Would U.S. Generals Obey Illegal Trump Orders?

23:56The mission to detain those people and to disrupt those operations goes to ICE. And then the president says, this being a federal agency, I'm not using the military to detain any of these people. I'm simply using the military to protect these other federal agencies while they do their job. Of detaining everyone in the voting line. Of detaining everybody in line. Yeah. It's very clever. It's, we're not doing domestic policing. We're simply securing federal installations, protecting federal employees because the state or the local municipality either can't or won't do it. Right. No, I think a lot of this, I've been arguing this, I've written this for The Atlantic and now I hear democratic politicians talking about it.

24:44The game has always been to disrupt the 2026 elections. I think that's right. Because Trump is doing stuff that is so illegal and exposes them to so much jeopardy, personal jeopardy, reaching your hands into the till and taking$230 million out and putting it in your own pocket, tearing down the East Wing and then putting a collection plate around to people who have business before the federal government. Who wants to build me a ballroom? The TikToks, I keep going on about this. I think TikTok is being sold for something like one third to one quarter. It's actual market value. The 80 % stake in TikTok USA is being sold to insiders at two thirds, three quarters is off, an instant windfall.

25:19If there is ever an effective Congress again, these things are going to be publicized. There could be all kinds of jeopardy, including personal legal jeopardy. So he can't have that. And it's a two-seat margin in the House of Representatives. And so, yes, you can gerrymander. That's limited effort. The real prize is to find some way to disrupt the elections in the places where you're most at risk, and then repeat the 2024 experience of or 2020 of saying, well, there's so much doubt. We have to, well, let's seat the Congress people we're sure of who are our Congress people, and let's put the others in abeyance for weeks or months until we settle all of this.

25:53And the last thing that, as I'm sure you know, is there is this precedent from the 1980s that when all else fails, when you have a contested seat in Congress and all else fails, the person who ultimately makes the decision whether to seat it is the Speaker of the House. And the Speaker of the House decides because the courts will not interfere. It's a political question they will not interfere in the ultimate question of whether this candidate or that candidate is the true winner. The House is the judge of its own qualifications, says the Constitution. So we have a big sort of illegal project being built.

26:25Is there any check interior to the system that will prevent this project from being carried out? You know, I often think that the states and the cities can say with a show of force to say, our police have this. We're good. We don't need you here. You know, that our state cops, we're good. Because I think part of Trump's project here, yeah, ICE is going to do, I mean, and the way they're just dragooning people into ICE who have no qualifications really is another tell. and creating this kind of paramilitary goon squad out of ICE. I mean, I always thought of myself as an immigration hawk, and I'm kind of reaching the defund ICE level at this point.

27:08But I think part of Trump's plan is simply to have these military forces during the election so visible that people just stay home, that they're just intimidated out of the public square, that you don't even have to arrest them. You don't have to have a big display of force, that the goal of all of this political activity, the goal of everything Trump is doing, is to drive people out of the public square to say, the Wi-Fi is still working. There's still 150 channels on TV. Beer is cheap. Gas is affordable. I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to deal with all of this. And it doesn't really matter.

27:49Because the other thing I think that's the undertone of all this is, look, it doesn't really matter who's in office. They're all bad. Everybody's corrupt. And so rather than use the military to inflict violence to stop the elections, you know, gerrymandering and voter suppression work in marginal elections, not huge turnout elections. And so what they're really trying to avert is a large Democratic turnout in places, you know, where they can pull that off. And I think you're right. I think I mean, look at what's going on right now with this representative from Arizona, Grijalva. The speaker is saying, if I have to keep Congress closed to not seat this person, that's what I'm going to do.

28:30And I'll just add one more thing, David. You talked about this kind of orgy of lawlessness here. You know, it's a cliche, but it really is just out of control. I actually think a huge part of this is about the Epstein files. I really do. I think that when this first became a thing, that's when Trump went into hyperdrive about throwing things against the wall just to see what sticks, what could distract us. And I mean, I hate that. I never thought the Epstein files were important until Trump started acting like they were important. What could be in these files that is worse than what we already have?

