The End of Reagan-Era Republicanism

Mona Charen on how Trump transformed the conservative movement and what the right got wrong. Plus: Signs of life from America’s guardrails and John Maynard Keynes’s “My Early Beliefs.”

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with a warning about President Trump’s escalating efforts to bend American institutions to his will. David explains how episodes including the Justice Department’s attempted prosecution of members of Congress, the political pressure on the Federal Reserve, and the campaign-style appeals delivered at Fort Bragg represent a systematic attempt to erode the guardrails of American democracy.

Then, David is joined by Mona Charen, a contributor at The Bulwark and longtime conservative commentator. Together, they reflect on their shared political evolution—from their early days as Reagan-era conservatives to their break with today’s Republican Party. They discuss what they believe they got right and what they got wrong, how Trump transformed the conservative movement, and why the version of conservatism they once believed in may be gone.

Finally, David discusses “My Early Beliefs,” the 1938 essay by John Maynard Keynes, and explores what Keynes’s reflections on changing one’s mind can teach us about political growth.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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 Mona Charen, and we will be discussing things we’ve changed our mind about since our days as young Reaganites a long, long time ago.

My book this week will be an essay on a similar theme, “My Early Beliefs,” by John Maynard Keynes, in which the great English philosopher and economist discusses how his views had changed from the early 20th century to the time in which he delivered this essay, just before the Second World War.

But before either the dialogue or the book, some thoughts about a remarkable development in the week just past. One of the defining characteristics of the Trump years has been the determination of President [Donald] Trump and the people around him to turn into instruments of presidential will federal agencies that were always thought of as more or less independent and apolitical. The Department of Justice, well, it’s part of the administration, for sure, and the attorney general is an appointee of the president. But there had always been a belief that the actions of the Department of Justice, especially the criminal-enforcement actions, were not dictated for political reasons by the president.

Well, that idea has just gone up in smoke in the Trump years. This has been the most nakedly political Department of Justice perhaps since [President] Warren Harding’s in the 1920s and maybe the most in history because of the recent event where Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—supposedly acting on her own but obviously acting at the command of Attorney General [Pam] Bondi, who was acting, obviously, at the command of Donald Trump—when the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia actually tried to indict six members of Congress, four of them members of the House of Representatives, two of them United States senators, for making a video urging U.S. military personnel to obey lawful orders and not to obey illegal orders, which you would think is something that would be as basic as telling the president of the United States not to take bribes. How could such a statement be controversial unless the president was taking bribes and unless the military was contemplating illegal orders? So they took offense for that reason, and they tried to prosecute members of Congress.

Now, the speech of members of Congress is protected not only by the First Amendment, like as yours and mine is, but by the speech and debate clause of the Constitution, which puts very severe limits on the ability of anybody to punish a member of Congress for something that the member of Congress said. And yet the Department of Justice tried just that. Happily, a grand jury completely rejected the charges—there was reportedly not a single member of the grand jury who took this seriously; it was unanimous rejection, an unparalleled humiliation for the Trump Justice Department. But the litigation of other attacks on those members of Congress continues.

At the same time, we saw in this past weekend a really shocking event, where President Trump traveled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fort Bragg is now Fort Bragg again—it was renamed, and it’s now de-renamed—and so Fort Bragg is what we will call it. And at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, a state where there’s a Senate election in 2026, a Senate election that may prove decisive for controlling the balance of the United States Senate after 2026, President Trump appeared onstage with the Republican candidate for Senate and urged military personnel to vote for that candidate.

President Donald Trump: We have another man who is running for the Senate, Michael Whatley, if here’s here—I don’t know. Michael? Michael. (Applause.) Michael, will you come here for a second, please? He’s running for the Senate. And if he gets in, you’re gonna be taken care of. If he doesn’t get in, we’re gonna be stripping the military like they always do, the Democrats.

Frum: The military is, of course, the most important apolitical institution. Presidents address the military all the time, but they are not supposed to make political speeches, rally speeches, to ask the military to vote a certain way. That’s unheard of. That’s shocking. It’s the prelude to authoritarian rule.

