Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts
On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses the menacing crises the Trump presidency is inflicting on the United States and its own movement to start 2026. David speculates that the recent lethal ICE incident in Minneapolis, the growing erraticism of Trump's rhetoric, and the targeting of Jerome Powell indicate that MAGA world is cracking. He argues that Trump’s unpredictable and escalating actions are taking the MAGA movement, the Trump presidency, the U.S., and the rest of the world down a path of doom.
Then, David is joined by Timothy Naftali, the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, to discuss perhaps Trump’s most brazen grift: his proposed presidential library in Miami. Frum and Naftali also discuss why comparisons of Trump to Nixon fall flat and how Trump’s actions in Venezuela reflect a policy of weakness.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Tim Naftali. You may know Tim from his many appearances on CNN, where he talks about the history of the presidency. Tim is a distinguished historian of U.S. diplomacy during the Cold War. He was also the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and we’ll be talking about the many strange moneymaking schemes around the plan for a [Donald] Trump presidential library in Miami. And we’ll be talking about the chaos and danger of the Trump foreign policy as it stumbles toward conflict with Europe over Greenland, in South America over Venezuela, in Iran, in the Far East.
My book this week will be Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and I’ll be talking about that and what it tells us about our changing attitudes toward children and toward cruelty.
But before the dialogue with Tim, before the book discussion of Jane Eyre, some preliminary thoughts about what we have seen in these remarkable early days of January 2026. It does seem that the MAGA movement and the Trump presidency have entered a kind of crazy death spiral. So many bizarre and menacing things have happened in just the past few days. There seems to be a kind of intensification of the crisis that has been with us since the beginning of the Trump era, the crisis that has been with us since the beginning of the Trump second term, and now, in 2026, a crisis that becomes ever more terrifying.
Over the weekend, there was a kind of rampage of ICE personnel in the city of Minneapolis. The weekend opened with the shooting death of a motorist in Minneapolis, Renee [Nicole] Good. And ICE seems to have reacted to the outburst of feeling about that shooting not by investigating the shooting, not by reconsidering its methods, but by using ever more brutal methods against ever more people in the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota.
ICE seems to be acting more and more not like a proper federal law-enforcement agency, with all the high professionalism and exacting standards that Americans rightfully expect and usually get from federal law enforcement. It’s acting like an armed MAGA militia, like the armed force of a political party, occupying part of the country and part of the voting population on behalf of another part of the country and another bloc of the voting population.
This comes as President Trump gave an interview to The New York Times in which he said that one of his great regrets about his first term was that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines in the election of 2020. Now, back then, there is some question whether, even if he’d issued such a shocking and illegal and improper order, whether the National Guard would have executed it, but now he has this armed mass of ICE militia roaming the country, breaking laws, ignoring rules. He seems to see them as his tool for carrying out such schemes in the year ahead.
At the same time, other bizarre behaviors have been issuing. On Sunday night, we learned that the Trump administration had opened a criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell for obviously specious and fake grounds. The Federal Reserve is renovating its headquarters. It’s a big project. There’s some questions about how much the project should cost, as there often are in federal buildings. Some of the reason for the expense is because President Trump himself in his first term ordered marble and other fancy accoutrements. Jerome Powell has testified to Congress about the cost. It’s a very technical matter, and Donald Trump’s people have decided this is their chance to bring pressure to bear on Jerome Powell to force the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates faster to help Donald Trump avoid catastrophe in the elections of 2026.
Jerome Powell then released a video denouncing the politicization of the Federal Reserve, denouncing the politicization of the Department of Justice that would allow itself to be used in such a way. Powell was promptly backed by a Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina. But we’re left with a real question: What happens to the Federal Reserve now? Jerome Powell’s term is set to expire in May of 2026. Will any Trump nominee be trusted by anybody as anything other than a Trump stooge? Can the Federal Reserve ever cut interest rates again without it looking like it’s yielding to intimidation by the Trump administration? We may, in fact, find ourselves with higher interest rates than we otherwise would have because of Trump’s attempt to abusively use improper process of law and his shamefully weak U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to intimidate the Federal Reserve Board into adopting different monetary policies than the ones that the Federal Reserve, in its collective opinion, collective judgment, thought were appropriate.
This seems part of a quickening spiral, but it’s not all. The president has been issuing other kinds of crazy commands and fatwas into the economy, decreeing with no legal authority that credit card rates be cut, talking about American oil companies that he’s trying to bully into crazy and unprofitable investments in Venezuela. Over the weekend, he issued a Truth Social post in which he described himself as the “Acting President of Venezuela,” which is kind of a spoof, but also a scene out of Woody Allen’s Bananas where the aging authoritarian president seems to be losing his marbles. He’s not the acting president of Venezuela. No American president should even joke about such a thing. But this one may not be joking.
And finally, we have the eruptions of more and more people around Trump to justify the killing of the motorist in Minneapolis—three bullets into the side of a car for someone who was, as we can all see, trying to escape a confrontation and who was set upon by an officer who seemed bent on punishing her not for anything she did wrong, but for her attitude toward him, for her disrespect toward him—a killing that seemed to have been motivated by ego, not by any sense of self-defense.