29:03That's the only part of this that gave me pause. I figured he's beyond shaming. I mean, the man, his shamelessness is his superpower. And this is why initially I said, you know, the Epstein files, you know, who cares? They're terrible and everybody knows they're terrible and everybody knows these guys were friends. But he's the guy. It's kind of like, why did we think Saddam Hussein had WMD? Because he was acting like it. You know, why do we think the Epstein files are radioactive? Because Trump's acting like it. Maybe they're not. But I think this, along with, you know, the tariffs going wrong, the economy in the wrong direction, I really think.

29:37And I think you're right. I think he knows that if, and this is actually a hopeful sign. He knows that one election in 2026 could be the beginning of the end of all of this. And for them, that's an existential threat. For Trump and his people, that's existential. And that's why he would say the military is the one institution that has to do what I tell it. Now, that's not true, as we know. But I think in his mind, he thinks of the military as toy soldiers. Well, let's revert to this conflict in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Trump has mused about taking it to land. And Venezuela seems to be target A.

30:16Colombia has also been indicated as a target. Before Trump became president, there was a lot of talk from Trump allies, including the vice president. In fact, Trump was kind of more cautious on this of some of his allies of doing strikes inside Mexico. And it's true there are cartel operations of different kinds in all of these countries. how much legal authority would a president need to start carrying out land targeting of cartel operations more than he has now i was never a fan of these AUMFs right the authorizations for the use of military force that guided us through the or that that were the in theory the constraint on the global war on terror but at least it was something it was the president going to congress saying here's what i want to do and i would like your authorization for it because now i'm going to spend money to do these things.

31:02That's the other part of it. And because you are the Article One power and we need to be coordinated as the United States goes to war. Trump is arguing that I can simply determine a threat, point the military at it and say, destroy this. That is not what Article Two says. That is not what the Constitution says. And I think, first of all, can we just step back and say, what happened to the guy who said, I'm not going to start any more stupid wars like all my predecessors. I mean, we're talking about invading Central America, Latin America. I mean, it's bonkers, but I don't think that he has anything like the legal authority to do this, but that would require a Congress that actually meets and functions as a Congress.

31:46You know, I think something people forget about these authorizations to use force. Before 1945, when the United States used military force on any scale, there was a declaration of war. Although there were a lot of police actions, especially in Central America, but usually, and there are some that continue, like the Philippines insurrection was pursuant to the powers that the president got from declaring war in Spain in 1898. And then there was the aftermath, which was this long insurrection in the Philippines, but he used the powers that were left over, first President McKinley, then President Teddy Roosevelt, left over from the initial declaration of war.

32:17I think one of the reasons they went out of style after 1945 was declarations of war gave the president too much power. And the Congress of the 50s and 60s said, look, we're not fighting the Soviet Union. We're fighting Soviet proxies. Yes, we want to give you certain military powers, but we don't want to give you the power to nationalize the entire civilian economy the way you would have if we did a proper declaration of war, whether it was Korea or Vietnam. So here's a much more limited grant of military power that is intended to protect the rights of the citizens from the vast powers the president gets with the declaration of war.

32:47But now that game has gone into reverse, is that we have now a situation where this president is asserting powers with no basis of any kind, and Congress has not been asked even to give them any kind of authorization. And innocent people may be being killed. Well, in the past, the other way that presidents got around this was to say that they were exercising force in accordance with treaty obligations. And that is a legal out, right? I mean, how do you go into Vietnam, for example? You say, well, we are members of CEDO, Southeast Asian Treaty Organization. This is an alliance obligation. Treaties are the law of the land.

33:23The president executes the laws. There was also an authorization, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Right. There was a resolution, but the president can always say, during World War, God forbid, there had been a World War III. I can send troops in under my obligations as America, as a signatory to the NATO treaty. There is no treaty. There is no law. There is no, I feel like I'm about to go all Al Gore, no controlling legal authority here that tells the president that he can just go kill people because he happens to think they're bad for our country. Why not counterfeiters? Why not bootleggers? Why drug, pretty much anybody who, black marketeers, why not just start killing anybody that you happen to think is doing something bad to the United States.

