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In the premiere episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum lays out his case for a new kind of political conversation—one that rejects the radicalized rhetoric dominating major podcasts.
He then details why Donald Trump’s tariffs wrecked world financial markets. David takes apart the excuses offered by tariff defenders, and tries to explain the shock and betrayal felt by America’s allies.
Then, David is joined by the former ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel shares the lessons he learned as White House chief of staff during the 2008–09 financial crises—and his assessment of how Democrats went wrong in 2024 and where they can advance from here.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello. And welcome to the first episode of The David Frum Show. I’m David, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Why another podcast? It’s a natural question. The answer begins with the chart I recently glimpsed from a media-studies organization. It showed that audio-visual content online tended to bunch up at the far extremes of American political dialogue: the far left and the far right—the far right having a big advantage. The center ground lay abandoned and seemingly barren.
Now, that’s not the way things are in real life. In real life, most of us are pretty levelheaded people, and we approach the world in a spirit of curiosity, not anger, looking for insights, not insults. Yet, when the sound comes on and the video comes up, things are suddenly different, and the worst voices get the biggest audiences. I don’t think it has to be that way. In the text edition of The Atlantic, we prove every day that Americans want something better. I’m going to try to give them that something better, also, here in audio and visual content on The David Frum Show.
We shouldn’t assume that just because people have deeply reactionary politics, they’re necessarily backwards in their technology. A century ago, in another dark time, fascists outpaced Democrats and liberals in their mastery of the then-new technology of the radio. Something similar to that seems to be happening today. We need to meet the worst forces in our society on the battleground of ideas, using the latest tools. And that’s what we’re going to try to do here.
You know, when people produce honest information about vaccines, about trade, about anything else that’s important that has unfortunately become controversial, of course, the production of that information costs resources, and those resources have to be paid for. The unfortunate result is that the truth is often paywalled, although lies are always free. Well, here on The David Frum Show, we’re going to try to be free in every sense of that term and to make content available to all who want it in as honest way as it’s possible to do.
My first guest this week will be Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, who served the United States in many capacities. I’m going to be talking to him at the beginning about one of those capacities: his service as White House chief of staff during the financial crisis of 2009, another steep collapse in financial markets. What similarities does he see between now and then? What differences? And what lessons does he have to offer us?
Before my conversation with Rahm Emanuel, a few opening thoughts. Last week, the United States suffered one of the severest shocks in the nation’s financial history. It’s a little difficult to wrap your mind around how big an event this Trump tariff disaster was. As of Friday afternoon, U.S. stock markets had suffered a loss of about $6 trillion. And to put this in context, the severest natural disaster in American history—Hurricane Katrina—cost the United States about $200 billion. So what Trump did was about 30 times as expensive as Hurricane Katrina. It’s more on the order of what it cost the nation to wage and win the Second World War.
Now, stock market valuations come and go, and perhaps some of this money will be recovered. But other forms of damage that Trump did never will be. Trump permanently—or at least for a generation—stained the good name of the United States with dozens of allies around the world, countries that had done things the United States asked, countries that had signed agreements with the United States. He demonstrated that America’s word was not good, that American credit could not be trusted. Many corporations have very intricate systems of supply with providers all over the planet. And those things were interrupted, and those business relationships were disrupted in ways, again, very hard to undo.
The economic mechanism is a sophisticated and delicate apparatus. And when somebody comes blundering around and smashes up arrangements, that has enduring effects. Now, some of Trump’s defenders will give you an explanation of what happened. They will tell you that woke financial markets guided by people who hate Trump went on a kind of petulant rampage against Trump’s “America First” agenda.
Can we pause to understand and absorb how childish a way of thinking this is? Financial markets are made up of millions of people making billions of decisions involving trillions of dollars. They’re as impersonal as the tides. The financial markets crashed because all of those decision makers across so many countries, across so many time zones, collectively assessed that Donald Trump had sliced a huge amount of value out of every company traded in the United States, and although we couldn’t see it, also out of every company not traded in the United States. There are some 30-plus million companies in the United States. Almost all of them must be poorer this week than they were last.
To understand why these financial markets reacted as they did, we need to begin by understanding what a tariff is. In the simplest terms, a tariff is a tax on any good imported into a country. But most of us experience those tariffs as taxes on things we consume: fruits and vegetables, electronic equipment, maybe an automobile. But from the point of view of the whole economy, it’s just as important to understand a tariff as a tax on things we produce as a tax on things we consume. Every industrial product—every product—is an assembly of components from other countries and other places. When you raise a tariff, you don’t just raise the tax to the consumer; you raise a tax to everybody at every step along the way of the value chain.
