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In this episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a response to a listener’s question about working-class wages, unpacking the economic storylines that have shaped American politics over the last 40 years. In his answer, David challenges the idea that grievance politics are always rooted in material decline.
David is then joined by Ambassador Susan Rice for a sweeping conversation on the disintegration of national-security processes under Trump. They discuss the implications of “Signalgate,” the absence of a full-time national security adviser, and the staggering national-security risks posed by a $400 million jet gifted by Qatar. Rice offers a sobering look at what the breakdown of structure and accountability means for America’s alliances, adversaries, and the rule of law.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 7 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Ambassador Susan Rice. Susan Rice represented the United States at the United Nations during the first Obama administration. She was national security adviser to President Obama, and then director of the Domestic Policy Council under President Joe Biden.
[Music]
Frum: Before my conversation with Ambassador Rice, I want to open the show by doing something a little different. I’ve often taken questions at the end of the show. This time I’m going to take a question—just one—at the top of the show and try to answer it here because I think this question is so important, such a key in the lock to all of our contemporary debates. It comes from a young viewer named Joe, in Florida, who’s a friend of our family’s, and he asks, “Given that working-class wages have been in decline for 40 years, especially for men, why would you expect anyone to sympathize with the idea of the American system, with free trade? Why wouldn’t they back Donald Trump, given the pressure they’re under?”
The reason this question is so important is because it reflects an attitude that many liberal-minded people have, which is: Where you see a grievance, where you see behavior that is self-harming or harmful to others, there has to be some rational cause behind it, some material cause behind it—that when people do something destructive or self-harming, they’re acting out some understandable, cognizable grievance they’ve got that somebody could do something about. And if only we could meet that rational, material basis of their grievance, we could turn things around and put us all on a better path.
That’s the idea you hear from many Democratic candidates or would-be candidates for 2028: Let’s hear what people are saying and find some way to meet these grievances. And I do not want to dismiss that. A lot of politics is about the rational. But what reactionary and fascist forces have always understood is there’s plenty of irrationalism in the human being, and that’s a real resource. And sometimes when you have a grievance, it expresses itself in ways that sound like material grievance, but it’s really not. So let me take on this point about 40 years of decline, take it apart and see whether a better understanding can put us somewhere.
Now, when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America, they use certain numbers and not other numbers. Depending on the numbers you use, you get a very different story. And unfortunately, we often choose the story we want and then choose the numbers that fit the story, rather than the other way around. So when people want to make the case that things have been very bad for working-class America for 40 years—which takes us back to 1985—they look at a series called hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers, or even hourly wages for nonsupervisory production workers.
That’s manufacturing, people who get a paycheck that is measured by the hour and who answer to some kind of supervisor. And if you look at those numbers, you see they rise basically pretty steeply for the 40 years from 1945 to the early 1980s. Then they flatten out or even go into a little bit of a decline in the 1980s. They jump up a little bit in the 1990s. Then they’re hit by the Great Recession, and they go down again and only pick up after about 2015. So that is a story of stagnation, decline, some improvement in the ’90s, some improvement in the 2010s, but basically not a very happy or healthy picture from 1985 forward for that kind of worker.
The problem with looking at those numbers is that those numbers describe fewer and fewer people in America. And they describe—even for those people—less and less of those people’s lives.
Here’s a different number. If you remember that a lot of the way that people get an income in modern America is not just from their job, but also from various kinds of government benefits—the earned-income tax credit, the child support from the government of various kinds—and if you also remember that fewer and fewer of us work as nonsupervisory hourly workers, especially nonsupervisory hourly production workers. If you just look at what happens to American households (now, households can be as few as one person)—that is, Americans who live in some independent domicile of some kind, whether it’s one person, a single worker, whether it’s two people, whether it’s a whole family; any one of those things can be a household—what you see is that in 1985, the median American household (that is, we’re not averaging in Bill Gates; we’re just taking the American in the middle) that household made about $60,000 present-day dollars, and 40 years later, in 2025, that household made about $80,000. And it wasn’t all from work. Some of it was from government benefits.
But clearly, a big jump from $60,000 to $80,000. Now, it’s not as steep a jump as they made from 1945 to 1985. If you look at the 40 years immediately after World War II, the median did better than it did in the 40 years after World War II, from 1985 to the present. But I’m not sure you can really rationally compare those things. Remember, if you were starting in 1945, you’re missing that that same person or family or group had the experience of World War II and the depression. There had been a lot of bad times before then, and there’s a big catch-up that happened in the 40 years after 1945.
There’s also something else that was different in the 40 years after 1945. In 1945, about 17 percent of Americans still lived on the farm. You get big gains in efficiency when you move people from farms to cities. America did it in the ’50s. Many European countries did it in the ’50s and ’60s. The Chinese, of course, have done it since 1990. And you get a big surge in productivity. You get a big surge in household wealth. But, of course, you can only do it once. It’s not a commute. You move from farm to city. That’s it. You’re in the city. You’re not going back to the farm. And further moves into the city—when you move from factory to office—you don’t get the same bump that you get when you move from factory to farm.