Now, fortunately, again, as with the rejection of the attempt to indict members of Congress for what they said, the attempt to mobilize the troops as political actors, that also looks to have fallen flat. Reporters who were present noted that the soldiers, who maybe were warned by their commanding officers, made a point of clapping for the president’s appearance, clapping when the president talked about raising their pay—well, that’s traditional—but keeping very quiet when the president made his pitch that they should vote for the president’s preferred candidate for United States Senate. But in both cases, these are mere instances of failure, not stories of the successful pushback by institutions. But there is a story from the past week that is a much happier story about institutions actually resisting.

One of the most important independent institutions in the United States government is the Federal Reserve. Again, the president appoints members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, but they are not in any way the president’s creatures. And the theory of the Federal Reserve—which is created by act of Congress, not by an action of the executive—is: The Federal Reserve makes monetary policy based on facts and realities, as best they can determine in their judgment, and not for political reasons. There have been deviations from this ideal; they’ve usually ended in catastrophe: inflations, depressions. And in recent times, the Federal Reserve has been generally regarded by all people, Republicans and Democrats, as setting a model of independence.

President Trump has now made some new appointments to the Federal Reserve. He’s appointed a new chairman to replace Jerome Powell, the existing chairman; Powell’s term expires in May, and President Trump has put forward a nominee. But not content with simply replacing Powell, which, of course, is his right as Powell’s term expires, President Trump has tried to put pressure on Powell to cut interest rates by bringing up all incredible things or by preparing to bring—it’s not filed yet—a criminal investigation of Powell for some series of nonsense charges. Now, the charges aren’t filed, but the president has been huffing and puffing and the Department of Justice has been subpoenaing Powell as if these actions were ready.

And at the same time, he has brought forward a successor—[Kevin] Warsh looks like a solid B, maybe a B-plus nominee. He looks a little partisan. That is, he’s a Republican, of course, and in Democratic terms, he’s always calling for higher interest rates; in Republican terms, he calls for lower interest rates. He seems to be much more a creature of politics than an ideal Fed chairman should be. But he’s obviously an intelligent person, he’s got some knowledge and experience, and he’s not the cringing sycophant that some of the other candidates for the job that Trump might have chosen were. So in a pretty unimpressive Westminster dog show, he may be the least mangy poodle, so fine; pick [Kevin] Warsh.

But Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is outgoing, has said, I am not going to consider any nominee by the president, meritorious or not, unless we end these full prosecutions, these sinister prosecutions, that Trump has instituted against one Federal Reserve governor already, Lisa Cook, and is threatening against another, Jerome Powell, because they wouldn’t cut interest rates as fast as he wanted. Until these prosecutions are at an end, no consideration of any nominee whatsoever. And because of the closely balanced nature of the Senate and the rules of the Senate, Tillis may be able to make this stick. And if he is joined by other United States senators, then there’s a real trial of strength to say, The president cannot treat the Federal Reserve as an instrument of his vengeance and policy and his crass ambitions to cut interest rates and try to get some inflationary juice into the economy before the election of 2026. No one will be considered until the prosecutions are ended.

That’s more than just a defeat; that is institutional counterpoise against the attempt by the president to corrupt institutions. He has successfully corrupted the Department of Justice. He’s trying to corrupt the military, so far with minimal success, but things may get worse. And he is attempting against the Federal Reserve. In the Federal Reserve case, there is resistance, and Senator Tillis is doing exactly the right thing, and let us hope that more senators join him: absolutely no consideration of any Trump nominee to the Federal Reserve until this menace against the existing governors is completely dropped, quashed, withdrawn, defeated, given up, abandoned, sealed forever—only then.

And the irony, of course, is that if President Trump doesn’t do this and the Senate continues not to act, Powell’s term continues. He remains as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even if he’s not chairman. He will stay on the Board of Governors, and the Board of Governors can at that point elect its own acting chairman, and it may still be Powell. So the punishment for Trump’s attempt to pervert the Federal Reserve may be getting more of what he doesn’t like, which would be a fit irony. But the best outcome: End this nonsense. Ideally, replace Bondi with an attorney general with some integrity, but failing even that, just end these shameless prosecutions, end these shameless acts of intimidation, drop the cases, close them, and then let the Senate consider the Warsh nomination on its merits, such as they are.