Trump defenders will say, for example, Well, if you build your car inside the United States, the car won’t be tariffed. Fine, as far as it goes. But what about the steel that goes into the car? Well, that’ll be tariffed. What about the aluminum that goes into the car? Tariffed. What about the glass out of which the windscreen is made? Tariffed. What about the fabric from which the upholstery of the seats has spun? Tariffed. What about electronic gear? What about the windshield wipers? All of those components that are assembled into the car: All of them are tariffed. And the whole car, as a result, is more expensive to everybody. And a car is by no means the most sophisticated item out there.
Think about iPhones. Think about airplanes. They are just giant assemblies of components and subcomponents that come from all over the planet. And every one of them is more expensive, and therefore, the final product is not only more expensive but more disrupted. Because, of course, manufacturers these days expect things to arrive just in time. They don’t keep warehouses full of parts. They bring the parts in constantly in container ships from all over the planet. And when Trump acts in the irrational and unexpected way that he did, he disrupts all of those systems of delivery.
Tariffs do one other thing that is very important to understand, which is: They invite corruption. They invite corruption at the highest level of society because every business in America—every business in the world—will now be on its way to Mar-a-Lago seeking a special exemption or a special favor for itself, some countervailing subsidy. And, of course, Trump will exact a price for those favors: Buy his memecoin to direct wealth to members of his family. Make a documentary and pay his wife or his child for the right to make the documentary. Do that and your tariff might be lifted.
It also invites corruption that touches each of us more personally. There’s going to be, in a few days, a 60 percent difference in the cost of an iPhone in Toronto or Vancouver from the cost of an iPhone in the United States market. Smugglers will arbitrage that extraordinary difference. And there will soon be goods moving on foot, by car, by truck, by boat, by plane, by container ship from all the rest of the world into the uniquely high-priced terrain in the United States.
It’s hard enough to police fentanyl. Fentanyl is something that everybody agrees is wrong. When smugglers are moving things like pepper and cinnamon and coffee and toilet paper and flat-screen TVs, no one’s going to think that’s wrong. They’re going to think those people are bringing them a better bargain. The idea that we’re going to all pay more for tube socks, as Peter Navarro, the Trump economic adviser said—well, some will. But many people will be looking for bargains from off the back of a truck from a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy.
You’ll hear excuses for what Donald Trump did. It’ll be said, for example, that what he’s trying to do—what he’s really trying to do—is raise revenues to fund the United States and make possible a cut in the tax rate, or maybe abolish the income tax altogether. You can’t know a lot of math if you’re going to believe that, because the numbers just don’t work. And that’s even before the tariffs cause a recession and invite all this smuggling.
Tariffs are not going to be a substitute for any kind of tax revenue. They don’t begin to pay the cost of a modern government, the government that Trump wants, including the defense establishment he wants. One of the reasons the United States moved away from tariffs more than a century ago was precisely that modern government costs more than a tariff can possibly sustain without terribly damaging effects.
It’ll be said, Well, okay, what he’s really doing is trying to force countries to make deals with the United States, and the phones will be burning up as nation after nation calls Trump to make a deal. We’ll be signing all of these free-trade agreements. Now, notice the claim that these are invitations to negotiate completely contradicts the claim that they’re here to raise revenue. If they’re here to raise revenue, the tariffs are supposed to be taxes that stay in place forever. If they’re to be negotiated away, they’re not going to raise much revenue. If they raise much revenue, they can’t be negotiated away.
Well, it’ll be said, No, no, no, the whole point of this thing is in order to counter China. China is such a predator. China is such a threat. China is such a difficult neighbor. We’re going to bring jobs back from China. But if the goal here is to counter China, why alienate every other nation in the Pacific? The United States, to balance a country as big as China, is going to need friends. And it has alienated those friends, from Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia. Every one of them is looking at the United States and saying, Little as we like the Chinese, they’re at least predictable. You guys are erratic. Maybe we’re safer with them than with you. And we’re certainly not falling in line with any counter-Chinese scheme you have, because you might smack us in the face for no reason, with no notice.
The last thing that is sometimes said—and the president himself has said this in his social media—is that what you are seeing is the working out of a master plan to lower interest rates. Well, you can lower your property taxes by burning down your house too. That doesn’t make that a good plan. Yeah, if we go into a major economic recession, as it looks like we’re going to do, yeah, interest rates will probably come down. They were very low during the Great Depression. They were very low during the financial crisis. The goal is not to have low interest rates; it’s to have lower interest rates consistent with high levels of economic activity. Causing recession to bring down interest rates is no kind of solution to any kind of rational problem. It’s an excuse after the fact.