So the idea that ’45 to ’85 was the norm, and ’85 to 2025 has been some kind of sad falling off, mistakes a lot of what happened in 1945. And also, it overlooks: Yeah, it’s good to be going up, but you need to remember, America in 1945 was quite a poor place by today’s standards, and even in 1985, it was not as affluent a country as it is now. In 1945, about a third of American households lacked indoor plumbing. In 1985, only about 70 percent of American households had air conditioning, whereas now, virtually everybody does.
So when you’re making those first steps, it’s easier. The technology of indoor plumbing exists. You move people from farm to city—they get the indoor plumbing; they get a big jump in their standard of living. It’s a little harder once they’re already in the cities.
So Problem 1 is what we’re measuring. If we look at all forms of income and not just the wages of a particular group of people, you see a bigger rise in incomes. And if you understand that something special happened between ’45 and ’85 that probably couldn’t have been reproduced between ’85 and 2025, no matter what, maybe you feel a little less angry about it.
But the second thing, when we’re trying honestly to evaluate how Americans are doing, you have to ask the question, What does your money buy? In a modern technological society, a lot of your improvements in standard of living show up not as increases in wages but as improvements in the quality of the products you get—in other words, as a decline of prices. So 2025, 1985—we both have cars, but the 1985 car is likely to kill you in circumstances where the 2025 car will keep you alive. They’re the same object. They may cost the same amount of money. But the car that doesn’t kill you is clearly a huge improvement over the car that does.
In the same way, there were color TVs in 1985, but they were not flat. You couldn’t put them in every room of your house. And they showed many, many fewer different kinds of programs. That while we can do a kind of food basket, we should remember that in 2025, more fresh fruits and vegetables are available to more people in more months of the year than were the case in 1985. In 1985, for most people, vegetables meant canned or frozen. In 2025, vegetables, for a lot of people in a lot of places a lot of the year, can mean fresh, and that’s a big improvement in quality. It’s a little hard to capture with a price signal, but that really is meaningful.
In the same way, how do we measure the improvement in well-being that comes when you want to write a letter to a friend or loved one, [and] you no longer have to handwrite it or type it, fold it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, walk into the post office, and drop it in a box, but you can hit send instantly on a text message or some other instantaneous form of communication. In 1985, there are no mobile phones. We were only five years away from paying a lot of money for long distance. So incomes went up more than the sad story tells us. What those incomes can buy has improved dramatically.
There’s one other thing that we really lose sight of here, which is: When we use these averages and say, The average American was this in 2025, and the average American was that in 1985, we need to remember, we’re not talking about a stable population of people. In 1985, there were about 107 million Americans in the workforce. In 2025, there were 170—107 to 170 million in the workforce, bigger workforce. But almost all of that growth—not quite all, but almost all of that growth—is the product of immigration. Almost all the growth in the American workforce over the past 40 years has been either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants.
Now, it’s a very contentious question. I’m not going to discuss here all the merits of the immigration question, all the costs, all the benefits. But very clearly, immigration is a benefit to the immigrant themselves, and it’s a benefit in almost all cases to the children of the immigrant.
When I say the average American had this in 1985, and the average American had that in 2025, and then I focus specifically on one household, which is the household of immigrants and their children, should I be comparing them to the Americans of 1985? Or should I be comparing them to what was their choice, their lot in life? Which is: If they hadn’t moved to the United States and maybe made the aggregate statistics a little worse, they’d be living in Mexico or Guatemala or the Philippines or wherever the family came from.
And maybe you should compare them not to what they have in 2025, not to what other Americans had in 1985, but to what people back in the Philippines or Mexico or Guatemala had in 1985, and then they look dramatically better off. And we can say, Okay, if this family of immigrants who are the cause of the growth of the workforce is so much better off, and if also all the people whose parents and grandparents are already here, if they’re better off because their wages have gone up and because their money buys more, and if what we’re measuring here is an impact on the aggregate statistics caused by the inflow of a lot of immigrants—whatever you think about immigration, it’s kind of strange to describe this as people becoming materially worse off.
And a lot of the situation that my friend Joe describes is kind of a statistical illusion. If you could spend 10 minutes back in 1985—I promise you, I was there—I promise you, you’d be shocked. You’d be shocked by all the things, all the conveniences, all the luxuries you take for granted. You’d be surprised at how much better the food is, how much cleaner the air is, how much less acidic the lakes are. In every way, you are so much better off. But it’s often hard to capture. And statistics often give us a false image of reality that is used by people who want to sell a case, but not to actually tell you what really happened.
And the reason why this is also misleading and dangerous is two points. The first is: Again, it makes our problems look too easy. It makes it seem like, well, if only we could find out what was—we could solve deindustrialization or meet whatever economic grievance that we hear cited as a cause of the Trump vote, we could make the Trump problem go away.
