David Frum

Senate from Texas in 2018, ran for governor of Texas in 2022.

We'll be discussing about the politics of the state of Texas after the March 3rd primary.

For my book talk this week, we're going to be doing something a little bit different.

This week marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

And I will be joined to discuss that by one of the world's leading experts on Adam Smith, an old friend of mine named Samuel Fleishacher, who teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

And we'll be doing a short book dialogue about Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations.

Before turning to either Beto O'Rourke or the Wealth of Nations, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about events of the recent days.

If you traveled over the weekend just past, you probably encountered snarling queues at TSA or any of the other airport check-ins.

This may have been maliciously organized by the Department of Homeland Security to drive home a point.

It may be a genuine problem.

I can't assess that.

But it is true that the Department of Homeland Security's budget is stalled in Congress.

And it is true there is no leadership at the Department of Homeland Security.

President Trump just removed the head of DHS, Kristi Noem, and her deputy, Corey Lewandowski.

And he has proposed to nominate someone else, but there's no action on that nomination.

And so there's no leadership.

There's no budget at the Department of Homeland Security in the middle of a U.S.-led war against the world's leading state sponsor of terror.

At the FBI, which is also a bureaucracy in charge of keeping Americans safe against terrorism, many of the leading counterterrorism experts have been purged from the FBI because they had worked on cases involving President Trump.

Now, just how bizarre is this?

A week ago, the United States started a war or joined a war or resumed a war or intensified a war, you can put it however you like, against the world's leading state sponsor of terror.