And now my dialogue with Mona Charen.

[Music]

Frum: Mona Charen is a contributor and podcaster at The Bulwark. A graduate of Barnard, she began her career in journalism at National Review. During the Reagan administration, she served as Nancy Reagan’s speechwriter. She was a panelist on CNN’s Capital Gang in the 1990s and is the author of four books, most recently, Hard Right: The GOP’s Drift Toward Extremism, published in 2023. She was an early and prominent leader of the Never Trump movement and stayed that way. Mona was also one of the very first people to welcome my wife and me to Washington when we arrived in the 1990s, so it’s a double pleasure to welcome her today on The David Frum Show. Mona, thank you for joining.

Mona Charen: So glad to do so. David, you guys improved Washington immensely. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) All right, so let me ask you, for the benefit of those whose memory has lapsed or who were maybe born more recently than some of us—

Charen: A lot of people were born more recently than we. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Would you mind recapitulating your political journey, from the start until Donald Trump appeared on the scene a decade ago?

Charen: Well, I don’t wanna bore people too much, but I became interested in politics out of a sense of gratitude. My family came to this country at the turn of the century—turn of the last century, I should say. And I became aware at a young age of what had happened to Jews who were left behind in the communities from which my grandparents had fled and understood that this was political in nature. And so when I was in my adolescence, not something I recommend as a fun way to spend your teenage years, but I sort of immersed myself in Holocaust studies and trying to make sense of how human beings could have done that. And the result was that it made me very, very grateful for the institutions, the stability, the human-rights protections that the United States affords, and so that kind of made me a conservative. Some people have said the primary emotional response of a conservative is gratitude, whereas the primary emotional response of a liberal is dissatisfaction, wanting to improve things.

And so I became interested in reading conservative writings. I also was highly aware that totalitarianism wasn’t just a phenomenon of the right, with the Nazis and the fascists, but that the communists were just as bad, or almost as bad, I would say. And so I was an anti-communist from a young age as well, became a conservative, began reading Bill Buckley in my local paper, and then reading National Review, then began to read other conservative thinkers. I was very drawn to Edmund Burke because he was—it spoke to me, right? He was a gradualist. He didn’t want any abrupt changes that he saw as dangerous and possibly contributing to despotism. And so that’s how I became a conservative, and I stayed that way for a very long time. And I was a conservative columnist and speaker and all of that—pundit. But with the rise of Trump, I saw the destruction of pretty much everything that—

Frum: Let me pause there—

Charen: Sure.

Frum: —I want to take the story up to 2016 and then slow down. I wanna go fast through the—

Charen: Sure, okay.

Frum: So where were you in the election of 2012?

Charen: I was a [Mitt] Romney supporter.

Frum: And why?

Charen: I felt that [Barack] Obama was a bad president. I didn’t agree with a lot of the things that he did. I liked that Romney—I remember when Romney was asked which industries the U.S. should be backing as the industries of the future and he said, I don’t know. And he said, And no one else knows either. I loved that. (Laughs.) That kind of modesty about what government can do or know, I liked all of that, so.

Frum: So you were on board with the conservative program into the second Obama term.

Charen: Yes.

Frum: When Donald Trump declared for president on that June day in 2015, did you take it seriously?

Charen: No, not a bit. And I remember, I think it was the Huffington Post said that they were going to only cover him in their entertainment coverage, not in their political coverage, and I thought that was about right.

Frum: At what point did you decide or accept that this might be a real thing?

Charen: When he continued to dominate the polls, when I saw that even the grotesque—there are a few things that stand out, of course, but the threatening violence against protesters at his rallies, mocking a handicapped reporter, scorning John McCain’s heroism—all of those things that I thought would have disqualified him obviously didn’t, and I began to worry. And then I remember, the primaries in 2015 really gave me chills that—or I guess it would have been 2016 by then—

Frum: So this is a very full buffet, and you can have more than one serving and make more than one trip. But as I hear you talking about your reaction, you are emphasizing, in the first trip to the buffet, the human qualities of Donald Trump. As you’re describing it here, that was the first reaction, the first repulsion.

