In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum reflects on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, examining how postwar reconciliation—not battlefield triumph—became America’s true finest hour. He contrasts that legacy with Donald Trump’s recent bombastic Victory Day statement, urging a rededication to the values that built a more peaceful world. David is then joined by The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum to discuss the astonishing and brazen corruption of the Trump presidency, how authoritarian regimes seek to break institutions, and the hardship of losing friendships to politics. Finally, David answers listener questions on fostering open-minded political dialogue among polarized high-school students, why America hasn’t developed a strong worker-based political movement like its European counterparts, and how to think about class in modern U.S. politics. He also weighs in on the risk of data suppression under the Trump administration and reflects on whether his long-held conservative values still belong to the political right. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What reflections does David Frum have on World War II's end?
This podcast will post in the week that the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. The Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30th, 1945. After his death, the German armies in Europe, one by one, began to approach the Allied commanders to surrender in Italy, in northwestern Europe.
Finally, on May 7th, the overall command structure of the German armies approached the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, to discuss an instrument of surrender for all the remaining German forces. The original instrument of surrender was rejected by the Soviet army. It didn't mention the Soviet Union explicitly, and they had some other objections to it.
And so the final instrument was negotiated during the day of May 8th, was agreed shortly before 10 o'clock PM on the 8th of May, and went into effect a little past 11 PM on the 8th of May. 11 p.m. May 8th was, of course, the early morning in Moscow, May 9th. And so this chain of events is left ever afterwards, a question mark.
But what is the exact and proper date of the end of the Second World War in Europe, whether it's May 8th, as it was in Berlin and where the Allied armies were, or May 9th, as it was in Moscow? Of course, the war itself would continue for more months.
As the Germans surrendered in the West, American forces in the Pacific were fighting a brutal battle on the island of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the whole war, certainly I think the bloodiest battle of the American Pacific campaign.
And no one knew on the day that the Nazis surrendered how long that war in the Pacific would last, except for a handful of Americans who were party to the secret of the atomic bomb,
Most Americans, most people assumed that there was probably another year of fighting ahead, an invasion of Japan and many thousands, maybe many hundreds of thousands of American casualties and allied casualties too, because the American army that entered Japan would be supported by Commonwealth forces, Australia, British, Canadian. But the atomic bomb did explode.
Japan did surrender and the war came to an end, a final and formal end. with the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay on the 2nd of September, 1945. So this is a time of commemoration. And in this time, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, issued a very strange post about the event on the 8th of May.
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Chapter 2: How does Trump’s Victory Day statement contrast with historical values?
He wrote, many of our allies and friends are celebrating May 8th as Victory Day, but we did more than any other country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II. I'm hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I. We won both wars. Nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance.
But we never celebrate anything. That's because we don't have leaders anymore that know how to do so. We are going to start celebrating our victories again. Now, that post was such a perfect crystallization of the Trump style. Bombast, boast, all of it making Trump himself the center of a story that he had nothing whatsoever to do with.
The statement is unwise and unattractive in all kinds of other ways, too. It denigrates the sacrifices and heroism of others, and it turns the tragedy and horror of war into a triumphant narrative that was completely alien to almost all the people who experienced it as nothing but a tale of suffering and waste and cruelty and misery.
I want to draw attention to something maybe less obvious about what is wrong, what is missing from the president's statement. The first is, as so often when Donald Trump talks about American military history, he emphasizes power and success and triumph and military genius. But always lacking is any mention of the values for which Americans fought.
America didn't go into World War II or even World War I to be top nation, to beat and dominate others. It went to defend things that Americans regarded as precious, and not only Americans, but others too. And one of the measures of how precious those values were, not only to Americans, to others, but the world that has grown up as a result of the war,
Because at this interval of eight decades, I think it's maybe most useful and most necessary not to think about what ended, the war in Europe that ended on May 8th or the war overall that ended on September 2nd in Tokyo Bay. I think it's more useful to think about what began the process of reconstruction and reconciliation that occupied the next eight decades.
The way in which former enemies became present partners. The way the Germans and the Japanese themselves discovered in their own defeat, their own liberation, because they came to accept the values for which Americans went into battle. The story of how we turned the chaos and trauma of the Second World War into something better.
And not Americans alone, but Americans working with allies, working with defeated adversaries. That is not as dramatic as the battles of World War II. I don't know that people are going to make successful documentary series out of trade negotiations and food aid and the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But those achievements were great.
And they are the things that at the eight decade interval require us most to be mindful because they are the things that are most in danger of being lost. You know, they're marble and bronze statues that commemorate all the horror and bloodshed of the war.
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Chapter 3: What are Anne Applebaum's insights on authoritarianism and corruption?
Your most recent book is a book about the intersection of autocracy and corruption. And that's the theme of your most recent article, very important article for The Atlantic. I want to start by raising a problem that you and I were talking about just before we began, which is In the Trump era, there's just too much bad news to keep track of. There's one appalling incident after another.
There's one absurd incident after another. There's this pencil matter. And so the way I thought to set you going was I think I can group the things that have happened in this first term into six major headers. of which the corruption theme is the last and the binding one. So the first is attacks on due process and individual liberties for disfavored entities and persons.
So that's the attacks on law firms. That's the removal of due process from people who are suspected of being in the country illegally and bags are put on their head and they're sent to El Salvador without a hearing. The second category, so the first is attacks on due process and rights for disfavored. The second is impunity for the favored. So pardons for the January 6th criminals.
