{"id":92,"date":"2026-05-27T17:12:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T17:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=92"},"modified":"2026-05-27T17:12:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T17:12:58","slug":"has-trump-corrupted-the-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=92","title":{"rendered":"Has Trump Corrupted the Military?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube<\/em><\/p>\n

On this week\u2019s episode of The David Frum Show<\/em>, The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s David Frum opens with his thoughts about the recently reported peace talks between the United States and Iran. David argues that these reported talks indicate the United States is losing the war in Iran, and that the loss highlights what has always been true: The presidency is too big a job for Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

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Then David is joined by Representative Jason Crow of Colorado to discuss Trump\u2019s politicization of the American military, lessons from the war in Iran, and the chaos at Pete Hegseth\u2019s so-called Department of War.<\/p>\n

David ends with a discussion of James Boswell\u2019s classic biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The following is a transcript of the episode:<\/em><\/p>\n

David Frum: <\/strong>Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show<\/em>. I\u2019m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic<\/em>. My guest this week will be Jason Crow, who represents the Sixth District of Colorado in the United States House of Representatives. The book for discussion this week will be James Boswell\u2019s [The<\/em>] Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em>, a classic of English biography and English literature.<\/p>\n

But before either the dialogue with Congressman Crow or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on news that is arriving this weekend that the United States and the Trump administration may have reached some kind of resolution in the war with Iran that began on February 28 of this year.<\/p>\n

Now, this news is very much in flux. That accounts for the unfamiliar look of this podcast, if you are watching. I am not recording from my usual recording place in Washington, D.C. I\u2019m in Ontario for the Memorial Day weekend and am improvising a recording studio here. If the news is accurate, what we hear, what has been reported so far, is the United States is reaching a settlement based on the idea that the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened, that oil will resume flowing out of the Persian Gulf, in return for which the United States will offer some kind of compensation to Iran. Maybe there\u2019ll be some kind of release of frozen Iranian assets. But the United States will get access to oil. The United States and the world will get access to oil. Iran will get money, and there\u2019ll be some kind of cease-fire and some kind of down-the-road-later return to the problem of the Iranian nuclear program.<\/p>\n

If these reports are accurate, this is a pretty humbling defeat of America\u2019s goals in the war with Iran that started on February 28. When the war started, President Trump never declared formal war aims, but based on things the administration said, something like this seemed to be in their mind. They wanted a formal termination of the Iranian nuclear program that the United States had badly damaged through air strikes last summer. The United States wanted an end to the Iranian ballistic-missile program, something that was not covered by the Iranian treaty that the Obama administration negotiated a decade ago. That the Obama deal overlooked the ballistic-missile program; the Trump administration wanted some kind of termination of the ballistic-missile program.<\/p>\n

The president of the United States had promised help is on the way to the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Iranian people who rose up against their terrorist, repressive, theocratic regime. And you might have thought that some kind of help for the Iranian people would be part of the outcome that the United States sought\u2014and maybe some kind of end to Iran\u2019s practice of being the world\u2019s leading state sponsor of terrorism, a status it\u2019s held since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, with blood on its hands of people all over the world, including many Americans, from its terrorism and aggression. Some kind of change in the nature of the regime to make it less dangerous to its neighbors and its own people.<\/p>\n

None of that happened, or none of that looks to have happened. All that looks to have happened is a reversion to the status quo as it was before the war started. If any of this is right, it is a pretty humbling climbdown.<\/p>\n

How on earth did we get here?<\/p>\n

The disparity in power between the United States and its ally Israel on the one hand, and an Iranian regime weakened, rocked by the challenge and the rebellion of its own people, would seem so overwhelming that it\u2019s hard to imagine how the United States could not<\/em> have won this war, and yet it seems to have not won in strategic terms. Really, it lost. How did that happen?<\/p>\n

Part of the answer\u2014only part, but part of that answer\u2014takes us to a disconcerting fact about the government of the United States right now, about the Trump administration and President Trump. And I think the best way to sort of sum up what the matter is, is by citing a statement President Trump made earlier in the month of May. He was talking to reporters, and they challenged him on his declining poll numbers, and especially his declining poll numbers among Republicans. And President Trump said, citing a story he had seen on CNN and misunderstood, he said, I have 100 percent support among Republicans.<\/em><\/p>\n

Trump:<\/strong> Although I do, I am at, according to CNN, 100 percent approval within the Republican Party. I\u2019m at a hundred percent approval.<\/p>\n

Now, President Trump mangled exactly what the poll said. None of that matters. The point was, the thing that had stuck in his mind and that he wanted people to know was that he believed, wrongly, but he believed he had 100 percent support among Republicans.<\/p>\n

Now, if true, that\u2019d be a pretty impressive number in one way\u2014who gets a hundred percent of anything? But the urge to cite it shows something very peculiar about President Trump, which is, he\u2019s never thought of himself as a national leader. He\u2019s a factional leader. He\u2019s the leader of the MAGA movement that has seized power in the United States, and that attempted, actually, to hold power in 2021 by violence, then return to power in 2024 by legal means, and that is now looking for ways to hold on to power after the elections of 2026 through gerrymandering and other forms of rule bending. He has always seen himself as a movement leader who happened to arrive in the government of the United States\u2014not as a national leader, not as the president of all the people.<\/p>\n