Anyway, none of this is true. Trump’s actual idea is: The United States should be running a trade surplus with the whole world—and not just the whole world together, but each country in the world, and anytime there’s any country with which the United States runs a trade deficit, that country is ripping the United States off. So if, for example, impoverished Madagascar is selling the United States more vanilla beans than it buys software and airplanes and insurance from the United States, then Madagascar is ripping us off by letting us have real vanilla.
Is that crazy or what? The whole world is an interlocking system of trade. The United States is not the center of the universe, with everyone having a one-on-one relationship with the United States. Countries sell to the United States to buy from other countries. Countries buy from other countries to sell to the United States. Everything is interlocked. And the United States will have different kinds of relationships with different kinds of countries at different stages in development.
And through it all, the United States has remained the wealthiest country in the world with the most sophisticated markets. Donald Trump keeps trying to tell Americans they failed. The country isn’t great. The country is some kind of economic disaster, when in fact, its economy, on Inauguration Day 2025, was the envy of the world. Only today is that economy an object of pity.
Let’s think about it for a minute, about all of this, from the perspective of other countries and other peoples. There’s a story told about the great British general the Duke of Wellington, winner of the Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon. After the battle, many years, a friend was riding in the countryside with the Duke of Wellington, and they observed a rise in the landscape. As they approached the rise, the friend said to the Duke of Wellington, This is so pretty. I wonder what the other side looks like.
And the Duke of Wellington imagined a landscape. He said, Oh, I suspect that there’ll be a stream running from this point to that point. There’ll be a copse of woods. There’ll be some hills. I think there may be some grazing animals. They passed over the top, and indeed everything was as the duke said. The friend said, Have you been here before? How did you know? The Duke of Wellington replied, Well, I’m a general. All my life I have devoted my life to the problem of what lies on the other side of the hill.
Donald Trump won’t think about the world from the perspective of anybody else, but that’s something, if you’re trying to do these so-called great deals, you ought to do. If you’re trying to impose your will on the planet, you ought to think about how the rest of the planet will respond. Everybody around the world looks at the United States and thinks, What are you people doing? We can’t trust you. We can’t look to you for leadership. You are unpredictable. We’re seeing action after action that can’t be explained: Your betrayal of Ukrainian troops in the field. Your abandonment of the island of Taiwan. Your outrageous and deliberate act of unprovoked economic aggression. And the miserable, mean-spirited treatment with which you attack visiting tourists and people who may have had a mistake on their visa. You throw them in prison forever. What kind of country are you?
We look different in the eyes of the world than we did just a few weeks and months ago. And the rest of the world will respond by saying, Even if you change your mind about all of this, even if Donald Trump rolls back the tariffs, we still need to keep our distance from you. We need to think about buying fewer weapon systems from you, because you can’t be trusted. We need to think about developing military systems that are independent of yours, because you can’t be trusted. We need to think about strategic autonomy from you, because you can’t be trusted. We need to think about finding new kinds of trading relationships and new kinds of partners, because you can’t be trusted.
Trump will end. Someday, this will all be history, but the consequences will not fade so fast.
Let me say a personal word. I come from Canada. I still spend a lot of time there. I have friends and relatives there. And my generation of Canadians undertook a long argument about the kind of relationship that Canada should have with the United States. And people like me said, Canadians should stand closer to the United States. You can trust the Americans. They’re good neighbors. They’re good allies. And their world design is a benign one. And Canada can find a prosperous and secure part by following American leadership. People like me, we feel very betrayed right now, and I think that memory, that’s not going to fade so fast.
Now my conversation with Rahm Emanuel, but first: a quick break.
[Break]
Frum: Rahm Emanuel, thank you so much for joining the podcast. It’s such an honor to have you.
Rahm Emanuel: Sure. Thank you, David. Thank you very much.
Frum: Let me recapitulate for anyone who does not know your brilliant career: Senior adviser in the Clinton White House, member of Congress and member of the Democratic House leadership, chief of staff to President Obama, mayor of Chicago, ambassador to Japan. That is quite a perspective on history.
I wanted to ask you about one particular moment in your perspective on history, which is: You were there in 2009 for one of the severest economic shocks in American history. As you and I speak, the United States is suffering another one. Have you got some perspective for us about what is going on? Lessons we should learn? Hope to offer?
Emanuel: Here’s my take on this moment, in particular, and it’s kind of a pull back, which is: China—in my view, you can’t raise tariffs high enough on them—China was becoming the center of focus of energy in the world economy. They’ve shuttered the Chilean steel plant, about to do that to South Africa. There’s more than 500 countries that have taken different types of legal actions against China because of unfair trade practices. And the president of the United States just declared “Liberation Day” in Beijing, not in America, because he’s giving them an out-of-jail card to get out, and now made America the focal of everybody’s energy and anger and frustration.