Charen: Yes.

Frum: And how did the rest follow? Because you start with a human reaction, but since then, you’ve had, as we’ll continue to discuss, a pretty dramatic political evolution. But you started with a human response, that this human being was violent and disgusting.

Charen: Yes, but he was also the antithesis of what I regarded as conservative virtues. So for example, he encouraged people to believe that he personally, through force of will, could solve huge problems that face us as a country. I thought that was the antithesis of everything that conservatism believed; it was Caesarism.

And then, of course, all of his various heresies, like his attacks on free trade and his racism, which, again, I thought was the fulfillment of every fever dream of the left that thought conservatives were all racists underneath, that if you scratched them, you’d find that they were really racist. And here, along comes Trump, who confirms this. So I resented that as well.

Frum: You were one of the contributors to the 2016 Never Trump special issue of National Review. I recently went back and looked at that. There about two dozen contributors. Some stayed true to their original position. Some flipped. Some have just become kind of shifty. (Laughs.)

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: But was that a moment where you still regarded yourself as a member in good standing of the conservative community?

Charen: Oh, boy, that feels like a lifetime ago, but at the time, we still believed, I guess, naively, that National Review had the kind of authority within the movement that we could speak ex cathedra and anathematize Donald Trump, and that people would take that seriously and they would say, Well, look at all these conservatives of long standing, who have stature within the movement, and therefore, if they say he’s not good, then that will be crippling for—I don’t know if we quite thought it’d be crippling, but we did think we had influence, and we didn’t.

Frum: Well, and I should stress that that issue was published, I believe, in January of 2016, so before any Republican primaries. Conservatives had the memory that, in 2012, there had been a lot of wacky novelty candidates who rose in the polls.

Charen: That’s right.

Frum: Date Michele Bachmann; marry Mitt Romney.

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: And I think a lot of people in January 2016 thought, That’s going to be the pattern here again.

Charen: Yeah, yep.

Frum: Date Donald Trump; marry Marco Rubio.

Charen: Yep, that’s right. Herman Cain—yeah, there were a bunch of them—and Ben Carson, of course, also ran in 2016, and I thought he was similar. And I remember discussing this with other people in 2012, that it was a little dismaying to see what was happening in the primaries and saying, The base has some appetites here that are a little worrisome. And in the end, they settled on Romney, but it was a tell that they were flirting with all those other sort of crazy candidates.

Frum: All right, so where were you on Election Night 2016? Do you remember?

Charen: Yeah, I was—

Frum: Maybe blackout drunk. (Laughs.)

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: Rio de Janeiro. (Laughs.)

Charen: I should have been. (Laughs.) Yeah, no, I was at my computer live-blogging and live-tweeting and all that, yeah.

Frum: So when do you internalize that there may be a bigger set of issues here than just the human reaction to Donald Trump, that he’s speaking to somebody, and he’s speaking to a lot of people, and he’s speaking to a lot of people that you knew and trusted, and not just the famous base but to peers and friends of yours? How does that dawn begin to rise?

Charen: Well, [National Review editor] Jonah Goldberg put it best many, years ago where he had an article where he said it was watching people that he knew and believed he understood gradually become Trumpy was like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where people, they just were absorbed into this thing. And so I watched one after another, and for a long time, it was a subject of grief for me that I watched these people that I respected bend the knee. It was an ongoing process that took years, and during that time, unfortunately, I lost many friends.

Frum: So Jonah Goldberg, whom you know well and I know, I think, less well, but I know, he would say—and I’m not going to gainsay this, although I think these statements can’t ever be fully true—but he would say, I haven’t changed my mind. I’ve stayed here, and the world has moved, but I’ve been constant. I certainly wouldn’t make that claim for myself. In fact, I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things, some of them in reaction to Donald Trump, some of them in reaction to other things. Where would you situate yourself in that spectrum of saying, I’ve stayed put; the world has moved, and my statement: The world moved, and I moved with it and against it, but I moved too.