But then we’re faced with things like the fact that Trumpism exists in every country, in every place, regardless of that country’s particular economic history. There are Trump-like movements in Germany and France. There are Trump-like movements in South Korea. This seems to be something going on in the modern world and has some deeper causes—in sexuality, in mass culture, and just the resistance of the human mind to orderly, liberal progress. There’s parts of it that people just don’t find that very satisfying, don’t find it very exciting. They want more. Also, ordinary liberal progress, while it may meet our demand for prosperity, it may not meet our demand for status, and it may not meet our demand to subordinate others whose status we think needs to be lower, as well as to make ours higher. So I worry it disarms us in the face of a real challenge.
The second thing is: It also empowers some people who have agendas of their own, of a kind that aren’t helpful either. There are a lot of people on the left wing of the Democratic Party for whom Trump was a kind of godsend. They have long wanted to do a kind of more economic, planned economy. They wanted to do more protectionism. And Trump then became a justification. And the text to read on this is a speech given by former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in 2018. Great respect for Jake Sullivan; this is not any kind of personal criticism of him.
But he gave a speech called, if I remember right, “a foreign policy for the middle class” that cited Trump’s success as a reason that the United States needed to have a much more planned economy and a much more protectionist economy. And indeed, if President Trump was the most protectionist president since World War II, President Biden was the second-most. Biden did not repeal very many of the Trump tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump term, and he didn’t reopen the Trans-Pacific Partnership that was the real answer to the problem of how we integrate China peacefully into the world trading system.
Biden, in many ways, was quite continuous with Trump on trade, and he was because there are people in the Democratic Party who wanted to be, and because they used a misreading of what the Trump experience was as a justification for things they wanted to do anyway. And the result was that we got some disappointing results during the Biden years.
Trade is a convenient target for a lot of people, and there are a lot of statistical papers. There’s a paper by a man named Autor, A–U–T–O–R, called “The China Shock”—I think it’s by group; Autor’s not the only author—that shows that areas in the United States that were exposed to a lot of trade competition from China did worse than areas that were not. They didn’t say those areas got poor. They just said if you compare an area that was hard hit by Chinese imports to an area that wasn’t, the area that wasn’t grew faster than the area that was. But they don’t prove whether that area that was hard hit shrank or whether it just grew more slowly. There’s a lot of gaps there.
The paper is used to prove many things beyond what it actually proves, even assuming it’s accurate. And it’s not trade that explains the many other problems in American life. It’s not trade that explains why Americans find it harder to get married. People in every country—every developed country—find it harder to get married. It’s not trade that explains why we see more gun violence, more substance abuse. Those things seem to have deeper causes. But trade is something we do with foreigners. And if you’re trying to come up with an explanation of the problems of American life that leave Americans out of it—that don’t call on anybody in America to do anything different from what they’ve done before—trade allows you to say, It’s the foreigners that are to blame. It’s an easy way to think. It’s an attractive way to think. But it’s not a helpful way to think.
I don’t want to gainsay everything in the argument I’ve just made here. I mean, obviously, working-class wages have been under pressure, and they may be under more pressure in the future as artificial intelligence and robotics advance. But if you think about what we could practically do for people under the situation, I would say, You know what they need first and foremost? Universal health insurance. That’s got nothing to do with trade.
And you can be a protectionist society, as the United States now is, thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Biden before, and not have universal health insurance. And you can be a free-trade society, like Denmark, and have universal health insurance. That’s maybe the first thing that people would want if they were thinking, How do we make the life of a person at the average in American life better, especially for their children? But it’s an appealing answer, and it’s got a lot of interest groups lined up in it.
But I think what we need to do as we confront Trump is confront the irrational. It exists in ourselves, as well as in other people. I’m not just making a finger-pointing exercise. Confront the irrational. We respond to violence. We respond to hate. We respond to intimidation. We respond to the desire to make ourselves more by making other people less. It’s not nice to think about those things, but the fact that they’re not nice doesn’t make them less powerful.
Trump is a successor to many dark movements in the human past that have occurred when trade was going up, when trade was going down, when industry was booming, when industry was shrinking. Prosperity makes everything easier. But prosperity does not make the irrational go away. So while we should certainly work for prosperity, and while we should certainly think very hard about how we improve the condition of the median American, the American at the center—after all, it’s a democracy; we’re running the whole country for that person—they are the judge and jury and how we’re doing. And if they’re not happy, well, they’re the ultimate boss.
But we shouldn’t be pulled into false arguments against international trade, and we shouldn’t believe a false story about the promise of America and accept the idea that there was some magical time when America was great, and now we have, sadly, fallen off. In every way you can measure, America is a better place today than it was 40 years ago. And if it isn’t as much better as we would like, well, the future is open. We can do more to make it better, faster for more people. But it is better. It was better. You have to believe in your country, and you have to not give an inch to those who defame the country in order to maximize their own power and their own cruelty.
Now my conversation with Ambassador Susan Rice. But first, a quick break.
[Music]
Frum: I’m delighted and honored to be joined today by Ambassador Susan Rice, a name that is famous in the United States and around the world. For deeper perspective, I strongly recommend her autobiography, Tough Love, which describes a multigenerational family commitment to ardent love of learning and public service. There’s a personal connection that the ambassador and I have that I won’t go into here, but that she describes, very movingly, in the book.