I think, obviously, this is an own goal. It’s the largest tax increase in American history on the American consumer. And I kind of say this both fictitiously but also seriously: If this is supposed to be a renaissance in America’s manufacturing—Elon Musk, the president’s friend, has a facility in Shanghai; 20,000 people work there. He has another one in Berlin: 12,000. Shutter them, and bring all the jobs back in manufacturing. Now, the over-under on that, not very good. But this is why it’s really one of the worst policies and decisions.
And you not only have a collapse in the market, but five months ago, the United States was outpacing everybody’s economy. We had low unemployment. We had growth at levels everybody else was envious of. And in five months, we’re already talking about a 60 percent chance of a recession, all because one man has decided a new economic theory that was totally reputed. So in 80 days, he’s undone 80 years’ worth of work.
Frum: Let me ask you very specifically about the crisis part of it. In 2009, there were two salient features to the response to the crisis. The first is: You had this legendarily smooth transition from W. Bush to Obama. There’s a book about it by a political scientist as the smoothest transition maybe in American history.
Emanuel: Yeah.
Frum: And then you had this extraordinary level of collaboration with central banks all over the planet and treasury departments all over the planet. So domestic consensus, international cooperation—those seem to be entirely missing now.
Emanuel: Yeah. There was a period. Look—there was not only cooperation between President Bush and incoming President Obama’s administration. Just one anecdote of that cooperation: All the resources expended to help the banks. We were notified in the transition. I met with President Bush and Josh Bolton; Josh Bolton and I had a meal. We went in to see President Bush, and I said, Look. We’ve gotten a heads up that both GM and Chrysler—not potentially Ford, but definitely GM and Chrysler—have six weeks left. That is it. We not only have this massive financial engulf to collapse that is going to lead, not just worldwide, but to the United States going from a recession into maybe something far worse. And to give us some help here so we have breathing room, could you take the politics of tapping the resources to save the auto industry so we have enough time to deal with one and set up the process to deal with the second?
There were going to be politics about tapping those resources outside of the financial sector for the auto industry and all the auto jobs and all the communities. And President Bush said, I’ll do it. We negotiated. Do we get eight weeks, six weeks? They took the six weeks, etcetera. I think there was—I’m doing it by memory—I think they supported with $24 billion for General Motors and Chrysler.
And he took both the politics as well as giving us some breathing room to work. That’s an anecdote of trust—not just of an action, but of trust. Also worldwide coordination, as you said.
And I remember, if you go back, now this is where President Bush is president. This is pre the transition. Ben Bernanke; Mr. Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Hank Paulson came up to speak to the bipartisan leadership. We were all meeting in Nancy Pelosi’s office. And he says the economy has 48 hours, 72 hours, before it totally collapses—not just the market collapses.
And we thought—from Democratic leader to Republican leader, House member to Senate member—we all leaned forward around the conference table and said, What did you just say? He said, We have 72 hours. The economy will collapse. And we spent all night and also the next 72 hours working through what became the hated, for good reason and bad reason—I’ll walk through it if you want—financial assistance to stabilize this financial system. And that was bipartisan, and it was across Pennsylvania Avenue. What did you have in that room? Patriotism and trust.
Now, there were a lot of faults, and we could talk about it later on. Things that I wanted to get done, we didn’t get done, etcetera. But those two examples of working together to stave off not just a financial crisis, but also, we were that close from the great recession bordering into a small-D depression, which we hadn’t seen since ’29.
Frum: Let’s talk a little bit about the international aspect, because one of the things, it’s a little dark to say this, but if you’re the European Central Bank or the Japanese Central Bank—
Emanuel: I think it’s a pretty dark day, so go ahead for it. (Laughs.)
Frum: If you’re the Europeans, Japanese, British, major central banks, you have to be hoping that this shock is as painful as possible and this recession is as nasty as possible to teach the Trump administration a lesson about waging economic warfare, economic aggression against allies in this way that is like an economic Pearl Harbor of bad faith and aggression. They don’t want to help. It’s not in their interest to help. And in 2009, it was in everybody’s interest to help each other.
So reminisce a little bit about that, and how do we get back into a place where America’s friends want to help, instead of saying, You know, you screwed us. Now we’re going to screw you?
Emanuel: David, I mean, you’ve got to treat friends like they are: friends. You can’t treat them worse than you treat your adversaries. I mean, now, you say they don’t want to help, and I agree with that. There’s also a part of them that the more you try to hurt, it may boomerang. So it’s not exactly a clean shot on goal here. But there is a lot of animosity, and I can’t get back not only trust in America [but also] the devastation to America as a safe harbor that’s built up. And so much of our hard power, economic power is built on what people view of America: rule of law, somebody you can depend on in a storm. That power—these other manifestations of it—are dependent on one piece.