Charen: So there did come a point after the initial shock and grief where I was actually not quite grateful, but at least appreciative of the fact that, in my 60s, because of the changing nature of American life, I was forced to reevaluate many things and see it through new eyes and including looking back at my own beliefs and possibly changing my mind on things. And I felt, in a way—I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I did feel like it was a bit of a gift because at our stage of life, people mostly get stuck and rigid, and so I was forced to be a little bit more flexible, and I’ve changed my mind about many things. Look, there are certain things that I still believe and have always believed, but I find myself without a political party that also believes those things, so.

Frum: I’m gonna give you, then, in a moment, an inventory of things you’ve changed your mind about and things you have not.

Charen: Okay.

Frum: You decide which of those inventories you’d like to catalog first.

Charen: Sure. Okay. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.)

Charen: So one big thing is I’ve always been interested in race relations and racial progress in America. If I go back on my work over the decades, I wrote a lot about school choice and about school reform and about family formation and other things where I felt that those were the areas to focus on to lift up African Americans, who lag behind whites and Hispanics on many social indexes. But part of my focus was a belief that the worst days of racism were really behind us, that only really kooks and fringe figures were still, like, old-fashioned racists in America, and that the new problems were things like the teachers’ unions were too powerful and didn’t allow school experimentation and reform, and family structure was a problem in the Black community—of course, in all communities, but it started in the Black community, with family breakup—and that we needed to focus more on building up family structure because that was so important for people’s success.

And what I saw in the last 10 years showed me that I had underestimated the degree to which the naked racism that had been part of American history, and which I was very familiar with but did not think persisted to this day, I now think that was wrong, that there is a tremendous amount of it and that it was naive of me to believe that we had conquered it. So that’s one thing.

Frum: Where are the things that you feel like, I’m still the same as ever; I still believe these things?

Charen: So I still believe that free markets are the best approach to many public-policy challenges. I still believe passionately in free trade. Looking for a party. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Yes, that is the issue where there was the most continuity between Trump 1 and [President Joe] Biden and now Trump 2, wasn’t it, that—

Charen: That’s right! That’s right.

Frum: I had the recent experience of talking to a group of important Democrats and saying, I just want you all to repeat after me the words free trade.

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: And they can’t do it.

Charen: They can’t do it.

Frum: They just can’t. Free and fair trade—no, no. No, no: free trade.

Charen: (Laughs.)

Frum: Can’t do it. And say, “Tariffs are bad.” And they say, Well, I’m against dumb tariffs.

Charen: Dumb tariffs, yeah.

Frum: I say, As opposed to smart tariffs? There are smart tariffs? For ideological reasons, for interest-group reasons, it’s very hard for—and there’s a lot of this—if we do move beyond Trump, I worry how much the next president, if there is a free and fair election in ’28, how much will the next president unravel, considering how little of the tariffs of Trump 1 Biden unraveled?

Charen: Yeah, agreed. So that’s one. Similarly, I continue to believe in market-oriented solutions to climate change. I think that the idea of creating prizes for new technology or all these kinds of things that economists have taught us are effective, that’s the direction that I would go. I’m afraid, again, there’s no constituency for that.

Let’s see. Fiscal discipline, worry about the debt—again, no party. (Laughs.) But more deeply, I am a believer in tradition and procedure and law and respect for tradition, so that’s one of the things that I find most horrifying about this populist era that we’re in, is that, going back to our earlier conversation about why I became a conservative, it’s the institutions, the procedures, the protections in law that it took hundreds and hundreds of years to enshrine in our system are critical, and so the idea that President Trump is now running roughshod over law and has allies aplenty in the MAGA movement who are ready—in his first term, he was trying to do it pretty much by himself; now he has eager allies. They’re destroying our system of justice and civil liberties in this country, and they’re destroying our international posture. And maybe I should mention, as that’s another thing I still believe in, I still believe the United States should be the leader of the free world, should have alliances, should stand up for countries that are invaded by aggressive neighbors, rather than finding common cause with their oppressors.