Now, if what you want to do is, sort of, plunder the Treasury and deliver a few benefits to your supporters at the expense of the rest of the country, this is a kind of, perhaps, for the short term, workable political strategy. But if you want to lead the country to war, it is doomed to failure. Wars are big, costly, dangerous events full of shocks, full of bad news. And when a president makes the heavy decision to lead the country to a major war\u2014and this war with Iran has been a major war involving massive expenditure, massive use of U.S. munitions, American loss of life, heavy loss of life on the Iranian side\u2014when the president makes that decision, he needs to mobilize something more than his preexisting fragment of popular support. He needs to speak to the country as a whole, or at least try to.<\/p>\n

Now, no president, maybe since Pearl Harbor, has been able to rally virtually every American to a single national cause. It\u2019s a democracy. There are a lot of different opinions, and that\u2019s as it should be. But presidents have tried. The presidents of the Cold War era tried. They tried to be something bigger than just the leader of a party. And that meant discipline upon them even when the country was not at war, that the president had to behave in certain ways that were recognized as presidential even by his opponents in order to retain the ability to speak to and for the whole nation when a real emergency appeared. And this is the one thing that I think most people would agree unites the chain of presidents from Franklin [D.] Roosevelt through [Harry] Truman, through [Dwight D.] Eisenhower into the later day, [Ronald] Reagan and [Barack] Obama and even [Joe] Biden tried to sound that music with his fainter voice.<\/p>\n

But Trump has never thought that way, never tried to do it that way. And so long as things seem to go reasonably well, as they did for the first three or so years of Trump\u2019s first term, it didn\u2019t harm him much or didn\u2019t hamper his plans. He was not regarded by half the country\u2014and more than half the country\u2014as some kind of interloper, somebody who got into the office by a kind of trick and who represented the interest only of a minority of the country, and who in everything from disaster relief to his tax program made no pretense of caring about the people who hadn\u2019t voted for him.<\/p>\n

But in this second term, where things have been bumpier, where the news has been worse, where he\u2019s made more mistakes, and where first there was the economic hardship caused by his crazy tariff program and then outright war, his inability to speak to and for the country, his inability to act the role of an American president, has become a major strategic liability for the United States because the United States was never able to accept any costs at all from the Iran war.<\/p>\n

A different president operating for different reasons would have said, I want to lead the country into war with Iran. I hope you all understand that this will be an expensive and difficult undertaking. Obviously, the price of fuel and perhaps the price of food will rise. I believe<\/em>, might say the president, this will be a short-term shock, but a shock it will be. I have various measures in mind to cushion the shock for those most in need, but this is important for all of our interests. Here\u2019s why. This is important for the peace of the world. Here\u2019s why. And I ask you to follow me and trust my leadership. <\/em>That\u2019s what a normal president would try to do.<\/p>\n

Because Trump had never tried to be that kind of president, he couldn\u2019t acknowledge any kind of suffering. He couldn\u2019t make the case for the war at all. He spoke to the nation at the State of the Union just a few days before leading the nation to war. He made almost no reference to Iran. He certainly gave no indication the war was coming, and he warned of nothing, and he asked for nothing. He asked for no support from Congress. He just went to war without any kind of consultation, no kind of authorization of the use of force, which his predecessors had done for large-scale military conflicts. Asking Congress for the use of force would mean that you would be subject to questioning by Congress. How much will this cost? How long will this last? What are the goals? Are they achievable?<\/em> President Trump didn\u2019t wanna face any of that kind of questioning, so he didn\u2019t ask for authority. But that meant his war had no co-authors. It was entirely his own doing, a one-man show. So long as everything went smoothly, that might not be so much trouble, but, of course, things have not gone smoothly, and now they\u2019ve ended very disappointingly, if not in outright defeat, and it\u2019s still the one-man show.<\/p>\n

The presidency has always been too big a job for Donald Trump. He\u2019s never understood it. He\u2019s never tried to do it. He has never imagined, even imagined the lineaments of the job, what it would look like, what kind of person that he would have to have been in order to be a president of all<\/em> the people, a president who sought<\/em> to be the president of all the people, who sought to speak on behalf of all the people, not all of the time, but when it really counted.<\/p>\n

Because of that lack in him, there has been a lack in the job, and because of that lack in the job, there was no realistic assessment of the costs of war, no realistic plan to deal with those costs, no realistic rally to the country to absorb those costs, and no ability in the country to bear those costs when they arrived. And the result is a war that has turned into defeat when it really didn\u2019t have to do so.<\/p>\n

This loss is Donald Trump\u2019s fault and Donald Trump\u2019s doing as much as anything else that he has done in his two terms as president\u2014more<\/em> than anything else, because it is one of the most expensive consequences of his most characteristic deficiency as president of the United States.<\/p>\n