34:10And I think he's doing this. I think the link between what he's doing overseas and the link to domestic politics is very clear. He's trying to establish the precedent that the military will do what he says, kill the people he wants killed, and undertake the operations he wants undertaken, no matter where they are. And I think with the drug case, he's also trying to make Americans falsely believe, as he often does, that their domestic problems are the fault of foreigners. Of other people, right. One of my favorite drug war stories is a story that is told both by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and by George Shultz in their respective memoirs.

34:44But the story is that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you probably know the story, was the first federal drug czar in the Nixon administration. That is, Nixon created an office in the White House, Office of National Drug Control Policy. Moynihan was put in charge and he became known as the drug czar. and in 1971 the united states executes the largest in cooperation i think with the french police the largest drug bust in the history of the world to that date the famous french connection that became the basis of the gene hackman movie pop by doyle baby so moynahan is very excited when he gets worried and he commands a helicopter to take him to camp david to brief the president personally about this tremendous victory and as he gets into the helicopter there is secretary of labor george schultz with the big helicopter ear earmuffs reading the financial times the wall street journal and Moynihan over the head helicopter communication device just gushes with enthusiasm.

35:35We've just completed the biggest drug interception in the history of the world. And Schultz, utterly uninterested, says, congratulations. Nice job. You don't understand, says Moynihan. This is the biggest drug bust in the history of the world. Good. Congratulations. Moynihan's a little hurt, a little crestfallen. And then he remembers before Schultz went into government, He taught economics at the University of Chicago. George, I imagine you think that so long as there's a demand for drugs in the United States, there will be a supply from somewhere. And Schultz now looked up interested for the first time and said, there may be hope for you after all.

36:12I hadn't. I actually hadn't heard that story. Oh, it's in both their memoirs. And it's a great story. And the point is, Americans were dying in very large numbers from fentanyl overdoses in the teens. It came to a peak in 2020. And then thanks to different policies, thanks to the availability of drugs that interfere with drug overdoses, those numbers have come down a little bit. But it remains an article of faith to Trump and the people around him, and especially to Vice President Vance. This is something that bad foreigners have done to Americans, not that Americans are doing to themselves. And if we can only punish the foreigners enough, virtuous Americans will not be lured into drug dependency.

36:49But that's, of course, not how it works. It's the demand that brings forth the supply. It's a domestic problem. There was a great quip, and I'm trying to remember who said it on social media, where somebody said, yes, we're in danger from drug traffickers the way that my cholesterol levels are in danger from Dairy Queen. I mean, this is something that we seem to learn over and over again. You and I are both old enough to remember the first war on drugs, the French connection, then the war on drugs in the 80s, and then the war on drugs in the 90s. All it did was drive up the price of drugs and make it more profitable.

37:23but people in the way that you know the the heroin epidemic of the 70s you know you know how that ended it ended when a lot of people died from taking heroin that's what snuffed it out the war on drugs of the i think we didn't use so much war on drugs analogy the just the logic of the just say no campaign that was publicized by nancy reagan was that was an attempt to address demand like it's a triangle there are three basic remedies or outcomes the drug problem one is you attack supply. The second is you attack demand. And the third is you learn to live with the drugs. And all of them are evil.

37:56Learning to live with the drugs means Americans suffer and die in preventable numbers. Dealing with the demand means that Americans go to prison because you punish both the low-level dealers and the users. And the supply means that you end up at war with the rest of the planet and trying to put your fingers in infinite numbers of holes in dikes as the drugs flow in. All of them are imperfect and sound policy begins with some kind of balance. But the Trump policy is to say, look, we are going to blame entirely for suppliers and not only suppliers, but foreign suppliers, and we're going to kill them.

