a political guy. You don’t get to hold up the four-star flag and say, That’s not me. I’m just an operator. I’m just a problem-solver. No, if you have gone before the U.S. Senate wearing civilian clothes and been confirmed as the secretary of defense, you’re a political guy after that.
Frum: Well, there was a reason why there used to be a law that said former generals could not become secretary of defense—
Nichols: It was a good law.
Frum: —because of just this reason.
If there are air strikes on the Latin American or South American or Mexican mainland, innocent people are certain to be killed because air strikes are so imprecise, even the best. Trump, from the beginning of his administration, began flying drones over Mexican territory without notifying the Mexicans. This was reported by CNN. The Mexicans found out from American news media. And then, because of the enormous pressure on the Mexican government, they hastily gave permission for something that they didn’t know about.
But the drones they are flying are Predators, which can be armed and may be armed. Now, so far, there have been no strikes, and so far, the reports are that the drones remain, to date, not armed. But that may or may not be true, that may or may not be up to date. And sooner or later, there may be a Predator drone strike inside Mexico. There may be a bomber strike inside Colombia, maybe one inside Venezuela. At that point, we’re into a bigger conflict. Well, is there anything inside the military that says, I need to see some paper here, sir, from Congress, from somebody?
Nichols: I think we’re past that point, David—
Frum: Mm-hmm, they’re going to do it—
Nichols: —I think we passed that point—
Frum: They’re going to do it.
Nichols: —eight boats ago. But now—
Frum: They’re going to do it.
Nichols: —the thing is, if you strike an unmarked boat in international waters, you can sort of slip under the kind of, like, Well—you can hand-wave away a lot of stuff—it’s piracy. They were bad guys. We thought they were gonna shoot at us. You can make up a lot of stuff.
If you attack a sovereign nation and its territory, it’s an act of war. I know there’s a lot of divided opinion about whether we should have struck Iran. Of all the places that I have supported going to war, I have always been really reticent about bombing a country of 92 million people that, basically, many of whom would be on our side, given the chance. Same thing here. You could argue that Iran’s a one-off. We did it under, again, some kind of nonproliferation regime that gives us a kind of pushed open door in that region.
Attacking Venezuela or Mexico, there is absolutely nothing, no legal cover for that. And I don’t know how Americans would respond to a president who said, I’m gonna keep us out of war, and I don’t know how the military is gonna respond to a president who said, I’m gonna keep us out of war, and now I’m ordering you into combat as a war of discretion to take out people who are not—I’m gonna sound like a political-science professor here for a minute—people who are not actually state agents. These are attacking nonstate actors in some way ’cause they’re drug dealers, right? They’re not the Venezuelan military or whatever.
But what Trump, I think, will do, and I think there’s two things that will come out of this; he’ll say, While the Venezuelan military was in our way, or they tried to obstruct us when we were—because you can make the argument that terrorists, ’cause remember, Trump has declared these people terrorists. So there is this Shultz doctrine that says if they’re in a third country and that country can’t or won’t do anything about them, you have some grounding for going after them, which is why I think he declared them that.
But I think, going back to the domestic environment, the election will come up next year, and Donald Trump’s gonna say, How can you dare criticize me or anybody else when this country’s at war and our brave boys are overseas fighting the drug lords like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Seagal hitting the beaches in Commando?
Frum: I wrote a dystopian novel a long time ago in which the background of the novel is this long-running war inside Mexico that no one can quite remember how the United States stumbled into, but it can’t find any way to get out of. And as Americans have discovered, these kinds of conflicts are easy to start, hard to end. It’s hard to define an end state.
There’s also, I think, a risk that is being very underplayed, which is, the major drug cartels have had a practice—I’m no kind of expert, but you can observe it—of not hitting back, and certainly not hitting back on American territory, that it’s just more trouble than it’s worth. And they try to avoid tangling with Americans. You’ll remember an incident that happened two or three years ago where a group of Americans were intercepted by a drug gang at the border. The drug gang thought they were Haitians who were trying to cut into their drug-smuggling business. They killed two, but they realized the survivors were American, and they released them and then volunteered a bunch of low-level narcos, saying, We’re so sorry. We did it. We turn ourselves in to the Mexican authorities. They don’t want to tangle with the United States.
But they have some capabilities if they ever did want to. They could let off car bombs in the streets of Texas and California pretty easily. They don’t, and maybe they never would, but it’s the kind of thing that, if you had a process, somebody would be saying, Have we considered what the other party’s countermove to our moves are? And it doesn’t look like that kind of process is happening at all.
