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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with thoughts on the coming midterm elections and the difficult position Republicans now face. He explains the political “fork” confronting Republican candidates: Having attached themselves to an unpopular president, they risk alienating either moderate voters or Trump’s loyal base.

Then David is joined by Omar Mohammed, the formerly anonymous blogger behind Mosul Eye, to discuss his new book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS. They discuss life under ISIS rule, the atrocities Mohammed witnessed firsthand in Mosul, and the dangers he faced in documenting them.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the role opera plays in our society.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Omar Mohammed: Our city was taken by the Islamic State, David, because we had no memory of anything that happened before. Because we allowed other people to be omitted. I don’t put blame on people collectively. That’s not what I do. That’s not my job. That’s not my craft. But my craft is also to understand why what happened happened.

[Music]

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 Omar Mohammed, a historian and author of the harrowing new book Mosul Eye, an eyewitness account of the ISIS reign of terror in the city of Mosul, Iraq. The book talk at the end of the show will not be about books at all. This week, I’m going to be offering some meditations on the place of opera in our culture.

But before either the dialogue with Omar Mohammed or the meditation on opera, some opening thoughts about something that has been puzzling me as we come to the end of the 2026 race, and maybe has been puzzling you as well.

As we all know, President Trump is in a lot of political trouble. He’s polling in the mid-30s: about where President [George W.] Bush was polling just before the big beating in the midterm elections of 2006, about where President Harry Truman was polling before the big Democratic beating in the elections of 1946.

One thing you might expect in a situation like this, where the president’s unpopularity is dragging down his party, is that individual members of the president’s party would try to look independent—put some distance between themselves and the president—in order to say, Look, maybe you’re mad at him, but don’t be mad at me. I did a good job for the people of my state, my district. Separate me out. Just don’t mix me in with Trump. Why are you mixing me in with Trump? I’m different. I’ve disagreed with him. I’m independent.

And you’re seeing very, very little of that kind of behavior. And the question is, why? Why won’t Republicans try to save themselves by putting some distance between them and Trump? It’s maybe late as we get into the second half of October. Why didn’t they do it before?

The explanation comes from a strategy in the game of chess. If you play chess, you are familiar with a maneuver called a fork. A fork is a tactic in which a single piece attacks two or more of the opponent’s pieces at the same time, forcing the opponent into a situation where the opponent can save only one of the threatened pieces. Republicans are in kind of this situation in this election of 2026. Yes, President Trump is unpopular. But in many places, especially in red states, the hope of survival is not by distancing from Trump but by somehow getting Republican turnout inflated to rev up the Republican base. And the way you do that is by clinging to President Trump, because as little as the rest of the country likes President Trump, his base continues to like him enthusiastically. The base is shrinking. There are fewer and fewer people who describe themselves as MAGA Republicans. But among those who do describe themselves as MAGA Republicans—and that’s a considerable number of people—the president’s support remains overwhelming, almost unanimous. So if you’re a Republican in a state like Iowa or Florida or even Texas, you’re in a situation where you think, I need to do two things. I need to find some way to bring independents back, and that requires distance from President Trump. But I need to make sure that my people, our people, turn up, and that requires clinging to President Trump. In other words, a classic fork.

And this fork is creating a kind of paralysis that may make the Republican situation in 2026 worse even than it has to be. Because instead of winning both independents and revving up the base, the Republicans caught in the fork may find themselves doing neither and collapsing in places that always had been thought about as winnable. And where this may have real consequences for the American political system and for the next two years is less in the Senate, less in the House, and more at a part of American politics that we tend not to think about as a system—we tend to think only about our own state—and that is the politics of the states.

A defining feature of American politics almost for the entire past generation has been the overwhelming dominance of the Republicans at the state level, and especially at the state-legislative level. There are 99 state legislatures, because Nebraska has only one chamber. So, 50 states; two chambers per state, except in Nebraska, you get to 99. Of those 99, Republicans have had, through most of the 21st century, an enormous majority almost all of the time. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but always they can bank on great control at the state level.

And that’s had a lot of implications, because it has been the secret weapon behind President Trump’s concentration of power at the federal level. When Trump was trying to manipulate the elections of 2020 and hold onto power in 2021 after his defeat, one of the things he had going for him is a lot of the places where the opposition to Trump might coalesce at the state level, that didn’t happen. And states often let President Trump get away with doing things that—if they were under non-Trump control, or if there was an even more even division of the parties—they would not allow.

The trouble that Republicans are in in 2026 could have big implications for state contests. Could perhaps even break the Republican majority on state legislatures, break the Republican hold on so many governor’s races. And this will have, for the final two years of President Trump’s term and for the 2028 election, implications as large as the opposite had in the first term of President Trump and in the election of 2020. He may be facing in 2028, or his party may be facing in 2028, a state system that is much more independent of the federal system than it has been before, and much less amenable to the kind of manipulation and tricks that Trump tried in 2020 and that led to the January 6th, 2021, attack on Congress.

If the Republican power subsides at the state level, Republicans will face another problem as well, and one with even longer-term consequences for the renewal of their party.

Oftentimes, when parties are beaten at the federal level—as it looks probable that the Republicans will be beaten in 2026, and as it looks very questionable that they will survive in 2028—they find renewal at the state level. And the classic example of this is the career of the president I wrote speeches for, George W. Bush.

In the 1990s Republicans in Congress and Senate sought to impeach President Bill Clinton. This move was tremendously unpopular and led to very bad Republican results in the midterm election of 1998 and to the resignation of then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. George W. Bush, in the same year, 1998, where Republicans did bad in congressional elections, George W. Bush won a decisive re-election as governor of Texas, with important breakthroughs in winning the Hispanic vote. And Republicans all over the country looked and said, Well, the people in Washington, the Republicans in Washington, they don’t seem to know what they’re doing. But this Republican in Texas—he seems to have the formula. And Bush began his campaign for the nomination in 2000 after that breakthrough in 1998 by presenting himself as a different kind of Republican. Different from whom? Different from Newt Gingrich, different from the people who’d impeached Bill Clinton. And so the result was that he could reinvent himself, reinvent his party. And the unsuccessful election of 1998 was followed by renewal in time for the election of the year 2000.

How do the Republicans do that post-Trump? They can’t, because they are caught in the fork. I mean, one thing you might imagine, for example, is that instead of nominating J. D. Vance or even Marco Rubio in 2028—someone closely tied with everything that Americans don’t like about Donald Trump—Republicans would say to themselves, Well, is there a state that’s an important state, a contested state, where there’s a governor who’s very popular?

What do you know? There is one. Georgia is that contested state, and Georgia has an outgoing governor, Brian Kemp, who’s had ratings of over 60 percent for much of his second term, who’s polling at about 60 percent right now, and who has done a good job of straddling the division between Republicans who don’t like Trump and Republicans who do. That’s the guy, you would think. That’s the guy. That’s our George W. Bush. That’s the guy who can break with Trump, be a Republican, be a different kind of Republican. Different from whom? Different from Trump. He doesn’t like Trump, but he’s still a Republican.

But that’s not happening, is it? It’s not happening, because Republican Party politics since 1998 has been effectively nationalized. It’s all Trump all the time; all federal, not state. And that not only defeats the attempts by Republicans at the national level to perform shenanigans; it also denies Republicans the chance to renew themselves from the place where, in American politics, renewal so often comes at the state level.

That’s a fork. It’s a fork the Republicans are not finding their way out of, and it’s a fork that will have large tactical consequences in 2026 and maybe large strategic consequences in 2028.

And now, my dialogue with Omar Mohammed.

[Music]

Frum: In June 2014, the armies of the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second city. Not long after, an anonymous blog called Mosul Eye began reporting on life inside the occupied city. The executions, the expulsions of Christians and Shiites, the mass rape of Yazidi girls, the destruction of shrines and manuscripts.

For more than three years, no one outside a tiny circle knew who was writing it. Journalists relied on it, and the Islamic State threatened its author with death in its most terrible forms. In December 2017, after Mosul was retaken, the Associated Press revealed the writer’s identity. His name was Omar Mohammed, a young historian of Ottoman Mosul.

Omar Mohammed lived a double life, outwardly conforming to ISIS edicts by day and recording the truth of what was happening to his city by night, until he fled the city at the end of 2015 and continued from abroad through a network of contacts inside Mosul. His brother was killed in the final battle to liberate the city.

He has now told the full story in his own words in a new book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS, published by Skyhorse Press. It is, in my opinion, a work of literature about the human spirit, to stand on the shelf with Primo Levi and Czesław Miłosz. A witness to the extremes of human cruelty, oppression, and endurance.

Omar Mohammed, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Omar Mohammed: David, thank you for having me, and I’m humbled by the words you said about me and about the book.

Frum: I think anyone in your presence understands the courage that you showed. Your life is a rebuke to all of us of what it means to be brave, not in a dangerous second, but through the grind of minute-by-minute exposure to terror and oppression and the risk of death.

I want to talk to you about your book. For, as a book and as a witness, because the book, as I said in the introduction, is also, in my opinion, a great work of literature. It’s not just a testimony. It is a work of creative understanding of what people have gone through.

But before we talk about any of those things, let me just start with this. As you know, you spend some time in the United States now. It’s a very busy country, a very inward-looking country, a very forgetful country. You’re a historian. You devoted your career and then the risk of death to remembrance. Why is it important to remember what happened in your city in those years?

Mohammed: There are two ways of saying that also, David. It’s not just why we should remember, but also why we should not forget. Because I’ve always said I can forgive, but forgetting is dangerous.

The reason being, the past 30 to 40 years that witnessed the rise of the so-called jihad on the West or jihad on democracy, against democracy, it believes in only one objective and one outcome and one goal. And that is the destruction of the Western democracy and Western civilization. They stand against everything democracy stands for. We should never forget. We should never stop remembering that they are always planning and plotting against the Western democracy and against the West in general. And this is a way of life that they don’t think should exist, and that they believe it must be eliminated and destroyed.

So yes, it’s a fight, and it’s my task as a historian to keep reminding the people, Westerners or non-Westerners. Because, trust me, if the Western democracy is removed, no one is going to be safe, and that is exactly what they want. We should always fight back. That is my act of remembrance, and that is why I want people to always remember.

Frum: And you continue through your activism, but you also continue as a historian trying to recapture the past of what Mosul was like before ISIS, and what life was like during ISIS. I want to read from your book one of the most terrible and vivid scenes of what you saw as a witness to history.

You have, in this part of the book, you have entered the ISIS capital in Syria. You are approaching from the outskirts, and you see a man who has literally been crucified, like Jesus in the Bible. You say, “In front of it was a man nailed to a cross”—you say you’re in front of an abandoned school. “In front of it was a man nailed to a cross. He was mounted in the manner described in the scriptures: arms extended, nails through the hands, the body suspended above the ground. A piece of paper bearing his name was attached to his chest: Sulyman Ayub. The charge was apostasy, the accusation that a Muslim had abandoned his faith, one of the offenses ISIS published with the most theatrical severity. The word for death was written beneath it in Arabic. But the man was not dead. He was moving, the small involuntary shifts of a living person in agony. Below him, dogs were feeding on his legs. Not strays circling at a distance, but animals that had been allowed to reach the body and were eating from it while the man lived.”

That’s a terrible scene. You give us the man’s name, and you were the only witness to his terrible end and the reasons for it.

Mohammed: I’m sorry, David, because you just read something to me that I thought by writing I will. I heard that—I wish you did not read this text.

Frum: I’m sorry.

Mohammed: I just did not want—

Frum: I wish I had not read it either, but I have and I did because of you.

Mohammed: Yes. And you can imagine I saw that man on my way of escaping the Islamic State. I made sure that I read his name. I made sure that I record his name. I made sure I protect his name from being forgotten. I also made sure by naming him, by giving him that name, that hopefully will outlast me and outlive me, but it will definitely outlive the Islamic State. That people will know that the people who were killed by the Islamic State had names, they had dreams. But it’s also—that animalistic nature of the Islamic State has unfortunately been on many occasions being read or being treated as, Well, what if the Islamic State is just a political movement trying to regain power in its area of interest? That is absolutely absurd. The Islamic State does not use violence to achieve its goals. It uses violence because that is the end goal of its ideology.

And this is one scene, David. Not to mention what’s across the book. I just wanted people to know that those people had names, and they should never be forgotten.

Frum: Well, I hope I won’t upset you. I want to read—I’m going to be reading some more things from the book as we go, to sort of root us so [that] people can also understand what you have done. And this book, you told me, was originally written in English. It is not translated.

Mohammed: It’s in English, yes.

Frum: One of your acts of courageous witness was to masquerade as a doctor or a medical professional to gain entrance to the hospitals, to see what was going on inside the hospitals. And you tell this story. In this case, I think you were not an eyewitness. I think you had interviewed somebody. This is from page 116:

“Yazidi girls, members of an ancient ethno-religious minority from the Sinjar region, whom ISIS had enslaved en masse the previous summer, were being brought in by ISIS fighters requesting mandatory abortions and sterilizations.” That is, the fighters were demanding mandatory abortions and sterilizations. “The doctor,” to whom you were speaking, “described a girl of 17 who had been raped repeatedly by multiple men and was in a state of nervous collapse. The girl refused the procedure.” That is, I assume, sterilization. “The number of such cases at that point was between 50 and 60. At least 12 girls younger than 15 had died of injuries from the violence. I wrote it down that evening in the same compressed register I use for everything: date, location, number, source. I’m not sure I’ve ever found the right language for what it takes to apply that method to that material. I wrote it down because if I did not, it would disappear into the silence ISIS was building around everything it did to Yazidi women.”

Mohammed: I remember this very well. I remember what the doctor told me, but I also equally remember the three other young girls that were killed and shot dead by the Islamic State. As we speak today, and as I mentioned, exactly what you say—that I write it so people will remember. So they will not be forgotten.

Today in 2026, we have people questioning that even the heinous attack against the Yazidis even took place or even happened. People are denying or questioning, or people are trying to make it look like, well, we were all attacked. Why does it have to be special for the Yazidis? Because that is the risk. If we do not record what the Islamic State did, there will be other people who will come and say, they will say that it was not that bad. It was not that horrible.

And that will always—as a historian, that is always the challenge. Because as historians, we are supposed to deal with the dead. But what I wanted to do is to give life to those people who were killed, so they will be forever witnesses to what happened to them.

Frum: My colleague at The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, a great scholar of the Stalinist and communist oppression in Eastern Europe, wrote in the preface—I’m going to now forget which of her books she wrote this, I think it was maybe her book on the Gulag, the Soviet Gulag. She said, “I write this book”—I’m quoting from memory—“not so that it will never happen again, but because it will happen again.” And I think one of the things I am reminded of by you and by, as I say, the other people I imagine you standing beside on the shelf, Primo Levi and Czesław Miłosz, of just these horrors occur again and again and again. And the only remedy against them—not the remedy, the way of beginning a remedy—is through unceasing remembrance.

Mohammed: Our city was taken by the Islamic State, David, because we had no memory of anything that happened before. Because we allowed other people to be omitted. I don’t put blame on people collectively. That’s not what I do. That’s not my job. That’s not my craft. But my craft is also to understand why what happened happened.

When the Islamic State took control of [a] third of Iraq and also over [a] third of Syria—but as much as I’m concerned with the city of Mosul, which is my hometown that I unfortunately lost forever, we had no memory of what happened before. We had no memory of what happened to the Jews in the ’40s and the ’50s. We had no memory of what happened to the Assyrians in the ’50s, all of these massacres. We had no memory of what happened in the ’50s. We had no memory of what happened in the early 2000s. People unfortunately forget, David. That’s why it is easy. It’s easy to take control of their past, present, and future. And it was my job to precisely make sure that, because as you cited Anne Applebaum, yes—I do completely agree that it might happen again. My job—I might not be able to prevent it, but if it happens again, at least there will not be only one person to fight against them. But everyone will be prepared, will be ready to understand what they are and what they represent.

Frum: I want to put an asterisk beside something you said a few moments ago. You referred to what happened to the Jews in the ’40s and ’50s, and many North American listeners, many English-speaking people, will think you’re meaning about the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. But you’re actually speaking about events that happened to the Jews in Iraq.

Mohammed: That’s exactly what I was referring to: the pogrom in Baghdad in the ’40s, or known as the Farhud. But also the revocation of the citizenship, the deportation of the Jews, confiscation of their properties and lands. There is an ancient Jewish history in Iraq that was completely omitted to the extent that I myself had no idea until I grew up, until I started finding out on my own. I had no idea that we had Jews in Mosul. I had no idea that the school I used to attend was built on the ruins of a Jewish school that was completely demolished to the ground. Of course, that allows people to be okay with things to happen again and again.

Frum: Well, you both judge people, but you’re very humane in your judgments of the choices and options that are available to ordinary people. And I want to read another passage here—this is from page 65 and 66—because, look: Americans may remember the fight over Mosul, which was spearheaded by American troops with their Iraqi troops, their other coalition forces. And it was a terrible battle, and we had images from it, but not from inside. There was a very effective censorship. And it’s easy to see the people who are in that city as just part of the scenery, part of the story, and you bring this extraordinary sympathy to them. And I want to read again from your book, page 65, 66:

“The population of an occupied city does not divide into resistors and collaborators. That is the binary of people who have never lived under total control. The reality is a spectrum so compressed that the distance between cooperation and refusal can be measured in the angle at which a man places money on a counter. A father who sent his son to the rewritten school”—that is, ISIS had taken command of the schools, and it foisted this reactionary curriculum on them—“a father who sent his son to the rewritten school was not endorsing ISIS’s curriculum. He was calculating that a distorted education was less damaging than no education at all, and that a boy seen on the streets during school hours would attract the attention of the Hisba, the religious police. A shopkeeper who paid the zakat, the forced tribute, was not funding the caliphate by conviction. He was buying another day of operation with the only currency the regime accepted. A woman who wore the niqab was not submitting to the ideology. She was navigating a city in which her uncovered face was a punishable offense and her covered face was survival. These were not moral failures. They were the daily calculations of prisoners performing the routines that captors required in order to remain alive.”

