In the premiere episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum lays out his case for a new kind of political conversation—one that rejects the radicalized rhetoric dominating major podcasts. He then details why Donald Trump’s tariffs wrecked world financial markets. David takes apart the excuses offered by tariff defenders, and tries to explain the shock and betrayal felt by America’s allies. Then, David is joined by the former ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel shares the lessons he learned as White House chief of staff during the 2008–09 financial crises—and his assessment of how Democrats went wrong in 2024 and where they can advance from here. 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
Full Episode
Hello, and welcome to the first episode of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Why another podcast? It's a natural question. The answer begins with the chart I recently glimpsed from a media studies organization.
It showed that audiovisual content online tended to bunch up at the far extremes of American political dialogue, the far left and the far right, with the far right having a big advantage. The center ground lay abandoned and seemingly barren. Now, that's not the way things are in real life. In real life, most of us are pretty level-headed people.
And we approach the world in a spirit of curiosity, not anger, looking for insights, not insults. Yet, when the sound comes on and the video comes up, things are suddenly different. And the worst voices get the biggest audiences. I don't think it has to be that way. In the text edition of The Atlantic, we prove every day that Americans want something better.
I'm going to try to give them that something better also here in audio and visual content on The David Frum Show. We shouldn't assume that just because people have deeply reactionary politics, they're necessarily backwards in their technology. A century ago in another dark time, fascists outpaced Democrats and liberals in their mastery of the then new technology of the radio.
Something similar to that seems to be happening today. We need to meet the worst forces in our society on the battleground of ideas using the latest tools. And that's what we're going to try to do here.
You know, when people produce honest information about vaccines, about trade, about anything else that's important that has unfortunately become controversial, of course the production of that information costs resources, and those resources have to be paid for. The unfortunate result is that the truth is often paywalled, while the lies are always free.
Well, here on the David Frum Show, we're going to try to be free in every sense of that term and to make content available to all who want it in as honest a way as it's possible to do. My first guest this week will be Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, who has served the United States in many capacities.
I'm going to be talking to him at the beginning about one of those capacities, his service as White House Chief of Staff during the financial crisis of 2009, another steep collapse in financial markets. What similarities does he see between now and then? What differences? And what lessons does he have to offer us? Before my conversation with Rahm Emanuel, a few opening thoughts.
Last week, the United States suffered one of the severest shocks in the nation's financial history. It's a little difficult to wrap your mind around how big an event this Trump tariff disaster was. As of Friday afternoon, U.S. stock markets had suffered a loss of about $6 trillion.
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