We’re in a kind of crack-up of the MAGA world. It’s becoming more extreme, more at variance with America, as it feels its unpopularity intensifying because of the terrible economy. We had a job report at the end of the week before I record that showed that the United States in all of 2025 created fewer net new jobs than the population of the city of Spokane, Washington. The economy’s in trouble, and prices are rising. The Republican prospects for 2026 are diminishing—at least if there is a free and fair election in 2026. And the president’s mind is going to: How can he seize voting machines? How can he use an armed militia against his political opponents? How can he use law enforcement, or the pretense of law enforcement, to pressure the Federal Reserve into making monetary policy subordinate to Trump’s reelection wishes? How can he steal oil from Venezuela? How can he steal Greenland from the Danes?
Trump’s MAGA movement is spiraling on a kind of death cycle. It’s taking the MAGA movement, the Trump presidency, the United States, and much of the rest of the world along for the downward ride to doom. Now, we are not helpless, as individuals, as citizens, to correct course, to stop this ride, to prevent MAGA from doing what it wants to do. We’re going to have to act responsibly because there is a stark choice here. MAGA is not America as we knew America, as we believe in America. MAGA is not the America where rights are respected; where police serve the public, and they don’t attack and harm the public. MAGA is not the America where the law is independent of the president and where the dollar is something that can be trusted by the whole world.
MAGA’s America is one thing; America’s America is another. You can have the rule of law in America, or you can have the Trump MAGA regime, not both. This is going to be, in 2026, the year for choosing. I am hopeful that Americans will, together, choose right. But I have to be clear-eyed about what the alternative is, how dangerous it is, and how bent it is on the doom of everything good and decent about the America as you used to know it.
And now my dialogue with Tim Naftali. But first, a quick break.
[Break]
Frum: Timothy Naftali is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International [and] Public Affairs. He previously served as the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. His many books include the 1997 classic “One Hell of a Gamble,” the definitive account of the Cuban missile crisis from the Soviet point of view. He is a regular contributor to CNN, where he is their in-house presidential historian. Tim is a native of Montreal, Canada. We were undergraduates together at Yale in the early 1980s and have been friends ever since, although I note for the record that Tim was several classes younger than me and is therefore considerably better preserved. (Laughs.) Tim, welcome so much to The David Frum [Show]. Thank you for making time today.
Timothy Naftali: So you begin with a lie. (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.) No, no, you are an amazing specimen—intellectual, moral, and physical.
Naftali: (Laughs.)
Frum: So we’ve got so many things to cover, but I wanna start drawing on your expertise as a founder of a presidential library. There is a project for a Trump presidential library in Miami. It will not surprise you to hear that this project is laden with scandal, but you think it’s not just the financial scandals that are important. So let’s talk about the financial scandal and the intellectual scandal of the Trump library.
Naftali: First of all, it’s great to be with you, David. I had the privilege of working for the National Archives and Records Administration, and I was appointed—I didn’t apply for the job, but I was appointed to be the first federal director of the Nixon Library. After Watergate, because of concerns that President Nixon would destroy his famous tapes and the documents, Congress seized his materials; President [Gerald] Ford signed the law, and so. And as a result, the Nixon materials couldn’t leave the Washington, D.C., area. So Nixon could not have a real presidential library, so he got an ersatz library. His family built a private Nixon Library—the museum was private. the archive was private—but it didn’t have any of his presidential materials, ’cause they couldn’t leave Washington, D.C.
Fast-forward about 10 years, for reasons that the Nixon family knows best, the Nixon family decided they didn’t wanna run this private library any longer; they wanted the federal government to run it. Well, for that to happen, they had to get Congress to change the governing law that affected the Nixon materials. Congress did change the law. The National Archives would then become responsible for the Nixon Library, would rename it, and would move the presidential materials from Washington, D.C., to Yorba Linda, California. And they needed a director for that, and they appointed me.
One of the challenges for my team was to establish the credibility of this new institution. Understandably, many Americans, not just those who are old enough to remember Watergate, were concerned about what might happen to the Nixon tapes and the Nixon papers if they were moved to Yorba Linda and perhaps, technically, under some kind of watchful eye of the Nixon family. And so it was really essential that the first federal director established the credibility of this space, that it’d be nonpartisan—not anti-Nixon, but not pro-Nixon. And so that was my job.
And among my responsibilities was to be the curator of the Watergate exhibit, the old Watergate exhibit. What we inherited basically made the argument that Watergate was a “coup” that happened in order to overturn the results of the 1972 election, and the Democrats pushed Nixon out, and that Nixon was mistreated. And given that we were moving to Yorba Linda, the documents, the materials that made clear that the president had been engaged in abuse of power—and he was never indicted, so we can’t say he was criminally responsible, but let’s say that there was heavy, heavy evidence that suggested the president had participated in criminal actions—in any case, how could you move those documents to Yorba Linda and then have in the public space up ahead, ’cause the archive was downstairs, material that contradicted the basic documents that we had? So the Watergate exhibit had to be changed. The Nixon Foundation said they couldn’t do it, and they asked me to do it, and the National Archives asked me to do it, so I was the curator of a Watergate exhibit, which was one way of establishing the credibility of the institution. And another way was to make sure a lot of materials were declassified and tapes were made available to the public, which we did. I was there for five years in total.