And the president is not only destroying America’s hard power, its soft power, but the credibility of the American brand that—people, maybe short term, will try to figure out retaliation versus negotiation, because the Trump administration is sending both signals, which is most also confusing. That’s short term. On the other hand, long term? Everybody will start to design economic pieces around America and away from America that will hurt America.
An example, two things illustrating this point: We spent the lion’s share of my time in Japan building a coherent alliance between the United States, Japan, and Korea, isolating China. China, seeing the opening, just created an economic and discussion of partnership between Japan, Korea, and China, isolating America. Very bad for America. Two: Forget the countries. Samsung, which was critical to America’s export controls against China on semiconductors, just cut a deal with a Chinese company. So we already have a company crack in the united front against China.
You don’t trust America? You think America’s going to treat you worse than they treat its own worst adversary? Then you make your own deals, and now it’s going to come, which is what I said. They just gave Beijing a get-out-of-jail card.
Frum: It’s like the Chinese have their national slogan, We may be nasty, but at least we’re predictable.
Emanuel: Well, they’re going to show that they’re the adult. If you were sitting in Beijing’s corridors of power, why would you not take advantage of that? Look—after the “wolf warrior” and after the economic coercion, we organized the Indo-Pacific against China. They knew they were isolated. They kept complaining about it because they had made a massive mistake treating Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines as the enemy.
We organized it. Own goal by China? We took advantage of it, and China was complaining that we were isolating them in their own backyard. Yeah, we were. Exactly. We isolated the isolator. Now China sees an opening, and it’s basically isolating the United States and taking advantage of it. We just hurt ourselves.
Frum: Let me ask you very specifically about the view from Tokyo of what is happening right now. Bank of Japan, Japanese Finance Ministry—what are they thinking? What are they doing? Can you give us any insight into that?
Emanuel: Well, I think it’s so—they can’t make heads or tails. They’re having, for lack of a better analogy, vertigo. The world they knew is upside down.
Now, think of it. If you’re the Japanese, for four consecutive years and starting on the fifth, you’re the No. 1 foreign direct investor in the United States. One million Americans work for Japanese companies. Forty-eight percent of them are in manufacturing and industrial. Those are years of investment, mainly in the auto industry but not limited, where you trust America and you invest in America. And they just had the wind spit back in their face, and they’ve now realized that those were bad investments.
That’s one. Given the defense piece, they’re going to try to figure out, Can we work this out amicably? And while we’re talking to you, we’re going to start these conversations with Korea, Australia, Taiwan, Philippines, the EU, Canada, and develop other economic ties. Now, remember, when America pulls out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Japan steps in, takes leadership, and creates that for their own good. They are now going to look at other markets and other ways of becoming less integrated with the U.S. economy and less supportive of a million Americans working in companies owned and run by the Japanese. So there’s a short term, medium term, and long term.
Frum: Can we talk about the economic theory or the economic excuses that are offered for what’s just happened?
Emanuel: Oh, I’m going to stop you there. There is no economic theory. Don’t dress it up and put lipstick on a pig. This is all about vindictiveness, anger. There’s no economic theory behind this, and this is an own goal of the worst order.
Frum: Okay. I was just being polite. (Laughs.)
Emanuel: Why? I’m here. We can take polite out of the conversation as a necessity.
Frum: All right. Candidly, I was recently in Austria, and I was in Vienna, and there’s a short street there called Dumbastraße, which, as an English reader, you read as “Dumbass Street.” And I’ve been thinking that the whole world has been living on Dumbass Street for too long.
Let’s talk about how we live on a smarter street. So the excuse offered is, look—these have been difficult times for Americans with less education, fewer credentials, and we need to have all these tariffs in order to protect Americans with less education and fewer credentials. And the answer is: A tariff wall is the solution to the problem of the parts of America that have not shared as much as other parts in the extraordinary economic progress of modern times.
I know you have a lot of thoughts about that. Tell us, how do we think more intelligently about how to respond to the problems of people, or the situation of people who have not done as well as others?
Emanuel: So first and foremost, the analysis of the problem is correct. Over the last 30 years, neither the risk or the opportunities were equally shared. And as I like to say, the American dream is unaffordable now and inaccessible to many Americans, and that should be unacceptable to us. Rather than having a shot at the American dream, the American public’s been given the shaft. And globalization does have winners, but it has losers, and we left the losers alone, isolated, and on their own, just to figure out their own way. That’s wrong. That’s un-American actually.