Nichols: I was talking with friends who have to teach this stuff at both military and civilian institutions, and it’s like, how do you teach the American national security process now? There isn’t one. It’s whatever Donald Trump—it’s all vibes, right? It’s whatever Donald Trump feels at any given moment. And the problem is that he has—it’s a problem for us; it’s an advantage to him—that he surrounded himself with people who say, I am anticipating that he wants to do this. I will always have a plan ready to say, “You bet, boss. I got a plan for striking Venezuela.”
And I don’t think they’ve thought it through. I don’t think they care about thinking it through, David. I think they wanna be able to say, America’s at war. Anybody who opposes the president is a traitor.
Frum: Last question before I let you go, with gratitude for your time: Greenland. The United States must have a plan for invading Greenland. American troops are deployed to Greenland in March of 1941, before the United States entered the Second World War, to secure Greenland against use as a German U-boat base. They operated with the approval of the local Greenland authorities. Denmark was then under Nazi occupation, so the Danish government was surely not displeased. And during the Cold War, there were always war games about, Well, what if the Soviets made a move on northern Greenland? So there must be these plans now. What happens if you tell an American officer, I wanna carry out a military attack on the territory of a NATO ally? Do they raise an eyebrow, or do they just do it?
Nichols: (Exhales.) I think you’ve finally gotten to a scenario that is so crystal clear—and maybe years of teaching military officers has made me too optimistic—I have to think that there are, even at lower levels, there are gonna be officers who are gonna say, I’m not doing that. I’m not killing—
Frum: Because they understand a treaty is a law in the United States.
Nichols: Well, also, they’ve trained with these guys. As you pointed out, look, we had plans during the Cold War—the GIUK gap, remember, the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap. This was gonna be where the Soviets were gonna come pouring through—
Frum: Or northern Norway. That was another—
Nichols: Right. We were worried about having to secure Iceland, Greenland, and Norway rather than let that fall. In fact, the Tom Clancy book Red Storm Rising, right, big attack on Keflavík, right? Iceland becomes the pivot upon which the world turns, you know? But it wasn’t that dumb an idea, because that’s a really strategically important place. But the idea that, somehow, the government of Denmark would say, Thank you for your invitation to join Greenland; we have declined it, and the president says, Seize all these cities, and—small though they are—seize these bases. Put the military—there are gonna be military guys—I’ve had Danes in my class, Danish officers sitting in my classroom. You’re gonna tell Americans, Hey, that captain that you trained with, you’re gonna have to blow ’em outta the water if they approach. I want to believe that an attack on a NATO ally would spark an internal revolt within the United States and the U.S. military. I want to believe that. Will it happen? It depends on how many people are watching TV at any given moment, I guess.
Frum: I’ll leave you with this thought. Secretary of the Treasury [Scott] Bessent recently gave an interview, I think, on one of the financial channels where he talked about the American strategy on dealing with China, and he said, We’re going to mobilize our allies to work with us. Mobilize our what? Our what? You don’t have very—there’s El Salvador; there’s maybe Israel; there’s maybe Russia. Everybody else is waiting for the United States to attack them.
Nichols: (Laughs.) Yeah.
Frum: It’s dismal. Dismal—
Nichols: Well, we’re getting to the point, I hate to say, that—I used to take pride—so much of this has been humbling for an Atlanticist and an American exceptionalist like you, like me. It’s humbling to say, I used to take pride in the fact that the Russians had no friends in the world and the Americans had plenty, right? Part of the reason Russia was always, even after the Soviet Union, Russia was always in the mess it was in: because they don’t have friends; they have clients. It’s all very transactional.
We’re becoming that. We’re becoming this kind of friendless, powerful state that just has clients rather—I mean, I kept a NATO flag in my office because I felt like this was not just an alliance of convenience; I felt like this was a fraternity of free and democratic nations committed to an idea that they were willing to die for. And this president—and I still think, David, I wanna believe it—I still believe that when this man leaves office, if he leaves office, that we can come back to that, we can recover our senses.
But right now, the president—and this is a problem for civil-military relations—the president is saying, We don’t really have any friends. You have me. I’m the commander. And if I tell you to attack somebody to whom we are bound by history and treaty, you’re gonna do it anyway. Remember when he was asked about torture in the first election, and he said, Well, if I tell the generals to do it, they’ll do it. Well, the military pushed back and said, We won’t do that. And I think, to this day, he didn’t like that answer.
Frum: Yeah. Let’s continue to believe it. Let’s continue to hope for it. Tom, thank you so much for making time for me today.
Nichols: Thanks for having me, David.