Lots of pardons for Republican officeholders who get caught up in corruption charges. There seems to be one of those a week. So due process for the disfavored, impunity for the favored. Then a foreign policy.
that attacks allies and sympathizes with foreign dictators, then the reconstruction of the whole American economy on lines that empower the state and create more favor, ability of the state to dispense favors, attacks on science, medicine, and otherwise objective sources of information, and then finally, self-enrichment by the president, his family, his friends.
And one of your many great contributions is to say this last is the binding agent that unites all the others. Can you take it from there and explain how we should think about this?
So if you look around the world, if you look at what links modern dictators and stipulate that modern dictators have very different ideologies, you have nationalist Russia and communist China and theocratic Iran and whatever North Korea is and the Bolivarian socialists in Venezuela. And you ask, what is it they have in common? Why do they support one another, which they do?
Why do they help keep one another in power, which they do? There's a whole consortia of countries keeping one the Venezuelan dictator Maduro in power, for example, even though they would seem to have nothing in common.
One of the answers is that they all share an interest in stealing and hiding money and in helping one another evade the sanctions that have been set up to prevent them from doing that and in perpetuating their own, not just their own power, but their own wealth.
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Chapter 4: How does the Trump administration exemplify kleptocracy?
There are general background statutes that say you can't use public office at all in any way that benefits yourself. Even if we haven't specified this is forbidden, there's a general, oh, and one more thing, you can't do this. But as you were saying, all of this depends on the president to enforce the law.
And if the president is determined not to and punishes those who try and removes those who try, The system, in the end, cannot be enforced against the wish of the president, at least not so long as he has Congress on his side.
Presumably the body that would be responsible for enforcing corruption laws against the president is the Department of Justice. And the Department of Justice in this administration is fully controlled by the president. There's a very political, very partisan group of people in charge of it.
And we're hearing all the time, I'm sure you've heard this as well, about current employees of the Department of Justice resigning. Some have done it publicly. Some have done it more quietly. They're looking for jobs afterwards and they don't want to be in the newspapers.
But there are many people who are resigning because the department isn't doing its job, not just in terms of enforcing the laws on the president, but everyone else. And so what we're going to have very soon is a very, very partisan group of lawyers or pseudo lawyers who are supposed to be enforcing the law, but who are all there
serving at the pleasure of the president, not there to enforce the constitution or the legal system. You know, it's always a tough thing. I've encountered this problem in other countries. I mean, sometimes it's called the chief prosecutor in our system. It's called the attorney general.
It's always a tough thing to say that that person is independent of the president, even though they're appointed by the president. I mean, they're meant to act independently. In theory, they should have the mentality of someone acting independently. And that's always a touchy thing to ensure. But at least in the last...
In modern American history, those people have sought to attain and to portray some kind of independence. They take an oath not to the president personally, but to the legal system, to the law. They attract the best lawyers in the country, very young, idealistic people, because those are people who want to work for the U.S.
government, for the American people, not for the personal benefit, the financial benefit of the president. I'm sure, you know, listeners can point to many exceptions and moments when this hasn't, you know, the system hasn't worked. But that was the theory of it. That was the idea. You know, how do you get an insure rule of law?
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Chapter 5: What legal and institutional challenges arise from Trump's presidency?
He says things all the time. You can't react to that. And then when he says, I don't know whether I'm bound to it in the same weekend. I don't know whether I'm bound to obey the Constitution or not, which is something he said. Is that something we should dismiss? Is that Trump just gassing? Or is that something that is directionally significant?
So he wears down people, even who are the most committed, by saying so many things that are just ridiculous. But buried in our little poison barbs of danger.
No, I mean, and he devalues the word of the president. Nobody knows whether to take him serious or not. And you're right. And then when we come to a moment where it matters what the president says, and it matters what decision he takes, and it matters whether he believes in the constitution or not, there will be a lot of people who have tuned out because, you know, because there's so much noise.
And, you know, the president a couple of days ago posted a photograph of himself dressed as the of himself, you know, profoundly insulting to millions of Catholics around the world who are still in mourning for the late Pope, you know, and yet, and all of it contributes to this atmosphere where people just want to say, well, I don't, this is too much. I can't stand it.
I'm not going to participate and I'm going home. And that is the quintessential authoritarian tactic. Because what you want is to rule behind a shadow of secrecy. You know, you want to be able to steal the money or take the money and have no one know about it. You want to be enacting laws and rules of your own design in the dark, without courts, without judges, without attention.
And you want the population to be dulled and repressed. and bored and angry and cynical, and you want them all to stay home. And so we see all that. We've seen this movie before in other countries, I should say. And we're seeing it happen in the United States right now.
Well, let me wrap up by taking us in a slightly different direction to something that it's a little uncomfortable for us to discuss. When you and I talk about people who do this or people who do that, it's not just a figure of speech. We're talking about people oftentimes whom we know personally, know sometimes quite well,
Because I think you a little less than me, but I very much come from the conservative political tradition, a conservative legal tradition. I was a president of the Federalist Society on a college campus a long time ago. And many of these people are people you also have come into contact with.
And we watch people we know, sometimes cynically, or at least at the start it's cynical, then it becomes more fanatical. People we knew from the Claremont Colleges, which became a center, has somehow become a center of right-wing anti-constitutionalism.
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