Mohammed: And I believe that’s exactly how we need to look at people whose will was stripped away. They were under total control of such a brutal regime. There is another way of resistance that I had noted back then, because you mentioned the curricula and the schools. There is, in another page in the book, when the professors of the university were forced to sit inside the library that ISIS had occupied and transformed into its hub to rewrite the curricula before they destroy the library. Those professors—they knew that if they say no, they will be killed, they will be punished.

But they at least decided to take some act of resistance. Even if it’s unnoticeable; even if it’s only for themselves to notice. Which is what they did, David. They would start writing slower and slower, slowly, slowly. So what is supposed to be delivered in one week, they would deliver it in two months, because they were always in the hope—probably in one month that ISIS would be removed, ISIS would disappear. So they would just go back to themself and say, I delayed them. I did not give them what they want quickly.

So there were people who would take this type of act of resistance. I actually prepared back then an entire confidential report, which I called “The Civil Disobedience,” because I needed to understand what might be the way to get into the people in case there will be a need to form a military resistance against the Islamic State. What do I need? Because I had thought about this. I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in such actions. But I needed to understand the mentality of the people. That’s why I went to go deeper inside the mentality of the people. And as you said—yes, we have to be human.

Frum: Iraq is a land of fathomless antiquity. Cities are built on top of cities. Mosul, your Mosul, is the city that Bible readers will know as Nineveh. I mean, it’s got a much more ancient history than that, but it is the city to which the prophet Jonah was sent. And the shrine to the prophet Jonah figures largely in your book.

Tell us about this layered history: Christian, Jewish, pre-Islamic, Islamic, Ottoman, modern. You are a historian. You describe a city that is built on layers and where the palaces of Assyrian kings from ancient Assyria are still there to be seen.

Mohammed: I will start with a joke that goes on until today in Mosul related to Jonah.

So the people of Nineveh—as you mentioned, Mosul is across the river from Nineveh. Which is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which was destroyed in the year 612 B.C. by the Medes and the Babylonians. And since then, the city of Mosul, which also existed back then, became more prominent, as the Assyrians kept moving to the other side. But also has the story of Jonah—and in the Bible it’s the fish, in the Quran it’s the whale, or it’s a big fish. And he arrived in Nineveh, and he started asking them to accept his message. And the joke goes—which is actually not a joke, but the people use it to say that we are the only people who were divinely protected. They say when God asked the people of Nineveh to accept his message, they told him, Give us your offer. Come back in three days; we’ll think about it. And he would come back in three days, and then they would say, Now we have contemplated; we can accept the offer. And then they were given a divine protection forever.

And that’s how people grew up in Mosul. That’s how I learned this story, from my grandmother telling me that we are the people of Yunus. We were never told that we are the people of the caliphate. We are—Yunus, it is the Arabic name—one of the names of the city of Mosul is “the city of Jonah.”

And you have this layer, and then you have an ancient Assyrian palace on top of that first layer. And then on top of the ancient Assyrian site, which has been rediscovered again, you have an ancient synagogue. And then on top of which a church was built, on top of which a tomb was built, on top of which a mosque was built. That’s how Mosul is. It’s a multilayered city. It’s as contradictory, as beautiful at once.

Frum: And Mosul is bisected by the River Tigris. And on one side is a more ancient city—an Ottoman city, I suppose. And on the other side is a more modern city with wider streets and more modern buildings. And this duality is a central feature of the book.

Mohammed: Yes. Because that is exactly what you see, and that’s exactly why I care a lot about the river. You can stand in the middle of the river. You look at the right, you see the modernity, you see modern life. But then you look at the left—everything is ancient. Wherever you step on, this is ancient. This is the oldest church in Mosul. This is the oldest synagogue. This is the oldest mosque. This is the oldest street. This is the oldest alley. Everything you mention there, you must add that first word: It’s the oldest. And wherever you step, you are surrounded by history. You are surrounded by complex history, I would say.

Because also, as much as Mosul is old and ancient, it also has multilayered society. Different religions, different faiths. But it’s also a city that has never been able to have this as a merged society. This is why we have always had in the city, what you have as the Jewish quarter or the Christian quarter or the Islamic quarter. People did not mix. But they always found a way to mix where it brought them together—which is the old market. And it can continue to live.

Frum: I’m going to read one last thing, a very vivid description of the end when the coalition forces came to expel ISIS from Mosul.

The Tigris is spanned by bridges. The coalition blew up the bridges, all but one, in order to sever the ability of ISIS to move fighters from one side to the other. ISIS then blew up, you say, the last of the bridges in order to fortify itself. And the more modern part of the city was cleared with considerable violence, but still leaving the city substantially intact.

And at that point, the fight turned to the older part of the city. And here’s what you say about that. “The West Mosul”—the West Mosul is the older part—“the West Mosul offensive was set for February 19th, 2017. What was coming would be unlike anything the city had endured in its thousands of years of continuous habitation. Not the Mongol sack of the 13th century, not the Ottoman conquests, not the British mandate, not even the fall to ISIS. What was coming was the destruction of Mosul by the forces that had come to save it. The old city, the city of shared walls and narrow alleys, and the leaning minaret, and the churches beside the mosques, and the shrines beside the markets, was about to be fed into the machinery of liberation. And the machinery did not distinguish between the enemy and the place the enemy had chosen to die inside. The time had come to end ISIS. The price of ending it was Mosul.”

Mohammed: It is the price we paid, David. Mosul in its total shape, in its total history. Mosul, that still holds the body of my brother, is the price we paid, yes.

But it’s the price we paid, and I’m willing to pay this price again if ISIS comes back again. I’m sorry. [Cries.] I did not expect myself today to—yeah, we paid Mosul as the price to end that totalitarian, brutal Islamist regime that came for the destruction of every memory we have built. Of every dream we had. Of every stone we marked, was completely erased. But it was a price worth paying, and I would give myself, and I would do it again. And I’m going to give 1,000 Mosul to ensure that no Islamic State, no caliphate would ever see the light. 1,000 Mosul, not one.

Frum: You did often put your life at risk, and at one point in a moment of gloom, you shaved your beard, you put on a red sweater. Red was prohibited for some reason I don’t understand. And you sort of walked around and waited for them to find you, and they didn’t. After you made good your escape—and this is a strange thing about the modern world—ISIS has cast Mosul back into what we would call medieval barbarity, although it was much worse than anything that ever happened in the Middle Ages.

And yet you’re able to be in contact with your family inside the city. And especially your brother, to whom you were so close, and you lose him in that last fight.

Mohammed: I insisted. I insisted on him. I kept telling him. I told him, This is not a warning I am giving you to leave where you are. I’m not telling you that I expect there is going to be a fight there. I’m telling you that I know that the fight is moving into the area where you are, and you must leave now. I did not know I was talking to a dead person. I think my brother realized he was dead. I think he understood. Because my brother, back then when he was talking to me, he was very calm. He was very sincere. He had the serenity that I have never seen before, because he is the one who was always concerned with our safety. He was always concerned, myself, my family, caring for us. But that time he was serene, he was calmer. My brother did not survive. The next day I knew. I knew that the moment I was talking to him, I knew he’s already dead.

I knew he was a dead man, and I knew that he knew he was a dead man

I just could not save my brother. It is one of my greatest regrets that I couldn’t—I should have, I should have kept calling him. I should have kept calling him. I should have sent someone to remove him from that area. I just, I couldn’t.

Frum: You lived this strange life in exile where you were once totally helpless and yet also quite powerful. Because your information was being fed into the global system that was monitoring what ISIS was doing, that was informing the forces that were gathering to destroy ISIS.

You could see, but you couldn’t touch what was going on in your city. And you could target, you could assist the coalition forces in targeting death, but you could not save anybody.

Mohammed: Yes. I could not just give up. I could not stand and do nothing. I realized that I had the power of saving people.

It was a very difficult decision to do, because it meant that I will have to be in contact with the coalition, be in contact with the Central Command. Be in contact with people that I’ve always resisted responding to. But when I realized that I had the tools that allowed me to save more lives. There were people getting killed on [a] daily basis, whether it’s by ISIS or the bombing or—it’s a battlefield. An irregular war, taking place in one of the oldest cities in the world, in which if you, not bombing a house, if you push too hard on the wall, the house is going to collapse.

People were desperate. I found the tools, I understood how it works. I used my presence in Paris back then, with that access to technology. And as I mentioned in my book, my brother I did not save, I couldn’t save. I saved 92 families, and I am always thankful that they are alive. I am always devastated that others could not make it. But I do remember that at least those lives were saved. At least others are still alive.

Frum: Let me ask you about your life in the past 10 years. So the fight for Mosul is over in 2017.

ISIS is expelled. The city is wrecked. Your identity is revealed at the end of 2017 by the Associated Press. You have now made a life; you’ve returned to your teaching and research work, and you spend your time in Paris and other cities.

What is your work like? What is your mission like in the 10 years since the book’s story comes to an end?

Mohammed: After I escaped and the moment I arrived in safety in France, I did not stop working on doing whatever I can to help the city. When it was the battle, I used every tool available to me to help the people.

And then the biggest challenge came, which is the recovery of the city. I started immediately advocating for resupplying the central library of the city of Mosul with books. People were asking, What do you want? I said, I need books. Hundreds of thousands of books were pouring from all over the world, coming, arriving in Mosul. They are all labeled “for Mosul Eye,” and the books would be immediately admitted. Someone sent us a container of 20 tons of books.

The heritage of the city—which is the memory of the city, the most visible element of our identity—was almost completely demolished to the ground by the Islamic State, so we had to rebuild it. I started advocating with the world to help the city. Projects started working on recovering the Al-Nuri mosque, which ISIS had used before to declare its caliphate. Later, they destroyed it. We had to rebuild it. A church and a synagogue.

And I have since been working on what I would call my life mission. Beside breathing life into the soul of Mosul, I realized that it cannot be completed until I make sure the Jewish history of Mosul, that was completely erased and omitted, goes back to the city itself. And this is why I began since then—I’ve been working on this in the past years, and still documenting the testimonies of the last people who were born Jewish in Mosul, who are still alive. Preserving the Jewish heritage of Mosul, but also not doing it in isolation; making it an integral part of the city’s history, so people will understand that they have a collective identity, a collective memory.

I did not stop working on doing the research on extremism and terrorism. I did not stop working—I completed my dissertation in the past 10 years or so. I have been doing everything, David, dedicating all my time for the city of Mosul. I’m not going to list things, but I’m going to say what my life was: is that I was a person on a mission. And still I am, to help the city of Mosul recover. Whether it’s the same city I am talking about or it’s a different city now, it’s a city that deserves to live.

Frum: [Novelist] Milan Kundera spoke of the struggle for freedom as being a struggle for memory and against forgetting. And you’ve talked very powerfully about the work of memory, what you’re trying to remember. The names and lives of people who were killed, the names and lives of people who were sexually abused. The city that is gone, the pre-city, or the older city that used to be there.

Let us talk a little bit now about forgetting. Because the way you and I made contact in the first place was I had spoken about this terrible simplification that has been happening across the Middle East, where ancient communities have, one by one, been expelled. The Middle East is becoming a region that was divided into so many different religions and so many different languages and so many different ways of life. Unless, like the Jews in Israel, they can find their own state, there is no survival for them in this region in this terrible simplification. And there’s a forgetting of what the Middle East was.

Can you talk a little bit about, as a historian of Ottoman Iraq and of Ottoman Mosul, what was there before? What was lost? And is there any way to recover that tolerance, that living together that was there before?

Mohammed: I think it’s conditional.

There is also, as you mentioned, there is a simplification of how the past looked like. There is a simplification of multiple definitions, including tolerance and coexistence. People assume that societies in the Middle East have lived, before even it was called Middle East, have lived in coexistence in a state of tolerance, and that is not the case.

We’ve always been through this type of on-and-off situation. When the government has no interest in attacking the non-Muslims, including the Ottoman Empire back then, people are going to be okay. They are living their life, going on in their life, and that’s it. Whenever there is a problem, it will be immediately—it depends on the context—it will be immediately blamed on either the Jews or the Christians.

But there is—in the middle of all of that, David, I’m not going to dismiss the reality. I’m not going to dismiss the fact that people have developed a model that allowed them to live in a coherent life, in a much more calmer life. But [it] was conditional with the fact that they had a space, and they had a place to communicate. And that was the market; simply the market. Because everyone who tells you that people lived in coexistence in their neighborhoods, that’s not true. In fact, the people did not communicate with each other in their residential areas. But they would always come together, and they would work, in the old markets: in a trade, in crafts. It even allowed the city to develop its own vocabularies and language, and allowed the people to work together, to live together, to contribute to the way of life together.

However, it has always been fragile, because that social contract has never been strengthened, has never been made sustainable. It will immediately break down whenever there is an issue, whenever there is a problem, whether it’s an internal or external. Whenever there is—there is always this labeling of a treacherous people or disloyal people. As long as you are not religiously part of that faith, then you have the potential of working against the nation.

There were moments in that history when things were much better. And that is during the period of what was known as, I think in the 17th through the mid of the 18th century, is “the phase of the city-states.” Meaning a family was in control of Mosul. There was the Jalili family, for example, for over two centuries in control of the city. He would have his most trusted minister in his cabinet as a Jew, and the other one is a Christian. His envoy to the Ottoman Empire was, in fact, Jewish.

People lived in harmony. People lived in coexistence. But then when that condition ended, it went back to the same situation. Jews had never had the possibility to have a school in Mosul until as late as [the 1920s], until after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Modernity came. And we understood—and this is to put it bluntly, brutally honest like that—democracy and separation of religion and the state have proven to be the only way for minorities to survive. And for people to understand that there is a way of life that is beyond history itself, that is beyond the promised caliphate, that is beyond these dangerous concepts that have been put in place for decades.

It’s a complicated history. Cannot be simplified simply by saying people have lived happily in coexistence—because it could be one year of coexistence and next year a bloody year on people, and so on. This is why it was easy, for example—we have witnessed the collapse of that system immediately after the Islamic State took control of the city. It completely collapsed. That social contract completely collapsed. We’ve seen neighbors killing or raping their neighbors, the Yazidis, kidnapping their women. We’ve seen Christian people being expelled, and some of their neighbors would steal and loot their belongings. What type of coexistence was that? It was always conditional with—you need a strong state, you need good governance. But you also need a system that is not built on the infrastructure of religion, or the idea that Muslims are the majority, so they should rule and everyone should come under their control. Because that should not be the case. That should not be the situation.

And it’s a complicated history also, because we still have conflicts we have not processed. We still have not asked the difficult questions. And David, I think I’ve already told you that some people have to get into the mud of that question and start facing them and start answering them.

People have always been asking the question, How could we live together? How could we continue to live together? But these questions always get faced with punishment, because it also has become easier to say and to simplify, Well, it’s a diverse region. It’s a beautiful, beautiful diversity. People have lived with each other. How did they live with each other? Nobody asks these questions. And I think it’s the region in the world that is becoming less diverse. A region that’s becoming less diverse. You go to Iraq today; you can easily notice: This part of the country is Shia, the other part is Sunni, the other part is Kurd. And where are the Christians? Where are the Yazidis? Where are the Jews in the middle of all of that?

This is a region that still needs some more work by its own people. I think people have to get things into their hands, matters into their hands, by facing the difficult questions. By facing the reality. For example, one of the outstanding questions: Why did ISIS happen? Why did ISIS took control of third of the country? Before that, why did Al-Qaeda even come to being? Why did people join the Islamic State? Why do people still have interest in something called caliphate in today’s modernity, in today’s fast-moving humanity? Why do you think people need a caliphate?

I think these questions need to be asked. There is nothing wrong about asking them. There is nothing directed against a religion when we ask these questions. But when certain religions, when certain texts become the source for people like the Islamic State, I think everyone has the right to ask: What’s wrong with that? What’s going wrong?

Frum: And when they ask, they will have your extraordinary work of witness and testimony as a guide to their better thinking. And maybe—possibly, let’s hope—to a better, more liberal, more democratic future.

Omar Mohammed, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Mohammed: David, thank you very much. And it was a little bit emotional for me. I apologize for that.

Frum: It was emotional for everyone. Thank you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Omar Mohammed for talking today about his powerful book, Mosul Eye.

I don’t know how to make a transition to another book talk after that discussion. So I’m going to talk about something really quite completely different, which is not only not a book but an entirely different art form: opera.

I went to see this past weekend the production of La bohème by Puccini at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. This is a 2026 production, but it’s a revival of an older design by the great designer [Franco] Zeffirelli. It’s a quite legendary production. The costumes and sets are in the basement. The most famous scene, that I’d heard about all my life and wanted to see in person, was at Act Two—which is set in a café, and suddenly the curtain rises on a Paris street. And there are rooftops, and there’s an open café, and there are hundreds of choristers and children. There are even a couple of live animals, a donkey and a horse, all of them reenacting what the Latin Quarter would’ve looked like in the reign of King Louis Philippe, which is when La bohème is set, although it’s written half a century later.