Frum: So let’s move forward in time from the Nixon Library, as you described it, to the project in the 2020s for a Trump presidential library. This library, as I read, is to be built in Miami on an extremely valuable piece of land, almost three acres big, on a highly developable strip of road where you could build condo towers or a hotel or something like that. The land formerly belonged to a local college. The land was transferred by the local college from the college’s ownership to the state government with no payment to the college, not the $65 million that is conservatively estimated, not the $100 million it might be worth, not more—nothing to the college. The state then transferred the land to a trust governed by representatives of the Trump family, and the idea is that some kind of Trump institution will be built on this parcel of land.
But there are a lot of hints that what will be built on the land is not just a library, as we’ve known it, not even the kind of crazy pharaonic library that you get for Barack Obama, but for-profit uses: condos, maybe a hotel. I’ve seen you quoted in stories about this project. What do you know about the coming Trump library? How does it compare and contrast to other presidential libraries that already exist?
Naftali: Well, I don’t know much more than what you’ve just described, David, but I believe in the idea of a presidential library, and I believe in the importance of nonpartisan public history. One of the things I learned out in Yorba Linda was that presidential libraries are important local institutions; we had a lot of students from local high schools and middle schools come to visit. Obviously, we had visitors from across the country. And we were able, in a sense, to try, as a team, to set a standard for public history.
So I believe in these institutions, and I am worried at the development, at the turn that these institutions have taken. You mentioned Barack Obama. President Obama had an opportunity to set a high standard for public history. We could debate his presidency, but what he did not have was a Watergate or an Iran-Contra. He did not have the sort of overwhelming scandal that allies of any president would have a hard time sort of softening, if not deleting entirely. So he had the opportunity to present, or to create, a model, a gem for public history, allowing the National Archives to do its job, overseeing a museum, but he didn’t do it. He decided that he wanted a private museum. Now, I’m not suggesting that Barack Obama wanted to re-create what we inherited and had to change in Yorba Linda, but it was clear that he wanted and his team wanted to be in control of how his presidency is portrayed.
Now we talk about Trump. Now, I’m not saying that President Trump would be doing what he’s doing now if Barack Obama had chosen to have a standard presidential library, but the fact that Barack Obama rejected the standard model of a presidential library just made it a little bit easier for President Trump to create what appears to be Trumpland. And I just think it’s disappointing. Our public institutions are under extreme stress; you’ve talked about this in your podcast on multiple occasions. And I think that, as a people, our self-confidence is directly proportional to how willing we are to talk about the peaks and valleys of our history. And one of the places where people can learn about the peaks and valleys of our history are these presidential libraries. And it’s sad that we’re gonna lose yet another opportunity to learn about the complexities of this era because the Trump library will be as disconnected from reality as possible.
You asked about corruption and Nixon. Before Watergate, Nixon put pressure on a House committee to give up federal land near San Clemente, which was actually part of Camp Pendleton, and allow him to use it for a library—so that’s public federal land, not state land. And Nixon’s people were putting pressure on getting that land. Of course, with Watergate, not only did that pressure campaign end, but the then-Nixon Foundation collapsed; the one that exists now was created well after Watergate. So the idea of putting pressure on a locality or on the federal government to get land that wasn’t really yours for a presidential library, that didn’t start with Trump. Nixon attempted to do it, but Watergate ended those particular desires.
Frum: But pre-Watergate Nixon, when he thought about, And we’ll have a for-profit use in this hypothetical Nixon Library; there will be a cafeteria, a gift shop, perhaps, he didn’t think, We’re gonna have a condo tower and hotel.
Naftali: No, of course not. That would have, by the way, obstructed the view from San Clemente. Of course, he didn’t wanna have … (Laughs.)
Frum: (Laughs.)
Naftali: Now, come on. Remember, Richard Nixon was a realist. No, no, no, of course not, but remember—let’s keep in mind that Donald Trump is our first developer president, and therefore, he thinks of everything in terms of development and, of course, self-enrichment, so I’m not surprised. Look, one of the things that’s clear about the Trump library is it’s gonna reflect the mores and the corruption of the era we’re living in, so it’ll be very representative of this period.
Frum: Yeah, I mean Nixon was a presidency who had a scandal, but Trump is a scandal who has a presidency. (Laughs.)
Naftali: (Laughs.)
Frum: So with Nixon, there are a lot of—and I’ve seen this amazing and fascinating institution that has been developed there. There are different rooms because there are things you can say about Nixon that are not about Watergate: diplomatic overtures, maybe the single most important environmental record of any of the presidents, meeting and failing to overcome economic challenges, race relations, or crime. There are a series of Nixon stories that are separate from the Watergate scandal story. I don’t know if there’s any aspect of the Trump presidency, any, that isn’t touched by some really important story of self-enrichment or corrupt dealing or lawbreaking of some other kind. I don’t think there’s a one. There isn’t a room that is: Okay, this is the presidency apart from the scandal. And so, as you say, maybe it’s fitting that the whole library is itself kind of a scandal.