She was educated at Stanford, then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, after which she began a meteoric ascent through the American national-security system, serving first President [Bill] Clinton and then President [Barack] Obama, rising to be ambassador to the UN National Security Council, national security adviser, and then under President Biden, switching to the domestic-policy shop, where she ran his domestic-policy council.
So, Ambassador Rice, thank you so, so much for joining us.
I want to start by mentioning that as you and I speak, the United States doesn’t have a national security adviser. So how big a gap is that, and what can we learn from this crazy Signal scandal that means that the national security adviser’s out, and the secretary of defense is very likely on his way out?
Susan Rice: Well, David, it’s great to be with you, and congratulations on the show.
You know, we have Marco Rubio playing four simultaneous roles: secretary of state, national security adviser, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development—what’s left of it, which is very little—and as the acting national archivist.
Having had at least one of those jobs, the job of national security adviser, I can tell you it is a 24/7, relentless, incredibly intense job, done correctly. Your role is not only to brief and advise the president but, very importantly, to manage the National Security Council staff of over 300 professionals and to coordinate the Cabinet-level national-security Principals Committee, which should be carefully assessing and exploring the most significant national-security challenges of the day, weighing options, making recommendations to the president, and ensuring that the decisions that the president makes are being implemented.
No human, however competent—let alone Marco Rubio, who’s barely been in the role of secretary of state for four months—can do all of those jobs, or even two of those jobs, effectively. So when you say there’s no national security adviser, what you’re saying is that this is a job that is a more-than-full-time job being done, if at all, on a very part-time basis.
I can’t imagine what that must be like for the national-security staffers, those that are left, that are true professionals who come from the various agencies and are working very hard on behalf of the American people to have no leader. [It’s] not clear if the deputy national security adviser is there for long and if so, what role he’s playing. I don’t know if Marco Rubio is sitting in the White House or at the State Department or in the National Archives or wherever, but he’s got a big job, and he’s got now four big jobs, and for a president who doesn’t like process and doesn’t like the rigor that national-security decision making is typically conducted with.
Frum: Well, when I said we don’t have the national security adviser, yes, as you say, Rubio has the title, as he has the title of national archivist, but those jobs are not being done. They are, in fact, for all practical purposes vacant. I’ve sometimes had the opportunity to interview national security advisers and secretaries of state, and one of the questions I always ask them, or I try to, is, How do you spend your time?
And there’s a huge difference, because at 300 people at the National Security Council staff, that’s a significant number of people, but it’s not a major bureaucracy the way the Department of State is. The secretary of state has to worry about personnel matters in a way that a national security adviser does less. The national security adviser is the first point of contact for every national emergency the United States faces. The secretary of state should be taking somewhat longer views, doing some planning work, as well as responding to emergencies. They’re very different, and as you say, Henry Kissinger tried it, but that was more an act of bureaucratic imperialism.
Rice: And at a time when things were much less demanding and complex. And by the way, he failed at it. (Laughs.) So now we’ll see how Marco Rubio does.
The other thing, David, to mention about the difference between the jobs is, you know, the secretary of state is supposed to travel and do a great deal of personal diplomacy all over the world. You cannot do that effectively and man the fort at the White House, where the national security adviser’s job is really properly a more inward-facing role.
Frum: Especially if, as so often happens, different parts of the foreign-policy apparatus are in disagreement: So State says one thing. Defense says something else. Other agencies say a third thing. The national security adviser is supposed to help the president broker those disputes by saying, I’m here to represent the president and no agency. And if you’re there representing an agency, too, how does any decision get made?
Rice: That’s part of the challenge. The national security adviser is meant to be an honest broker. He or she ultimately gets to make a recommendation to the president as to the appropriate course, but taking into account—and fairly and accurately without spin—representing the views of the other national-security Cabinet members. So there’s a conflict of interest inherent in those two roles being occupied by one individual.
Frum: I want to ask you about the scandal that may have laid low Mike Waltz, although there may be other reasons. There was this very strange person. Laura—what was her name? Loomer?
Rice: Laura Loomer.
Frum: She has some unusual kind of influence or hold on the president, and she recommended that he get rid of a lot of people in the national-security apparatus. Maybe that’s part of what’s going on. There may be some fight over Iran policy. That may be what’s going on. Trump may have remembered that Mike Waltz had a previous history as a congressman, where he was not as infatuated with Donald Trump as Donald Trump would wish him to be. There may be many other issues.
But how do you read the Signalgate scandal? It’s often true that senior national-security people don’t use the means that they’re supposed to use. They’re just too inconvenient. It’s not just Hillary Clinton. Colin Powell, many others have sought shortcuts or some more convenient method of communication. How do you understand what happened and how serious it was?