And now my dialogue with Jason Crow.<\/p>\n

[Music<\/em>]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Jason Crow represents Colorado\u2019s Sixth District in the United States House of Representatives, centered on the city of Aurora, east of Denver. First elected in 2018, he serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Armed Services Committee. He is also co-chair for candidate recruitment of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.<\/p>\n

Crow is a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. He fought with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 75th Ranger Regiment. He completed three tours of duty and rose to the rank of captain. He was awarded the Bronze Star. Crow earned his bachelor\u2019s degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2002 and a law degree from the University of Denver\u2019s College of Law in 2009. Congressman Crow, thank you so much for joining me today.<\/p>\n

Jason Crow: <\/strong>Thanks for having me, David.<\/p>\n

Frum:<\/strong> So we\u2019ve all seen your televised tangles with the defense establishment and the wry humor you bring to those encounters. And I want to draw today on your knowledge of that establishment and especially of the part that tends to get kind of a pass in the Trump era: the uniform part. There\u2019s a lot of criticism of the civilian leadership, but the war in Iran seems to be not going very well from an operational point of view. Aircraft loss, bases struck, and very uncertain reports on the amount of damage to military targets that the military has actually been able to inflict. So I want to get your assessment as a veteran and as a member of the two most important committees of the House of Representatives on this question. From a military point of view, never mind the decision to go in the first place, how is this war proceeding?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah, I look at it in two different ways. So the rank and file\u2014those men and women in uniform who are carrying out the air strikes, who are conducting the operations\u2014they\u2019re doing a remarkable job. This is, just operationally\u2014taking out the politics, whether or not this is the right thing to be doing, operationally\u2014our military is doing a remarkable job day to day in their mission, and it\u2019s highlighting how good they really are.<\/p>\n

I will parse out of that, though, how I believe the senior commanders\u2014those who are testifying before the Armed Services Committee, those who are briefing us\u2014how they\u2019re performing, and I think in many cases they have been less than candid, at best. At worst, they\u2019ve hidden the ball from us, haven\u2019t been straightforward. I just recently cross-examined the head of Central Command, which has responsibility over the war in Iran and wasn\u2019t giving me very basic answers to straightforward questions that weren\u2019t difficult questions at all.<\/p>\n

So that is problematic to me because there is a history in America of our senior commanders\u2014this is in Iraq, this is in Afghanistan, this is in Vietnam\u2014simply looking at tactics and confusing tactics with strategy. A series of successful tactical missions do not make a strategy. And that is a big part of our problem right now.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>There\u2019s a question about how, even tactically, how successful. I mean, the military seems to be caught by surprise again and again by things that shouldn\u2019t be surprises. It\u2019s not a surprise that the Iranians moved to close the Strait of Hormuz. I\u2019m guessing the question of a U.S. conflict with Iran has been war-gamed annually since the spring of 1980.<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>And I assume that in those war games, the Iranian players\u2019 first or second go-to move is the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>After the United States assassinated the terrorist commander Qassem Soleimani, the Iranians hit back with missile attacks on U.S. bases, which did damage to individuals and to property. It shouldn\u2019t have been a surprise that there would be attacks on U.S. bases. And yet, in both cases, the U.S. military seems to have been taken by surprise.<\/p>\n

Crow:<\/strong> Well, I think those are different examples. So the attacks on some of the bases, some of the logistics hubs, the communications and radar facilities that killed six service members in one instance\u2014I think that is a good example of not being prepared. I don\u2019t think that those service members were protected by counter-drone capability. I don\u2019t think they had the battle-hardened cover that you need in a drone environment. And I think that\u2019s because we raced into this conflict.<\/p>\n

Same with the Strait of Hormuz. I actually don\u2019t believe that our military commanders were caught by surprise by the closure of the strait. I actually know that\u2019s part of our contingency planning and what is likely in a scenario like this. But what I think happened is, you have the president and you have the secretary of defense, who make decisions impulsively, who don\u2019t listen to the best advice of their military commanders and say, Just go out and do something and do it now<\/em>. And there are instances where our generals and our admirals say, Okay, you are the commander in chief. We will do this now, but we need two weeks, we need three weeks to get the minesweepers in place, to get air-defense capabilities in place<\/em>. And if the president disregards that advice, then it puts our service members in a terrible position.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Well, there\u2019s another question about the uniformed military, which is, there has been notice since the beginning of full-scale fighting between Russia and Ukraine, in February of 2022, that warfare is shifting and that tanks and aircraft and ships are all much more vulnerable than they used to be to very cheap and very smart drones. The Ukrainians lead the world in this technology. The United States seems to have been hit by Iranian drones, and fighting in 2026, four years after the beginning of the Ukraine war, seems not to have been ready for that.<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah, our entire model of defense right now is not relevant to the current era of warfare. We\u2019ve been shooting down $30,000 Shahed drones coming from Iran with $1 million missile interceptors. The math on that just doesn\u2019t work, right? We have a huge military and a huge defense budget, but even at that, our adversaries are at an advantage if they can just send swarm after swarm after swarm of cheap, attritable drones or missiles at us while we spend 10 to 20 times the cost of those same systems to knock them out. That\u2019s not good for the taxpayer, that\u2019s not good for our service members, and it\u2019s not good value for the money we\u2019re investing. Which is exactly why a $1.5 trillion defense budget, which is almost a 50 percent increase in our defense budget, is absolutely absurd right now, especially if it\u2019s not coupled with dramatic defense reform to change how we\u2019re buying things, how we\u2019re fielding things, and making sure that we\u2019re buying things that are actually cheaper and more effective.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth have had a year and a half since coming into office to remake the upper reaches of the military the way they want, and they seem to have done that in a very ambitious and aggressive way: firing lots of generals, hiring lots of generals. And they now have the high command of their wish. How do you assess the quality and merit of the high command that Hegseth and Trump have built?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>So I think there\u2019s a really important point that I\u2019ve been trying to make, and I\u2019ll reiterate here. It\u2019s not that they\u2019re moving troops around or shifting troop footprints or firing generals and admirals. That actually is within the purview of the commander in chief and our political leadership to put the right people in place\u2014if it\u2019s done appropriately and for the right reasons. Right? I\u2019m not just presumptively opposed to moving troops around Europe or prepositioning them and making sure that we\u2019re responding to threats, that we\u2019re keeping our people safe, or that if a general or admiral isn\u2019t performing, that we get somebody in place who does perform.<\/p>\n