I found myself thinking less about Puccini and less about La bohème than about the whole strange institution of opera.

In any major Western city, there will be, probably, an opera house. And the opera house, it will be one of many theaters and venues, but it is usually one with a certain kind of statement of importance and formality. There may be sport centers that are bigger, but they’re never as central. And there may be theaters that are almost as central, but they’re never as big. And there’s always something about the opera that sets itself apart. Often, typically, it’s on a square, not facing the street. That’s how it is in Paris; that’s how it is in Vienna. And of course, that’s how it is in New York, where there’s this kind of formation of three buildings that set back from the street with a giant plaza in between. There’s a statement of importance. And people recognize this importance, and act on it.

Very few people—almost nobody dresses up anymore to go to the theater. But people still dress up, especially women, to go to the opera. As I looked around myself, I saw women in long dresses, women wearing costume clothing that was quite different from what they’d wear not only during the day, but really to almost any other kind of evening out.

And I thought about the kind of cultural knowledge that is embedded in this strange institution, and at the cultural self-confidence it takes to put such a building on such a square in such a city, and to summon people and to say, This is something that is different, not only from other things that you do during your everyday life. This is different even from other forms of art. This is somehow higher and more important and different and more formal. More commanding; more central. And I wonder: Where do people get that confidence? Where do people get that nerve? And then I found myself thinking: Do we still have it?

Opera is kind of an ossified form. I mean, there are new operas written, but they tend not to be very popular. And it is Puccini and Verdi, and especially La bohème. La bohème seems to be the most popular opera, at least in the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire, and this particular design has been played again and again and again. So it’s kind of an ossified form. And I wonder if the confidence behind that form is also becoming ossified too.

Now, I’m not going to make a brief for opera. You may like it; you may not. You may want to see the show, you may not. That’s not what I’m interested in. What I’m interested in is: Can we still summon the cultural self-confidence to say, of certain kinds of works of art: These are important. These are things that people should value. These are things, whether you like it yourself or not, they have a central place in your culture and your society. And the texture of your city will endorse this idea, whether or not you have ever set foot yourself inside the venue in which this cultural confidence is expressed.

And I think there will be critics who will say that kind of cultural confidence is misplaced. What about other things that other people do? Who’s to say? Who’s to say why someone has the authority to proclaim this and not that? But maybe we can’t get along without it either. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about on my way in and out to watch Zeffirelli’s donkeys and horses in his extraordinary setting of this amazing piece of art, in this amazing venue in this great city.

Thanks so much for joining me this week on The David Frum Show. It would be a great help to spreading the word of the show if you would share, subscribe, like on whatever platform you use. As always, the best way to support the work of this program and all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. I hope you’ll please consider doing that. Thanks so much for watching and listening. See you next week on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

[Music]

Maybe you’ve seen the ad: A man and a woman are loading a shopping cart. The woman tells the man he must return a carton of eggs. “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”

The woman explains that grocery prices are rising because the United States gives so much aid to Israel. “It’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” the woman explains. “Don’t they get universal health care too?” the man asks. “We’re paying for that, too, probably,” the woman responds, at which point the man puts back the bananas.

The ad was produced by an independent political-action committee to support the Senate campaign of the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. During the Democratic primary, El-Sayed regularly denounced American supporters of Israel as a shadowy, sinister special interest. Since winning the nomination, he has distanced himself from his earlier language. Now a super PAC is reviving it for him only a week before the general election.

The legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson explained the ad half a century before it was produced. In his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, he described “one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics,” which may have played a role in one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas:

The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get away calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

In the case of the ad supporting El-Sayed, the sonofabitch targeted by the false accusation is not El-Sayed’s theoretical opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers—not really. The ad concludes, “Mike Rogers is for”—ironic chuckle—“they/them.” We all know who they are, and they are the real target of the ad.

[James Loeffler: The hatred that broke American politics]

The accusation that Israel is to blame for America’s economic problems is not some unique quirk of El-Sayed supporters. During his campaign to become New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani told Politico in 2025 that the dilapidated state of the city’s housing was the fault of the same villain: “The government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.”

That same year, Marjorie Taylor Greene drew a similar link. American aid, she charged, typically accounts for up to a fifth of Israel’s defense budget, “even though Israel, nuclear-armed Israel, has universal healthcare for their citizens and subsidized college for their citizens. Here in America, we’re $37 trillion in debt.”

On Meet the Press in August, El-Sayed insinuated that U.S. aid for weapons in Israel was somehow an impediment to health care at home. “This campaign was a referendum on whether or not we want health care here or bombs somewhere else.”

Do supporters of Israel have to deny the false accusation? Okay, here goes. U.S. military aid to Israel is set at $3.8 billion a year from 2019 to 2028—about one-20th of 1 percent of the total federal budget. In 2024, Congress approved a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other allies—of which, nearly two-thirds went to Ukraine, about $15 billion went to Israel, and about $9 billion was directed to humanitarian relief, including assistance for Gazan civilians displaced by the war that Hamas started. (The rest went to Taiwan and other allies in the Indo-Pacific region.)

Almost all U.S. assistance to Israel takes the form of credits that Israel can use only to buy American-made equipment. This assistance provides at least two direct and immediate benefits to Americans. First, it buys the United States access to Israeli military technology. By partly underwriting the development of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system, the U.S. has gained the use of battle-tested systems that also protect American lives. Second, this assistance lowers the per-unit cost of U.S. systems. The United States buys up to 48 F-35 fighters a year. Israel has bought 75 and is considering an estimated 25 more. Foreign orders allow U.S. arms manufacturers to improve their economies of scale. At a time when other NATO allies are canceling their orders of American equipment because they no longer fully trust the U.S. as an ally or supplier, Israeli orders enhance the efficiency of American defense production.

[Helen Lewis: The firebrand]

Meanwhile, all U.S. aid to Israel amounts to a fraction of what Israel’s critics wish to spend domestically. Despite the implications of that El-Sayed ad: Americans spend $1.1 trillion a year on groceries. Canceling aid to Israel would deliver the equivalent of about 30 hours of that spending. Per Mamdani’s complaint that Israel is to blame for bad housing in New York City: The city’s housing authority estimates its backlog of deferred maintenance at almost $80 billion, or about 20 years’ worth of U.S. assistance to Israel at present levels. Expanding Medicare to cover all American citizens would cost perhaps more than $32 trillion in additional federal spending over the first decade. Covering even one month of this plan would take 70 years’ worth of aid to Israel.

By blaming the Jewish state for the price of bananas in Michigan, the super-PAC ad calls to mind political tricks older and more disturbing than the one attributed to Johnson. In 1899, Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna and one of the most notorious anti-Semites of the 19th century, gave a speech blaming the Habsburg empire’s economic troubles on its Jews. “Here in our Austrian fatherland the situation is such that the Jews have seized a degree of influence which exceeds their number and importance,” he argued. “And in this respect the Jews operate a terrorism of a kind that could hardly be worse. For us, in Austria, it is a matter of liberating Christian people from the hegemony of Jewry.”

As with the rising cost of living in the U.S., the problem Lueger was concerned with was real. His voter base of artisans and craftspeople was coming under immense pressure from factory competition. There was not much Lueger could do about his voters’ distress. But he could point them toward a politically useful target. Now, with a modest update of Lueger’s language, an outside PAC’s closing argument in one of the most watched Senate races of 2026 blames a familiar “they/them.”

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the growing calls for Medicare for All. David discusses how Medicare for All might actually work, why it’s impractical, and why it is fundamentally a promise Democrats cannot keep.

Then, David is joined by Kara Swisher to discuss her new podcast with Hillary Clinton, the dangers of unregulated AI, and the power of the AI oligarchs over American politics. David and Kara discuss the potential of an AI bubble and what responsible oversight of AI would look like.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, and whether the AI revolution changes any of Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.

So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—

Kara Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.

Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”

Swisher: Everything.

[Music]

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 Kara Swisher, host of the On With Kara Swisher podcast, and co-host of Pivot, and co-host, very excitingly, of a new podcast that she will co-star [with] Hillary Clinton. And we’ll be talking about that new podcast with Kara.

This week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, an enormously influential book on economic history published a decade ago. And I’ll be discussing whether the advent of the AI revolution changes any of Robert Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.

But before the dialogue with Kara Swisher and before the book discussion, I want to open with some thoughts about the debate over Medicare for All: the slogan, and the idea of Medicare for All.

It does look like the next Congress will feature many more advocates of the Medicare for All idea than American politics has seen for a long time. There are bills in Congress purporting to offer or designing or proposing a Medicare for All scheme. It’s a slogan on the campaign trail. Let’s take it seriously. Let’s think about this in a real-world way, because we may be talking about this a lot come 2027. What does Medicare for All mean? How would you get there if you were minded to get there?

So understand, Medicare, of course, is the program that provides much health insurance for people over 65. It has components with prescription drugs, but the core of it is that it covers medical and hospital bills for people over 65, with some contribution from the over-65s themselves.

The Medicare for All proposal is to extend this scheme through all of the American economy, covering everybody through the Medicare program and displacing a lot of the health-care insurance that you have now. Which is mostly—those people who get private health insurance get it usually paid for through an employer, out of the worker’s pay, but through an employer.

What would it mean to make this change from a system where much of the health care in the economy is paid for by employer-financed private insurance to one where the U.S. Treasury pays for most health care? So: Half a decade ago, at the end of the 2010s, there was a big study of this. The Congressional Budget Office, and others, too, did a big study of what it would mean to transition to a Medicare for All program. And CBO’s estimate in the year 2020 was that such a program would cost the U.S. Treasury, over the next 10 years, about $30 trillion. The work has not been redone by CBO. But if I think it—if you just figure out prices are higher, you’re going further out into time, you’re starting in 2030 and going to 2040—it’s a good guess that it would cost closer to $40 trillion over 10 years than it would cost to $30 trillion over 10 years.

So where would you get the $40 trillion? The U.S. Treasury is going to be spending a lot more. How would it get the extra $40 trillion? Now, proponents of Medicare for All will say—and they’re not completely wrong about this—they will say: Wait a moment. That’s not $40 trillion of new spending. We’re spending the $40 trillion now or thereabouts. We’re spending it one way. That is, you get mostly from your private insurance through your employer. So we’re just taking $40 trillion from this sector of the economy and moving it over to the government, and net-net, it will even out. Maybe it’s a little bit more expensive than what we have now, but not a lot more expensive.

Let’s suppose they’re right about that. Still, we have one way of financing it now, and we’re going to be moved to another way of financing it along the way. How do you make that transition? What would that look like? The proponents of Medicare for All will say this: Look, when you get a job, if you have health care, you are really paying for the health insurance. Your employer lowers your wages to cover the cost and then pays an insurance company, or they self-insure. But in any way, the employer finances the payment of the health coverage out of the wages that you don’t get. When we move to health care for all, Medicare for All, the employer will no longer be buying private insurance. So your wages should go up, and out of that higher wage, you should be able to pay a higher tax.

But that blackboard analysis blinks the fact, yeah, you’re going to be paying a new tax, probably a payroll tax, maybe some other kind of tax. And it’s going to be quite a big tax that is going to fall on just about every worker in the economy.

Now, again: You’re paying a kind of health-care tax now, because your wages are lower. But the Medicare for All people assume that your employer will raise your wage almost all of what you’re now paying for health insurance through your employer. You’ll get almost all of that money back, maybe all of it. That’s the assumption. And so you’ll be well-positioned to pay the new tax, which will not be heavier than what you’re paying now. But even if that’s all true, it won’t be true for everybody. Some people will be winners; some people will be losers. Some people will be big winners, some people will be big losers, and everybody will see a new tax on their paycheck.

So what Medicare for All means from the point of view of American politics is: The new president elected in 2028—assuming that president is committed to this idea—the new Congress that comes to power either now or in 2029, that new Congress, one of their first orders of business will be passing the biggest and most far-reaching tax increase that Americans have seen on their paychecks since World War II. That’s what Medicare for All means. Start the next Congress, start the next presidency with a massive increase in a visible tax that you explain to American people they won’t really feel—because their wages should be going up if their employer gives them back the money the employer is keeping right now to pay for health insurance.

And aware of the politics of this, some of the Medicare for All proponents have come up with a series of gimmicks to conceal the tax. In 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a system where we wouldn’t have a payroll tax. We’d tax large employers in the economy directly. Every employer with 50 employees or more would pay a new tax directly on the employer. It would be invisible to the employee, and that would get us to the transition to Medicare for All.

But the Warren idea has been almost universally derided by experts in the field as completely complicated, unworkable, inviting all kinds of distortion. For one thing, it would mean that no employer in the economy who had 49 employees would ever hire a 50th. The 50th employer would generate a massive new tax on that employer. So on the verge of this AI revolution that is calling into question all kinds of people’s employment, you’d create a massive new tax that would say, If you’re at 49, stay there forever. Never get to 50 employees. So that seems kind of daunting and distorting.

So even if you believe all of these things, you’re signing up for a big project. Now, the really irresponsible people in the Democratic Party, the Bernie Sanderses, will say, We don’t need payroll tax. The billionaires and the millionaires: They’ll pay for it all. But that’s, again, more sloganeering. The math doesn’t work, and anyway, billionaires and millionaires find it quite easy to escape taxes. And the way you would write the tax would be with an increase in income taxes—and that would be seen not just by billionaires and millionaires, but by lots and lots and lots of people.

There is no way around it. Medicare for All means transition to a new kind of program that needs a new kind of funding mechanism that requires a new and highly visible tax that will fall on many, many people. And if you think no Congress will ever pass that thing—which is kind of what I suspect—then when you talk about Medicare for All, you are promising something that you know you cannot deliver.

One of the reasons I think that American politics has seen so much demoralization and polarization over the past 15 years is because you’ve had politicians—President Trump is the worst offender, but he’s not the only offender—who promise things they know can’t happen. You’re not going to restore American manufacturing and make America great again by keeping out foreign products. You can’t pass tax cuts forever and have no spending cuts. Those things, it doesn’t work. Gravity, math—they all exist. And people, if not the candidates themselves, people around the candidates, they know they’re promising things they can’t do and Medicare for All is just such a thing.

Now, where Medicare for All is very useful for a politician, and this goes back to the Bernie Sanders model, if you’re the one senator who is in favor of this idea, and all the other senators say, It’s unworkable. We’re not going to do it, then you can get enormous attention for yourself. You can pose as the one truth-teller in the Senate, the one honest man in the village of the accomplices and the weaklings. You’re the one guy, and you’re saying this one thing, and you don’t have to worry about the unfeasibility of it because no one will ever let you do it. And that’s how you get the career of Bernie Sanders, which is a career of decades in public life, almost no accomplishments of any kind, but an enormous following because of the promises he keeps making.

But you can only have one of those guys: one in the Senate, maybe a handful in the House. If you have a dozen senators who are promising things like that—if you have 40 or 50 or 60 or 80 or 100 members of the House who are promising those things—the question of the design of the program, the question of the how this is going to be paid for, the question of the massive tax that will fall on Americans on the promise that their wages will go up because the employers will give them back the money the employers are now paying for private health insurance, all of that really comes to the fore.

One of the ways to get to a better politics in America is for politicians to make promises that they know they can keep and that they intend to keep. And one of the ways to keep us on the bad path we’re on now is to have lots of people making promises that sound good to a comparatively small coterie of the voters, but that they know or should know they can’t keep. That they know or should know that they won’t keep. And that they can know or should know are impossible.

We’ve got a lot of that going on right now, and it points the way to further demoralization, further polarization. Change in an advanced society like the United States, in a complex bureaucratic society with a lot of vested interests—it has to be incremental. Even if incremental change is imperfect, that’s the way it has to be, and anyone who promises you a non-incremental change is promising something they can’t deliver and probably don’t mean.

And now my dialogue with Kara Swisher.

[Music]

Frum: Kara Swisher hosts On With Kara Swisher, co-hosts Pivot with Scott Galloway, and has a CNN series on the people trying to live forever. She has just announced a new election-season podcast with a co-host you may know, Hillary Clinton. Kara Swisher is known to her many followers as a tireless and fearless reporter on technology and those enriched by technology.

She is the author of three books, most recently Burn Book: A Tech Love Story from Simon & Schuster, in which she calls Mark Zuckerberg the most damaging man in tech and Elon Musk the most disappointing.

On Election Day, she’ll be onstage in Toronto for a live taping of Pivot, so Canadian viewers and listeners may want to make a note of that.

Kara, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Swisher: Thank you. Unfortunately, we’re sold out in Toronto because the Canadians love us.

Frum: Oh, congratulations. Congratulations.

Swisher: Thanks, thanks.

Frum: Getting Canadians out on a dark November night.

Swisher: Well, we’re going to get them warm. We’re going to warm them up with dick jokes and insights, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Frum: All right. So let me start by asking you about your new co-host. How did that come to be? Tell me about the project.

Swisher: Oh, you know, it’s really interesting. One of the things I do a lot, and I have done over my career, is I kind of zig when others are zagging or I do something unusual. And, you know, there’s this sort of trope that all Democratic-establishment older people don’t know what they’re talking about, and they need to move aside. And I have said, many of them, I have said directly they should do that. But when I was at this dinner party—and I’ve known Hillary for a long time, and I’ve interviewed her many times on different things I’ve done over the many years—and it was at this, one of these big fancy tables. And Hillary had me sit next to her because we have a really good rapport, and we sort of tease each other a lot in really, in ways people don’t, I think, tease her.