Rice: I think, David, it’s extremely serious. This wasn’t a case of somebody sending an email point to point or using texts for scheduling. This was a case where the most sophisticated and complicated deliberations among the national-security team did not take place in places they should have: in the White House Situation Room around a table for several hours, probably on multiple occasions, to weigh the question of whether, how, when, and with what preparation the United States was going to launch attacks on the Houthi militants in Yemen.
This is one of the most important kinds of decisions that the national-security principals make, or they make a recommendation to the president after a lot of assessment and analysis. And these guys did it, you know, with emojis and shorthand on Signal. So the first problem, before you get to how they communicated, is the extent to which they communicated and deliberated, which was de minimis. And the question of the use of force and putting American men and women in uniform in harm’s way is one of the most significant types of decisions that gets made, and it deserves thoughtful and thorough consideration. That didn’t happen.
Secondly, you’re using a commercial application, Signal, which is not encrypted to the same degree that classified U.S. government systems are. And they were inherently discussing classified information. Whether and when to engage in military operations is, by definition, classified. The details—the operational details—that Pete Hegseth put into the chat were extraordinarily sensitive and highly classified. Then you had J. D. Vance weighing in on even the question of whether there should be such military strikes. And frankly, that’s the discussion that should be happening around the Situation Room table.
The reason it’s so dangerous is not only that they give scant and superficial consideration to such important issues, but it’s because we know that our most sophisticated adversaries—and indeed, some of our allies—can hack into personal phones and into Signal and learn in advance what we are planning. And if the Chinese had done that, or the Russians, and handed it off to the Houthis or to the Iranians to give to the Houthis, or if the Iranians had done it—they have highly sophisticated capabilities—that could have meant that our operational security was compromised and that our pilots and others engaged in the operations were at direct risk.
It was incredibly reckless and incredibly dangerous behavior. And they seemed to do it, David, as a matter of course. I mean, now we’re learning that there are multiple regular Signal chats between and among the national-security principals. The last photograph that a journalist captured of Mike Waltz’s phone right before he was fired showed that he was sitting in the Cabinet room, in a Cabinet meeting—where, by the way, you’re not supposed to have your phones; you’re supposed to leave them outside in a secure container—using Signal to communicate with the vice president and other senior officials, Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, it’s ridiculous.
Frum: You know, as we talk about this, I’m very conscious that a lot of people will say, Signalgate, that that was when, like, Louis XIV ruled France, or maybe Pontius Pilate was in charge of Judea.
Rice: (Laughs.)
Frum: That was a long, long—that was, like, 18 scandals back.
Rice: (Laughs.) How many Scaramuccis?
Frum: Right now, the new scandal is the Emirate of Qatar has offered the president of the United States his own personal jet to take away with him after he leaves office. One of the trademark—I don’t know whether it’s a strength or a weakness or both—features of this Trump administration has been, you pile scandal on top of scandal on top of scandal, and no one can keep track of them. And it does seem like if you’re going to do one bad thing, you might as well do a hundred, because the average survival rate seems to go up.
I ask you this because you were at the center, or you were sort of caught up in a decade ago, scandal politics—in retrospect, a kind of contrived-looking scandal—but looking back on that and comparing it to Trump 1 and Trump 2, do you think there are things that this administration knows about scandal politics that other administrations have not known?
Rice: Well, that’s a great question, David. I mean, I think first of all, the Trump administration—Trump 1, but in particular, Trump 2—just doesn’t give a goddamn about what they say or what they do. Trump 1 was characterized by nonstop lying. That is certainly the case in Trump 2, but combined with a sense of impunity and complete lack of accountability to the American people, to the truth, to the Constitution, to anything.
And so they lie and gaslight on a daily basis. And it’s so extreme that I think the media has a difficult time keeping up, though credit to the many that are trying. The opposition—the Democrats—can’t make a storyline stick. Signalgate should be as big a national-security scandal as any we’ve seen in decades. It is that bad. And it’s been in multiple iterations. Now Pete Hegseth, we’ve learned, shared the same operational details on a Signal chat with his family members, which is ridiculous. They have no need to know.
And it goes on and on, and yet they flood the zone with so much crap on a daily basis—so many lies, so much obfuscation, so much gaslighting—that their BS just overwhelms people’s capacity to absorb it. And obviously, they know that, and that’s part of their, as you suggest, their modus operandi.
Frum: I have a private theory that I developed during the first Trump campaign, back in 2016. I remember seeing a poll at the time that asked Americans what they thought of the two candidates: Hillary Clinton and President Trump—or Donald Trump, as he then was. And this was not a good poll for Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton beat him—she’s more intelligent, more knowledgeable, cares about people like you. She won in every single category that the poll asked. I forget every question, but these were the important questions that you would want in a leader of the nation.
