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 Fiona Hill, an advisor to three American presidents on Russia and Eurasia generally, and of course, a central figure in exposing President Trump's wrongdoing that led to the 2019 first impeachment of President Trump.

My book this week will be a 1981 travelogue by the great writer V.S.

Naipaul, Among the Believers, which took him to, among other countries, Iran in the immediate aftershock of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Before I get to the dialogue and the book, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about a domestic subject.

And that is this extraordinary moment where Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins informed a TV interviewer that her department had run thousands of simulations and good news, it was possible to feed an American person for less than $3 if that person ate a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing.

She didn't have enough respect either for her audience or for the people she was talking about to remember what that fourth thing was that would make up this kind of snack plate.

And this has attracted a lot of question marks.

What if you want a second corn tortilla?

And by the way, with chicken selling even at Walmart for between 25 and 30 cents an ounce, how big a piece of chicken is that piece of chicken going to be for under $3?

But aside from the let them eat cake aspect of this, one of the things that is really striking has been the refusal of the Trump administration even to acknowledge that there is a food affordability problem in the United States.

President Trump has responded to the increases in the price of food, the general price increase under his presidency, by simply lying about it.

I've got a little summary here.

I don't pretend this is an exhaustive summary.

Here he is on October 21.

Grocery prices are way down.

Here he is on October 16th.

Groceries are down.

Here he is on October 14th.