Chapter 1: What are the impacts of Trump's tariffs on grocery prices?
I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
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.
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Chapter 2: Why does Trump insist grocery prices are falling?
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. Now, as you know, groceries are down.
October 10th, we've gotten prices way down for groceries at the United Nations on September 23rd. Under my leadership, grocery prices are down. I'm sure there are many other instances. On January 13th, President Trump addressed the Detroit Economic Club, and there he spoke from a script. So there was a little bit more effort to make the words not a complete lie.
And his quote on January 13th was, grocery prices are starting to go rapidly down. Now, grocery prices are up, up, up. Data released in the week that I record this program by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found the cost of food at home rose 2.4% overall in the 12 months of 2025 and 0.7% in December alone, the fastest single month increase since October of 2022.
and the rise in food prices stands out because many other prices are ceasing to go up so fast gasoline rent other similar prices that the the worst of the inflation for them seems to have at least taken a little pause in december but grocery prices continue to grow and many individual food items are up astonishingly high the price of beef up 16.4 percent the price of coffee almost 20 percent price of lettuce other fresh produce the price of frozen fish again up and
The one exception to all this is the one price that the Trump people love to talk about, and that is the price of eggs. Those are down. But across the board, grocery prices are way up. And this is not, as it was under Biden, just a product of a general price inflation affecting the whole world. Many of the price increases have been driven very deliberately by upward by particular policies.
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Chapter 3: How does Fiona Hill perceive Putin's worldview?
He backed away from that threat a little bit in January. But pasta is still tariffed. And the Canadian wheat that goes into American-made pasta, that's also tariffed. So this was done deliberately and on purpose. And without a lot of regard for the fate of the people on the other end. This could be dealt with by a different kind of president, by some argument that it's worth it.
Yes, you're all going to have to pay more for food, but that is on the way to my vision of self-sufficiency through tariffs. We'll seal off the United States economy and the world, and even though you'll all pay more and maybe be a little poorer, at least you'll have less trade with foreigners. But the Trump people are just systematically incapable of dealing with trade-offs and telling the truth.
And they're especially dishonest about the distributional effect. When you put food prices up, not everybody pays equally. The richer you are, the smaller proportion of your income you spend on food. And the less you notice the price of the grocery. But the people who are in the middle or in the lower part of the income distribution, they feel it most.
And they are many of the people who trusted Donald Trump to help them because through campaign 2024, he promised that would be his first priority.
Chapter 4: What is Putin's strategy in Ukraine according to Fiona Hill?
Not just that he would stop prices from going up, but that he would make them go down. Now, Trump lies about a lot of things, and a lot of the things that he lies about are things that it's difficult for people to check, or maybe they just seem too abstract to check. Our economy is the hottest in the world. How do you prove that right or wrong?
But the people who decide elections, they know what everything in the grocery basket costs, and they know that the president is lying to them again and again and again. And that has an impact on their faith on him personally and directly. It has an effect on the political calculus, but it has an effect generally on the way politics works.
The Americans who turned to Donald Trump were those most distrustful of the political system, most inclined to believe that the political system is indifferent to them, deceitful to them. And they put special and unique trust in this one person. whom they regarded falsely, but whom they regarded trustingly as a great business leader, to tell them the truth and to deliver them relief.
When he breaks his word to them, of course he breaks the special political bond that he once had. And you can see that in all the polls that show him down, down, down, and especially down on economic issues. but it's an attack on their faith in the general political system. Because if this one unique figure that they were willing to trust, if he too is deceptive, then what is there?
It raises the question again of how we go on from here and how we restore the relationship of trust between the American people, their government, and the president who leads the government and symbolizes the government. If he's not a person who can trust, how can anything be trusted?
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Chapter 5: How does Trump's leadership affect American credibility abroad?
It's a haunting, difficult question. One probably that won't be resolved so fast. but a question that is going to dominate our politics for the three remaining years of the Trump presidency and through this election year of 2026, when people will once again get a chance to say, we resent these prices. We resent the deliberate policy to make the prices go up. We resent being lied to.
We want something different. We want to change. And now my dialogue with Fiona Hill. But first, a quick break.
I'm Anne Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.
And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win.
Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.
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Chapter 6: What insights does Fiona Hill offer about authoritarian regimes?
reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.
Fiona Hill has served three presidents as a deep expert on Russian affairs and Eurasia broadly. Born in the United Kingdom, educated at Harvard and St. Andrews University in Scotland, she is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Chancellor of Durham University in Great Britain.
In 2021, she published a memoir, There Is Nothing For You Here, about her upbringing in England's former coal country. Fiona Hill is best known for her courageous integrity during and honest testimony about President Trump's attempt to extort Ukraine for his personal political advantage in his first presidential term.
In this moment of global crisis, I am one of many who turns to Fiona Hill for insight and guidance. Fiona, thank you so much for joining me today.
Thanks so much, David. It's really great to be with you.