But there was one category where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and that was honesty. You think, like, Well, that’s weird because he lies all the time. And I thought about this a lot, and I realized that, of course, politicians have a way of speaking that sounds dishonest. The question is, Did you eat the last piece of pie? And the politician who ate the last piece of pie doesn’t want to say yes, because they might get in trouble. Doesn’t want to say no, because that’s an outright lie. So they haver, they equivocate, they temporize, they put things in context, and they talk like a politician. They equivocate. You know, that we have to put pie eating into a larger context, that certainly, among those in the vicinity—I was one of those in the vicinity of the refrigerator at the time that the pie was eaten, but I do not have direct personal knowledge of exactly the consumption pattern. Donald Trump would just look you in the eye and say, Nope, I didn’t, when he did. And because—
Rice: Or he’d say, No, I didn’t eat the pie. You ate the pie.
Frum: You ate the pie. And so because he will flatly lie, he doesn’t equivocate. He doesn’t temporize. He doesn’t haver. He just flat out lies. If you don’t know the facts or if you’re ready to believe him, he sounds honest. Whereas the person tiptoeing around the question, Did you eat the last piece of pie? they sound like a crook.
Rice: I think there’s something to that, David. I do. But, you know, I think the broader point is that this Trump administration has no interest in, no pretense of, no commitment to doing anything that doesn’t suit their interests at the time, whether legal, illegal, truthful, untruthful, moral, immoral.
And you started this discussion with something that I think really deserves careful scrutiny and outrage: The notion that a president of the United States would accept a $400 million 747 from a foreign government—any foreign government, much less the Qataris, whose loyalties and interests only occasionally, to put it kindly, align with ours—is truly outrageous.
And it’s not just the corruption this represents, which is massive and mind-boggling. It’s the national-security consequences. Air Force One is a flying, secure environment. It is as secure and classified as the White House Situation Room. If a foreign government has built or overseen the production of an aircraft and then hands it off to the United States, the first thing is we have no idea of knowing what kinds of listening or other devices they’ve put in it.
Secondly, to accept a gift of that sort and then to keep it for your personal benefit after you leave office is giving a foreign government a huge amount of influence over the president of the United States and the United States of America, and leaves us susceptible not just to all forms of espionage that the Qataris could potentially conduct, but leaves us vulnerable to exploitation by the Qataris or those acting in concert with the Qataris. And Qatar is close to Hamas. Qatar has got a sort of funky relationship with Iran.
It just blows the mind that we would put ourselves in that kind of vulnerable posture vis-à-vis the Qataris, much less any other foreign government. And the fact that, you know, yeah, there’s outrage, but Republicans are like, There’s nothing to see here. No problem. Trump says, You’re stupid to turn down any gift. We have laws, and the Constitution itself is black-and-white clear that the president of the United States cannot, without Congress’s approval, accept a gift of any significance from a foreign government.
Frum: Yeah, it’s not only that this is clearly illegal, whatever Pam Bondi may say—who was herself a foreign agent for the Qataris. It’s clearly illegal. It’s also, if you go back and read The Federalist Papers, the receiving of a large gift from a foreign potentate is their definition, their paradigmatic example, of what counts as an impeachable offense. This is the one thing that they are most frightened that the president will do—take payoffs from foreign rulers, especially foreign monarchs.
And the idea that—it’s like birthright citizenship that Trump also denies. There are a lot of things in the Constitution that are murky. What process is due? Well, argue. You know, we’ll never settle that question. Your Fifth Amendment: You’re not to have property taken without just compensation. What’s just compensation? We can argue about that.
But if you’re born on American soil, are you a citizen unless you’re the child of a diplomat? Yes. Clearly, no question about that. And can the president take a present from a foreign king? No. How is this question even on the president’s desk? This would normally be something, you would think, that the ambassador to Qatar would say, Your highness, what a wonderful, magnificent gesture. But all things considered, if you just would get one of those beautiful cards, send the president a handmade card saying how much you like him. He’ll like that a lot more than this jet, which, of course, you understand, he cannot even consider accepting.
Rice: It’s just insane. And it’s indicative of what you were describing, which is a “flood the zone with crap” strategy that overwhelms the public, the media, the courts, everything. But this is blatantly illegal, blatantly unconstitutional, and a supreme act of unprecedented corruption.
Frum: Can you take us on a little tour in putting on your national security adviser cap from a while ago? Take us on a little tour of how much damage has been done to America’s alliances, to its position in the world, to the respect in which adversaries hold it over the past few months of extraordinary, unprecedented activity. Just—we can’t do everything, but what in your mind are the things that people most need to know, but what is different today than was the case in the fall of 2024?
Rice: Well, David, so much damage has been done, and it’s very hard to see how it’s reparable in any reasonable length of time, even with a new president and a new administration. The most important thing that’s been lost is the trust of our allies in American commitments, in America’s loyalty and solidarity with our allies, and the ability to believe that we will do what we say.
And when you lose that trust, particularly among your allies, you can’t get that back. When you think about Canada—a country you know well, I know well—Canada has shared with the United States the longest peaceful border in the world. We are democracies that share values and history. Canada has fought and died alongside the United States in war after war after war, from the Second World War to Vietnam to Afghanistan. They have bled and died with us. And like our other NATO allies, the only time that our Article 5 mutual-defense commitment that we make among the NATO allies has ever been invoked, as you know, was after 9/11, when the allies came to our defense and served with us for years and years and years in Afghanistan to try to defeat al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts.