When it becomes my business, when it becomes Congress\u2019s business, is when that\u2019s being done for political reasons, or someone\u2019s being targeted for their race or their gender, or they\u2019re making these decisions based on political loyalty and not competency. And it appears as though many of those decisions are being made for those improper reasons, right? Shifting 5,000 troops out of Germany, right? Maybe we need to do that. Maybe we need to put troops into the Baltics, into Poland, into Romania, because we want to move things into the Eastern flank. But that\u2019s not what they\u2019re doing. They\u2019re moving them out because Donald Trump is pissed at the chancellor of Germany because he felt personally slighted, so he\u2019s making a decision to move a brigade of troops around. Same thing with the almost 30 generals and admirals who have been fired without cause, without reason. Some are out there dismissed, shown the door, sometimes with 24 hours\u2019 notice, and no explanation to Congress as to why that\u2019s happening other than a perceived lack of loyalty to Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>One of the most mysterious of those shifts, and perhaps you can share some insight into this, was: An admiral was removed from command over the forces in the Caribbean area shortly before there was a major change in the way the United States approached drug smuggling, where boats are to be blown out of the water summarily on the basis of who knows what kind of information. It looks as if\u2014and I don\u2019t know this, but you may\u2014that the admiral was removed because he had objected to these strikes. Can you shed any light on that story?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>I\u2019ve been trying to get information on that, and information right now is hard to come by, but I agree with you. It appears as though\u2014this is what\u2019s called Southcom, Southern Command, right? Because the world is divided in the geographic regions called \u201ccombatant commands\u201d: Central Command, Africa Command, European Command, Southern Command, Northern Command, all of which have responsibility over those areas of the world, as you know, David, and they\u2019re the ones who do the war fighting. So when there are wars that are being fought or contingency operations, it\u2019s those combatant commanders. So what makes the dismissal of the Southern Command most suspicious is: (a) it happened right after the Caribbean operation started, and (b) this person was in office in their position for less than a year. So this is an out-of-cycle dismissal. So something happened here, what we\u2019re trying to get answers to, that led to this dismissal of this person right after they took the job and right after we launched a highly legally suspect operation. That, in my view, actually has been a violation of the law of war in several instances, including a shooting on a vessel that was clearly a shipwrecked vessel with noncombatants clinging to the side of it who were targeted and killed.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>So you don\u2019t have conclusive information yet on that removal.<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>No, I don\u2019t. Same thing with the chief of staff of the Army, Randy George, also fired without cause, overnight, given almost no notice. Somebody who was in office before Donald Trump came to office and replaced, it seems, without any valid reason.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Do you have any suspicion\u2014or I should say, we all have suspicions. Do you have any basis for suspicion that Donald Trump is trying to build a more politically pliable military?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>No, clearly that\u2019s happening. Clearly it\u2019s happening. I think it\u2019s objectively true, right? They\u2019re holding campaign rallies at military bases with campaign apparel and gear. You have the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, literally this past week campaigning for a congressional campaign while sitting as the secretary of defense. It\u2019s unprecedented. It\u2019s a clear a breach of the lines between being a civil servant, a political appointee of our biggest agency, and in my view, the most consequential because we\u2019re carrying out our national-defense mission and responsible for the lives of millions of service members, taking time and actually going to campaign and stump for a pro-Trump member of Congress. It\u2019s crazy. It\u2019s crazy. Those lines have been more than blurred. They\u2019ve been erased by this administration, and the consequence of that is several-fold. No. 1: What is so precious to me is that our military is a standard bearer, should be a standard bearer, of our values and should reflect the diversity of this country. We have civilian-military divide\u2014we have civilian control, rather, of our military, which is precious\u2014but our country has historically held our military in high esteem and had great confidence in it because it\u2019s nonpolitical, it\u2019s nonpartisan, it is run by career officers who have come up through that nonpartisan system. And it draws from our entire nation: Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Republican, Democrat, independent, urban, rural. It looks like this country. And the moment it stops doing those things\u2014being nonpartisan, drawing from the diversity of this country\u2014it will be the moment that it does not have the trust of our nation and will no longer be the venerable institution that it has been for generations.<\/p>\n