Naftali: Well, I think the first term had a few things that could be pointed to: Warp Speed. Of course, the Trump people don’t wanna talk about that; MAHA does not include vaccines. But I really—and this is a point of view that may seem old-fashioned now and naive—but I really believe that it is healthy for a country to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of our presidents, rather than seeing them as these totems or these saints that are perfect or are devils.
Nixon is complicated. One of the things about Nixon that people might find interesting is that he had a sense of shame. He had a sense of shame, and he had a sense of legitimacy. And his sense of legitimacy was his understanding of what the presidency should look like. And when he thought about the presidency, he was thinking about Dwight Eisenhower and he was thinking about Franklin Roosevelt. So that’s why he was so secretive. Yes, he had dark impulses, but he knew that the American people would not embrace them, and so he was not honest about them.
We live in a different period. We live in a period where we have a president who has been reelected despite the fact that he shared his dark impulses with the American people. And he is not constrained by shame. And Nixon had shame, so it meant internal constraint. And then he had guardrails. And of course, we all talk about them all the time, but his term—his time in office; he had a little more than one term—Richard Nixon had guardrails. And he would have been a worse president domestically had it not been for the guardrails. Well, we have now a president with similar, but not identical, dark impulses who has no sense of shame and no guardrails. And that’s why the Trump presidency, in its 2.0 version, cannot be compared to the Nixon presidency at all. The Trump first term could be compared because you had a president with dark impulses surrounded by good-government Republicans with guardrails. We’re in a different world now.
Frum: Yeah. Well, I think it needs to be stressed again and again with Richard Nixon that the president he most admired was the unlikely figure of Woodrow Wilson, who was the president that most voiced a kind of vaunting idealism, sometimes a little ethereal, out-of-this-world idealism, and Nixon admired that. Richard Nixon’s parents, especially his beloved mother, had been huge Wilsonians, and he admired him so much. There’s a story that William Safire tells—and I’ve never been able to find out whether Safire is wrong or right about the story, and we’ll just have to take it onto Safire’s testimony—but Richard Nixon, in his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, had a desk that he pulled from the White House inventory—and you must know the story—that was described in the record as the “Wilson desk.” And he believed this was Woodrow Wilson’s desk, on which Woodrow Wilson typed his work. And Safire, who was a Nixon speechwriter, said he talked to the head of the whoever keeps these inventories, and he said, Look, it’s not the Woodrow Wilson desk; it’s the Henry Wilson desk, Henry Wilson being [Ulysses S.] Grant’s vice president.
Naftali: Yes. (Laughs.)
Frum: But no one has the heart to tell the president that he’s got the wrong [Wilson]. (Laughs.) Now, again, I’ve not been able ever to confirm or deny this story, but Safire would be a pretty good authority; he was there.
Naftali: Well, one thing about Safire is he had a very nice metaphor for Nixon, which was that Nixon was a layer cake, and think of him as a layer cake, and you cut a slice and all these layers, and they’re different, and they’re somewhat contradictory.
One thing I wanna mention is that, yes, it’s true—Woodrow Wilson was a historical mentor of sorts—but so was de Gaulle. Richard Nixon admired [former French President] Charles de Gaulle, next to Eisenhower, of any living leader at the time. And of course, de Gaulle wasn’t Wilsonian at all. (Laughs.) He was the most Machiavellian of leaders. So Nixon’s a complicated man. The point, however—
Frum: But he was, in his own way, a man of great integrity and ethic who had refused to join the sellout of French national identity after the fall of France and had taken the enormous risk of going into exile with nothing, not even his family; they followed later. So that’s an inspirational example too, whereas Donald Trump’s example seemed to be Roy Cohn.
Naftali: Well, and one more thing: Again, Richard Nixon also understood the international system. He did not wanna destroy the architecture that [President Harry S.] Truman had constructed. Although he had real doubts about elements, of course, of the Great Society, he wasn’t about to dismantle the New Deal. He came from a poor family, and he recognized the importance of a safety net. He’s a complicated man.
One of the reasons we talk about him—not simply because he resigned, but he had these dark impulses, and he was a bigot, and he was an anti-Semite. And these dark passions motivated policy, at times, and so that’s why we talk about him: He was a flawed character. The difference, however, was he was a smart man, and he was a man who read, and he was a man who understood history, and he cared about history, and he did not wanna be an outlier. He was not someone who believed, I am the beginning and the end of American history. I have predecessors, and I have to be mindful of them, so that’s also a source of some constraint on his behavior.
Frum: And I will have successors.
Naftali: And I will be passing on to them a better country, I hope, than the one that I received. But remember, he was thinking in terms of the country. His self-dealing involved a $7,000—get this—a $7,000 shield around his pool in San Clemente. That was the great corrupt bargain of his presidency. Now, his crimes and his abuse of power are quite different, but when you talk about “What did he steal, if anything?,” what the Congress found was, yes, he found a way to get the Secret Service to say that it was in the interest of his protection that he have a screen around his pool.
Frum: By the way, that’s not a crazy claim.
Naftali: No, it’s not a crazy claim, but just to give you a sense of proportion.
Frum: It’s not a billion-dollar crypto scheme in which your investors lose 95 percent of their money. (Laughs.)
Naftali: No, no, no. No, he wasn’t a grifter. Keep in mind, Richard Nixon was not a grifter, and it’s important to keep that in mind.