And she had a mind full of really great, fast insights that were fresh to me that I hadn’t heard. And I hear all the insights. And then, you know, the economy: insight. Mamdani: insights, and actually in a way that you were not expecting from her. I was like, it was quite smart, very clear. And I thought, What is in her Wheaties these days? Because she really—she didn’t care anymore, and of course, this is what you hear off the record. And I thought: This is the Hillary you see sort of in those Lauren Boebert/Epstein hearings or in the Benghazi hearings. Very smart, very sharp, often on social media. And I thought: I’m going to bottle that Hillary.

And I just knew. And by the way, it’s racing up the charts right now. We’re now at No. 4, which is, I know that it’s because of her. And it’s because she has these fresh insights, and I wanted to show people the Hillary I know on the topics she’s good at. And so it’s worked. And we have—the rapport is important. But anyway, that’s what we’re doing, and we’re trying it out. And if it really works as both a business and a piece of content, we’re going to keep doing it through the presidential.

Frum: So is it the two of you ping-ponging with each other, or will there be third parties there? How will this work?

Swisher: There’s going to be guests. We just did one to start with. Well, I did it very quick. I do everything I do very quickly, essentially. And it was a germ of an idea, but it’s like Hillary unplugged. Or like, you know, when Johnny Cash came back and was doing Nine Inch Nails? That’s what I feel like I’m doing here. You do want to hear her. And I had tested it on Pivot, where she was spectacular. And we’ll have guests. I want people who disagree with her and who she disagrees with, both on the left and the right. Because that’s, to me, when she’s at her best. And really have some throwdowns. So people—I’m talking about with reasonable people, not insane people. I’m not going to have Laura Loomer go against Hillary Clinton, because it’s kind of ridiculous and pointless. But I want to have robust discussions about difficult issues, and I think, by smart people with substance.

Frum: Will you be able to get her to defend the person she actually is? And what I mean by that is: those people who were prominent in the Democratic Party from 1992 to 2008-ish, 2010. The people who believed in making government more efficient, in expanding trade, and bringing Mexico into North American economic life. That’s what she was associated with, and they came under attack from their party’s left. And they seem just to be, like, shamefacedly mumbling an, Oh, you’re so right, and The establishment was so bad, and Yes, we should burn everything down. But will she, on your program, be willing to stand up for the person she was?

Swisher: Yeah, I think she’ll defend it, and also say what’s good and bad. What I was really struck with on the Pivot podcast is, I was expecting her to do the sort of typical Democratic-establishment Mamdani thing. And she had a very insightful reason why he’s doing well. Here’s where he could go wrong, and stuff like that.

You know, look: Fact of the matter is, she’s been a, whatever you say about the presidential race. And I thought that there’s all manner of complexity there. It’s not just because Hillary lost; Donald Trump really won that election. And the changing tide of the American public, and the sort of attacks that the right had on her for years that end up working after a while. I think she will be very honest. I think she’s at a point—and she did say this—is, people like her more when she’s not running for anything. They like her more when she’s either in office or in service of a, you know, typically a man. It’s a little bit, you know, if I lived back then, I would’ve liked to have Eleanor Roosevelt do a podcast with me. Like all the insight she gained over the years.

And a good thing that she did this week: We were talking about the execution, which has now been canceled publicly by Donald Trump. She said: He’s going to cancel it, and here’s why. And she was 100 percent right. And she analyzed it, and then threw in what they did during the [Osama] bin Laden raid. Which was very helpful to understand the complexity of, like—there were people in the room that wanted to show his bullet-riddled body. They brought in experts; they brought in all kinds of things saying what the best outcome would be. And so she’s got a lot of wisdom sort of hidden in there that can be relevant to today. And again, she’s going to have to admit mistakes. She knows that, and she’s actually willing to do it.

Frum: I’m sort of more interested to hear her not admit mistakes if she doesn’t believe she made them.

What I mean by that is: I’m a graduate of a Republican world where the rule of the game was, if you were in the center of the party, you had a big kick me sign on your back. And the right of the party could say anything about you, and you could never say anything back. And the Democrats seem to have that same relationship with their left.

And I’m thinking about, so Hillary Clinton was instrumental in the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Obama administration. She was proud of it. She believed in it. She was right. She defended it in the hardcover edition of the book she published before the 2016 election, and she stripped it out of the paperback edition. And you say, Why not stand up for what you believe? Why the kick me sign?

Swisher: She might have changed her mind, David. It’s called changing. She may have thought more about it and think about it, and—one of the things I really like about her is she thinks in real time. Like, she’s really compared to a lot of Democratic people who would just spout the same crap, essentially, like Everything’s fine. I just feel like she’s willing to throw down, all kinds of ways.

She’s also willing to be flexible about good ideas. And I think where she is right now in her career—she should speak to you about this—but I think where she is in, what fucking works, right? Like she started talking about the execution like, Of course it’s heinous; of course it’s amoral. But let’s not focus on that. Let’s focus on: If they do this, it’s going to be a recruiting video for jihadists. So let’s not do that. She’s very practical. And so I think she will—”whatever works” seems to be where she is in her life. And she’s not worried about, like, The Democratic establishment shouldn’t speak. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care, and she shouldn’t.

Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.

So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—

Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.

Frum: Okay.

Swisher: So not stronger.

Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”

Okay. So some of the AI executives have, in recent months and years, begun to repeat what you have been saying earlier. And my question to you is, when you hear that, do you think, Okay, look, they’re in a death race, and it drives everyone to do things they don’t wish to do. And if only the competition could be a little less fierce, then maybe they could think more about safety? Or do you think there’s something nefarious going on, that they’ve got some other agenda? Do you take them at their word when they say these things? Are they reformed characters? How do you read it?

Swisher: No. I mean, my approach to most of these people—not all of them, most of them—is, Hello, he lied. Essentially.

And so I think they—it’s a little complex. You know, it’s more complex than the way we binary every single thing we do around technology these days. They’re either villains or they’re heroes. Or they’re this, or they go from this. Or we love them, we hate them. That kind of thing. And life’s not like that, essentially.

What I think is happening is: They hate regulation. They don’t want any. That’s why they sucked up to Trump the first term, and that’s why they sucked up to him this time. Some of them had had real political conversions, but for the most part, they want to make money. They want to dominate. And that has never changed in all the time I’ve known them.

So, as I joked, if Kamala Harris had won, Mark Zuckerberg would’ve identified as they/them if it suited him. They’ll do whatever it takes. And by the way, guess what’s going to happen when the Democrats come in? Oh! He was the worst. I can’t believe I went to dinner at his house 412 times in the last—

Frum: Thank God you got here.

Swisher: Oh!

Frum: I’ve been waiting in this basement, waiting for you.

Swisher: I wasn’t really having a good time at that lunch.

These people literally would sell their mamas down, if they needed to. That’s my feeling on the general populace. And they’re very interested in winning. Winning and shareholder value. I mean, if Tim Cook is going to give a golden statue to Donald Trump, you’ve got to know what’s going on there. Now, I’ve heard since then he actually likes Donald Trump, which—okay, fine. No accounting for taste. But I think it’s all about shareholder value, every single thing they do.

And so I think when they talk about regulation, they want the regulation they want that is good for them. They never think of safety unless they’re forced to. But neither did big pharma, neither did airplanes, [the] car [industry]. Hello, Unsafe at Any Speed. That’s what it took. They wouldn’t have put seat belts in there if they didn’t have to. Or airbags. The chemical companies would love to spew poison, and, Oh well; some people die. And those people were civically interested. The tech people have never been civically interested, ever. Like, they don’t care about other people. And so we just have to make them have safety. And should, because this is very much like nuclear proliferation. This is on the same level of importance. Why are we outsourcing our safety to private industry on a topic that they themselves say is existential?

Frum: Well, this is the thing I find sort of baffling. There are people who say, and there are AI skeptics who say, You know, it’s not that big a deal. It’s the latest computer thing. It’s not transformative. There are people who say that. And if that’s what you believe, okay, yeah, have a light footprint, because how heavily do we regulate word-processing technology? And then there are people who say it’s going to kill us all. Well, if it’s going to kill us all, then it should be illegal. Government should not just regulating; government should be suppressing it. I don’t understand the people who take the view: I want to run a big company that makes products that I fear are going to kill us. Why are you doing that?

Swisher: I think the “kill us all” thing is—you know, with the way tech people talk, you’ve got to have listened to them for so long. They love to say “non-zero chance.” I was doing an interview with Elon Musk once, and he’s like, There’s a non-zero chance we’re in a simulation. Meaning we’re basically a video game for a greater civilization and teenagers are playing Earth, whatever it happens to be, and we aren’t real. We’re all a simulation. Well, it is a non-zero. It’s like there’s a non-zero chance that there is a god sitting up on a cloud. And so that’s what they tend to do.

And so what they know is—I think Elon actually said it best. It’s like, this isn’t just nuclear bombs; it’s things that can set off nuclear bombs without you wanting it to, essentially. And I often recount this dinner party I had in Silicon Valley 10 years ago. Many of the big names right now, they were posing these questions: What would, if you told AI to solve world hunger, what would it do? It would kill half the human race, because that’s the right answer. It’s not the right answer. It’s the answer that would work the quickest, right? And so they just—I think there is an existential crisis. But they don’t—

Frum: Wait a minute. Let me stop you on that. That’s a terrible answer actually, because—even if you’re a Nazi—because killing half the human race is a lot more expensive and time-consuming than feeding the 10 percent of the human race. Do you—

Swisher: Oh, they would do it with a nuclear bomb, my friend.

Frum: Do you think this is a line of work that attracts people with severe personality disorders? And that that distorts their thinking about problems?

Swisher: No, I’m thinking the AI would do it, because it doesn’t have any emotion. It isn’t attached to humanity. When Elon started off, it was interesting. I’ll use him because he was the earliest person to talk to me about the threats—he and [Open AI CEO] Sam [Altman], but mostly Elon—about the threats of AI, and was very concerned. And I think, you know, he’s a science-fiction guy. It also informs him. A lot of these people are science-fiction types. This is part of the air they breathe, essentially. And his first thing was Terminator. And we all have seen that movie where, you know—time machine, comes back, kills the original, blah, blah, blah. And so that’s where they were in sort of this dystopian idea. And that gives the machines a personality, an anthropomorphic personality, when in fact it doesn’t. Or like The Matrix, like they want to keep us as batteries, or they have a malevolence. It’s always a malevolence. Mostly it doesn’t have malevolence at all, because it doesn’t care. And doesn’t care—I don’t mean “hates us.” It means we don’t exist.

So he moved on to the idea that AI treats humans like house cats. Like, we don’t want to kill our house cat. We’ll feed our house cat. But that’s how they look at us. Again, a little too anthropomorphic.

The third one I thought he came upon was the best one. This was later. Which is: We’re building a highway in Georgia, and we put down asphalt. Do we know we’ve killed a lot of ants and anthills along the way? Do we think about it at all? No.

Frum: Okay. So what I meant by that crack about personality disorders is: I wonder whether when we inevitably anthropomorphize everything; that’s the way our minds are constituted. If you have a severely dysfunctional personality, when you anthropomorphize, you imagine the AI to be like you. So when Elon Musk thinks What would an AI be like?, he thinks it would be like him. And, yeah, kind of indifferent to human suffering. I wonder if a more normal person who had read, say, Frankenstein instead of The Terminator might say that this may be a more complex, tragic, meaningful relationship. And the limited—the kind of odd, odd stuntedness in some vectors, combined with obviously great talents in others—makes people poor understanders of the world around them.

Swisher: Yeah; they like to understand everything. The machines have power when they have power. They like to offput their power and their blame onto the machines. And it’s not the machines that are the problem. It’s like saying electricity is the reason we electrocute people. Or the knife was the reason people died. It’s because the person with their hand on the knife killed someone. And so they just want to blame the knife, right? And actually, recently, Jeff Bezos talked about this, like: We can’t be against the knife. We’re against murder. I’m like: Yeah, we’re against murder by you. Like, they don’t like to take that step by focusing in on the machine.

And one of the things they tend to do, a lot of, is remove themselves from the equation—that they aren’t at fault in any way. And this is a longtime thing, you know, with social media. Oh, I don’t know why girls are feeling self-esteem problems. Do boys listen to more porn? I wonder what caused that. Like, they’re very much not of that. And one of the things they’ve done, which I have followed of theirs, is just that, one: that they’re the victims. And two: that they have no consequences for the things they make. And this is the same kind of thing. This is what they made. And my only argument is like, why are we letting them decide on something this important? Because they’re broken people, and we need a bigger pool of people making a decision about something that they themselves say is very important.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about another one of your recommendations that has come true. You argued often that the ownership of TikTok should be shifted from its Chinese founders. Congress passed a law calling for just that. The Supreme Court said that that law was constitutional. Congress had the power to force the sale of TikTok, at least its U.S. operations, to a U.S. operator, and it eventually did happen. But what seems to have happened is, none of the things that are toxic about TikTok have changed. It’s just TikTok has been sold in ways to enrich President Trump’s allies and supporters.

When you look back on that, do you think, Hmm, that’s not what I meant. They didn’t hear me right?

Swisher: I was worried at the time. Many people were worried about the deleterious effects of social media, which are very real, in lots of personality, etcetera. I was worried about propaganda. I was a propaganda-studies major at the School of Foreign Service. So I think about—what could you use these things for? And if I were the Chinese Communist Party, that’s exactly what I’d do. I mean, I’m not mad at them for doing it. It’s just, that’s what you would do to have this. And we had no such service in China to be able to do that. I mean, our best thing is to lob Voice of America over there, and it doesn’t really work. The internet possibly is a way to get through into that culture, but they strictly control their information diet there.

And so I was worried about propaganda. Then I was worried about the ability to shift the narrative with the algorithm. But again, that’s gone back to William Randolph Hearst. I mean, this is not new.

Frum: Where I’m pressing on this is—the Trump administration seems like the nightmare version of the advice you’ve been giving. They have an activist Federal Communications Commission, which is on the march in all kinds of ways to stop things that they don’t like, whether it’s The View or Jimmy Kimmel.

Do any of your feelings about regulation change watching the Trump administration wield these regulatory powers?

Swisher: No, because—we have got to go back. Obviously, after post-Nixon, they went back and fixed a lot of things they didn’t think he would do. We’re going to have to go back and figure out how to deal. If the internet isn’t regulated by the government, then neither should broadcast networks be. It’s not a public good. I mean, at this point, we should just sell it to them, and they should do what they want, and there probably should be some sort of public-access kind of thing.

I mean, we have to really rethink this. Because when you have a moron like Brendan Carr—and I say that very clearly; he’s a moron, but he’s also an unctuous toady and a thirsty person as someone who wants power—in charge of that, you get all the abuses. And of course, they do all the abuses they accused other people, the Democrats mostly, of doing, right? They do exactly—because they think, like, What’s the worst thing a Democrat could do? And really the worst thing is the things they want to do. And so yeah; I worry about that. We have to really rethink the FCC, top to frigging bottom. We’re going to have to do that.

The same thing with the Justice Department. Like, what are we going to do going forward with that? How do we reassert the powers of independence in these judiciary? What do we do when the executive loses its mind, right? And that’s been something that’s happening for a long time, the power of the exec—you know that. I mean, there’s been books and books.

Frum: I don’t think we’ve seen an executive like this ever before. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why advocates of regulation were caught unawares, because there is a long tradition of people who advocate regulation imagining a kind of benign regulator, or at least a disinterested regulator. A regulator will be someone at least non-malicious, somebody like—someone like me. You imagine the regulator in your image. And then you get, Well, wait a moment. What we’ve done is, we’ve empowered—the regulatory move has empowered Donald Trump to redistribute TikTok to his friends. Has empowered Brendan Carr.

None of the evils that you are concerned about have been ameliorated, but a whole lot of new evils that you didn’t want have happened.

Swisher: Yes, but it’s not the regulatory structure. You know, it’s sort of a perfect storm of a Congress that has abrogated its power, a Supreme Court that has abrogated—the nicest way to say it—has abrogated its power, but actually is working for the man, and then an executive willing to break laws.

One of the geniuses of Trump, I hate to say it, is like: He oversteps the line constantly. He eliminates the line. And so, what do you do when you wouldn’t imagine someone would’ve done that? And now we have to imagine, and therefore we have to put up a whole new set of lines and powers. And maybe there’ll be a much less powerful president going forward. Maybe this is the final moment of this executive theory that has been going on for, I don’t know, 100 years now—the growing power of the executive.

Frum: Let me ask you about another thing that I wonder if you’ve thought about, or rethought, since the time.

So during the Biden administration, a lot of the Biden people did want to regulate tech in some way. But they were nervous, kind of for the reasons I’ve been sort of pointing to, they were nervous about content-based [approaches]. They didn’t want to interfere with the business. And so the regulatory energy went into antitrust. It’s like, well—maybe the problem is not that the product is toxic. Maybe the problem is the company producing the toxic is too big, and we will empower Lina Khan to go after the bigness of the companies, as if that got us anywhere. And so there’s a lot of effort to curb the bigness of the platforms, without thinking about what they were doing.

How do you feel about that strategy, looking back on it?