38:25And we are going to imagine this is doing something when, of course, as George Shultz would tell us - That's because it's not about drugs. I'm convinced that this policy in Central America is not about drugs, David. I think it's about - Training the military to do bad things. Right. I don't think Donald Trump cares a whit about fentanyl and drugs coming to the United States. I think, you know, I think Donald Trump lives in a world where everything is graded in terms of how does this affect me and help me and help my political fortunes and other people. I mean, you know, J.D. Vance knows better.

38:59I mean, he tried to set up a nonprofit about this and then kind of walked away from it. Everybody knows that this is not the game. And I think it's not just to blame it on foreigners, which of course is a classic kind of MAGA world grievance issue, right? Every bad thing that's – if you're unemployed, it's because of the Chinese. If your kid is in the basement playing video games all day, it's because of evil programmers somewhere. If your kid's taking drugs, it's because of the Mexicans. Yeah. Oh, they also like to blame women. If your kid's in the basement, it's because no girl will marry him and we need to punish women some more to make them marry your feckless son.

39:33Right. And then the next step is, and the answer to this is always to militarize the problem. I mean, every time Trump seems to run into something he can't solve, you can almost see him saying, well, maybe the army can do this. I think there's two reasons for it. One is he is childlike. He is fascinated by displays of military power in the way like an eight-year-old is. But also he's figured out the whole rest of the federal bureaucracy can slow roll him, can object, can rat him out to Congress. He is really counting on the military to be the people who keep his secrets, execute his orders, do what they're told.

40:11I would really like to know why this four-star in charge of Southcom retired early. If it was under protest, I think he should tell the nation. Does that person have some kind of moral duty to be public? Because the military creed is you go quietly and keep your counsel, maybe talk to your fellow four-stars. Do you think he has a duty to do more? I would say under most circumstances, yes, but not now. We are in an extreme situation. And if you've resigned because you think that you're killing people illegally, then your duty as an American citizen supersedes. Remember what George Washington said, when we took up the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.

40:54You are first and foremost a citizen of the United States. And if people are getting killed, if the president is turning the military into a hit squad, you need to say something. And I've been really upset about the fact that there's been a lot of that there. You know, you've seen it with and I don't want to call out generals because I have never been a general. That's a tough job. I wouldn't want to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of human lives. On the other hand, when these people enter the political sphere, I think they have a responsibility to speak up. One of the things that really bothered me, and this was a bad sign in civil military relations, years ago, Jim Mattis was testifying before Congress and Tim Kaine was pressing him on an important issue.

41:39And Mattis said, well, Senator, I'm not a political guy. Well, I'm sorry, but once you're a cabinet secretary and the secretary of defense, you're a political guy. You don't get to hold up the four-star flag and say, that's not me. I'm just an operator. I'm just a problem solver. No. If you have gone before the US Senate wearing civilian clothes and been confirmed as the secretary of defense, you're a political guy. Well, there was a reason why there used to be a law that said former generals could not become Secretary of Defense. It was a good law. And because of just this reason. If there are airstrikes on the Latin American or Mexican mainland, South American or Mexican mainland, innocent people are certain to be killed.

42:21Because airstrikes are so imprecise, even the best. Trump, from the beginning of his administration, began flying drones over Mexican territory without notifying the Mexicans. This was reported by CNN. And the Mexicans found out from American news media. And then because of the enormous pressure on the Mexican government, they hastily gave permission for something that they didn't know about. But the drones they're flying are predators, which can be armed and may be armed. Now, so far, there have been no strikes. And so far, the reports are that the drones remain to date not armed. But that may or may not be true.

42:51That may or may not be up to date. And sooner or later, there may be a predator drone strike inside Mexico. There may be a bomber strike inside Colombia, maybe one inside Venezuela. At that point, we're into a bigger conflict. Is there anything inside the military that say, I need to see some paper here, sir, from Congress, from somebody? I think we're past that point, David. They're going to do it. I think we passed that point eight boats ago. But now, I mean, if he does, the thing is, if you strike an unmarked boat in international waters, you can sort of slip under the kind of like, well, you can hand wave away a lot of it.