Richard Nixon also believed in allies. He didn’t like all of them—he had some very choice things to say about [former Canadian Prime Minister] Pierre Trudeau and others—but he believed in alliances. He wasn’t about to disrupt and destroy what he had inherited, even though he differed from some of his predecessors. We live in an era with a president who is disrupting and destroying because he can.
Frum: Yeah. One of my pet peeves is: People will use the phrase about Trump “the most corrupt presidency in American history.” And to which I was saying, Okay, if you were to do the corrupt presidencies: Ulysses Grant, Warren Harding, who else would you—although, as you say, Watergate is not technically a corruption scandal, but let’s throw it in because we’re speaking loosely. Would you add anybody else to that list?
Naftali: Well, one of the problems for those of us who study this is that the documents are pretty sparse about congressional corruption in the 19th century; we have some documents about presidential corruption. But keep in mind, before Chester Arthur, ironically, pushes for civil service reform, and we get a nonpartisan professional civil service, government jobs were given away to the highest bidder. So, in a sense, you had a basic corruption at the core of presidencies because—
Frum: I wanna dissent for that. They were not sold to the highest bidder; they were given as rewards for party loyalty. So it wasn’t [that] there was a lot of cash that traded hands—because people who had cash to spend would not want a government job. They might want a government contract.
Naftali: I was thinking about being the head of the post office—or, actually—
Frum: Yeah, oh, I see. Yeah.
Naftali: —the customs duty officer, or also, the person who had the concession on, in that era, the Indian land reservation, those people made lots of money. Also, that was the era when government documents were actually printed by private companies, and that particular contract was worth a lot of money. No, the president didn’t get any cash in return, but he was paying off an ally, and there was a business consequence for the ally.
Frum: And then you have Warren Harding, who himself was kind of a lecherous “slob,” as Alice Roosevelt [Longworth] called him, but doesn’t seem to have been on the take in any way—
Naftali: No.
Frum: The big corruption scandals were happening around him and with him being checked out and indifferent because he was not very intelligent and not very conscientious, but he was not, personally, a crook.
But the point I’m building to is that I don’t think you can compare any of these things to, for example, the Trump crypto business, where a president has made a billion dollars in less than a year in office selling assets that have just collapsed in [value] in the hands of the buyers. And this, to me, looks like that we need to say: This is not the most corrupt president in American history. If Trump were Russian, if Trump were Nigerian, he’d be one of the contenders for the most corrupt president in Nigerian or Russian history. He’s just outside the realm of anything ever previously contemplated for a president—not for an Indian lands commissioner, not for the head of the New York [Custom] House, but for a president in American history.
Naftali: If you look at the essence of all of these peace discussions, it is no surprise that sovereign-wealth funds are involved because we—not the American people, but we, our government—is seeking resources. So it’s not a peace agreement. What is happening is that we are engaging in some kind of bribery scandal with all these countries, where we are saying, Give us a piece of whatever your mineral resources might be—like in Congo, there are certain kinds, and in Ukraine—and we’re saying, We’ll help you by throwing our weight around, but in return, you’re gonna help us. And us is not the American people writ large, but the president’s—I would call them the chauvinistas or chovinistas, of Mar-a-Lago, the people that are close to the Trump family. They’re the ones likely—and the tech bros—they’re the ones likely to benefit from this.
This is, to use the term from Broadway, this is a musical crap game that is going from conflict zone to conflict zone, and the president is using this as a way to enrich himself and his allies. There is no precedent for this. And because there is no country as powerful as the United States, no authoritarian leader in the world has the opportunities for enrichment that Donald Trump has at the moment.
Frum: Well, this takes us, I think, to the Venezuela topic, which you wanted to discuss. Now, one of the things I have said, and I’ve said this in a more colloquial way that was open to be misunderstood, that I talked about wars for oil and how no one fights them. Well, that’s not quite right; people have fought wars for oil. But what I mean is that anyone who did his accounting wouldn’t do a fight for oil because the oil is available on the marketplace. You have to pay for it. Whether or not the oil is on land that is friendly to you or not, whether it’s your sovereign territory or not, you have to pay for the technology; you have the return on capital; you have to pay the people who work there; you have to build the infrastructure and the roads. If you do proper accounting, what you’ll [find is]: You know what, just buy it; don’t fight for it. The war costs way more than any benefit of the oil. But of course, if you don’t do the accounting, if you say, Well, no, my accounting is this: The public pays all the bills, and a small handful of insiders get all the benefits. Then, from the point of view of that small handful of insiders, then the war can make sense, which is what seems to be happening in Venezuela.
Americans of a certain age forget this: The United States is now again by far the largest producer of oil on Earth and by far the largest producer of natural gas on Earth. If you throw in Canada—and Trump wants to not throw in but grab Canada, but group the United States and Canada together, whether Canada retains its independence or not—almost 30 percent of the planet’s output of oil comes from the United States and Canada. And the price is at barely breakeven right now, so it’s not like we’re desperately short of it. As I record, it’s about $58 a barrel, and in most parts of North America, that’s a break-even price. So the idea of having lots more of it—for what? But there are people who say, If I can get my personal hands on Venezuelan oil, at someone else’s expense, then I personally can make a lot of money, even though it’s a crazy-bad deal for the American people.