Swisher: I don’t like any one strategy. They are too big. They’re just too big. Nobody can compete in search or in AI. It’s so expensive. It’s going to end up being two companies essentially. The redo of antitrust legislation is long overdue. I think we’re operating on a hundred-year-old law at this point. So we really have to radically rethink what big means and what the damages are. It’s not price, it’s not this, whatever. That needs a radical rehaul, and that’s something everybody knows.

The other thing is the speed at which we can meet these challenges. I mean, listen, [President] Obama, I had a long-going argument with him like: You’re not doing anything, and by the time we do something, they’re going to be too big to do anything about, because they’ll have so much power from a lobbying perspective and just money perspective that we’re not going to be able to stop them.

And then you have Citizens United on top of that, which allows these incredibly wealthy people to manipulate the system. And the numbers are just staggering—the amount how much wealthy people have put into campaigns recently. And so it’s sort of a combination of all the things at once.

So I don’t think it’s just—we have to overhaul antitrust. I really am enjoying a lot of these product-liability lawsuits that are happening in California and across the nation around these companies. It’s really a very effective way to start to go at them, is it not. We’re not going to touch free speech, but your product fucking sucks and is killing people. That’s a really good argument. So our legal system is actually meeting the moment in that regard. And there’ll be more and more. It’s like a cigarette moment. It’s happening. It really is happening. And they’re trying their best to shut it down, but they’re not always winning.

And then the third thing, which I think is the most important, is public sentiment about these people and about the things they do. And data centers—as you know, I’ve talked about, and I think I predicted this rather well—is an expression of voter discontent over all of it. And it’s just a physical thing they can point to in their own neighborhoods that they don’t like. And it is going to have a profound—it is having—a profound effect on this election. It will have a profound effect on the next presidential election, and it will have a profound effect on what we should do about the tax system. Like, that these people, they don’t pay their taxes. They don’t pay their taxes.

Frum: Isn’t the reaction to data centers kind of like the Lina Khan mistake all over again? There’s something that people really are worried about. And that’s: What does AI do to my life, to my job, to my children’s prospects? They can’t get a handle on it. And say, Well, there’s this big real-estate use outside of town. And if AI were a good thing, then this is just something we’d have to get used to, as we had to get used to gas stations. It’s part of modern life. If AI is a bad thing, then the problem is not the data center that serves the AI; the problem is the AI. And yet we have this way to go down these cul-de-sacs of bigness. Or the, I don’t like the data center, or, It’s too noisy. So we don’t talk about what’s important; we talk about what’s accessible.

Swisher: Listen, I spent a lot of time trying to find people who are trying to explain what a good data center is, too. I interviewed a Michigan mayor, and he had put together a great data-center deal. We have to—I say this to people—we have to have them. It’s a question of how we have them. And I think one of the things that tech people have tried to do is shove it down our throats without any consultation.

And I think that is what’s powerful among the voters, and I think it’s absolutely legitimate that people should have a say in how these things are going to go up. We don’t have to just, you know, bend over and take it. We don’t. We do not. And I think that’s what you’re seeing here. And it’s raising great issues of: What do we want to do about the water? And we can do very smart technological things to help save water. What do we want to do about where they’re located? What do we want to do about noise?

But instead, you had Elon Musk dropping one in Tennessee with gas belching this. You have Kevin O’Leary over in Utah acting like a giant asshole. But it was stopped, and it doesn’t mean that his data center was good. The way they approached it was in this typical—it reminds you of when the railroads went through. We’re just going to shove them right through your land. You don’t get a say. You don’t get anything. But today, I think this is a good sign of a healthy democracy pushing back, even if we actually do need some data centers in this country.

Frum: So you, you’re not only a very influential commentator on these tech issues, you’re an adept user of tech, and you’re raising a family. Do you have a personal-hygiene regime for the people you care about and for yourself to get the best out of the technology? And do you have any advice for anybody on what that hygiene regime should look like?

Swisher: Yeah, I mean, I have older kids, and they can do what they want. Like, I’m not—they’re old enough. One is 21, one’s 24. And I see young people moving very quickly away from social media. It’s really interesting. They don’t like it. I don’t mind them using the devices if they’re reading or watching substantive things. What I mind is sort of the mindless doomscrolling or the mindless silliness of it, because I try to stress upon all my kids how addictive it is, right? Because I myself am addicted. You’re addicted, I bet. It’s clearly like a cigarette. It’s got the elements of that, right? And so I like to stress with them of putting it down. My one son bought a box he puts his phone in for three hours, and he just locks it. It’s a lockbox, and it will not open no matter what he does unless he breaks it, and then he’s kind of crazy if he does that. And so I make it clear that just, it’s not controllable in a lot of ways.

The other thing I try to do is say—I’m not one of those people that says, Don’t use it. I’m like, Try it. Try it. I was just bugging my wife. She was going on about AI, and I said, You don’t use it enough to have this opinion. You need to try it to understand it. And she was like, I don’t need to try to understand it. I go, You absolutely have to try it to understand it. And so I advocate people trying it and then figuring out what they like and don’t like.

Another thing is my younger kids, they don’t use it at all. And they will not, I’m telling you, they will not have phones until they’re 16 or 17 probably. And it’ll change by then, so I don’t think I’m going to have to worry that much. But they can use it to watch movies. It’s perfectly convenient. They can use it to, you know, look up things. They do that at school. That’s perfectly fine. It’s a book. It can be used as a book. But I definitely restrict; I will. They’re not at the age where they will be using—they won’t be using social media at all. I won’t allow it.

Frum: You’re warning me that it’s addictive. But you’re also warning me that I can’t have an opinion unless I try it.

Swisher: I think you have to understand—

Frum: Do I, like Ulysses, tie myself to the mast—

Swisher: (Laughs.) Yes! Yes, close your ears.

Frum: Try it a little bit?

Swisher: Absolutely. Yes.

Frum: How do I do that?

Swisher: Well, you have to understand going in that it’s addictive, and you’ve got to figure out some strategies for yourself, like in terms of how to do it. All I’m saying is you need to understand it if you are to talk about it. You know what I mean? You can’t just be ignorant about what it’s doing.

Now, some people just, you know—like I just did an interview with someone, and she’s like, I’ve been down a glacier since 1989. I don’t know what it is. And that’s a perfectly fine way to do it if your job doesn’t depend on it, but a lot of people’s jobs depend on it.

And so I do stress that people should under—I always was, you know, I was sort of the screamer at The Washington Post, saying, Are you ignoring digital? Why are you still on a typewriter? Why aren’t you doing this, this, this, and this? And, Craigslist is going to kill classifieds. I think you need to be fully aware of the technology and understand how it can help work for you, including AI. A lot of AIs can be quite helpful in a lot of ways. And then try to minimize the stuff that is so clearly addictive and stupid and hurtful to your brain, like relationships, AI-bot relationships. Do not partake.

Frum: I was going to ask you about that. Partly because Google is so broken, I use some of the AI platforms as research tools. And I found there’s some prophylactics that I found useful. One—you can set the settings: Never call me by my name. Never tell me it’s a good question. Never praise anything I’ve done. I do not want a relationship with you. I just want to know who won the World Series in 1938. Tell me that. And I do find—

Swisher: Can I add another one?

Frum: Yeah.

Swisher: Give me the provenance of where you got this.

Frum: Yes. I tell it, these are the sources. You can’t use Wikipedia. I’ve got a list of forbidden sources—

Swisher: Or “tell me.” Tell me: Where did this come from?

Frum: Yeah, I’ve got a list of forbidden sources, and there always has to be both a site and a link, so I can check that you’ve quoted it right. Which, by the way, that’s not always true. And, you know, use government documents—even in the age of Trump—if you’re going to give me a statistic. Or, These are reputable organizations; these are not.

But what I’m mostly keen is to avoid anything where it’s a different relationship than I used to have with Google, or a box where I ask it a question and it serves me the answer.

Swisher: That’s excellent hygiene. I mean, I treat AI like a supersized Google, a better and easier Google. Because one of the things about Google is, you’d go to the page, and then you’d go down, and you’d spend a lot of time. It’s sort of like being in a library with all the books on the floor, and you’re kind of looking among them. When it’s properly sourced, it’s invaluable, like in terms of saving time on research and other things. And so I think one of the things that people have to realize—if they use it in that regard, terrific. It’s a terrific thing.

When they start to have relationships with it, which a lot of people do, or they really like it, or they answer them, there’s—like, I just did a great interview with Sherry Turkle, which everyone should read her book called Artificial Intimacy—there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there. I keep saying, I really like my… they have a name for their Claude or whatever. I was like, There’s nothing there. But they think it is because, as humans, we’re so egomaniacal, we tend to, you know, just make it human when it’s just not. And that’s a really important thing that you did.

Frum: You’re an optimist on the employment effects of AI.

Swisher: No. I don’t know. I’m—

Frum: Well, you’re not a doomer. You’re not saying that everyone’s going to be fired.

Swisher: There’s a doomer, there’s a zoomer, and then there’s—is it a boomer? There’s a doomer, a boomer, and a zoomer. I think that’s the way they’ve split among them. I suppose I’m a zoomer.

Frum: Okay, explain. You lost me.

Swisher: Okay. A boomer is, Oh, it’s going to solve everything. And that’s largely marketing from those guys. And it may. It might. It could, for sure. We didn’t know the effects of many things before they came into use. Everything’s going to be great. Nothing’s going to be wrong. It’s not dangerous at all. I just think every historical technology trend has always had an upside and a downside, period. Period. That’s the way it is if you study history. So that’s—this “up and to the right” stuff is nonsense.

There’s those who say it’s going to kill us all. It certainly could, and we should mitigate against that. You should have scenarios of consequences absolutely in place and pay a lot of attention. Nobody should ever have been surprised by the Hugging Face incident and all these incursions by rogue agents. I don’t know why anyone’s been surprised by it. It’s like—of course that’s what it was going to do. And so, the doomers can be a little bit like, There’s nothing about it that’s good. And I’m sorry, that is not the case. It’s like with nuclear energy. There’s a lot to be said about nuclear energy that’s good. There’s a lot that needs to be said that’s bad.

And so I would put myself in the “let’s go thing by thing and make a list of things we don’t want”—and I think that’s relatively easy. Which is, hey, killer drones. Maybe we should have a global decision-making on this one, with everyone deciding what the standard should be. Surveillance: Hey, let’s discuss what AI should be able to surveil and what it shouldn’t, and what parameters, and let that be monitored by government—democratic governments, at least.

There’s all manner of things we can do. And here’s a good thing. Let it help; let’s put all the data about climate change in it, and let it help us figure out solutions. Great thing for AI to do. Cancer research, that kind of stuff. You could go thing by thing.

Frum: So AI investment is what’s holding up the U.S. economy right now. Maybe also health care. We’re now on our way to a 6 percent yield for 30-year U.S. money, and it’s probably going to stay this high for a while and maybe even get higher.

How long can AI investment continue when money costs 6 percent or more?

Swisher: You know, I compare it to the internet, and remember there was a crash there, right? There was that dramatic crash in 2000. And that was nothing. It didn’t cost anything to put up these internet companies. I mean, the price that these numbers are astronomical, especially given their revenue.

Here’s all I know. There’s 12 LLMs. There’s going to be two. Inevitably, it is going to coalesce into a smaller group of people, because the business isn’t that big, you know, ultimately. And it’s not—a lot of times when these tech moguls now, because they’re searching for any way to say that it’s good after they’re the ones that told us it sucked. Which is very funny in a lot of ways when you think about it—you know, Oh, there’s going to be abundance. You don’t have to work.

Like, they’re just making that shit up, just so you know. It’s like going to Mars. Like, Oh, we’re going to live on Mars. Oh, did you know there’s too much gravity there for the human bone? Oh, no, because I talked to an astrobiologist, or We have to go underground because the radiation is going to make us dumb. So we’re going to become what? Trolls? We’re going to actually become trolls? Like, they never want to mess with the details.

Frum: Should the U.S. government nationalize Starlink and SpaceX? And if it does, how does it prevent those companies from bogging down in bureaucracy the way NASA did?

Swisher: You know, we used to have this wonderful thing in this country, the public-private partnership. Which is now gone, right? You know why you have the internet, folks? Because of the government. You know why you have a lot of the drugs you have? Because of the government. You know why you have the space program? Oh, yeah, the government.

And so I think what’s really important is, once we have something that’s a national priority—like space or, you know, AI or something—let’s have these partnerships where they don’t get to drive the car. They’re in the car with the rest of us. And what they want to do is drive the car. Because you know what, Dave? They know better than we do, because they’re smarter than us. But they’re not smarter than us. That’s the biggest lie about them. They’re not. They’re broken people just like the rest of us. And why do they get more decision-making than anybody else? That’s all. I think that’s a pretty easy thing to work through.

But I think this idea of public-private partnerships has always been one of the great things of this country. It really doesn’t happen other places. It’s either top-down like in China, and that certainly has worked to an extent. Or it’s just nothing happens, like in Europe, right? But the idea of a public-private partnership—where corporations work with governments, and some of it’s dedicated to the public good, especially when we’re paying money—seems to me to have worked for a very long time. It’s brought us vaccines. It’s brought us innovations in space. It’s brought us innovations in the internet and digital. And it could continue to do things that are great for most of society rather than a small, tiny few of them.

Frum: If you’re going to have public-private partnerships, what does governance look like? Is there a role for Congress? How does it work that we make sure you don’t get the Brendan Carrs, and telling Jimmy Kimmel not to make jokes. You don’t have Elon Musk saying, I’m blowing hot and cold on Ukraine. I like them this week. I don’t like them next week.

Swisher: I think the problem is three things that I think of. Everyone is like, Oh, it’s the internet that’s, or the tech billionaires that are killing us. I’m like, you know, it’s a really complex thing. Gerrymandering was one thing that has been killing us. We cannot have any elections that aren’t for sure, and therefore nobody has an interest in compromise, right? That’s one.

Two, social media, which has been really deleterious and politicizing people. When people have commonalities, it splits them. As its business plan is to split you from each other. And I throw in Fox News and cable with that, but I don’t think it has as much. It did have an impact; now social media has taken that over.

And the third thing I would say is, this idea that in this idolatry of these rich people, innovators, right? I think it happened previously in our history during the Gilded Age, and it caused all manner of damage for regular people, right? Whether it was children who were being industrialized into these things. And we looked at it and said, No, and we’re going to do this. We’re going to make these rules.

And I think this is the push-pull of the American system, that capitalism is a really vibrant way to move forward. But why do they get to decide?

I think we need a stronger Congress. And the only way we’re going to do that is getting rid of Citizens United, getting rid of gerrymandering. So that we have more elections where people have to compete on ideas, not on loyalty or fealty to Donald Trump or whoever the person happens to be.

Frum: Kara Swisher, thank you so much for joining me today. What a Catherine wheel of sparkling ideas, and we’ll all be listening to the show.

Swisher: You should let your AI be mean to you. That would be interesting. Be meaner. Like challenge it more.

Frum: Yes. I sometimes am mean to it.

Swisher: Oh, it doesn’t like that.

Frum: No, it doesn’t, because it has sort of biases, and then when you challenge it gets a little testy.

Swisher: Can I leave you with one thing?

Frum: Yes.

Swisher: It is us. Like, it is us. It’s trained on us. Where do you think it’s getting its information? And everything you see in our world will be reflected there. Lying, joy, happiness, sycophancy, wisdom will be all in there. And it just depends on the—again, I’ll leave you with one thing.

Many years ago at Google, they had a thing when you would go in, and it would scroll all the queries across the world that were coming in. And you’d see it. And you’d sit there, and you’d go, What are people; what are they doing? It would be like: horse, straw, France, and you’re like, What do they want? What are they looking for? Like I always sat there and I would stare at it trying to figure out what they were.

And they had a globe where all the queries were coming in, and the globe would spin, and all the different languages and everything else. It was a really great data visualization. And all the questions were light that flowed off the Earth. And when it went around, most of Africa was dark, which was really kind of this weird metaphor, right? Dark Africa. But it was because they weren’t connected, right? And they didn’t have as much connection as other parts of the world, like the United States or in China or wherever. And I looked at that, and I thought: Well, it’s not like they’re not asking questions there. You just can’t see the questions they’re asking.

And I think the ability to ask questions is the biggest ability of a democracy. To ask questions. And you don’t want your questions to be algorithmically generated. And that’s the greatest strength of humanity—is we can ask questions, we can continue to ask questions. And that’s why I don’t think it will kill us, because it can’t ask questions. It can only mimic us like monkeys.

Frum: Kara, thank you so much.

Swisher: Thank you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Kara Swisher for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, published by Princeton in 2016.

When the The Rise and Fall of American Growth was published a decade ago, it caused a great debate. Because Gordon’s argument, based on meticulous arrangements of large amounts of data, was that the internet revolution, social media, the computer itself had not actually done as much to improve American standards of living as the internal combustion engine, electricity, antibiotics, and the innovations of an earlier time. He argued that the American economy, or the American standard of living, grew faster from 1870 to 1970 than ever since. And all the fantastic changes in technology that we have seen didn’t add up to that much in terms of their impact on the overall state of the American economy and the well-being of the typical American.