43:28It's piracy. They were bad guys. We thought they were going to shoot at us. You can make up a lot of stuff. If you attack a sovereign nation and its territory, it's an act of war. I mean, I know there's a lot of divided opinion about whether we should have struck Iran. Of all the places that I have supported going to war, I have always been really reticent about bombing a country of 92 million people that basically many of whom would be on our side, given the chance. Same thing here. I mean, you could argue that Iran's a one-off. We did it under, again, some kind of nonproliferation regime that gives us a kind of pushed open door in that region.

44:06Attacking Venezuela or Mexico, there is absolutely nothing, no legal cover for that. And I don't know how Americans would respond to a president who said, I'm going to keep us out of war. I don't know how the military is going to respond to a president who said, I'm going to keep us out of war. And now I'm ordering you into combat as a war of discretion to take out people who are not, I'm going to sound like a political science professor here for a minute, people who are not actually state agents. These are attacking non-state actors in some way because they're drug dealers, right? They're not the Venezuelan military or whatever.

44:44But what Trump, I think, will do, and I think there's two things that will come out of this. He'll say, well, the Venezuelan military was in our way, or they tried to obstruct us when we were, because you can make the argument that terrorists, because remember, Trump has declared these people terrorists. So there is this Schultz doctrine that says if they're in a third country and that country can't or won't do anything about them, you have some grounding for going after them, which is why I think he declared them that. But I think going back to the domestic environment, the election will come up next year and Donald Trump's going to say, how can you dare criticize me or anybody else when this country's at war and our brave boys are overseas fighting the drug lords like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steven Seagal hitting the beaches in commando.

45:29I wrote a dystopian novel a long time ago in which the background of the novel is this long running war inside Mexico that no one can quite remember how the United States stumbled into, but it can't find any way to get out of. And as Americans have discovered, these kinds of conflicts are easy to start, hard to end. It's hard to define an end state. There's also, I think, a real risk that is being very underplayed, which is the major drug cartels have had a practice, I'm no kind of expert, but you can observe it, of not hitting back, and certainly not hitting back on American territory. It's just more trouble than it's worth.

46:05And they try to avoid tangling with Americans. You'll remember an incident that happened two or three years ago where a group of Americans were intercepted by a drug gang at the border. The drug gang thought they were Haitians who were trying to cut into their drug smuggling business. They killed two, but they realized the other, the survivors, and they released them and then volunteered a bunch of low-level narcos saying, we're so sorry, we did it. We turn ourselves into the Mexican authorities. They don't want to tangle with the United States, but they have some capabilities if they ever did want to.

46:38I mean, they could let off car bombs in the streets of Texas and California pretty easily. They don't, and maybe they never would, but it's the kind of thing that if you had a process, somebody would be saying, have we considered what the other party's counter move to our moves are? And it doesn't look like that kind of process is happening at all. I was talking with friends who have to teach this stuff at both military and civilian institutions. And it's like, how do you teach the American national security process now? There isn't one. It's whatever Donald Trump, it's all vibes, right? It's whatever Donald Trump feels at any given moment.

47:13And the problem is that he has, I mean, it's a problem for us. It's an advantage to him that he surrounded himself with people who say, I am anticipating that he wants to do this. I will always have a plan ready to say, you bet, boss, I got a plan for striking Venezuela. And I don't think they've thought it through. I don't think they care about thinking it through, David. it. I think they want to be able to say America's at war. Anybody who opposes the president is a traitor. Last question before I let you go with gratitude for your time. Greenland. The United States must have a plan for invading Greenland.

47:47American troops were deployed to Greenland in March of 1941 before the United States entered the Second World War to secure Greenland against German uses of German U-boat base. They operated with the approval of the local Greenland authorities. Denmark was then under Nazi occupation. So the Danish government was surely not displeased. And during the Cold War, there were always war games about, well, what if the Soviets made a move on northern Greenland? So there must be these plans now. What happens if you tell an American officer, I want to carry out a military attack on the territory of a NATO ally?