Naftali: One of the things that students of the Cold War—some—missed was that we did not engage in our Cold War crusades in search of resources. In fact, the quagmire area was Vietnam, and there were, at the time, no resources whatsoever. We were in the business of regime change and regime construction because we were contesting the world with the Soviet Union, and we were also worried about the credibility of our alliances. When we were dragged into some countries, we were dragged in because of the weakness of our allies, and Iran is a perfect example. We toppled the government of Iran because the British had been pressing us to do this. Why—
Frum: This is in the early 1950s.
Naftali: The 1950s. I’m bringing this up because what our president is doing now is what weak countries do, not strong countries. The British were weak, and they needed to control the oil refinery in Abadan, in Iran, and they did not want the Iranians to have a better share of the money that was really theirs. And so the British put pressure on us to help them. And we knew how weak the British were.
So it’s absolutely true that the mercantilist Trump vision of how states are powerful is a vision of a weak country, not a strong one. We have the resources to buy what we need. But I agree: What I think is going on is that his buddies are going to benefit, which is why he is dealing with the Congo and why he’s—I’m not sure what he’s getting from Thailand and Cambodia, but that’s why he’s interested in the Congo; that’s why he’s interested in Azerbaijan, and he called it Albania, but it’s Armenia. It’s because these places have resources, and he and his buddies would like access to it. It has nothing to do with the interests of the United States.
Frum: Yeah, it’s a private profit at public expense. And I think you are putting your finger on something very profound, which is: During the Cold War, at the time of American power, the American interest was always a world system. That’s why the United States from 1945 onward, and even before, rejected spheres of influence, because spheres of influence were for losers. The American view was, Sphere of influence? It’s the planet. We can’t necessarily make our writ run on every part of the planet all the time; there are other powers, some of them hostile. But our vision is of a planetary-wide system of collective security, free trade, American investment—we want the whole thing. And we believe that will be good for people; we believe that we’re bringing liberty and prosperity to other people, so it’s not something we’re cruelly imposing on others. But the ambition was large.
The sphere of influence is what declining powers want: Well, as we no longer can make our writ run broader and broader, so we want an area where we’re preserved and where other powers agree not to poach in our waters, because they could if there weren’t a deal. You’re going to talk about the Monroe Doctrine a little bit—
Naftali: That’s the origin—
Frum: The Monroe Doctrine was issued in the United States—I think you were going to say “was weak,” and so explain that.
Naftali: Well, the Monroe Doctrine—1823, the Spanish empire is collapsing in the Americas. There’s a great fear that the French and the Russians, what was called then the Holy Alliance, would come in, sweep back into the Western Hemisphere, and reimpose monarchical systems, in competition with our Republican system. And so the U.S. government wanted to say to the European monarchical powers, Stay away. We will be neutral in your conflicts in your sphere. Stay away from the Western Hemisphere. It was an anti-European doctrine. What happens over time is, as American power grows, the Monroe Doctrine becomes a more offensive doctrine.
Frum: I gotta pause you there, though, because this is a thing that I think not enough Americans realize when we talk about spheres of influence being for the weak. What was the enforcement mechanism for the Monroe Doctrine?
Naftali: Oh, it’s easy: the British navy. The British navy—
Frum: It was the British navy. (Laughs.) It was the British navy! The way the Monroe Doctrine worked was: The United States said to Britain, We will offer you privileged access, or favorable access, to our markets, which were—we fought two wars, the Revolution and 1812; there’s a lot of unpleasantness and ill feeling. Let’s put all of that behind us. Let us be permanent friends. (Laughs.) And your navy, which you pay for, will police the Arctic to keep the Spanish and everybody else out of what we are calling our hemisphere, but what we really mean is your hemisphere.
Naftali: Look, we could, and I don’t know if your listeners would wanna do this, but we could talk about the peculiar relationship between the Americans and the British. The British actually offered to have a joint statement that was something like the Monroe Doctrine; they actually offered it to the Monroe administration. And John Quincy Adams, who wanted to be president in 1824, realized—he was secretary of state at the time—realized that, because his father was John Adams and associated with the Federalists, which were associated with a pro-British party, that it would be political suicide if he participated in a joint statement with London. So he convinced Monroe, No, no, no, no joint statement with London. Let’s have a unilateral statement that says, “Europe out.” But the administration actually knew that it needed Britain; it desperately needed Britain. Even Thomas Jefferson, who was a former president by that point, and Jefferson never liked the British much, recognized that Britain could destroy the United States and wanted—this is as a former president—wanted the Monroe administration to be on good terms with Britain, so absolutely, the Monroe Doctrine was a product of weakness, not strength. It’s in the 20th century that, with the growth in American power, the Monroe Doctrine is pointed to as a source of strength. It wasn’t. That’s not its tradition.
Frum: And then, in the early 20th century, the United States has become strong, but is not yet the strongest. Then the United States becomes increasingly aggressive and militaristic in its enforcement of an exclusion zone, especially in the Caribbean—principally against the Germans, much less against the British, who still were a fearsome force in the 1890s, 1910s.