Frum: You put your finger there on something that I’ve really been wrestling with a lot, and I recently had this conversation with David Brooks, so let me raise it again with you. And I don’t have yet a developed view on this—I think about it all the time, so I don’t wanna be glib and pretend this is an easy question, and at the end of it, if you were to turn the tables, I wouldn’t know what to answer. So that said, there is a big part of me that wishes that [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and Joe Biden were right in their first-term approach, which is: Donald Trump was this unfortunate error that the American people made. They’d had a pretty good track record of picking presidents to that point; they got one wrong. The Electoral College was maybe to blame. And the thing to do was just to tidy up the mess and move on with as little recrimination and backward-looking as possible.

There is another view, which is: That failed, that Trump came back. As he often said of himself, “I became worse”; he did. The people around him became even worse than that. And we have now a full-throated attack on every American institution, the abuse of law, and it’s not clear to me you can just dust this off and tidy up and move forward without serious backward-looking and accountability. I wrestle with that question. Do you have any guidance to offer, or are you as stuck in the predicament as I am?

Charen: So I guess what you’re describing is lustration. And I think, in order to get to that point, you have to be more advanced than we are. We are still too divided and polarized to even begin to grapple with “How do we fix and put back together what’s been destroyed?” So part of the problem with the Merrick Garland thing was, and the whole approach—the people who said, Trump is a criminal, and we have to prosecute him, and they believed very firmly in the justice of that, and I understand it, but at the same time, it was done badly, I think, because that New York case really was politically motivated, and it’s the one case that they got. But it allowed the MAGA forces to say, You see? Both sides abused the judicial system for political ends, and therefore, when we do it, it’s just what was done to us. This is just payback. And so that’s a risk when you decide to use the justice system that way.

I hope that there will come a time when there’s enough recognition across party lines that we’ve gone off the rails that there will be an openness to a true accounting. There are people who are committing real crimes, including the president of the United States right now. The blowing up people in boats who you just suspect may be drug traffickers is a prime example. But it’s gonna take time and a huge amount of persuasion, and more than the persuasion, it’s gonna take more experience of the awfulness for the American people to get to the point where they’re ready for an accounting.

Frum: Let me go back to the very beginning and raise something, and this is something I think we share. I think we both came to conservatism in great part because of our Jewish identity, because of our inheritance of mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe. In my case, it was almost all of my father’s family came out and they lived, and the vast majority of his family who were left behind, they died. And had my father’s parents made a slightly different decision in 1930, my father would have been murdered at about the time of his ninth, 10th, or 11th birthday. So that’s the starting point, I think, of both of our politics: We come to conservatism by our Jewishness.

The Trump presidency has raised some very special questions, very haunting questions for American Jews. On the one hand, as you say, it’s a highly bigoted presidency, a highly chauvinist presidency, and Trump certainly has won the support of people who are increasingly not only outspoken, but flamboyantly anti-Semitic. At the same time, Donald Trump acted to support Israel, to win a much more decisive outcome in the Gaza war than the Biden presidency or a Kamala Harris presidency. And he’s acted against the Iranian nuclear program, which is an existential genocidal threat to the half the Jewish people who live in Israel.

Most American Jews are opposed to the Trump presidency, but many of the most active and prominent American Jews are quite passionately in support of his presidency for the reasons I mentioned and for others as well. How do you, as someone who, as you said, began your political journey because of this Jewish inheritance, how do you make sense of Trump as a Jewish woman?

Charen: My feeling about this is—there are a couple. One is that there is a tendency all too common to say, Well, whatever else he may be, at least he’s good for my group. And that is not a principled position to take, in my opinion, but also, I think it misses the bigger importance of what his destructiveness means for the Jewish people, among many others, because he is destroying the United States as a bulwark of free nations and a strong alliance. And so even though for now, he has taken positions that seem to please the [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government and supporters of Israel, first of all, he’s for sale, so who knows if that will last. It’s never about his true beliefs; it’s always about what’s good for him, and certainly, there are many people on the planet who have a lot more to offer him in that regard than the Jews do, so who knows how long that would last. But also, a secure Israel and a secure Jewish people depend on moral and principled leadership of the United States.