So the problem with the tariffs is it treats everything as a nail to its hammer. China and Columbia are not the same. One’s a potential ally; the other one’s an adversary. One’s a potential market, and the other one isn’t. Columbia doesn’t involve itself in economic espionage. It doesn’t involve itself in intellectual property theft. China does. That’s one.
Second, how do you make sure that Peoria, Youngstown, Battle Creek, La Crosse, Wisconsin, Ames, Iowa, are not left on their own to negotiate against China, Mexico, or, for that matter, Vietnam? And the best way to do that, in my view, is to invest in Americans and America. And we didn’t do that. So while globalization was happening—huge opportunities. Also, huge risk. Your kids, my kids are going to succeed. Other people’s kids are going to get the shaft unless we give them the tools to succeed, like our families gave our own children to succeed.
Which means—and I’m not saying I have the exact ticket, but we know it’s true in human history: Education is essential for progress, both for society and for the individual. One of the things I try to do in Chicago: We were the first city to make [it so that] if you got a B average in high school, community college was free. So everybody had a shot, without going into the poorhouse or a second mortgage, to get an education past high school, which is where three-quarters of all jobs are.
Second—equally valuable—to get your high-school diploma, you had to show us a letter of acceptance from a college, a community college, a branch of the armed forces, or vocational-education institution. We gave you support; career counseling kept you on course. So if you wanted to go to the Navy, you knew what math courses, what history classes, what to take, so you were ready. We made post-high-school education expectations and requirements universal, not just the Frum and Emanuel children.
And third, just shy of 50 percent—49.2 percent of our kids—were taking either Advanced Placement, international, baccalaureate, or dual-credit, dual-enrollment college classes in high school. They were graduating already with college credit and not having to pay for it.
So to me that’s No. 1, because your education is your passport to a better future. I don’t care whether it’s going into healthcare at Malcolm X Community College in Chicago, transportation distribution logistics at another school in our community college center, advanced manufacturing at Richard J. Daley Community College. But everybody’s going to have the skills so they can navigate the future the best they can.
Education is essential. Then investing in science, technology, the critical kind of infrastructure writ large, which means investing in America. And if you invest in Americans in America, I don’t care if you’re from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou—we’re going to kick your butt. I’d always bet on America and Americans, but we’ve got to be honest: The last 30 years, they didn’t get that equal investment. They didn’t get the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. And we paid a price for it. And they paid a price, and they have every right to be furious.
Frum: We had three two-term presidencies back-to-back under two parties—Clinton, W. Bush, Obama—that made reform and improvement in the standards of educational performance central to their domestic agenda.
And yet we look back on, as you say, the 30 years. I don’t think there’s a lot of happiness or satisfaction with the results of all the effort that those three two-term presidents invested in improving education. What went wrong? Why are we not getting more for the effort we’ve made? What lessons do we learn from the disappointment?
Emanuel: There’s actually an interesting article today. One is, look: I wasn’t in an office anymore, but I was against what we were doing during COVID, because it became clear within six months, kids’ mortality rates, etcetera, and they’re locking kids out of schools for two years and the impact of what COVID did—especially if you’re a former mayor, like me in Chicago, where 84 percent of your kids are from poverty—absolutely stupidest thing you could do. I’m not going to clean it up. It was stupid.
Now, there’s a story today in the Times, on the day you’re asking me, it’s pretty clear that both [No Child Left Behind] by President Bush; President Clinton’s 100,000 specialized teachers, plus school choice, plus other types of things on both reform and accountability; President Obama’s basic race to the top—those were actually quite successful academically. They were slow but steady progress on reading, math scores to getting not just the high-income kids—meaning, children of high-income families—but low-income children succeeding.
Now, the truth of the matter is, we were replacing teaching with just testing, and there was a reaction both to the left, to the right to it. And then once that accountability was basically erased, you had a deterioration in standards and in educational attainment, and parents—also educators—rebelled against the accountability.
Now, testing is only a means of information to improve. What happened was because of the strictures, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. The testing became, we were teaching towards the test rather than using the test to improve teaching. And it kind of flipped. And what should have happened was more of a reform. But the idea that there wasn’t an improvement, it’s not true. In fact, there was improvement. It begins to stall out around 2010, just at the period of time where people start to break from accountability. The impacts on that were most dramatically felt by first-time English learners and also the poor. And then it starts to, in COVID, float up to, kind of, all income levels.
Frum: Let’s talk a little bit about the COVID experience in education. So if you were, in COVID, in a red state or especially red county, you had a much higher chance of dying from the disease, especially after vaccines became available, than in the blue states and blue counties. So that’s, you know, checkmark for the blue team that they did a better job of vaccinating people or maybe a less bad job of dissuading people from being vaccinated.