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Frum: <\/strong>Do you worry about a scenario, and how confident are you that the military would resist this scenario, where President Trump announces a few days or weeks before the 2026 elections: He\u2019s got reports that antifa are planning to attack voting stations in all the districts that Republicans held but are afraid of losing, and he needs to deploy the military to protect voting against antifa and also to do a really thorough check of the identifications of anyone who looks to him as if they might be suspicious, might be antifa, might be an illegal voter\u2014he just wants to have the military backing up the job because he doesn\u2019t trust local authorities to do that? If that kind of thought came into his head, how confident are you that the military would find a way not to do it?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>You know, my job is not to have confidence. My job is to prepare for every contingency, every possibility, and to be ready to defend our country, defend our institutions and our democracy. Right? Hope is not a plan, David. I\u2019ve learned to listen to the president, to listen to what he says, because he\u2019s tried to do many of the things that he\u2019s floated trial balloons for or said he\u2019s gonna do. And I think nothing is out of the realm of possibility for this man.<\/p>\n

Which is exactly why last November I joined with several of my fellow veterans, and we filmed a video that has since been called the \u201cDon\u2019t Give Up the Ship\u201d video. But we simply reminded our service members of their obligation to follow the law and to abide by the Constitution. Which, you know, for folks in the military and veterans out there, there is nothing remarkable at all about that video, right? Because that\u2019s Military 101. You get drilled in that in boot camp. You learn about it throughout your career. It\u2019s a part of daily military life and you\u2019re deployed when you\u2019re at war. Nothing remarkable about it. But it did lead our president to threaten to have us executed and then tried for treason, in that order, by the way. So he messed up the order.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Or not.<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah, or not. But you know, this is a man who has threatened to kill the families and children of terrorists, which is a violation of the law of war; who threatened a couple of weeks ago to wipe an entire civilization off the planet, right? Like, none of this is normal. And we have to\u2014my obligation as a member of Congress now is to make sure that we\u2019re ready for anything that might be thrown our way.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>So I want to repeat the question. You made the video. You restated what is the clear law. The president went into a fury. Legal action was threatened against the people who made the video. So how confident are you that the military would do what you said, which is to refuse an illegal order if it came from President Trump?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>What I\u2019m doing is I\u2019m trying to prepare what we call in the military, \u201cprepare the battlefield.\u201d I\u2019m trying to send a message. This isn\u2019t based on confidence\u2014or lack of confidence, for that matter. But what I\u2019m trying to do is send a message and start a national conversation around what the obligation of our service members is. And maybe this is best illustrated with a very short story, if I may.<\/p>\n

When I was getting my platoon ready for the invasion of Iraq, my platoon of paratroopers with 82nd Airborne Division\u2014this was March of 2003\u2014I was responsible for this platoon of paratroopers. And I had studied military leadership. I had studied the law of war. I had studied the Sand Creek Massacre, the My Lai Massacre, when military leadership failed and terrible things happened at war. So what I knew was that, again, hope was not a plan, that I had to prepare my paratroopers. So I actually rented the video Platoon<\/em>, and I took all my paratroopers out of their rooms in their barracks, and I brought them down to the common room in the barracks, and I showed them the scene in the movie Platoon<\/em> that depicted the My Lai Massacre. And then I led them in a discussion of how that happens: How do young men who come from places around this country end up doing something like that? That\u2019s so antithetical to their humanity, that is such a clear violation of their obligation, their oath and the law? How does that happen? How does, as Herman Melville often talked about, how he wrote about in Moby Dick<\/em>, how do you become the monsters that you\u2019re chasing in those instances and lose sight of who you are and where you come from?<\/p>\n

So we had that discussion, and then we did<\/em> go to war, several weeks later. And my platoon was faced with fear, with uncertainty, with the loss of their friends, not knowing who the enemy was, where the enemy was. And months, months went on, and we grinded it out and the fatigue and the fear and the chaos just came down on us month after month. But my platoon did the right thing. We abided by our oath in the Constitution, and we came back with honor. And I don\u2019t think that was an accident. I think it\u2019s because we had those conversations, that I laid the groundwork to protect ourselves. And that\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to do right now, is lay the groundwork, have that conversation, and get people ready for: What are they going to do in that moment where they have to make a split-second decision that will determine whether the law\u2019s followed or not, whether they pull a trigger or not? Because I\u2019m not going to be standing there right next to those folks when they\u2019re asked to make that decision. But what I can do is talk to them now and start that national conversation. And that\u2019s what we\u2019ve done.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Let\u2019s revert to a topic we touched on before, which is a place where war crimes may very well be happening even as we speak, and that is on the Caribbean Sea.<\/p>\n