48:19Do they raise an eyebrow or do they just do it? I think you finally got into a scenario that is so crystal clear. And maybe years of teaching military officers has made me too optimistic. I have to think that there are, even at lower levels, there are going to be officers who are going to say, I'm not doing that. I'm not kidding. Because they understand a treaty is a law. Well, and also they've trained with these guys. Yeah. You know, as you pointed out, look, we had plans during the Cold War. Yeah, the GU gap. Remember the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap. This was going to be where the Soviets were going to come pouring through.

48:58Or Northern Norway. That was another. Right. We were worried about having to secure Iceland, Greenland, and Norway rather than let that fall. In fact, the Tom Clancy book, Red Storm Rising, big attack on Keflavik. Iceland becomes like the pivot upon which the world turns. But it wasn't that dumb an idea because that's a really strategically important place. But the idea that somehow the government of Denmark would say, thank you for your invitation to join Greenland. we have declined it. And the president says, seize all these cities and small though they are, seize these bases, put the military.

49:37There are going to be military guys. I've had Danes in my class, Danish officers sitting in my classroom. I mean, you're going to tell Americans, hey, that captain that you trained with, you're going to have to blow them out of the water if they approach. I want to believe that an attack on a NATO ally would spark an internal revolt within the United States and the US military. I want to believe that. Will it happen? It depends on how many people are watching TV at any given moment, I guess. I'll leave you with this thought. Secretary of Treasury Besant recently gave an interview, I think, on one of the financial channels.

50:14We talked about the American strategy on dealing with China. And he said, we're going to mobilize our allies to work with us. Mobilize our what? Our what? You don't have very many. There's El Salvador. There's maybe Israel. There's maybe Russia. Everybody else is waiting for the United States to attack them. It's dismal. Well, we're getting to the point. I hate to say that I used to take pride. So much of this has been humbling for an Atlanticist and an American exceptionalists like you, like me, it's humbling to say, I used to take pride in the fact that the Russians had no friends in the world and the Americans had plenty.

50:53Part of the reason Russia was always in the, even after the Soviet Union, Russia was always in the mess it was in because they don't have friends. They have clients. It's all very transactional. We're becoming that. We're becoming this kind of friendless, powerful state that just has clients. rather, I mean, I kept the NATO flag in my office because I felt like this was not just an alliance of convenience. I felt like this was a fraternity of free and democratic nations committed to an idea that they were willing to die for. And this president, and I still think, David, I want to believe it. I still believe that when this man leaves office, if he leaves office, that we can come back to that.

51:37We can recover our senses. But right now, the president, and this is a problem for civil military relations. The president is saying, we don't really have any friends. You have me, I'm the commander. And if I tell you to attack somebody to whom we are bound by history and treaty, you're going to do it anyway. Remember when he was asked about torture in the first election, and he said, well, if I tell the generals to do it, they'll do it. Well, the military pushed back and said, We won't do that. And I think to this day, he didn't like that answer. Yeah. Let's continue to believe it. Let's continue to hope for it.

52:12Tom, thank you so much for making time for me today. Thanks for having me, David. Bye-bye.

52:25This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify.

52:55A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Fromm Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

53:33It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

53:44Thanks so much to Tom Nichols for joining me this week on The David Fromm Show. I am so grateful to him for joining and to you for watching. As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is not a book at all, but a play, Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco. Ionesco was a Romanian-born writer who lived much of his life in France and wrote mostly in French. He lived through the Second World War in both Romania and France, the first half of the war in Romania, and then in 1942 in France. He witnessed in the 1930s the rise of communism and fascism and Nazism and other extremist ideologies. And then he lived the experience of military occupation and dictatorship.