If you were in a red state or a red county, it was more likely that your schools would reopen early. And we see some indications that kids in Florida did better than kids in California, as a result of decisions made at the state level. So how should we think about this gap in educational performance that was very much concentrated in blue states and blue cities?
Emanuel: Look—there’s two things. One is: The way I look at it, and there’s lessons to be learned from Alabama’s improvement on math, Mississippi’s improvements on reading. So you can’t undo the stupidity of two years of locking kids out of school. Can’t undo it. But you can start to ameliorate it and make up for lost ground.
A couple things are very clear. You need more time on topic, so you’ve got to add time in the day to reading, math, and writing. Two: Testing so you can find early data on intervention and then apply one-on-one, whether that’s in person or by using technology—one of the things that comes out of COVID, that was the one thing that was valuable—and you can start to do one-on-one [teaching] through technology and tutoring kids so they get more time. And once they get that time, you could see dramatic improvements in both reading and writing, as an example of academic areas.
Third: A horrible habit has been, basically, kids and parents have accepted almost a four-day school week. And I think you should make, because absentee rates now are double digits, [it so that] any child absent more than 7 percent, it absolute that you won’t be able to matriculate to the next grade. We have to reimpose a minimum of a five-day [week]. If it was up to me, I’d reorganize the school year-round so you don’t have the summer slide that everybody in educational fields talk about, but that’s a different subject.
As for dealing with absenteeism, it’s now become chronic, and it’s now in the high teens. And it’s across the board, anything north of—pick your number—7 percent, 8 percent, whatever it is, you can’t matriculate. And start to reimpose more time, not just in the school—more time on one-on-one instruction. I will also say, though, one of the costs here that’s crazy: 20 percent of a child’s life, David, is in the classroom. And if you want a child to succeed, you gotta invest in the other 80 percent.
So we, as a city, a state, invest in the 80 percent to back up and support the 20 percent. No teacher by themselves can handle the effects of poverty rushing through the front door of the classroom. It’s not possible.
Frum: Do you have a view on phones in the schools?
Emanuel: Yeah, get rid of them. Not in the classroom. Not allowed. All the time should be on the teacher and the blackboard, not on your phones. Get rid of them.
I’ve been long—in fact, I don’t want to say. The campaign knows this: I tried to get Kamala Harris’s campaign in the summer to adopt a national standard of no phones in classrooms. I’m a big, big supporter. Because again, you’re not allowing the teacher to teach. You’re having the teacher become a policeman. That’s not the job of the teacher.
Frum: You mentioned the Kamala Harris campaign. Can I ask you—
Emanuel: Do I have to? (Laughs.)
Frum: Let’s not make it personal, but just at the highest level of generality you want, lessons learned? I mean, you were the candidate recruiter in 2006 for the big Democratic wins that year. You won in a lot of places that Democrats historically didn’t win of the House. You get a lot of credit for that from all political observers. That was very much your project. And then 2008, okay, there’s an economic crisis. Maybe the challenging candidate had the chance, had a certain advantage, but it was a pretty decisive victory, especially compared to the victories and defeats that came later. So lessons for 2024.
Emanuel: Two other things. In one other thing in 2008, we won 30 seats in 2006 and then won another 20-plus seats in 2008. So you have back-to-back, which you’ve not seen in a long time. Okay, so not to count that, but I didn’t want the history to be forgotten by your listeners.
Frum: He who does not toot his own horn, his horn shall not be tooted.
Emanuel: I was general with—Chris Van Hollen deserves credit for that. My colleague who was my vice when I was chair, he deserves it a hundred percent. But it’s an important point about how big a repudiation there was in ’08.
Here’s my take. There’s three lessons of 2024 that are informative to 2026, 2028, and beyond. One level, you had 70 percent of the country that said the economy was heading in the wrong direction. So architecturally, structurally, it was an anti-incumbent. Now, the reason I think that got so high goes back to the Afghanistan pullout and constantly telling the American people the economy was great when they were telling you something else. And it intensified because there was a sense that there was nobody listening in Washington. So telling people what they weren’t experiencing was wrong. But it was still 70 percent.
Two: Below that, there was two Kamala Harris campaigns. She inherits the nomination. Joe Biden and her are eight points down, and by the debate, they are three points up. That’s a big swing. And principally, she’s running not only on energy; she says it’s a new beginning, and she talks about the economy, runs ads basically about, I understand the struggles you’re under, the pressure—a totally different economic message from the economy’s great to you’re under stress.
And then, I don’t know what happens the morning after her debate with Donald Trump, but they switch and go to democracy, which was what Joe Biden was running on. I mean, I don’t know what happened, and I still don’t know this. And I’m like, I don’t have an answer for you. But it was like, you go 11 points up, and then you switch. Like, what was wrong with the 11-point swing? You thought you deserved 12? I don’t understand it to this day. And all of a sudden, they go into democracy. If you care about democracy, we had you on hello. You didn’t need persuasion. It was on economics.