Now, you\u2019re both a warrior and a lawyer, and as you just said, you\u2019re a moviegoer. So you know that one of the biggest themes of American film is the rogue cop who sees that ordinary laws are no use against the most nefarious criminals, especially drug dealers, and goes outside the law to do a kind of primitive justice by killing people who the law can\u2019t otherwise reach. And that\u2019s, I think, what the government of the United States would like us to believe is happening on the Caribbean, that Here are all these terrible people doing terrible harm to Americans, smuggling the drugs that are killing Americans through fentanyl, and the ordinary channels of law just aren\u2019t equal to the challenge<\/em>. And so they\u2019re taking the law into their own hands, just like the rogue cops in all those movies that you might have rented, and just killing first and trusting the people to see they\u2019ve done the right thing.<\/p>\n

And if Hollywood is any judge, Americans often go along with that way of thinking, at least when they\u2019re at the cinema. I don\u2019t know how they\u2019d go along with it in real life. What\u2019s your answer? What does the answer do? Let\u2019s suppose that most of the people, or some of the people, or many of the people being killed genuinely are engaged in the smuggling, trafficking of drugs. Why not just kill them?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Well, you know, there is this cinematic myth of vigilantism, which plays out well on the screen. Like, it looks good. It feels good. I like those movies too. They\u2019re kind of fun to watch, right? And they viscerally feel good. The problem is: That\u2019s not who we are as a country. We\u2019re a country of rule of law, and we all benefit from rule of law. \u2019Cause vigilantism seems fine until you\u2019re on the wrong side of it. Because who gets to decide who\u2019s right or wrong? Who gets to decide who the judge, jury, and executioner is? Good thing is that in democracies, we have a system in place where you\u2019re presumed innocent. We have a system where there\u2019s a process to protect the innocent and adjudicate the guilty, that we\u2019re not a society of vigilantism, or we shouldn\u2019t be, outside of what happens in Hollywood. So that\u2019s No. 1.<\/p>\n

No. 2 is: There\u2019s no doubt that fentanyl is destroying our communities. As a parent of young kids, it keeps me awake at night, this idea that my child could be one mistake away from death. And there\u2019s no shortage of parents in my community who I represent who have suffered that. And we absolutely need to stop it. We need to stop it. But we need a real strategy to stop it, one that actually still follows our laws, that\u2019s still consistent to who we are with a democracy.<\/p>\n

And I also want to be really clear that what\u2019s happening in the Caribbean is not stopping it, because they\u2019re not blowing up fentanyl. That\u2019s point No. 3. They\u2019re literally not blowing up fentanyl. They\u2019re blowing up marijuana boats, right? So the price of marijuana is going up, but fentanyl doesn\u2019t come by boats. It doesn\u2019t come over the Caribbean Sea, and it doesn\u2019t come from the places in Venezuela where those boats are originating from.<\/p>\n

What is going on is this administration wants a bunch of videos of boats being blown up so they can post them in real time on TV and say, Hey, look\u2014we\u2019re the ones getting serious about combating fentanyl<\/em>. But the fact is: They\u2019re not actually blowing up fentanyl. That is still flowing into our community. So how about we actually get serious about this and have a real counter-fentanyl program that addresses the flow of it, which is coming over land into the United States, and addresses the demand and the education side?<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve done back in Colorado is: I\u2019ve started a series of webinars with parents, teachers, students where I invite the FBI in, the DEA in, and education organizations, and we\u2019re doing educational webinars and forums that teach folks about the dangers of fentanyl, how to detect it, how to stop it, how to prevent it, at the same time as I\u2019ve remained committed to a real counter-drug program in the United States.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Do you have any estimation of the number of people who have been killed in the Caribbean by U.S. strikes? And do you have any sense of how many of them are actually engaged in what they\u2019re accused of? And do you have any doubts that there are people who have been killed who are not engaged in the activity they\u2019re accused of?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>I don\u2019t have the exact number, but we don\u2019t know. And that is the problem. Actually, that question proves my point. We don\u2019t know whether they are drug runners or not. Some of them are; we do know that. I\u2019m not saying that drug boats haven\u2019t been blown up. What I\u2019m saying is we just can\u2019t go blowing up boats without some kind of system in place to make sure these are the people who we want to go after (a), (b) we\u2019re not a country that just does things without making sure that we\u2019re following our own laws, and (c) we actually aren\u2019t dealing with fentanyl. That\u2019s another key point here. We\u2019re not stopping the flow. And we\u2019re trying to let people believe that we are, is the biggest problem. And that\u2019s doing a disservice to everybody.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>So the person who\u2019s sort of the command chair for these decisions is Secretary Hegseth. I hope everyone has seen the fascinating videos of your encounters with him. But in a dispassionate moment when you\u2019re not sparring with your favorite sparring partner, can you give us an estimation of the job Secretary Hegseth is doing? I mean, Saturday Night Live<\/em> makes fun of him. Is there anything good to be said about him?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>No, I mean, I can\u2019t think of something, which is saying something, actually, right? Because I\u2019m not\u2014listen, I don\u2019t relish any of this. I don\u2019t feel good about the fact. This isn\u2019t just a game for me. I don\u2019t relish sparring with folks. I\u2019m not doing it for cinematic effect. I\u2019m doing it because I\u2019m deeply disturbed by the conduct of this administration and department. I don\u2019t believe that there is leadership. I think leadership is MIA from the Department of Defense, which is responsible for the lives of millions of service members, who are sometimes at great risk daily because of the missions and the things that this administration is choosing to do. And we have, by all accounts, a secretary of defense who\u2019s unqualified, has never run an organization anywhere near this size or complexity, and spends most of his time performing stunts, taking joyrides in helicopters and F-16s, and filming workout videos of himself instead of actually doing the day-to-day job of the really hard day-to-day work of running a department like this. Right?<\/p>\n