So let's start by looking at the world from the other side of the board, from Vladimir Putin's point of view. You know, spent a lot of time thinking about how he thinks, what he's thinking about, the way he's different and surprising from an American point of view. How does the world look to him? Ukraine, the pending crisis in NATO, but he's taken some blows in Iran and Venezuela.
How does the world map look from his point of view?
Well, David, it's good that you pointed out those negative aspects of some of the recent changes for Putin from the start. Thinking about those blows, as you put it, I think very aptly in Iran and Venezuela, two countries which have very close relationships with Putin and Russia, which I'm sure we'll get to in the course of our discussion.
But if you put some of those downsides, again, on the shelf for the moment until we get back to them, if you took it at just face value, the world would look pretty propitious from Putin's point of view. Because you mentioned in your introduction, Trump's efforts to extort, as you put it, President Zelensky of Ukraine in the run-up to that first impeachment trial.
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Chapter 7: How does Naipaul's 'Among the Believers' relate to modern authoritarianism?
It seems so far away now that none of us can really remember it. When he basically puts the United States on notice that if Russia doesn't get what it wants in terms of the United States pulling out of Europe, pulling back from Ukraine, taking NATO back to the studs, back to the borders, which it was in before its expansionary phase in the late 1990s, then Putin was going to do something extreme.
which, of course, turned out to be the full-on invasion of Ukraine in the February of 2022. And so Putin's been pushing for advantage that whole period. And so from his point of view, if you look at it, it now looks like we are in a world where sphere of influences and strongmen and transactional relationships are shaping the environment.
As you and I speak, we have troops from NATO countries, including, of course, Denmark, but some of its Scandinavian partners, France, the UK, on their way to Greenland. How big a win is that for Putin?
It's enormous. And the posited reasoning for the United States of wanting to acquire Greenland. And again, this does actually go back again to the first Trump administration in 2019. But the posited reasoning is some kind of pressure from really acute pressure from Russia and China. We've also had President Xi Jinping of China saying, we're not interested in Greenland, not on us.
And Putin also having never actually made any kind of claims against Greenland. So this is really something that is a fairly absurd development from everybody's point of view. But for Putin, obviously, this is potentially a bonanza. But this is where kind of a flip side of uncertainty might come into this. Because as you're saying, who are the troops?
I mean, perhaps not in the large enough numbers. I mean, actually, if I was the Europeans, I'd be sending even more in. What we're seeing here is Europeans having to stake out their interests in the name of their security, but it's in reaction to the United States, not just in reaction to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
And that brings, I would say, a bit more uncertainty for Putin, just along the lines of the blows that he's already had in Iran and Venezuela.
Yeah.
Well, let's look at the Ukraine map from his point of view. The war as a military matter has gone catastrophically badly for him. It's now, as I am told, a conflict, at least the post-February 22 conflict has now lasted longer than the Soviet involvement in World War II. They started late, of course. And the toll in life and money is overwhelming.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from the Iranian Revolution?
I mean, that's absolutely right. And this is where Trump's return to the White House has been a real boon for Vladimir Putin, because he is now operating in a world which is, for Putin, a very easy one to navigate in the sense of you've got global leaders, and he only really counts as global leaders, Xi and Trump, who have the same sort of mindset of wanting to return to that 19th
century or even 18th century, certainly early 20th century view of transactional relationships among the big powers with everything defined really by politics at the top, not this kind of mass politics that came in much later. So Putin's very comfortable in that environment. But as you've pointed out, Ukraine was a catastrophic blunder.
I mean, he did this full-on invasion in Ukraine, not expecting it to be all the things that you've described. This wasn't intended to be the largest military action in Europe since World War II. It certainly wasn't intended to last longer than the Soviet Union was battling Nazi Germany, which that's the threshold, as you point out. We just passed this month. I mean, that is just remarkable.
It was supposed to be a special military operation. In many respects, it was supposed to be something along the lines of
of what the Trump administration just pulled off in Venezuela, a decapitation, thinking that they would remove Zelensky and they'd probably get, in fact, what the United States government is angling to get in Venezuela, a pliable alternative leader who might have actually come out of the same system. And it would be business as usual for them, not basically new forms of business for Ukraine.
So it's been an absolute disaster. But the point is, that Putin is something of what one might call a survivalist and a prepper. I mean, he's basically been building up resources. He's been thinking long and hard about what it takes for Russia to be more resilient, even though it is quite brittle in terms of its political system and in terms of what we see unfolding there in Ukraine.
You can't keep this up forever. But Putin has marshaled resources and all the capabilities of Russia to the point, I mean, heavily militarized the economy, heavily militarized the whole system. He has this vertical of power that enables him to do all kinds of things that other leaders cannot, even Trump.
You can't sue Vladimir Putin, you know, as you can currently still sue the United States government. But his bet is that because of these changes in international circumstances, especially because of the incumbent in the White House, that he will be able to last everyone else out.
He will have the ability to basically press this to a final conclusion that despite all the losses, all the incredibly high costs, and he is ruthless and he's prepared to pay that price, everybody else will fold. That's his bet.
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