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Ronald Reagan, invoking the 17th-century Puritan John Winthrop, once compared America to “a shining city on a hill.” This image of visibility and power, my colleague David Frum writes in a new essay, “imposed extra moral responsibility on the city dwellers.” In the next Trump era, David argues, Reagan’s vision of America will disappear: “The hilltop will become a height from which to exercise arrogant control over those who occupy the lower slopes and valleys.”

I called David to chat about the Trump administration’s zero-sum view of the world during Donald Trump’s first term and what to expect from the president-elect’s approach to foreign relationships come January.

A Powerful Teacher

Isabel Fattal: You write that Trump’s version of “America First” is not exactly isolationist but instead predatory. How so?

David Frum: “America First” hearkens back to the 1940s, when it was the slogan about keeping America out of the Second World War. “America First” as a phrase is often associated with the idea of isolationism. But Trump is not an isolationist. He is very keen on involvement with foreign countries. He has business in foreign countries. He collects all kinds of benefits from foreign countries, for himself and his family and his businesses. What he is interested in is a more predatory approach to foreign countries, where countries pay the United States for military protection, and where trade is organized in a way in which the United States wins and other countries lose.

Isabel: How might Trump use his relationships with foreign countries as a way to pay off the money he owes in civil penalties for defamation and fraud?

David: Trump has about half a billion dollars in legal penalties over his head, and he has posted some bonds to meet those penalties. But if he loses his cases on appeal, he will have to pay. It isn’t that Trump doesn’t ultimately have the resources, but a lot of his resources are locked up in buildings that his family has owned for a long time and would be subject to high capital-gains taxes. One of the things that Trump might do is look to foreign sources to help him with that problem. And a lot of people around the world with a lot of resources are eager to help him.

Isabel: You note in your piece that the Biden administration maintained most of the protectionist measures it inherited from Trump. Where do the past eight years leave America in its approach to global trade?

David: If Donald Trump was the most protectionist president since the Depression, Joe Biden was the second-most-protectionist president since the Depression. The Biden administration wanted to do a very aggressive industrial policy. The so-called Inflation Reduction Act had a lot of protectionist measures in it. They kept most of the Trump tariffs in place and added some of their own. They did no trade-expanding negotiations, unlike, for example, their predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush. The United States has not completed a major trade-expanding agreement since Obama signed the free-trade agreements with Colombia and Panama.

Isabel: Let’s talk a bit about how the American people feel. You write in your essay that Americans who experienced the Truman era understood that “America alone meant America weakened.” How has an ingrained understanding of the importance of expanding global trade “curdled,” as you write, “into regrets and doubts”?

David: The Great Depression was an exceedingly nasty experience, and everybody who lived through it learned some powerful lessons, including that trade barriers made depressions worse and bad depressions easily turned into deadly world wars. The people who recovered from that world wanted to do things in a different way.

Isabel: In the absence of firsthand experience, do you think Americans will ever come to value the “city on a hill” idea again?

David: There are lots of ways to learn things, but direct personal experience is a very powerful teacher. Those experiences of the 1930s and ’40s have faded into time. Meanwhile, Americans have had new experiences of the shock of NAFTA and China. It’s very easy for people to blame foreigners for difficulties at home, and to forget the deeper history that explains why we need to grow together in prosperity, that the prosperity of some doesn’t come at the expense of others.

Related:

• America’s lonely future
• What Europe fears

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• David Frum: The sound of fear on air
• Democratic states’ new anti-Trump strategy
• The 10 books that made us think the most this year

Today’s News

1. Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance unit, was fatally shot in a premeditated attack in Manhattan this morning, according to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. The suspect fled the scene and is not in custody.
2. French Prime Minister Michel Barnier was ousted after French lawmakers passed a no-confidence motion. His successor will be selected by President Emmanuel Macron.
3. A majority of the Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical about overturning a Tennessee law that denies gender-affirming care to transgender minors.

Dispatches

• Work in Progress: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a bellwether for some of the most powerful trends in politics and society, Derek Thompson writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

McNeal

By Ayad Akhtar

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world. Soon after, a software developer asked it to provide instructions for removing a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR, and to write these instructions in the style of the King James Bible. ChatGPT complied: “And the Lord said, ‘Verily I say unto thee, seek not to put thy peanut butter sandwiches in thy VCR, for it is not a suitable place for such things.’”

Many of us read these results with wonder and amazement and then went about our business. Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and playwright, started thinking about a new play.

— Jeremy Strong

Read the full play.

More From The Atlantic

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• The case against despair in Trump’s second term

Culture Break

Watch. Wicked (in theaters now) is a musical blockbuster that didn’t play by the rules, Shirley Li writes. It makes the case that audiences aren’t so tired of the genre after all.

Read. These five essay and short-story collections are easy to read at your own pace.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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