Robert Gordon, at the time, after a lot of back-and-forth, was admitted to have probably won the argument that the American standard of living has not risen as fast since 1970 as it did before. But come the AI innovation, there is now massive challenge to Robert Gordon’s ideas. And this challenge took the form of a bet, in the world of AI—a famous bet with an economist named Erik Brynjolfsson of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

In 2020, Erik Brynjolfsson bet Robert Gordon. It was a nominal bet with the proceeds to go to charity, so it’s not a Polymarket Trump-era bet. This was a bet between colleagues, respectful colleagues, to say: I bet you that over the coming decade, the decade of the 2020s, American productivity growth will accelerate. And he put down a specific number. He said it will accelerate past 1.8 percent a year. Gordon took the other side of the bet, and as we stand about halfway through the course of the bet, it looks like Robert Gordon is losing the bet. American productivity has been growing faster than 1.8 percent since 2020, and especially in the past few months as AI kicks in.

So does this prove that AI is indeed a big deal, and that the Robert Gordon thesis was wrong? So two things need to be understood to understand this debate and the bet.

The first is exactly what productivity is. Productivity is a measure of output per worker, per human worker. We now have to specify per human worker. If AI were doing all the apocalyptic things that it’s supposed to do—if it were wiping out millions of jobs, if it were changing the nature of work while boosting output—that would be very obviously disturbing for a lot of people. It would change people’s lives. But from a point of view of the economic statistics, you would see that change, that revolution, in the form of a lot more output; not that much or even less employment. And so output per human worker would be going up fast.

Well, as I say, Robert Gordon lost his bet. Output per worker has been going up faster than 1.8 percent. But that 1.8 is not that great. Between 1948 and 1973, productivity output per worker rose by 3 percent a year, because of highways and antibiotics and the mechanization of agriculture. Three percent a year from ’48 to ’73. Getting around 2 percent a year now. Better than 1.8, but not great.

And all of this, I think, casts some deeper light on what AI is going to do to American work, and that’s why I returned to Robert Gordon’s book this week to refresh my mind about what he said and more importantly, why he said that. Because as disruptive as AI promises to be, most Americans work in fields where it’s difficult to accelerate work. The sectors that dominate American spending and American employment and American prices are health care, education, housing, construction, and personal care. Now, these are activities that are physical, heavily regulated, and labor intensive.

I mean, let’s say that AI is able to completely take over the job of designing new houses. And instead of architects and draftspeople and using older-fashioned computer technology, the AI designs the house from beginning to end with no human input at all. How big a deal is that? Well, if the AI doesn’t speed up the time and cost of getting a permit for the house, if it doesn’t speed up local government—simply making the designing process faster—I mean, it will disturb and disrupt the work of the people who used to do that. But it’s not going to bring down the cost of the house that much, so you won’t get a big productivity bump. And so it is with so many other areas: nursing, teaching, and so on.

When Robert Gordon warned that American growth or observed that American growth had slowed down since 1970, and he predicted that American growth would remain slow, he based that on a couple of observations about the way the American economy has changed. And these are changes that the AI revolution doesn’t seem to be undoing, not yet.

First, he pointed out that the government is much less well-financed than it used to be. There’s a much heavier debt load on the American worker—from government deficits and government debts—than there used to be. Second, we’re not raising human educational attainment as fast as we used to do. When you took the American economy from an economy where most workers had not even finished high school to one where almost everybody had finished high school and many people had finished college, that got you a big bump. In a way that the slight increase in college attainment that we’ve seen over the past years, that doesn’t change it that much. Especially when those people who do not go on to college, when there’s some evidence that their education—the quality of their educational attainment, as measured by standardized tests—that seems to have been declining a little bit since COVID and since the advent of the smartphone.

So educational attainment is not accelerating; may be stalling. The debt burden is heavy, and so much of the economy is still in the world of physical labor, physical things, regulated things. So as you observe and discuss the AI revolution, be mindful that, in the work that I do, and perhaps in the work that you do, AI may be a very big deal. But in the world of work that most people do and where most of us spend most of our money—housing, health care, education, personal care—it isn’t yet making that big a difference, and it may not make that much of a difference to the overall performance of an economy for a long time to come.

I don’t want to diminish what we are seeing. Obviously, the things these machines can do are very impressive. But where’s the benefit? How big is it? Is it really as transformational? And maybe one of the reasons that people in the AI world are so eager to tell us horror stories about the terrible things that AI might do is to compensate a little bit for some of the disappointment about the good things we want it to do but that it isn’t doing yet—and may not do for a long time to come.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. See you this coming weekend. And I hope you will share the program on whatever platform; like, subscribe. And, of course, if you want to help the program and bring it to more people, the best thing to do is to subscribe to The Atlantic. That’s how you support the work of me and all of my colleagues. See you soon. Bye-bye.

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“BALANCED BUDGET!!! DJT” Donald Trump posted that promise on February 7, 2025, the 18th day of his current presidential term. During the 2024 campaign, he had promised even more: the elimination of the entire national debt in a single term of office.

Trump insisted that he could reach his budget goals without disagreeable spending cuts. At a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in July 2024, Trump pledged to make “not one penny” in cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He repeated that “not one penny” promise countless times through 2024, including in the Republican platform. Instead, he proposed eliminating deficits and debt with magic money from growth, from crypto, and—above all—from tariffs. Tariffs would generate so much revenue that they might replace the income tax, maybe even finance a $2,000 dividend for every American taxpayer.

Basic budget math contradicted Trump’s fantasies. The United States imported about $3.3 trillion in goods in 2024. The budget deficit for that year was about $1.8 trillion. To imagine that tariffs could eliminate the budget deficit required believing that the Trump administration would impose a 55 percent tariff on all imports—including oil, natural gas, and electricity—and that consumers would pay this tariff without altering their buying behavior at all. That was all obviously absurd.

[Martha Gimbel: Americans are already paying dearly for the national debt]

But there was a Plan B to balance the budget! Let Elon Musk do it! At a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in October 2024, Musk boasted that he could save $2 trillion in wasteful spending. That was the genesis of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s guerrilla war against the U.S. government. This adventure not only likely violated the Constitution but also almost certainly worsened the deficit. DOGE reduced the IRS auditing staff by nearly one-third. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the ensuing collapse in federal enforcement efforts will cost the Treasury more than $860 billion in revenue over the next decade.

Fast-forward to the present. The budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 is about $2 trillion, or about $160 billion more than in Joe Biden’s last complete year as president. Next year’s deficit is likely to be even bigger. When Trump spoke of eliminating the national debt, total debt stood at nearly $35 trillion. On the current trajectory, total debt could reach $45 trillion by 2028.

To put that another way: The U.S. debt reached $10 trillion for the first time during the financial crisis of 2008. That once seemed a crushing burden. Now an extra $10 trillion in debt is the cost of just four years of Trump’s fiscal recklessness.

Some highlights of how this record was achieved: In 2025, Trump and the Republican-led Congress passed a tax bill that made the 2017 tax cuts permanent—and added more tax reductions on top of them. The tax legislation will directly reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the coming decade. Trump’s cuts to food stamps and Medicaid reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. Altogether, Trump’s budget plans netted out to $3.4 trillion in direct costs over the decade ahead—a sum that grows to $4.1 trillion because of the rising costs of debt service in the Trump era.

Trump’s biggest budget idea was to substitute tariffs for other government revenue sources. This plan proved not only economically unrealistic but also illegal. Tariffs are taxes, and taxes must be voted for by Congress, according to the Constitution. Congress delegated some emergency tariff authority to the president, but not enough to create a permanent new scheme of revenue. The Supreme Court confirmed this basic rule in February 2026.

[Read: Congress might be about to hand Trump sweeping tariff powers]

The situation will continue to get worse. The Trump administration estimates that the Iran war has cost about $45 billion. That figure covers operational costs such as fuel and munitions. But in March, the Pentagon requested an additional $200 billion to meet a wider range of war-related needs, and Trump’s fiscal budget for 2027 seeks $1.5 trillion for the U.S. military, up 44 percent from pre-Iran-war levels.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced income taxes on Social Security benefits, and Trump’s inflation has driven increases in Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment. The Social Security trust fund is now projected to be exhausted in 2032, forcing either big tax increases or big benefit cuts.

An early warning that Trump’s monetary promises should not be trusted came at that same 2024 St. Cloud rally where Trump promised no cuts to Social Security, when Trump stiffed the town with $209,000 in event fees. As the midterm elections near, Trump has accused the Democrats of threatening the country’s economy with socialism and communism. Yet his administration has managed to wreck the country’s finances worse than any government in U.S. history, without the excuse of an economic crisis or a successful major war. October 1 marked the start of America’s fiscal new year. A new Congress will face a new fiscal reality.

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses President Trump’s announced diesel deal with Russia, the administration’s abandonment of Ukraine, and why Trump is giving up so much to gain very little.

Then, David is joined from Kyiv by Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist and the author of the new book The Land of Tears and Hope. David and Illia talk about the history of Ukraine, its current state as the war with Russia rages on, and how and why the Trump administration seems so hostile to the country.

Finally, David concludes with discussion about why so little literature exists about the history of slavery in Eastern Europe.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion. But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans.

[Music]

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 Illia Ponomarenko, author of a new history of Ukraine, Land of Tears and Hope, available from Bloomsbury in the month of November. Illia and I will discuss the deep history of Ukraine, the recent onslaught of Russian drones and missiles on Ukrainian cities, and how Ukrainians feel about their abandonment by the Trump administration.

This week’s book will also be Eastern European–focused. It’s not a book that exists. It’s a book that I would like to read, and I set out a research assignment for some intrepid Eastern Europeanist to deliver a book I would like to know more about in, again, in the deep history of the lands that are now Ukraine, now Poland, and now Russia.

But before either the dialogue with Illia or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the most shocking recent turn in the U.S.-Ukraine story.

When Illia and I recorded our dialogue, we did not yet know about this announcement that was pending from the Trump administration, declaring or imagining or proposing, or whatever the word is, for what is likely vaporware. Not a real deal; a big purchase, a massive—in the words of President Trump—a massive purchase of Russian diesel fuel for the United States.

Now, I wrote an article for The Atlantic this past weekend with the facts and figures about just how negligible an achievement this so-called deal really is. The United States is a diesel superpower. It’s probably the largest producer of diesel on Earth. We don’t exactly know that for sure, because we don’t know really how much China produces, but probably the United States is the largest producer of diesel in the world. It is certainly the largest exporter of diesel in the world. And it produces much more than it uses at home. So it exports about a million and a half barrels of diesel fuel a day.

The reason American prices have been rising so fast for truckers and farmers and others who use diesel fuel is not because of anything that’s happening in the U.S. market, or even the North American market. The United States imports a little diesel fuel from Canada because it’s easier sometimes to import from Canada and then to export from the Gulf Coast than to supply the United States entirely from its own resources. The reason that the price has been rising is because of disturbances in the global market. What matters is world demand and world supply of diesel, not U.S. demand and U.S. supply of diesel.

Now, if this Russian deal exists at all, it’s a matter of a few hours’ worth of U.S. production and U.S. consumption. It’s not a big event, and it won’t change world prices because Russia doesn’t have a lot of diesel to sell. Although Russia used to be a big diesel producer, Russian oil facilities have been damaged so intensely by Ukrainian missile and drone fire that Russia has very little diesel to contribute. In fact, Russia has had an export ban on diesel since July. If Russia has any diesel to sell, it’s going to take it from another consumer; India, maybe. And by diverting diesel oil from India to the United States, it doesn’t do anything for the United States, which has more than enough diesel here at home. It makes life a little tougher for India, and it doesn’t change the world price at all, because nothing happens in global supply and demand. The whole thing is a complete nothingburger.

But it does two things that are important. The first is: The Russians have dangled in front of the Trump inner circle the prospect of enormous wealth for them if American sanctions on Russia are dismantled. And it’s taken a first step toward the dismantling of those sanctions and put the United States on the path to confrontation with Ukraine, because President Trump now has to worry the only way he can get Russian diesel is if the Ukrainians stop attacking Russian energy facilities, which they are doing in retaliation for the Russian attacks on their cities and schools and historical societies and hospitals, on their civilian population. They have struck back against Russian energy infrastructure to cramp Russia’s war-making ability.

President Trump has now created a situation where his goal of seeming to do something about diesel and maybe also enriching a lot of people who are in his inner circle is in conflict with Ukraine’s self-defense, and the only way he can get what he wants is by ordering Ukraine to stop defending itself. And we have seen already Trump’s pressure on Ukraine: If you continue to strike the Russian energy infrastructure, you are making an enemy of me.

He is taking away Ukraine’s war-making ability for his own reasons, in ways that will not help American motorists even slightly, American farmers, American truckers. And of course, he is doing nothing to bring about a resolution of the conflict in the Persian Gulf, which has removed so much diesel fuel from Europe and Asia because that’s where those countries get their supplies from.

Trump from the beginning of this second presidency has taken Ukraine as a kind of personal affront. Now, a lot of this is a little hard to understand, but maybe we don’t need to understand it. You know, when I was working on my story about Trump’s vaporware diesel deal, an editor asked me, Do you think Trump believes it? Do you think he imagines that these few barrels he’s getting from Russia are, in fact, going to make any difference to American supply? Or is he totally delusional? And I had to answer, I don’t actually—of course, I don’t know the answer to that question. My instinct—it’s just an instinct—is that President Trump was much more of a self-aware con man when he entered politics a decade ago than he is now. He now may be kind of lost: truly in a world of illusions, where he no longer himself knows what is true and what is a lie.

But it doesn’t matter, because there’s a consistent through line, whether these are deceptions of others or deceptions of himself. The through line is: He just is tantalized by the prospect of vast wealth for himself and others by doing deals with Russia. And he’s willing to sacrifice the lives and security and independence of Ukraine to his ambition. And he treats Ukraine’s self-assertion and self-defense as an act of impudence and defiance—not against those who are trying to invade and aggress and annex Ukraine, but against himself. Because Ukraine bothers him, and he doesn’t like it, and he wants it to go away.

What he’s leaving all Americans with is one of the most shameful passages in the history of American foreign policy. A people that are defending their national sovereignty, that are fighting back under the most difficult conditions with the supremest forms of human bravery. Who ask only from the United States the wherewithal with which to defend themselves, and who are being denied that wherewithal by President Trump for reasons we can’t understand, but none of which look good. I hope anyone who can hear my voice will join me in sharing their dismay and their shame at what President Trump has done to the good name of American democracy and American world leadership.

And now my dialogue with Illia Ponomarenko.

[Music]

Frum: Illia Ponomarenko was born in 1992 in a small town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. He studied at Mariupol State University. When Russia invaded his home region in 2014, Illia began his career as a reporter. He has never stopped.

His first book, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, was published in 2024 to global acclaim. Illness closed his path to military service, so he turned to a deeper fight: the fight over whether Ukraine has a history of its own. His new book, The Land of Tears and Hope, tells the Ukrainian story from the Slavic tribes and the Vikings through the Cossacks, Soviet terror, and the Maidan to this very war today. It will be published next month. Order it now.

Illia Ponomarenko, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Illia Ponomarenko: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Frum: Illia, you have written this deeply moving history of Ukraine, and I want to address it in full, but the events of the past days in Ukraine have been so dramatic and so horrible I think we must start there.

So tell us, we’re speaking in the early part of October, tell us the situation as it is now and what has happened in the past days to your country.

Illia Ponomarenko: Well, of course, the centerpiece of any news and the spotlight is Kyiv, this capital city, and what’s happening. The air battle over Kyiv that’s going on nonstop for days and weeks already, with drones, missiles. Never stopping, day and night.

So the central attention is given to the defense of the capital and to preserving life in the capital. And Russians are really trying to abrupt the very existence of the city, to instill fear, to abrupt transportation, normal food supply, water supplies. Bridges over the Dnipro River that divides the city, which is extremely vital. So Russians have switched to this tactic of trying to absolutely paralyze the very heart of the country—to install fear, to enforce the capitulation, since they can’t get any substantial military success for the fifth year of this war.

But I must say that, you know, I live just outside Kyiv in suburbs, and also in several places in Kyiv Oblast, in the outskirts. But I spend as much time as I can in the city, in many ways just to be there with my city, in there. And I would say that over the last three days, which is what I said on social media, the air battle—this constant attack—the entire environment had become a little less stressful, a little calmer. I would say I think, this my feeling, that Ukrainians managed—the Ukrainian military managed to overcome this surprise and shock and managed to adapt to this new situation. And I think if the situation continues, we might say that Russians have weakened in terms of their ability to strike Kyiv on the daily basis. So Ukrainians have made another move to adapt to what Russia does, and it goes on and on and on. So it’s constant battle between Ukrainian adaptation and Russian attempts to paralyze the city.

Frum: Let me try a little context. I think from the point of view of a lot of people in the Western world, in the United States—we’re so far away. It seems like this is an endless story of Russian attacks, Ukrainian defense. But there was a true intensification of the Russian air attack on the capital of Ukraine beginning at about the end of September, with some new technologies, some new methods. And the first effect was very devastating. A much greater loss of life, much greater damage than had been the case until the later part of September, the beginning of October. And so it is this new campaign—this intensified campaign at the end of September, beginning of October—that you say is now running out of impetus and faltering a little bit?

Ponomarenko: It gets significantly visibly weaker in terms of the number of drones, Russian drones, that made it to the capital and strike. So there are far less booms in the sky over Kyiv over the last few days, which is good. Which is something that enlightens us, because the military also reports a lot of new technologies, counter-technologies that are being applied to intercept jet-powered Russian drones that are super difficult targets to get.

Frum: These jet-powered drones, this is the new—because drones, until now, have been slow. And they could be shot down with a .50-caliber machine gun if the weapon-wielder was fast and skillful enough. But a jet-powered drone moves much faster, and so can’t be intercepted by a machine gun. You need a much more sophisticated technology to catch the jet-powered drone.