But last interaction I had with him, he chuckled mid interaction and he said, I know what you\u2019re doing. You\u2019re just playing gotcha like you do on TV, all the times I see you on TV<\/em>. And I thought to myself, This guy\u2019s watching me on TV?<\/em> Right? Like, yeah, maybe I like living rent-free in the guy\u2019s head, but I would rather other things be living in this guy\u2019s head, like: How do we run the department? How do we reform the DOD to be relevant to 2026? How do we actually execute a war in Iran that is successful? Those are all the things that should be occupying this guy\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>You\u2019ve got an important role in Democratic Party candidate recruitment. One of the questions about the Democratic Party in \u201926 and even more in \u201928 is: Is there a candidate-quality problem? Are forces that are sort of outside the party pushing far-left choices upon the party, or turning seats that are potentially winnable into seats that are less winnable? Is that something you worry about, and what measures do you have in place to safeguard yourself if you are worried?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah, I\u2019m worried about it a little bit, right? I\u2019m the, as you said, the recruitment co-chair. So it\u2019s a big part of my job to find what I call that next generation of servant leaders. People are going to step up because if you want to change culture, if you want to change policy, if you want to change any organization and move it in the right direction\u2014in my case, the Democratic Party, which I think has been moving in the wrong direction, if I want to get that back on the rails\u2014you got to get the right people to do it. It\u2019s all about the people.<\/p>\n

Right? So I\u2019ve been going, you know, throughout this country, traveling, sitting in front of, you know, people in their living rooms and bars, and having meetings and zooms and endless calls, finding these folks and identifying them. And I can tell you, we have an incredible, incredible group of candidates. So by and large, we have amazing folks. There are some instances where I think there are people who are out of step with their community, that, you know, aren\u2019t going to be able to flip a seat in the way that we want to flip a seat.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s for primary voters to decide. I\u2019m pro-primary. I think that\u2019s\u2014it tests candidates. It makes them better. And we are a party that embraces that. I actually had my own really tough primary in my first election; it made me a better candidate. I don\u2019t shy away from that.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Well, let me ask you a specific question. So this is not somebody\u2019s who\u2019s in the congressional system, but the mayor of Seattle was caught on video speaking of businesses that were thinking of leaving Seattle because the taxes were too high. And she said, Well, bye<\/em>. And the whole world has now seen that video, and it\u2019s created an image of the Democratic Party\u2019s attitude toward business and job creation. That\u2019s not your problem. She\u2019s not running for Congress, but how do you protect your congressional intake from people who say things like that and brand the Democratic Party as one that\u2019s hostile to job creation and business?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s actually really easy. And that is: Most of the people in the districts that I\u2019m recruiting for\u2014these are, you know, red rural areas\u2014don\u2019t give a damn what\u2019s happening in New York City, in Seattle, in Boston. You know, that\u2019s an easy one. It\u2019s like, I don\u2019t know why people are so obsessed with mayors and members of Congress and districts on the coasts when, my community, what we\u2019re struggling with is we don\u2019t\u2014we\u2019re not getting enough farm-irrigation money. We\u2019re not ready for wildfire season. We got too much lead in our drinking water in our schools. Our bridges are about to collapse. And by the way, you know, 100,000 people in my district are about ready to lose their health care.<\/p>\n

So, you know, I let other folks worry about, you know, politicians thousands of miles away that are saying things that I wouldn\u2019t say and maybe I don\u2019t agree with. I\u2019m just going to be relentlessly focused on my constituents and what we\u2019re trying to do in our community.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s leadership, that\u2019s what people need. So that\u2019s an easy one.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>And one of the things I read you say about this was, you were interested in people with broad life experience that took them outside their comfort zone. Could you expand on what you mean by that and why that\u2019s important?<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah, so, you know, generally recruiting people who have come from outside of politics, right? America knows that our politics are broken. I mean, I know that, right? It doesn\u2019t take a genius to observe that our system is not working. So generally, electing career politicians is not the answer. And people want somebody different. People want to know that somebody has actually done something outside of politics successfully that\u2019s transcended political boundaries, right?<\/p>\n