So we also have the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world, which serves both countries enormously well. And Donald Trump woke up one morning and decided arbitrarily to cripple the Canadian economy—Mexican too, to the extent he can, and Europe—through completely arbitrary tariffs that do very little for us, do a lot of harm for Canada, and weaken our supply-chain connectivity as we should be working together to deal with countries that pose a real threat in certain strategic sectors, like China. Instead, Trump imposes tariffs designed to bring the Canadian economy to its knees and speaks repeatedly in terms of turning Canada into the 51st state, which, as you know and I hope all the listeners know, is not only never going to happen but is incredibly offensive to every Canadian, and has done more to unite Canada—Anglophone, Francophone, First Nations—than anything in a long time.
So it’s really—it’s horribly damaging. And I talk to Canadian friends. I’m sure you talk to friends and family. And they’re pissed off, and they don’t understand why their good friend and best friend would do this to them. And it’s not just about Trump. I mean, they’re just pissed off at the United States broadly. They’re not traveling here in the way they used to. They’re not buying American products the way they used to. And this is not going to go away just because they’ve elected Mark Carney, and he’s determined to stand up for Canada’s interest. This is long-term damage, as I’m sure you would agree.
Frum: Let me ask you about adversaries, because among Trump supporters is a view that because Trump is so crude, so obnoxious, so overbearing, so insulting, he must impress the Chinese—no end. They must look at him and say, There is one rough, tough guy whom we better not fool around with, and, you know, Obama was so polite, and George W. Bush was so affable, we don’t respect them. But we can respect this guy, and that the world now fears to cross Donald Trump. What is your assessment of what the adversaries think?
Rice: China’s laughing, okay? China plays a long game. They understand that in a trade war with the United States, in many ways, they have the upper hand. Why? In large part because they’re not a democracy. And they can withstand economic pain, blame it on the United States, and their people will eat it. That’s not going to work here in the United States. And plus, China is looking at the damage that we are doing to economies around Asia and seeing an opportunity for them to fill a vacuum in a bilateral trade relationship that we’ve left.
Moreover, China played Trump’s game with him, and he said—Trump said—We’re going to tariff you this amount. And China said, Okay, I’ll call you and raise you. And they went back and forth until it got to a crazy level. But the Chinese are not backing down, and the Chinese, moreover, are saying, Beyond the trade realm, we’ve got a whole bunch of non-trade things we can do to make your life miserable, Donald Trump. And that’s when they went after rare earths and a whole bunch of other important products, commodities, that we depend on that China only can provide.
So they go to the negotiating table. You can see the Trump administration sweating as the impacts on prices and supply chains and small businesses and the stock market begin to mount, with inflation looking to increase substantially. So they create a pretext and go to the negotiating table with the Chinese. And basically, without getting any concessions that are in the realm of what Trump suggested he wanted when he started this trade war—whether it be on fentanyl or whether it be on manufacturing or anything else—they’ve negotiated a face-saving climbdown for 90 days. It basically takes us back to the status quo ante. We got nothing for all this disruption. So the Chinese understand that Trump’s not a tough guy. Trump is somebody who is a bully, and bullies understand other bullies, and they back down when people stand up to them. That’s the message I believe the Chinese have taken away.
The Russians—you want to talk about adversaries—a completely different story. Guess how much tariffs Trump imposed on Russia? Zero. Why? Why? Russia is playing Trump in a very different way on Ukraine, on many other things, but they understand that, for whatever reason, Trump bows down to Putin, tiptoes around him, and sells out our allies and Ukraine and anybody else to benefit Putin.
Frum: Well, this is where I wanted to build to as our second-to-last question. Can Ukraine survive Trump? Can it stay on the battlefield, or is he going to break it and betray it in a way that all the Ukrainian patriotism and courage and sacrifice will not be able to overcome?
Rice: Well, it’s an interesting question because if Trump were to decide that he’s cutting off intelligence support on a sustained basis, cutting off military assistance, doing nothing with the frozen assets, leaving Ukraine to the mercy of the Russians and what the Europeans can do without us, I think it’s bleak for Ukraine. Not impossible, but bleak. And the degree to which the Europeans—who already, as you know, have contributed more to Ukraine in dollar terms, militarily and economically, than the United States—but if they step up even more, can that suffice? I think [it’s] tough to be confident in that.
So, you know, I think that the real question is: Will Putin overplay his hand? And he’s obviously holding out for not only the great deal that the Trump administration unilaterally proposed to him—which would require the Ukrainians to give up vast quantities of their territory more than the Russians currently occupy; foreign recognition of Crimea as Russian, which is insane; not to mention, no NATO membership and no U.S. security guarantees. That’s a ridiculously favorable set of terms for Putin, and he’s sitting back there saying it’s not enough. And if at some point, the Trump administration determines that Putin’s humiliation of Donald Trump is untenable, then maybe that changes the Trump calculus and Ukraine has a bit more of a lifeline.