Naftali: Well, I’m gonna say something nice about lawyers. I don’t often say nice things about lawyers, American lawyers, but I wanna say this about American lawyers. So you have Theodore Roosevelt, who, because he desperately wants the [Panama] Canal, right, Theodore Roosevelt has something called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which basically says the United States can intervene at will in its sphere of influence, which is the Western Hemisphere, to protect American interests and American private interests. In the 1930s, American lawyers, Elihu Root and Henry Stimson, say, This is a bad policy. We don’t wanna be intervening. The United States, for example, had Marines in Nicaragua from 1912 to 1931. It was almost as long as we had troops in Afghanistan.
Frum: Haiti too. Haiti—
Naftali: And the position was: It’s foolish. These are expensive investments. And frankly, we don’t wanna be running these countries, because then we have to be involved in the day-to-day business of their politics, which are confusing. And anyway, they speak Spanish; Haiti speaks French. So what Stimson, who was secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, says is, We’re not doing this anymore. The Monroe Doctrine, it’s a doctrine of the United States versus Europe, not the United States versus Latin America. This is not in our interests. We are no longer gonna do this.
And so from 1931 until last weekend, our position in the Western Hemisphere was: We have an interest in an American system of free states. Different presidents had a different threshold for intervention, but the fact of the matter is, ultimately, what we want are all these states to govern themselves and for us to trade with them. It was not, We wanna find the resources we need and acquire them. That had been our policy before 1931. It hasn’t been since 1931, and now it has changed, and I sure wish the team in power did a little bit of historical work and realized why we got out of that business back in the early 20th century.
Frum: Well, they’re about to find out the hard way because, this intervention in Venezuela—maybe they’ve just bundled President [Nicolás] Maduro out of town, and they’re going to give him a trial and see what happens. I keep saying they have not calculated enough that he might be acquitted. You gotta think that there is a real chance that that could happen because it’s not a drumhead court-martial. It’s not a Pete Hegseth I take away your pension, and then you sue me. It’s going to be a real trial, and the defendant can win. And, by the way, and if the defendant wins, the defendant may have some tort claims (Laughs.) against the United States for the summary method with which he was removed, so that could all happen. They didn’t seem to have thought about that.
But if they are serious about trying to extract oil from Venezuela, the oil is in places where the road network isn’t good, where the electrical network isn’t good. I’m given to understand there are not remotely enough tankers in the world to begin moving Venezuelan oil at any scale. So all of those things are going to have to be built and paid for by somebody.
Naftali: Yes, and ask yourself, with the price of oil dropping—and you’re in the oil business—are you going to invest money into what could be a failed state? So then the question is, Okay, well, we—
Frum: With guerilla warfare a real possibility.
Naftali: Yeah. So then we ask the question, Oh, well, we don’t want a failed state. Oh, no, no, no, we don’t want a Somalia. No, no, no, no, no. And then the question is, Okay, how are you going to avoid a failed state with this particular approach to the transition in Venezuela? You’ve got a group of people whose intellectual worldview is fundamentally different from our—I don’t care how Machiavellian they might be; they are fundamentally different from the vision that the best of the Trump team has for Venezuela, by that, I mean Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio. How are you gonna manage that with them? Well, maybe you can’t manage it with them, which means we have to go, which means we find ourselves supervising the police, making sure there’s law and order, because no American businessperson is gonna wanna invest in Somalia or you name whichever failed country that might have access to oil—you name it, and they’re not gonna wanna do it—which means we’ve just managed to create a failed state in Venezuela, or at least, that’s the possibility.
It’s amazing to me the hubris that has led to this. But, by the way, as we’ve seen before, hubris begets hubris because we’re already talking about the next great American expedition and acquisition in the Western Hemisphere: Greenland.
Frum: It’s demoralizing.
Do you think the Trump library in Miami will, in fact, ever be built?
Naftali: Hmm. Well, after the first term, of course, the current president decided he hadn’t lost and his interest was in regaining power, not in legacy. And so there was no Trump library—there was no foundation for a Trump library after the first term. There seems to be some interest in legacy right now. After all, this is a president who wants his name on everything, so he’s clearly thinking about the future. It’s fascinating. He’s already putting his name everywhere, as if he’s about to retire. So I have a feeling that the old man actually wants a Trump library.
Frum: Let me develop the thought a little bit. He’s tapping out hundreds of millions of dollars for this Trump ballroom that is being built beside the White House. The estimate began at $200-something million. It’s risen to $300 million. I don’t know that there’s any real cost accounting going on here; I would not be surprised if it turns out to be a lot more than that. He won’t care, because he’s raising the money from people who are buying influence. They don’t care: Well, what does it cost to keep Trump happy? Twenty-five million dollars. I give it; I get something in return.
But a lot of those people are going to be tapped out. He’s not going to want to pay for the Trump library himself. He’s going to wanna turn to that same network of donors. And their calculus of interest in paying for it may be quite different after November than it is now. They’re not giving it because they like them so much; they’re giving it because they expect something from him. And that library advances to the extent that Trump can deliver benefits to people of whom he’s asking tens of millions of dollars.