So let’s leave Israel aside for just a second. What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.) And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.

Frum: Yeah. Let me push back on that just a little, and again, I say this in a spirit of uncertainty, not in the spirit of argument. So the polls look pretty bad for Trump and his party at the moment that we speak. Who knows whether that will continue. Who knows whether Trump will try to find some way, by fraud or by force, to seek a third term. He says so, and I think by now, we should take those warnings seriously, although the body does fail us all in the end. Trump’s running mate and the presumptive front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, assuming there’s still a Constitution in 2028, is J. D. Vance, who’s very close to Tucker Carlson, and I will argue this with some of my more, again, Israel-oriented Republican friends, but I think is clearly not a friend to either the Jewish state or the Jewish people.

On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J. D. Vance is the Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris because he was Jewish and because he wouldn’t renounce his support for Israel and wouldn’t hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on American college campuses, and where important voices in that party are saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is Holocaust inversion, that they are looking for a nominee who will say that the perpetrators of the attempted annihilation of Israel on October 7, 2023, that those attempted perpetrators were the victims of a Nazi-like genocide and the victims, who fought back in self-defense, they were the Nazis who committed a genocide. And that’s, for important parts of the Democratic Party, going to be the litmus test for their candidate in 2028.

It’s great that everyone’s so interested in the Jews as the Issue One. (Laughs.) I sometimes wonder, Why did we have to be so fascinating?

Charen: (Laughs.) You know that old saying—there are only two kinds of people in the world who are fascinated by Jews: Jews and anti-Semites. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Well, yeah, but it turns out that, well, a lot of people are fascinated by Jews. So how do you make sense of this, is [the fact] that you may, given life and health and the continued existence of the United States Constitution, may be called upon next time to make a choice between someone who is backed by domestic anti-Semitism and someone who won their nomination by making some kind of deal or arrangement or truce with those who do Holocaust inversion against the Jewish state and the Jewish people?

Charen: Yeah. It’s a very, very difficult time for the Jewish people, honestly. I think we were born at a time after the Holocaust when anti-Semitism was at epic low rates because of the Holocaust, and that is over. Our children and grandchildren will not be living in that world; they’ll be living in a world where it’s come roaring back. And you’re right—the problem on the left is considerable, but it’s untested as of now. So we know that the anti-Semites are very close to power on the Republican side. As you say, J. D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the precinct of the hard-left progressives. It’s untested as to whether that will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We’ll see. That would be very, very worrisome.

Frum: Let me, as we wind up, take you back to the beginning and ask you, as you look back on the political views you had in the earlier part of your life, do you now feel regret or do you feel like, I got benefit from it even if I don’t hold to all of it these days?

Charen: Got benefit from what—from the views?

Frum: The things I believed between age 20 and age 40, I regret those things, or I don’t regret them, because I couldn’t be where I am and, in fact, there’s some value to them.

Charen: No, there are certain things that I am proud of from that period. I was a firm anti-communist. I think it’s a great boon to humanity that communism is largely a thing of history now. And there are many other issues that I think conservatives were right about. But the world has changed. The conservatism that I signed up for is completely gone. There’s no coherent set of ideas that is held by a movement, far less a party, now that is recognizable.

Frum: Yeah, again, I may be projecting my own thoughts onto you. This is a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot; I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been working on a memoir for a long time, and I’ve been wrestling with these questions, that there are things that, when I look back on the world of my early political views, things that I thought were important, that were the defining thing—as you say, anti-communism, free markets, free trade. And that turned out to be something I cared about but that most of the people I was associated with, turned out, they never cared about it very much at all. And then [there were] other things that I dismissed as irritating or awkward or embarrassing or marginal paranoias and bigotries and conspiracism, and that turned out to be really important to a lot of the people I was formerly associated with.

On the other hand, I do sometimes think that the reason for the prominence of the Never Trump Republicans in the anti-Trump coalition is not just their novelty value; I mean, everyone likes a conversion story. But also, I think there’s something important that we bring, and that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I’m sure you’ve seen often in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they’ll say something [like], Aha, we warned you that the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson, Trump was the inevitable outcome—

Charen: Absolutely. All the time.