Frum: Bye-bye.
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Frum: Thanks so much to Tom Nichols for joining me this week on The David Frum Show. I am so grateful to him for joining and to you for watching.
As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is not a book at all, but a play: Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco. Ionesco was a Romanian-born writer who lived much of his life in France and wrote mostly in French. He lived through the Second World War in both Romania and France, the first half of the war in Romania and then, in 1942, in France. He witnessed in the 1930s the rise of communism and fascism and Nazism and other extremist ideologies, and then he lived the experience of military occupation and dictatorship. In 1959, he wrote a play to make sense of the personality changes he had seen among the people he knew in the terrible era of the 1930s. That play was Rhinoceros.
I’ll start with the plot of the play and then tell you a little bit about my encounter with it. The play is set in a small French town by the sea. One by one—and with no more explanation than that—one by one, the people of the town begin transforming into rhinoceroses: thundering, trumpeting, mindless beasts that move in herds, that carry out destruction, and have no regard for human life or human decency, human values. Somehow—and for, again, no explained reason—the town drunkard, Bérenger, is exempted from this transformation, even as more upstanding citizens become rhinoceros beasts. Eventually the human population of the town is reduced to just two people: Bérenger and the woman he loves, Daisy. But even Daisy admires the rhinoceroses; she sees them as beautiful and mighty. And she comes to lose respect for Bérenger because he alone is standing against them. The lovers quarrel, Bérenger strikes Daisy, and with that, she abandons him, and in her anger, she too goes off to join the beasts. Whether she’ll actually become a beast or not is left ambiguous, but she is with the beasts, and Bérenger is left alone.
I first saw this play as a boy in my mid-teens in 1974 or ’75. The play I saw was the movie version—you can still see it on YouTube and other platforms—starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as Bérenger. During the Trump years, I found myself thinking about this play more and more often because it often seemed that long-standing friends of mine were turning into rhinoceroses: mindless, trumpeting beasts. And sometimes people were not becoming rhinoceroses who quite surprised me, like Bérenger, the very last person you would think would be a person of integrity and resistance. I too saw this among some of the people I knew who I was genuinely surprised—I did not think it would be them, but it was them.
I read the play in text, and I was reading it again just a little while ago because I had somebody very particular as in mind in the rhinoceros category. When you read the play, as opposed to watching the Zero Mostel–Gene Wilder version, there’s something very striking. In the Zero Mostel–Gene Wilder version, Bérenger gives a final speech in a mood of defiance. He climbs to a tall building, he addresses the world, and he shouts his resistance. It’s much more ambiguous in the text of the play, and let me read you the concluding portion of the final monologue.
Bérenger is alone; Daisy’s abandoned him. And he says, “I’ve only myself to blame; I should have gone with them while there was still time. Now it’s too late! Now I’m a monster, just a monster. Now I’ll never become a rhinoceros, never, never! I’ve gone past changing. I want to, I really do, but I can’t, I just can’t. I can’t stand the sight of me. I’m too ashamed!” And he’s been looking in the mirror here. He turns his back on himself in the mirror, and he says, “I’m so ugly! People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end.” And then he gives his final oration, and you can imagine this being delivered in many different ways: “Oh well, too bad! I’ll take on the whole lot of them! I’ll put up a fight against the … lot of them, the whole lot of them. I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!” Now, you can play that defiantly, as Gene Wilder did. You can play it with resignation. You can play it with cynical humor. I think it’s an ending that speaks to all of us in these dark times. “I’ll take on the whole lot of them. I’ll put up a fight against them to the end. I’m the last man left, and…” I’m sorry; I beg your—“I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them. I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!”
One of the things that struck me as I reread this monologue just before preparing this talk was there’s no action plan here. One of the things that we’re often asked in the Trump years is, Okay, okay, got it. What’s our plan? And what Ionesco tells us is, before the plan, there’s the moment of decision, and unlikely people are going to have to make that decision, but they have to decide, I’m not capitulating. And once that decision is made, only then can the plan appear. But, again, it begins as a moral choice, and that’s a moral choice I’m counting on more and more Americans to make, even those who, for a time, spent some time among the rhinoceroses or as rhinoceroses.
Thanks so much for watching or listening to The David Frum Show this week. I hope you’ll join us again next week on whatever platform you choose, video or audio. Remember, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you’re minded to do so, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That supports my work and that of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic. You might also consider signing up for a David Frum alert on The Atlantic site, which will let you know when I post a new article.
Again, thanks so much for being with us this week, whether you are listening or whether you’re watching. I’m David Frum. See you next week. Bye-bye.
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