Naftali: Well, we have to ask ourselves, To what extent will the government of Congo, will Qatar, will the UAE, will Saudi Arabia, to what extent are they gonna front-load payments to this library as part of elaborate agreements that the Trump team is engaged in? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are promissory notes for all these things that have already been established, and that would allow the Trump library to be sort of a laundering mechanism for whatever follows. So I wouldn’t put it past this team—I’m talking about the Trump team—that they are not thinking about ways to use this quasi-commercial Trump library as a place to park money, and money that we can get from governments that have an interest in what we’re deciding today, get it from them now. So they’re not gonna wait until December of 2028 to get this money.
Frum: Tim, thank you so much for your time and insight today.
Naftali: My pleasure. Thank you, David, for inviting me on.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Tim Naftali for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top of the program, my book this week is Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë. I opened this book series by discussing the masterwork by her sister Emily, Wuthering Heights, one of the darkest novels in the entire canon of English literature. Jane Eyre is a more assimilable document. It is much more like a classic love story, although very dark in its way. The story of Jane and her brooding, mysterious Mr. Rochester has, I think, enlivened a lot of high-school classes. I wanna discuss something that is not the love story, something that occurs earlier in the book Jane Eyre.
Jane Eyre tells autobiographically, in the first person, the story of a young English woman, starting from about the age of 10 until she is married and has children. The young Jane Eyre is an orphan who is sent to live with an aunt by marriage and cousins, who treat her neglectfully at best, quite brutally at worst. And the book opens with a searing depiction of the maltreatment and unkindness of the adult world to unwanted children. So here is a passage from the recollections of the young Jane Eyre, aged only 10. The aunt by marriage is named Mrs. Reed, and Mrs. Reed is the person referred to in the quote I’m about to read.
“Well might I dread, well might I dislike Mrs. Reed; for it was her nature to wound me cruelly; never was I happy in her presence; however carefully I obeyed, however strenuously I strove to please her, my efforts were still repulsed and repaid by such sentences as the above.” The above is a quoted insult to the young Jane. “Now, uttered before a stranger, the accusation cut me to the heart; I dimly perceived that she was already obliterating hope from the new phase of existence which she destined me to enter; I felt, though I could not have expressed the feeling, that she was sowing aversion and unkindness along my future path; I saw myself transformed into an artful, noxious child, and what could I do to remedy the injury?
“‘Nothing, indeed,’ thought I, as I struggled to repress a sob, and hastily wiped away some tears, the impotent evidences of my anguish.”
Now, those are not a 10-year-old’s words. That’s not a 10-year-old’s vocabulary. But those are very much a 10-year-old’s feelings. And what I draw attention to here is this book, published in 1847, is the beginning of a new thing in English literature specifically and in world literature in general, which is attention to the vulnerability and feelings of the young child.
Now, it’s not invented in Jane Eyre. Oliver Twist is published in 1838, earlier, and I’m not scholar enough to know, but I’m sure somebody in English literature was doing this even before [Charles] Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. But it is something you will not find much of in the literature before 1800; nothing at all, I would think, before 1750; and nothing at all in Greek and Roman literature, and the other literatures that shaped English literature of the 19th century. It’s a new thought that is forming; a revolution against cruelty to the vulnerable, especially the young; a transformation in human consciousness expressed through literature and taught through literature.
Where does it come from, and what does it mean, this new thing in the world? Well, it comes from, in some ways, from a sort of secularized Protestant Christianity that a lot of the—Jane Eyre is a very religious person, and it’s a very religious book. Although the Brontës had not much use for the formally constituted clergy, the awareness of God and the person’s relationship to God is a powerful theme, especially in Jane Eyre, but in all the Brontë novels. It comes too, I think, from something that is happening in the material world around them. The 1840s are the beginnings of the moment where individual people in England would feel the power of the Industrial Revolution to transform humanity’s relationship to its environment.
When young Jane Eyre is sent off to school, there’s an outbreak of some kind of disease—maybe tuberculosis, maybe typhoid fever—that kills a lot of the girls. Now, Jane Eyre is written before the advent of modern germ theory. Neither the narrator nor the author understand where this disease comes from. But they do have a sense that something could and should be done about it, which is a new idea. As people become more masterful toward nature, they become more insistent that something better than what existed before could and should happen. And the way you measure this change, this transformation is, above all, in the status of the most vulnerable people in society and especially children. A revolution against cruelty, and you can see it happening in the pages of novels, and you can see it happening, especially, in the early parts of Jane Eyre.
It’s a remarkable thing to see a new idea coming into being, especially such a sweet and generous new idea as that of goodness and protectiveness toward children of every status, not just those who are children of kings, not just those who are heroes and gods, but every child. That’s the message of Jane Eyre. That’s a new idea in the world, and it’s one that we’re still integrating into our consciousness, but that has more and more power to shape and guide us, and should have more and more power to shape and guide us. The rejection of cruelty is one of the proudest things about modern humanity, and it’s good to meet it at the beginning of its career and to speed it along its way at this later phase in its career.
Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum [Show]. As ever, I recommend, if you would like to support the work of this program, the best way to do it is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That way, you support the work of me and all of my colleagues. You can follow me on social media: @DavidFrum on both Instagram and X (Twitter). I am so grateful that you joined this week. I hope to see and talk to you again next week as you watch or listen to The David Frum Show. Thank you. Bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