Frum: No, he’s not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and George W. He’s different. And we’re here to tell you that as people who liked all those people. He’s different. And because we liked all those people, we can tell you how and why he’s different in a way that the typical commenter who’s blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can’t tell you.

Charen: Well, yeah, the people who are kind of—and I’ll say this—I think they’re kind of smug, and they say, This was always conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case. One thing that pops right into my head, for example: David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. The president of the United States at the time was George H. W. Bush. He said, We want no part of him, even if he’s a Republican, even if he gets the Republican—that’s not who we are, etc. That was just normal, that the party would, and the movement would, reject that kind of thing. Today? They’d say, He’s anti-woke—

Frum: Make him the head of the Department of Homeland Security! (Laughs.)

Charen: Exactly! (Laughs.)

Frum: He’s got the mission. (Laughs.) And he’s got a lot of guys who’d make perfect recruits for our new paramilitary force. (Laughs.)

Charen: Exactly, he can start making those videos for ICE. Yeah, no, it’s really sad and pathetic, but anyway. But that is different, and we’re here to report that we lived through it and we would not have tolerated that kind of thing. We left when this became the party. So it obviously wasn’t the party in 2000.

Frum: Yeah. Are there realistic circumstances where you can see yourself reimagining yourself as a Republican and a conservative again—obviously, there are fantastical circumstances, but realistic circumstances where you can imagine yourself feeling at home again?

Charen: Not until this whole generation dies off, and since I’m gonna die off before they do, no.

Frum: (Laughs.)

Charen: (Laughs.) Because the Republican Party and the conservative movement have both been so deeply corrupted. And so, no, I cannot imagine. There is an argument that, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the neoconservatives, who had all been Democrats—some of them remained Democrats—but when they moved toward the Republican Party, they brought with them a way of thinking and ideas that were incredibly rejuvenating for conservatism. And possibly, the migration of some former conservatives into the Democratic Party can do the same thing? That’s maybe a little bit fanciful, but I hope so.

Frum: And if you were to say, what are the gifts? What are the things that they might bring with them, like the magi?

Charen: (Laughs.) The appreciation—so I’ll tell you one quick story, if I can. I was at a meeting with a bunch of people who spanned the spectrum but leaned heavily to the left, and we were talking about how elections are run in this country. And before the advent of Trump, there were a lot of liberal reform bills and things that wanted to centralize the way we run elections in this country and limit the power of states to control it. And so I remember chatting with this person. I said, The fact that the Constitution gives this power to the states looks pretty good right now, doesn’t it? And he said, Yeah. (Laughs.) So some of those limitations on what government power can do, which are sort of our birthright as conservatives—we’re suspicious of government power. Unlike liberals, who always think only of what good it can do, we’re very imbued with, No, it can also be really, really dangerous. So maybe we bring a little bit of that perspective to policy making.

Frum: Tell us at the end, finally, about the work you’re doing now. What are the things that, in your personal work, you think are important, that get you up in the morning?

Charen: Well, sometimes it’s hard to get up in the morning because the news is really depressing. (Laughs.)

Frum: (Laughs.) Okay, so while you’re there, in bed, pulling the covers over your head and thinking, Maybe this was all a terrible dream, the voice of conscience that says, No, you have to get out and doing, what is that voice reminding you of?

Charen: It is remembering how important—just [George] Orwell’s line about It’s the duty of intelligent men to state the obvious, keep saying it, being unafraid to say the things that a lot of people in mainstream media and, certainly, in the business world and in many of our institutions, people are afraid to be honest and tell the truth. And so those of us who have been foolish enough to lose all our friends by telling the truth in the past can continue to tell the truth as we see it, and maybe that still has value. (Laughs.)

Frum: Mona Charen, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Charen: My pleasure.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Mona Charen for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As mentioned at the top, my book this week is actually an essay, “My Early Beliefs,” by the great English economist John Maynard Keynes. Since Mona and I spent so much time discussing our own political evolution, I thought it might be interesting to turn to what is maybe the most famous such discussion ever written, and that is Keynes’s essay, w