And then the third level, David, which is not the election in 2024 but this moment in time in history. Three seminal moments in my view. First, the war in Iraq. You have a trillion dollars, thousands of men and women lose their lives, and their lives are maimed, and it’s built on deception, and nobody who was there is held accountable. And it devastates America and Americans and American communities.
Six years later, five years later, you have the financial meltdown that we were talking about, and people lose their homes, and the bankers are demanding their bonuses, having destroyed Americans’ livelihoods and their savings. And this gets back to an argument we had in the Obama White House because I wanted to do Old Testament justice before we did healthcare. I thought we should do financial reform—lost that debate, legitimate discussion about the equities of going healthcare before financial reform. But I was the principal advocate for [what] I thought the system needed: Put bankers on the other side, and beat the living hell out of them for what they did. And I did. I talked about Old Testament justice, and I said that the public needed to see us wrestling with people, that they were not only at the top of the economic ladder but were literally pissing down on everybody else and telling them it was raining.
And third, after all that anger at the establishment comes COVID. And we, as Democrats, don the code of the establishment. And I think those moments broke trust, confidence in the establishment in America. And we’re still living with that, as we can see by the reelection of Donald Trump. And you can see it in the rest of the developed world. As I’ve said before, COVID was not only bad for your body; it wasn’t great for the body politic either.
And so when you put that all together, both 2020—what happened in 2024 is informative about understanding not just the anger [but] legitimate parts of why people are angry. They have a right to be angry. Rather than being given a shot, they were given the shaft, and Washington and the people that make it up let them down. The question is on all of us. What did we learn under President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, and other periods? Both the good, the bad, things that we have to correct, things that we have to—that’s what we should be doing. What we’re doing now is just rage. And we’re turning allies into adversaries, and we’re giving adversaries a get-of-jail card, and that is going to come back to haunt America.
Frum: Let me ask you a last question before I release you from your generous time.
Emanuel: Well, this is not exactly like jail time or parole or probation. (Laughs.)
Frum: Last question. How confident are you that the United States will have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028?
Emanuel: I’m on the 75 percentile that they’ll be free and fair, and the 25 percent that sits there is because of the unilateral disarmament by Donald Trump against Iran, China, and Russia, who clearly have shown they will mess in America’s democracy—because again, it destroys the trust the public has in America and its institutions.
What he’s doing on our cybersecurity with our men and women who man the front lines, the thin blue line in protecting America—our adversaries want to screw us. They want to screw us. And I would say something else, but that is what they’re trying to do. And he just unilaterally disarmed. So I still believe there will be fair elections, because I trust at the state level, regardless if it’s blue or red state, the secretaries of state, the county commissioners who are responsible for elections will do the best job they can. They are good patriots.
What makes me nervous and is bleeping yellow, could be bleeping red—and I’m not sure; I don’t know—is the fact that, you know that old line, paranoid people still have enemies? China, Russia, and Iran and North Korea are trying to screw the United States, and the president of the United States just gave them a way in to do it.
Frum: You see the threat to free and fair elections as coming from outside the house, not inside the house.
Emanuel: Look—we have challenges inside the United States, but if you ask me what makes up the lion’s share of my 25 percent of fair [elections], it is our adversaries.
Here’s the thing that I don’t understand, and this gets to larger than just the elections. China and Russia have explicitly stated that they are on a course to undermine America’s leadership—hard power, soft power, economic power, etcetera. And the President of the United States with a Cabinet whose entire grasp of the English language is limited to four words of, “Yes, sir, Mr. President” have decided to align America with our enemies. And there’s no other way to look at it.
Frum: Thank you so much for your candor and your time. Candor’s legendary. The time is scarce. I’m grateful for both.
Emanuel: I just wanted the record to note that I cleaned up my language that I usually say at the dining room table.
Frum: Yeah. I think people are going to be a little disappointed with that. I think there’s a certain expectation of what’s coming, and then they don’t get it.
Emanuel: But think about the positive. There’s a moment of maturity by Rahm. Who knew it was possible? Who knew?
Frum: Who knew? Thank you so much. All right. Bye-bye.
Emanuel: Thanks, David.
[Music]
Frum: Thank you again to Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. We’ll be back next week, and next week we’ll be answering questions from viewers and listeners. I hope you’ll consider submitting a question to producer@thedavidfrumshow.com as either an email or an audio file, and we’ll sift through them and begin answering them in the weeks to come.
Thank you so much for viewing. I hope you’ll join us again next week for more of The David Frum Show.