Ponomarenko: Yeah. One of the bright pictures of life in Kyiv is always seeing, in the streets, pickups with machine guns—sometimes it’s M2 Browning machine guns—with the mobile air-defense groups that try to shoot these things down.

But when it comes to jet-powered drones, which is the next step essentially, and especially when it comes to mass-produced, jet-powered drones, it’s a huge problem. Because they move at velocity of 700, 600 kilometers per hour. So it’s an insanely complicated target to get. And they are cheap; they are easy, simple. They are massive. So could be swarms of them over the Ukrainian cities.

Nonetheless, within weeks we started getting new solutions to this. There are—you know, Ukrainian defense in many ways is comprised of many, many private companies that suggest many, many technical solutions. Right now we have five or six prototype interceptor drones that are engine-powered, or jet-powered, that are being presented by various companies in Ukraine. And they are simply showing the first results, just the first results, on videos intercepting these Russian jet-powered drones. So surprisingly, it goes fast. The entire Russian campaign against Kyiv was a shock. It was sharp. It intensified really quickly and shockingly. But at the same time, the Ukrainian response to this is very fast and very sharp. So our big question is whether we could launch the mass production of a successful prototype that works well. And this is exactly, essentially, how this war works.

Frum: Ukraine is striking deeply at Russian targets, especially energy-production targets, ever farther into Russia. And there are reports—I don’t know how much weight to put on them—of surrenders among Russian ground troops, of deteriorating performance among Russian ground troops, that make us think that maybe something deeper is happening in the war than just the strike, counter-strike—the cycle of innovation and counter-innovation you describe.

Ponomarenko: But also, another front of this war is actual battlefield war, that’s happening along from the frozen front line in Ukraine’s south and east. And we have a situation in which Ukrainian military, in one of the most important, if not the most important axis of Russian attack, which is near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk—the very core of the industrial part of Donbas that’s still under Ukrainian control, and also the belt of the fortress cities in Ukraine’s east.

The Ukrainian military, over the months of very careful, very clandestine operations, managed to inflict a very, very serious defeat to local Russian forces. So that’s why we get pictures of surrendered Russian troops, because they got encircled; they got captured. That’s how the Ukrainian military, and it’s pretty open, and it could be independently verified that Ukrainian military have tactical gains. And also they managed to cut off one of the accesses of Russian attacks on these fortress cities: the northern claw, as we call it.

So Ukraine, despite all the bombs, despite all the bravado from the Russian side, Ukraine has pretty significant tactical successes on the field, on the battlefield. Which are pretty impressive on the scale of this war, five years on.

Frum: What can you tell us about the present state of American assistance to Ukraine?

The Trump administration has cut off aid to Ukraine. Such American weapons as you get are paid for by your European counterparts and allies. Is there any American intelligence flowing to Ukraine? Is there any non-material assistance you’re getting? Or is the attitude truly as hostile in Ukraine as it seems to be from the point of view of Washington, D.C.?

Ponomarenko: Well, of course, we are very far from being in the place where we’ve been under the previous administration when we had consistent and very serious and very regular packages of assistance. Right now, you are right to say that what’s being delivered to Ukraine from the United States is being purchased as part of the Pearl program by European backers. It’s mostly about supplies, technical maintenance, things that help maintain the U.S.-made hardware in possession of Ukraine. Very important part of this American participation is, of course, the intelligence. And I must say that despite all the complexities or all the complications that Ukrainian administration has with the United States, this intelligence sharing is one of the most important things that Ukraine has from outside the country, because it’s about saving lives. It’s about giving early warnings about Russian missile attacks. This is what we get from Americans, essentially.

So in many ways, what you see, from the point of view of [President Volodymyr] Zelensky—the way he talks to Donald Trump, the way he tries to preserve a more or less stable relationship with the United States and with the Trump administration—it’s about intelligence. Because this is something that we would be extremely, extremely reluctant to lose. Because it’s about saving lives; it’s about air defense.

Frum: Can you offer any generalization about how Ukrainians today feel about their relationship with the United States? And what the United States has done for them as it has become less generous, but not yet zero generosity?

Ponomarenko: Well, I’m really trying to give you a very average attitude that’s been present in the Ukrainian public opinion. Of course, a lot of people are dissatisfied. A lot of people are stressed about this, because one of the things that we always thought of as unshakable, as static as the Earth itself, is the American support. Bipartisan support in both house chambers of the Congress, in the White House. We always thought that our interests are 100 percent complacent with America’s interests, and this is what we thought was unshakable and unmovable.

I am not going to lie to you that Donald Trump remains one of the least popular figures in Ukraine. Because of many reasons, mostly because of a lot of words that he said about Ukraine. And I cannot lie to you that this image also affects really badly on the image of the United States as a country, or on the United States as a people, in the eyes of Ukrainians. A lot of emotions are involved into this. We must understand that war, being at war, is a very emotional thing. It’s about a lot of strong words; a lot of strong thoughts about this.

But I would not say that a lot of people here still respect the United States, still consider America to be the leader of the free world, the cornerstone of this free world. And despite everything that has happened over the last couple of years, still consider America to be probably back anytime soon in terms of its presence and its posture and its leadership.

So I would say that, you know, of course, feelings are very complicated. Feelings are very emotional about Americans. I cannot say that I agree with a lot of those things that I hear from my fellow Ukrainians about Americans and American aid. I really try, and I think it’s extremely fair and just to separate what this administration, what politicians do, what they say about, about us, what they do. And also, I try to remind my fellow Ukrainians of how many Americans do support Ukraine up to this day. We have figures between 60 and 70 percent on both sides of the political spectrum. I cannot stress this enough that, after all these years, having so many people across the ocean being so eager in terms of supporting Ukraine—the country that they probably never heard about before this war—is something that is to be deeply appreciated and something that is very ours to have.

Frum: For those of us who, like you, believe in the role of the United States as the guarantor of the free world, and who believe that the phrase free world means something, this has been a shameful hour. And the patience, and maybe someday the understanding and even forgiveness of the Ukrainian people to this deviation from America’s role in the world, is felt here too, and should be felt.

Let me talk to you about your book. And again, the title is The Land of Tears and Hope. It is, as you say, it’s emotional. And it is not a classic history written with chapter one, chapter two, that we—you jump like a film director from scene to scene, and pass over a lot of years, and have a very arresting technique.

Frum: Ukraine is one of the world’s newest states. Or the present Ukrainian state is one of the world’s newest states, founded in 1991. You make us feel the antiquity of Ukrainian culture, language, sensibility. How do you manage this contrast between the newness of the government, the newness of the constitution, the newness of the state, and the antiquity of everything that the state is built on?

Ponomarenko: That’s a very interesting thing about modern Ukraine. By saying modern Ukraine, I mean the country that was built after the revolution of 2014, which is the newest phase of Ukrainian existence. Because Ukraine is very young in terms of being a political entity, especially when it comes to being very independently thinking, sensing itself as an independent nation-state, not someone’s backyard, not as also Russia. But in terms of feeling itself like an entity, a country, a nation with its own home. It’s a very new thing to Ukraine even compared to its just 35 years of its independence.

And at the same time, Ukrainians—and Ukrainian people in general as a people, as ethnicity—have a very long historical memory. And a lot of things that are dearest to us, that are part of our culture, of our everyday thinking about traditions, of the fairy tale that we tell to our children through the night, and many of those things date back to medieval times. Date back to the early modernity, like Ukrainian Cossacks. They date back to pre-Christian times, ancient Slavic tribes.

You know, when I was writing this book, it was a surprise even to me when I realized this: how many things we have from our everyday traditions, from our holiday celebrations, from our sayings that we get back from pre-Christian times, from thousands of years ago. A lot of things in our life go back to those times—when there was no Ukraine, neither as a nation, neither as a state, neither as in, even in a word in this. But they live with us.

Frum: I think this is something that Americans especially have a hard time understanding. Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion, about verbal undertakings to Mikhail Gorbachev back when there was a Soviet Union. And then what, well, what does it say in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994?

But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans. For them, this war is about whether Ukraine exists—as a culture, as a polity, as a society—or whether you’re just sort of charming primitive, rural Russians who don’t understand that you need to belong to the greater entity of Mother Russia.

And you talk a lot about that in the book, about the distinctiveness of Ukraine. And maybe begin with this question: So, how many years separate the founding of the city of Kyiv from the founding of the city of Moscow?

Ponomarenko: Whoa. It’s even a complicated question to answer when the city of Kyiv, as we know it, was founded. Because there are lots of evidence, lots of arguments among scientists. But let’s try to set the beginnings of Kyiv as a continuous city around the fall of the Roman Empire’s time. And when it comes to Moscow, a lot of people barely realize that. They imagine Kyiv and Ukraine and what ended up being Ukraine, and then what ended up being Russia, as in the model that Moscow gave birth to Kyiv, gave birth to Ukraine. It’s an offshoot of great Russian tradition. But at the same time, the situation was just exactly vice versa.

There was ancient Kyiv—ancient great kingdom of those people who are ancestors. And those people, once upon a time, many years after their best time, after their blossoming time, they established what was a very distant fort in the forest that was named Moscow. So essentially, those cities, those lands that ended up being the historical core of Russia—we’re talking about the city of Vladimir, of Suzdal, the very core of Russia—they were settlers. They were settled from, say, historical Kyiv to those places, because people were seeking land, new territories. So, simple truth is that what ended up being Ukraine gave birth to what ended up being Russia—not vice versa.

But at the same time I do give this information, I do provide the reader with these thoughts about the past and the common roots of Eastern Slavic peoples, Russians, Ukrainian people, Russians. But at the same time, I do not stick to this very nationalistic and very radical and simplified view that Ukraine is the only country that has the roots in this long past, and no one else does. I think that Russians and Ukrainians have a common origin, and also Belorussians.

But Ukraine—what we have right now in Ukraine—has the biggest share of these roots belonging to it. So that’s my position about this. And why I wrote about this book is that in Ukraine of today, a very important part of life is getting back to these roots, appreciating this. Stopping to think about us, ourselves and this country as the backyard of Russia—but a country that has its roots back through to the Middle Ages, to ancient times, that was the cradle of Christianity in this region of human civilization. That has very ancient and very beautiful and in many ways unique historical wonders in this land. A huge part of Ukrainian life right now in this national awakening is getting back to its roots, its ancient roots.

Frum: In more recent times, and by that I mean the past few hundred years, Ukraine has been entangled in very grim, bloody, complex relations with not only with the Russian neighbors, but with Poles and with its Jewish minority. And these swirl together in stories that are sometimes very powerfully resonant, but sometimes very ugly and bloody. And you talk about that a lot: about the Ukrainian-Polish duality, the Ukrainian-Jewish duality, as well as the Ukrainian-Russian duality.

Ponomarenko: I do talk about this. And my central point in this regard is that Ukraine is a very rich country. Ukraine is a very beautiful country. And because of this, it has a very tragic history. And Timothy Snyder, historian that is insanely popular in Ukraine, he was just brutally right to include Ukraine as part of the so-called bloodlands. Because Ukraine, with all its riches, with all its geographical position, it has always been a target for many empires that wanted to possess Ukraine and its riches. And its geographical positions, its human resources, its brains.

So in many ways, the Ukrainian history—and I realized it myself as I was preparing for this book—I realized that we are essentially as a people, Ukrainian people have been moving for many centuries in this closed circle of trying to get independence and its own nationhood, and losing it again. And becoming a powerhouse for new empires and a donor of resources for new wars, new empires. Such as the Russian Empire was in many, many ways built on the conquest and possession of Ukrainian riches. Same goes about Stalin’s USSR. Hitler wanted Ukraine badly as part of his Lebensraum, because Ukraine is a very fertile land. It’s a very pleasant land to be on.

Ukraine is a part of human civilization where it’s really good to be a master in. You have a really rich empire if you have Ukraine. And this moving on this vicious circle of history, it always comes with insane blood, with insane national intra-ethnic feuds, violence, social tensions. Such as with Jewish population, with Polish population. So my very central point of this book eventually is that it’s a land of tears because of many, many wars; many, many tragedies. Some of the worst tragedies of human history happened in Ukrainian lands between parties that wanted to possess this land. But also a land of hope, because we hope that with this independent Ukraine and in this war in which Ukraine may again lose its freedom and its independence, there is hope that at least at this time—for the first time in many, many centuries—we could break through this vicious circle, and upheld this democratic, free, strong Ukraine that would never be a powerhouse and a donor for new empires and new wars.

Frum: I grew up in Canada, which was the center of a lot of diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity. And I don’t want to make this too much of a generalization, but I would say, when I was young anyway, that diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity tended very much to the reactionary side: ultra-nationalist and very defensive of Ukraine and all that it had done. And so there was a tendency to say, to think that the bloodshed between Ukrainians and Poles, it stretches back to the 1600s, but was very intense during the Second World War. The Ukrainians were innocent; the Poles were guilty. The crimes against the Jews, well, they didn’t happen, and if they happened, the Jews deserved them.

And what has been striking about Ukrainian culture since 1991, and especially since 2014, and very much in your book, is the ability to tell a story of national pride while integrating national shames, without letting those shames detract from the future. And understanding that Ukrainians and Poles had a very tangled history. Ukrainians and Jews have had a tangled history, a lot of suffering. And yet something new and modern and liberal can emerge from this by recognizing the full truth and all the components of the Ukrainian national identity.

Ponomarenko: In my book, I specifically stay away from radical views or idealizing the history of this land. I state it very clear, and I think it’s a very just thing to say that Ukraine is a very complicated place. It’s a very brutal place in history. It’s a very terrible place in terms of all the blood that was shed for this country, and in this country. It’s one of the crossroads of this world where many people wanted to be a master in.

So I specifically say that when it comes to, for instance, the killings of Jewish and pogroms. For instance, we have a national hero of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led the greatest and the biggest rebellion of Ukrainian Cossacks since the 17th century, that almost led to the installment of the Ukrainian nationhood within the old Polish crown. And right now, especially in the last 100 years, Bohdan Khmelnytsky is idolized. It’s his own monuments. He’s on Ukrainian money. He’s the symbol of the founding fathers of the Ukrainian nationhood. But at the same time, one of the darkest pages of Ukrainian history is the way the Jewish population was treated during those uprisings, because the uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish crown in the 17th century was the outburst of anger of extremely poor people. Of extremely oppressed people in terms of their religion, in terms of their money. It was an outburst of anger against the very system they were living in, with nobles being absolutely unpunishable with religious oppression. So it naturally fell upon Jews, as part of this system that was also unjust toward them in this regard.

Frum: Because the Polish nobles were far away, and the Jews were neighbors right next door.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; it was a very complicated social system. In which Jews, for instance, when it comes to 17th century—in that period, for instance—Jews were laid upon with duties like taxes, or they were the only ones that are allowed to with banking operations. And who loves people who you owe money, or who collect taxes, or who run bars, for instance. Who have monopoly on producing drinks, for instance.

So it was about a lot of hatred, about a lot of injustices. And try to explain to a very angry peasant—who has been robbed, who has been poor, extremely destitute, who has barely any education when it comes to basic things—when emotions go through, try to explain to these people, to this angry crowd ready to take up arms and commit massacres, that, for instance, Jews are not guilty of this; that they are surviving also on the last wheels.

So in general, Ukrainian history is full of such things. And in my book, I do not represent any radical. I do not provide any justifications. I explain how it happened, what happened. But I do not idealize. And I simply speak on behalf of very average, young Ukrainian that’s thinking about this country with no nationalism, with no radical points, with no attempts to idealize Ukraine and its history.

Ukraine is a complicated place. And what’s important also about this country, especially when it comes to the Ukraine of today, is that I see it with my own eyes from everyday life in my country. That we have overcome a lot of those things that drag us down from the past. We mentioned Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Despite all this past, despite such a bloody history of pogroms dating back to 20th century, what we have right now in Ukraine is that the chief rabbi of Ukraine is a hard advocate for Ukrainian victory, and he spends basically entire his life advocating support for Ukraine. His son, his adopted son, died fighting for Ukraine as a volunteer in the armed forces. When it comes to Islam, for instance, we have a chief mufti, former chief mufti of Ukraine—which is the top priest, or top clergyman, for Ukrainian Muslim community—he resigned from his position, and he’s a battlefield medic with the Ukrainian military.

We have Jewish presidents as of now.

Frum: Well, I sometimes think that it’s going to be fascinating to explain when my grandchildren or great-grandchildren visit Kyiv that the biggest statue in Kyiv is Khmelnytsky—who ranks along with, just behind Hitler as one of the greatest villains in Jewish history—and the second-biggest statue in Kyiv will be of President Zelensky.

Ponomarenko: I’m not sure about this, because Ukrainians tend to be highly critical towards the leader that they have as of the moment.

Frum: While he’s alive, sure.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; as of the moment, yeah. One of the things that really saved this country and continues moving forward is that we have a tendency of being extremely critical towards any sort of authority. So, Zelensky might, could have been like a war hero. He could be a president that was elected by a landslide. But it always happens that Ukrainians fall in love very quickly, and they get dissatisfied and extremely critical very quickly, even quicker than that.

But when it comes to—you have a very good point about monuments. I take a walk in downtown Kyiv, and I see a monument for Sholem Aleichem, the great Jewish writer. We have a museum for him in downtown Kyiv. We have—what’s the word for this? It’s the placard with the commemorative placard, commemorative plate. Toward, yeah—that marks the building where Golda Meir was born and raised in Kyiv. She’s a girl from Kyiv.