Have you built a business? Have you met a payroll? Have you led a military unit? Have you been in charge of a sheriff\u2019s office or a police department? Have you run a Parent-Teacher Organization or a community organization or a Rotary Club of Democrats, Republicans, independents? Right? Have you actually accomplished something that has brought people together, that has found common ground and built something and achieved something? And that can look like a lot of different things, but that those are the candidates who not only can win elections, but more importantly, who can actually do what we need to have done, and that is: rebuild our country, bring us back together, and be pragmatic. That is the bottom line for me. Those are the people who I\u2019m looking for. And the good news is, they are stepping up in droves. This class is potentially an amazing class of servant leaders that can help break the fever that\u2019s gripping this country and move us in a better direction.<\/p>\n

Frum: <\/strong>Congressman Jason Crowe, thank you so much for talking to me today. Bye-bye.<\/p>\n

Crow: <\/strong>Yeah, thanks for having me, David. Goodbye.<\/p>\n

[Music<\/em>]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Frum:<\/strong>Thanks so much to Congressman Jason Crow for joining me this week on The David Frum Show<\/em>. As mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is James Boswell\u2019s [The<\/em>] Life of Samuel Johnson<\/em>, a classic of biography and of English literature. This is a book that has probably entered your consciousness and your vocabulary, even if you\u2019ve never read it or haven\u2019t read it in a long time, or have barely even heard of it.<\/p>\n

Sayings from the book include, \u201cWhen a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,\u201d or that a second marriage is the \u201ctriumph of hope over experience,\u201d or, \u201cNo man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.\u201d Chances are, you\u2019ve heard or maybe even repeated these sayings without ever having read the book. Yet the book repays a revisit or a visit in the first place if you\u2019ve never read it, because it says something, reveals something profound about the importance of literacy.<\/p>\n

And one of the great themes of this segment of the program has been what we are losing as literacy recedes from our culture. And to understand the point I\u2019m driving at, to understand what this book represents and what is lost as we lose contact with books like this, I want to begin by citing a famous negative review of the book by Thomas Macaulay, the great English historian of the early 19th century.<\/p>\n

He wrote in 1831, very scathingly, not so much about the book but about the author of the book, James Boswell. He called him all kinds of names and described what Macaulay regarded as Boswell\u2019s mental feebleness and all of his other faults of character. And then he wrapped up by saying this: \u201cLogic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him,\u201d that is Boswell. \u201cHe had, indeed, a quick observation and retentive memory. [These] qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, the reason Macaulay talks that way is because the character of James Boswell in Boswell\u2019s book is, indeed, revealed in very unflattering ways. He doesn\u2019t quite address some of the things that he shows in his diaries\u2014his alcoholism, his sexual compulsiveness\u2014but he does reveal a needy ego and a kind of naive sensibility. He makes himself a very small person and shows himself in all kinds of ridiculous situations in order to make Johnson, his subject, Samuel Johnson, look larger and more heroic.<\/p>\n

But of course, if you read the book carefully and think about it, you realize that all of this is an act of artifice. All of this is a work of art, and the apparent spontaneity and naturalness of the book, the sense that you\u2019re simply overhearing Johnson in conversation, that\u2019s a literary construction achieved through great effort and skill, not a happy accident of a fool\u2019s compulsive note-taking.<\/p>\n

Johnson is the author of the epigrams, but Boswell is very much the co-author. Did Johnson really say each of these things exactly in the polished, fine form that Boswell records them? Or did Boswell improve them? Did he compress the setup for some of the great sayings? Did he cast the spotlight in just the right way? Did he make, as a work of art, the rest of the scene more shadowy to make the central figure brighter? And of course, he did. Just as Dr. Watson is humbled to make Sherlock Holmes better, just as Plato humbles himself to make Socrates look better, so Boswell does the same literary construction to make his hero, Johnson, look better.<\/p>\n

Now, as you read the book and reread the book, you notice that this is going on, and you realize how wrong Macaulay is in his naive reading that just takes the book as a straightforward matter and doesn\u2019t think about how is it made, how do we know it, how are we encountering it. The act of reading is an act of thinking about how the subject matter, the topic matter we are reading, was created in the first place. It makes us more critical consumers of what we enjoy. It forces us to reckon with something that if we purely subsist on short-term form video, we will not reckon. The camera always lies. The narrator is always part of the action. The narrator\u2019s job is to teach us to mistrust the narrator, and thus to teach us how to read, and by teaching us how to read, teach us how to think.<\/p>\n

When we lose our literacy, we lose our cognitive skills. We lose our critical judgment. We lose our distance from the world. We lose our ability to understand through the power of the instruction not to trust.<\/p>\n

Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show<\/em>. If you are minded to support the work of the program, you can so valuably help us by sharing it on whatever platforms you use, subscribing to The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s YouTube channel.<\/p>\n

And as ever, if you\u2019re minded to actually give material support to the program, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic<\/em>. That helps the work of all of my colleagues. Thanks so much for watching and listening to this week\u2019s David Frum Show<\/em>. See you next week. Bye-bye.<\/p>\n

Read more Today\u2019s Atlantic Trivia: Portmanteaus<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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