Frum: Presidents build policy systems around their own personal natures. President Franklin Roosevelt liked creative chaos. President Eisenhower liked orderly, tidy systems. Some presidents like to see arguments battled out in front of them. Some presidents want the battle to happen before the president is in the room and wants to have a consensus among the advisers. Some people want the discussion, want to hear all the reasons behind the conclusion. Some people just say, Cut to the chase. Tell me what you all think.
And you’ve dealt with different presidents who have their own different styles, and I’m sure you have opinions about which work better, and of course, in the end, it has to work for the particular person. But imagine the Trump administration as kind of a silhouette. Take the president out of the picture. Look at the reactions of the people around, of the way you would as a senior staffer and say, If you just knew about the process he’s got, the process that has grown up around him, what would you say about this presidency, based on your observation from domestic- and national-security councils?
Rice: Well, David, obviously I’m not in the White House, and it’s not always easy from the outside to make these kinds of judgments. But it really appears to me that 99 percent of the time there is no process.
The process is, as you hear many of the Cabinet officials and those closest to the president say all the time, Donald Trump will decide this. So it seems like everything, small and large—even though sometimes when convenient, he denies any knowledge of issues—is a Trump decision. And it’s not clear that anything like the structure or the rigor that you would find in normal administrations exists in this context.
Do people write him memos? Does he make decisions on paper, as is the custom and the Presidential Records Act anticipates and requires? Do people sit around the table in the White House Situation Room and discuss and debate options and make recommendations to the president? Does a president ever chair the National Security Council principals, or does he simply make his own decisions? It’s been recently reported, David, that the president of the United States, who’s been in office well over a hundred days now, has only received the presidential daily briefing—the most important, highly classified daily intelligence briefing—some 12 times, some 12 days of his hundred-plus days in office.
What is he doing if he is not reading the PDB? And I hate to say this—you could say it about the airplane; you could say it about Signalgate; you could say it about so many different things—but if any other president had refused or opted not to receive the presidential daily briefing from the intelligence community on a regular basis, it would be a huge, huge scandal with massive investigations in Congress and huge speculation that the president is not playing with a full deck. That’s a key part of the job. So there is no process, as far as I can tell.
Frum: For those who’ve never seen one, can you just give some indication of what’s the difference between the presidential daily brief and, say, the morning news on FOX TV? Which is better?
Rice: (Laughs.) I don’t watch Fox morning news, so just to be clear, although I’ve seen snippets of it.
Frum: What kinds of things does he not know if he’s not listening or reading to the brief?
Rice: What he does not know is what our intelligence community has been able to collect and analyze and assess through all the various means that we have of intelligence collection and provide to the president that information and analysis that he would otherwise not have. I don’t want to get into any level of description of what is in a PDB, but trust me—it’s very different from Fox News. It’s different from The New York Times and from even The Economist, because we have sources and methods of collection and analysis that far exceed what is often available through what we call “open sources.”
Frum: You can see administrations develop trajectories. You can see at the beginning, often, where it’s going and where, if it goes wrong, how it might go wrong. If you look ahead just to the end of 2025, what are the dangers that you see that we seem to be navigating toward rather than away from?
Rice: Well, I mean, there are many dangers, as we’ve discussed, of process, of care with the most sensitive information that is available. We’ve talked about allies and adversaries—adversaries taking advantage of us, allies losing trust in us. All of that, obviously, matters enormously. The lack of truthfulness—trustworthiness, whether domestically or internationally—the gaslighting.
But I am also extremely worried that the president and those around him are so dismissive of any degree of law or accountability, even to the Constitution, that we could soon potentially see them outright, blatantly, and unapologetically defying court orders, including orders from the Supreme Court. And this blatantly illegal threat to suspend habeas corpus and, perhaps with it, implement some version of martial law based on a completely false pretext is something that I think is not far-fetched. I wish it were, and one we have to be very, very vigilant about.
Frum: They’ve built bureaucracies that are getting in the habit of breaking the law, and when you build a weapon, the weapon tends to go off.
Rice: Well, look—that would be a nuclear weapon going off in the heart of our constitutional republic. And whether you voted for Donald Trump or not, whether you support Donald Trump or not, poll after poll shows that Americans want and expect their president to adhere to court orders, to respect the Constitution and the rule of law. And all of us, regardless of party affiliation, regardless of how we voted, have an obligation to insist and demand that the president and his administration abide by the rule of law in the Constitution, and when they don’t, that they pay for it in the way that we hold our leaders accountable, which is at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion.
Frum: Ambassador Rice, thank you so much for your time.
Rice: Thank you, David.
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Frum: I’m so grateful to Ambassador Susan Rice for joining me today. Thank you, too, for joining. I hope you’ll share the program with your friends, subscribe to it, or share it on whatever platform you follow us on. And I hope you’ll consider subscribing to The Atlantic. That’s what you can do immediately to support the work of this program and so much other content that you get from The Atlantic.
Please subscribe. Please follow us. Please share the content. Thank you for joining. I’ll see you next week.
[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.
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