54:22In 1959, he wrote a play to make sense of the personality changes he had seen among the people he knew in the terrible era of the 1930s. That play was Rhinoceros. I'll start with the plot of the play and then tell you a little bit about my encounter with it. The play is set in a small French town by the sea. one by one and with no more explanation of that one by one the people of town begin transforming into rhinoceroses thundering trumpeting mindless beasts that move in herds that carry out destruction and have no regard for human life or human decency human values somehow and for again no explained reason the town drunkard beringer is exempted from this transformation even as more upstanding citizens become rhinoceros beasts eventually the human population of the town is reduced to just two people, Berenger and the woman he loves, Daisy.

55:13But even Daisy admires the rhinoceroses. She sees them as beautiful and mighty. And she comes to lose respect for Berenger because he alone is standing against them. The lover's quarrel, Berenger strikes Daisy. And with that, she abandons him. And in her anger, she too goes off to join the beast. Whether she will actually become a beast or not is left ambiguous, but she is with the beast and Berenger is left alone. I first saw this play as a boy in my mid-teens in 1974, 75. The play I saw was the movie version. You can still see it on YouTube and other platforms, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as Berenger.

55:53During the Trump years, I found myself thinking about this play more and more often because it often seemed that longstanding friends of mine were turning into rhinoceroses, mindless, trumpeting beasts. And sometimes people were not becoming rhinoceroses who quite surprised me, like Berenger. The very last person you would think would be a person of integrity and resistance. I too saw this among some of the people I knew. I was genuinely surprised. I did not think it would be them, but it was them. I read the play in text and I was reading it again just a little while ago because I had somebody very particular in mind in the rhinoceros category.

56:30When you read the play, as opposed to watching the Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder version. There's something very striking. In the Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder version, Beringer gives a final speech in a mood of defiance. He climbs to a tall building, he addresses the world, and he shouts his resistance. It's much more ambiguous in the text of the play. And let me read you the concluding portion of the final monologue. Beringer is alone. Daisy's abandoned him. And he says, I've only myself to blame. I should have gone with them while there was still time. Now it's too late. Now I'm a monster, just a monster.

57:05Now I'll never become a rhinoceros. Never, never. I've gone past changing. I want to. I really do, but I can't. I just can't. I can't stand the sight of me. I'm too ashamed. And he's been looking in the mirror here. He turns his back on himself in the mirror and he says, I'm so ugly. People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end. And then he gives his final oration. And you can imagine this being delivered in many different ways. Oh, well, too bad. I'll take on the whole lot of them. I'll put up a fight against the whole lot of them, the whole lot of them. I'm the last man left and I'm staying that way until the end.

57:42I'm not capitulating. Now, you can play that defiantly as Gene Wilder did. You can play it with resignation. You can play it with cynical humor. I think it's an ending that speaks to all of us in these dark times. I'll take on the whole lot of them. I'll put up a fight against them to the end. I'm the last man left. I'll put up a fight against a lot of them, the whole lot of them. I'm the last man left and I'm staying that way until the end. I'm not capitulating. One of the things that struck me as I reread this monologue just before preparing this talk was there's no action plan here. One of the things that we're often asked in the Trump appears.

58:17Okay, okay, got it. What's our plan? And what Eugenio Hinesco tells us is before the plan, there's the moment of decision. And unlikely people are going to have to make that decision, but they have to decide, I'm not capitulating. And once that decision is made, only then can the plan appear. But again, it begins as a moral choice. And that's a moral choice I'm counting on more and more Americans to make, even those who for a time spent some time among the rhinoceroses or as rhinoceroses. Thanks so much for watching or listening to The David Fromm Show this week. I hope you'll join us again next week on whatever platform you choose, video or audio.

58:54Remember, the best way to support the work of this podcast, if you're minded to do so, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That supports my work and that of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic. You might also consider signing up for a David Fromm alert on The Atlantic site, which will let you know when I post a new article. Again, thanks so much for being with us this week, whether you're listening or whether you're watching. I'm David Frum. See you next week. Bye-bye.

59:40This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum. and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grime. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live.

1:00:24Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. is thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.