At the same time, we have a lot of Jewish places. There are Middle Eastern cuisine restaurants, and what’s important in this is that they often share the same street with Muslim places, with halal places for Muslims. One of the most important and popular Kyiv restaurants is, it’s called Musafir. It’s Crimean Tatar food. Like a Muslim place that gives you, essentially, gives you a vibe of a Muslim homecoming and Muslim cuisine. And I can give you a lot of examples of such things in a predominantly Slavic country with Christian churches and all those things.

But what I really appreciate about my country—and I really feel about this—is that I see that in this country, with its feeling of purpose that unites confessions, religions, many ethnicities. I really like this, about my Ukraine.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about another painful historical passage. And there’s been, especially in very recent weeks, an attempt to stoke Polish-Ukrainian animosities that date back to the events of the Second World War. Poland and Ukraine had claims on overlapping territories. The ebb and tide of wars sometimes favoring the Poles, sometimes favoring the Ukrainians. Led to terrible massacres. And Poland has been an indispensable ally of Ukraine in its struggle for freedom, but there have been attempts politically to sort of trigger, push those painful memories of the past in a way that would sever the Polish-Ukrainian relationship. How does that play in Ukrainian culture? How does that play in Ukrainian politics?

Ponomarenko: I too confidently can say that something that could be called “a Polish question” is absolutely absent in Ukrainian politics. Nobody talks about Poland. Nobody talks about the complicated Polish-Ukrainian history. Average Ukrainian—especially when it comes to those who are beside arguments on Twitter with Poles—average Ukrainian thinks about Poland as a neighboring country that has not wasted any time, just like we did, with its independence. That has gained enormous successes as an economy. Essentially the example of what could have happened to Ukraine if we haven’t wasted our time.

Frum: I mean, both of you—Poland in 1989 was almost as poor as Ukraine was in 1989.

Ponomarenko: Yeah, if not poorer. If not poorer, yes.

Frum: And Poland made a series of very bold free-market choices, ripped the bandage off, took a real—I was there in 1990. It was tough. But Poland has had this remarkable growth. The free-market policies have paid off, and Poland is now on its way to becoming a fully developed—if it’s not already a fully developed country, it’s minutes away from being a fully developed country.

Illia Ponomarenko: It’s very cool. It’s very impressive in this regard. And my entire point in my book, and in my entire presence on social media and everywhere, is that I’m trying to talk like an average, simple Ukrainian, that has no extreme political views of this. An average, simple Ukrainian says that Poland is a cool place. It’s very impressive that they have achieved this. Two million, if my memory doesn’t fail me, two million Ukrainians live in Poland and work in Poland. And we spend a lot of time using Polish airports, in general using Poland as a hub. Not only for, you know, the military supplies and everything, but also for substituting things that are not available to us because of the wartime.

Most of the people go—if we need airports, most of the people in Ukraine still go to Poland to cross the border and to get to the airports and travel for anything. So, it’s really sad to see that from the Polish side, we see that this complicated history between Ukrainians and Poles often gets used as a political tool within Poland.

I definitely can say that nobody talks about this in Ukraine, because we have far more pressing problems on our heads, to be honest. But I must say that it’s really sad, and it was pretty shocking to me to see that, beyond those fiery rhetorics and playing politics about this, we have pretty material things happening. Like continuing and shocking attacks on Ukrainians in Poland. That’s happening. They are popping up in the news, way too frequent, which is kind of shocking to disregard.

Frum: One thing that you very eloquently write about is something that Ukrainians, as you say, do feel strongly about, and that is the flag of the European Union. And you have this very poetic passage in the book where you describe as Ukraine was negotiating a kind of auxiliary membership in the European Union, just before the Maidan in 2014, that the European flags began to appear. And I think in most of Europe, the European flag is associated with regulations on fishing, food safety, air [control]—you know, what kind of coolant you can use in a refrigerator. A series of boring bureaucratic technicalities to make sure that goods and services can move across borders.

It isn’t any kind of inspirational idea anymore. It’s just a bunch of rules. But you describe very movingly how, for Ukrainians, it became an idea.

Ponomarenko: We have a pretty long history of this European Union flag of being a symbol. It dates back to 20, 25 years ago, when Ukrainians started massively thinking about going west, essentially turning away from Russia.

Essentially it’s about the emergence of my generation, of the people in their 20s and 30s. It is in our childhood that we started getting things like democracy from school. Human rights; the rule of law. We started understanding this as something very normal—something very good to aspire to.

So I’m not sure if I had this in my book. But there was, in early days of Euromaidan revolution, it was late 2013 in Mariupol. We had a little rally in support of signing this association agreement with the European Union, and I remember myself leading a small crowd of my friends, students, and also a couple of lecturers. And all holding this European flag and moving through Mariupol avenues.

It has always been a symbol of hope. It has always been a symbol of a generation that is pretty different from our parents. It has always been a symbol of us really wanting to be in this place where our biggest problem is regulations—you know, the temperature in our ACs, boring laws, these arguments over percentages. It’s just an idealized, very romantic dream of Ukraine overcoming a lot of things that drag us behind. And a romantic dream of Ukraine as a nation, as a state. Just getting closer to who we were. Very modern, very Westernized in our mindsets, in our tastes and everything. A generation that is really not different from any generation right now in the West.

But we had a state that was incompatible with our values, especially when it comes to hyper-corruption during the [Viktor] Yanukovych presidency. And this state, the mafia state, under the wing of Moscow, has become so incompatible with our values—with our aspirations for the future, with the way we think about our country, the way we want it to be—that it essentially led to a revolution. And the symbol was moving towards that place where people argue about ACs as their biggest problems, instead of us.

Frum: It’s now a dozen years since that revolution in the Maidan. Historians write about the past. I don’t know if you consider yourself an historian. I don’t know whether your next book will also be in history, but sometimes they’re tempted to make a comment about the future. Can you look out and say—if your future self could write one more chapter of the book, what would that chapter look like?

Ponomarenko: If I could, I would want to give an afterword in the history, in the book, about the way it came to be for Ukraine after the end. Because I end not on a strictly positive mode. My book’s ending is about hope. It brings a reader to a moment when the full-scale Russian invasion starts in 2022. And I’m not promising myself and the reader a victory. I’m not promising myself, and the victory a success. I’m not saying that Ukraine will win. I’m talking about hope, and essentially the last word in my book is hope. The hope that we will prevail—we will break through this vicious circle that we have been discussing right now.

And one of the images that I had in my head, and I expressed in my final words in this book, is this idea of Christmastime. Christmas Eve in Kyiv in the evening, in the frosty night, in the first Christmas after the war. Kyiv is one of the most beautiful places to celebrate Christmas in terms of the spirit, the spirit of Christmas here.

And I would want to write an afterword of how this first Christmas after the war in free, independent Ukraine would take place. Because it’s just like the European Union flag—it’s a dream. It’s something to aspire to. It’s something to hope for. And it would mean that our hope came true: of saving this country and giving it, handing it over to our children.

Christmas in postwar Kyiv, in independent Ukraine—that would be my afterword, I’d say. Yeah.

Frum: And Christmas is so symbolic for Ukrainians, because even the date on which you celebrate Christmas expresses your vision of the kind of future you want for your country. Whether that is December 25th, as would be celebrated to your west, or a different date, as would be celebrated to your east.

Ponomarenko: We officially switched to having two Christmases. Officially in Ukraine, there are two Christmases, so it serves both traditions. [December] 25th or January 7th. And, of course, it’s part of the de-Russification, the getting out of the Russian-style traditions. With—it goes along with the disgust with everything that’s represented by Russian church, Russian traditions, Russian way of life and everything. And I truly believed that this thing with Christmas on December 25th was more of a formal thing, or more about the youth, you know? Westernized youth; we want the same Christmas, just like on Home Alone day. It’s more about us being too westernized as distant from, you know, most of the population that sticks to the older traditions.

But at the same time, with every year of this war, I see it with every Christmas. That really, far more people that I expected do celebrate and switch to Christmas on December.

Frum: Whatever day it is, I wish you that future Christmas in peace and freedom. I hope it comes soon. Illia, thank you so much for joining me. The book is The Land of Tears and Hope. It will be published in November by Bloomsbury. As you said, it was written originally in English. It’s a very moving book. It is very cinematic, very dramatic. And it was both exciting and very touching to read, and I was grateful to have a chance to read an early edition of it. Illia Ponomarenko, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Ponomarenko: Thank you. Thank you very much for this.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Thanks so much to Illia Ponomarenko for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is not a book I have read. It’s not a book I can read, because it’s a book that doesn’t exist yet, but that I want to read. Let me explain.

Our modern world has been shaped by slavery and the traffic in slaves. Illia makes the point, in his remarkable history of Ukraine, that Ukraine was a target of slaving through much of the past 500 years.

That point is made briefly in Illia’s book, because there’s not a lot that is known about that compared to the other great slave traffics that made the modern world.

Imagine a map of Western Eurasia. Draw a line from the Ural Mountains that separates European from Asian-Russia through the Middle East, putting Iran on our one side of the line and India and what’s now Pakistan on the other side of the line, around Africa and into the Western world, North America, South America. In that world, in the past 500 years, there have been four massive, horrifying slave traffics.

By far the best known is the one that took African slaves across the Atlantic to the New World. That slave traffic is very well documented. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to the website slavevoyages.org, and there you will find a database of every known slave ship that crossed the Atlantic over the past 500 years. About 36,000 ships’ voyages, in all, that moved about 12 million people. Twelve and a half million people got on the boats; about 10 and a half million people got off the boats. Of those people—the 10 and a half million who got off the boats in the New World—about 46 percent went to Brazil, the rest to elsewhere in Spanish America. About three and a half percent went to what became the United States. Their fates, their destinies, their horrors, their sufferings: Those are as well studied as any topic in modern history.

But there are three other slave traffics that are not nearly so well known. Maybe the runner-up in terms of well-knownness is the slave traffic that took people from Italy, southern France, southern Spain, as far away as England and even Iceland, into the western part of North Africa, to what’s now Algeria and Tunisia, the Barbary Coast. That also is reasonably well studied, because the languages of the people who were enslaved are well known to Western scholars. They spoke French; they spoke Spanish; they spoke Italian. And the slavers spoke Arabic, a language that is also quite well known to Western scholarship. And there’s an estimate that in the 200 years or 250 years from 1530 to 1780, about a million people were taken from France, Italy, Spain—as far away as England, Ireland, and Iceland—into western North Africa.

The two other traffics, however, are not nearly so well known. The traffic from Africa east into the Middle East. That’s not so well known. And the traffic from what is now Ukraine, Poland, and Russia into what is now the Middle East, into what was then the Ottoman Empire, is also very poorly studied. And that last is the book that I want to read about.

The estimate that scholars have—and it’s a very rough estimate—is that over the past 500 years, about 2 million people were taken from what is now Poland, Ukraine, Western Russia, into what is now the Middle East, into the Ottoman Empire. The records on this are very poor, and they are in languages that are not well understood in the West. They’re in the Ottoman archives. They’re in other small languages of Eastern Europe. And of course, Eastern Europe has been subject to all kinds of horrifying violence in recent times that destroyed archives, that destroyed archeological sites. So it’s kind of a mysterious topic.

And the topic has also been distorted because, for much of the past 100 years, Eastern European history was channeled through institutions dominated by the former Soviet Union, which propounded a heavy-handed Marxism that—for reasons of its own ideological internal necessity—didn’t take seriously the slave operations. Of what affected the foreign slave operations. They’re very interested in serfdom: the people who were held to the land inside Eastern Europe. But not so interested in the people who were removed from it.

But as Ukraine and Poland and these other countries find their own destiny, this is a topic I think we need to know better. Slavery is violence. Slavery is inflicted by people more capable of organized violence on people less capable of organized violence. People and nations. What does it do to a nation to be on the receiving end of organized violence, foreign-organized violence, century after century in the way that Eastern Europeans were? How does it change them? How does it shape their national sense of themselves? That’s a subject I’d like to know a lot more about, and there isn’t the literature to tell me about it. But as Ukraine and Poland and the others find their place in the modern world, I think it’s a story that we need to know more about, and that I’d like to read more about.

So if there’s anyone out there who has fluency or familiarity or even competence in Ottoman archives—Turkish language, Polish language, Ukrainian language, Russian language—here’s an assignment for you: Help us understand what it did to Eastern Europe to be on the receiving end of this organized violence for so many hundreds of years. And how that experience feeds, if it does feed, into the rising national consciousness of Eastern Europe today.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you will share this program on whatever platforms are available to you. Remember, as always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Please consider that. See you soon here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

Late last night, President Trump announced a “massive” deal to buy diesel fuel from Russia. For the American truckers and farmers Trump claims to be serving, the deal means little or nothing. Trump may not know or may not care that his latest gambit will not reduce diesel prices. His poll numbers are plunging to Herbert Hoover levels. He needs a last-minute electioneering gimmick.

But while the deal will not benefit American consumers, it has immense consequences for others. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the deal is a potential lifesaver. For war-ravaged Ukraine, it is the most outrageous and heartless Trump betrayal to date. For Trump’s entourage, the deal promises corruption opportunities on a multibillion-dollar scale. And for people trying to understand the Trump presidency, the deal is further proof of the accusation that Nancy Pelosi flung in Trump’s face in 2019: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”

The United States is a diesel superpower. It is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of diesel fuel. U.S. refineries produce about 5.2 million barrels of diesel a day. Americans consume about 3.7 million barrels a day. The surplus is sold abroad: In recent months exports have run above 1.5 million barrels a day.

The United States imports some diesel fuel from Canada, about 154,000 barrels a day, owing to the peculiarities of pipeline and shipping networks: It’s cheaper to supply New England from the Canadian refinery in New Brunswick than from U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast. By comparison, Trump’s Russia deal is for 2.25 million barrels: the equivalent of about 16 hours’ worth of U.S. consumption, 10 hours’ worth of U.S. production, or 14 days’ worth of Canadian imports.

Unfortunately for U.S. diesel consumers, the price of diesel fuel is set by global markets, not North American ones. Trump’s Iran war has disrupted fuel supplies from the Middle East, including diesel supplies. Before the war, Europe imported more than half a million barrels of diesel a day from the Persian Gulf. The world’s second-biggest diesel exporter used to be Russia, which shipped about 817,000 barrels a day in 2025. When the Iran war raised energy prices, Russia was positioned to profit.

[David Frum: Why Trump didn’t predict the gas-price spike]

The United States in the past tried to help Ukraine by sanctioning Russian energy exports. Trump sometimes pretended to support this policy. In September 2025, for example, Trump proclaimed a tariff on India, ostensibly to punish India for buying Russian oil—but then lifted it in February.

So the Ukrainians took matters into their own hands. As Russia has intensified its horrific drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians, Ukraine has struck back with a devastating campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, including diesel. By late summer 2026, the Ukrainians estimated that they had shut down 43 percent of Russian refinery capacity. According to Ukrainian reports, Russian production of oil of all kinds plunged from 5.6 million barrels a day before the Iran war to 4.1 million barrels by late summer 2026. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in July. That ban has been extended into October.

Friends of Ukraine hailed the attacks on Russian energy infrastructure as a war-changing success. Trump saw a threat to Republican hopes in the midterms. Curbs on Russian fuel exports helped push the price of diesel fuel in the U.S. above $5 a gallon in July, then higher than $6 a gallon in September.

Since Trump’s return to power in 2025, the Putin regime has dangled lucrative deals in front of the president’s entourage.

The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2025 about secret conversations in Miami the previous month between the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, and Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner:

“For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

The report noted that Dmitriev “found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.” The New York Times reported last week about an even more brazen Russian offering: a multibillion-dollar oil deal for assets owned by Russia’s Lukoil, which would directly benefit a Trump donor and two Middle Eastern groups that have done business with Kushner or Witkoff’s family. (A spokesman for Steve Witkoff said of the Times story that Witkoff “has no conflict of interest and no financial stake in this matter.” Of the Wall Street Journal story, a source described as “familiar with Witkoff’s thinking” said “the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.”)

But all these apparently enticing Russian schemes come with a catch: Russian energy assets are not worth much if those assets are regularly wrecked by Ukrainian drones. This makes plain the implicit quid pro quo in these lucrative deals offered to Trump’s family and friends: If you compel Ukraine to surrender, we will enrich you beyond reckoning.

Putin is attempting to leverage Russia’s most strategic asset in his war on Ukraine: Trump’s weakness for corruption. The 2.25 million barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on world energy markets or the world price of diesel. But accepting those barrels will collapse the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against the Ukrainian air attacks on Russian energy production.

Trump stopped providing aid to Ukraine long ago. But the U.S. still provides Ukraine with crucial intelligence information. If Putin can entice Trump to cut Ukraine off from U.S. intelligence, he can do real damage to Ukraine’s capabilities. Russian diesel fuel is the cheese in that mousetrap. Trump’s negotiators are sniffing at the bait: The Kyiv Post reported today that Witkoff and Kushner are already threatening to stop information-sharing if Ukraine continues to strike Russian energy assets. And meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly planning his own trip to Russia—one that members of Congress are urging him to cancel, as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick recently reported.

There is much about Putin’s offer of diesel that remains doubtful. Does Trump have the legal authority to buy previously sanctioned Russian oil? Does Russia even possess the diesel to sell? But one thing at least remains as clear as ever: With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.