'Anger is coming' after Trump Republican's midterm losses;

America got hit by a blue tsunami last week, but does that democratic takeover of Capitol Hill truly bode well for Canada? And to discuss, we're now joined by David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic. David Frum, thanks so much for joining us on the West Block. Hope you got some sleep this week after an interesting week in U.S. politics. I don't think we can sleep through this. I think this is too dramatic. Okay, well, we'll try not to put you to sleep during this this interview. I want to start by asking you, if I may, what... The new political landscape in the United States could potentially mean for Canadians, many of whom, of course, like Americans, are also worried about the growing cost of living for many of the same reasons, including President Trump's tariffs. We've heard already from some Democrats who say, look, when they take control of Capitol Hill in January, one of the first orders of business will be to reverse some of these tariffs against Canada. But how realistic? Is that, in your view, you know, given the math, given the president already talking about using his veto powers to put away anything he doesn't like? Well, the House and Senate by themselves do not have power with the numbers they have to force a repeal of the tariffs. Remember, Congress has authority over tariffs. Congress has delegated over the years some of that authority to the president. The Supreme Court said President Trump has overinterpreted these delegations, but still he's got some delegated power. And Congress can't simply order him not to use the power he's got or that they've given him. So on just a strict math, legal point of view, they can't force a change. But the politics force the change. Donald Trump saw a collapse in his party support in the American South. They lost the Senate seat in South Carolina. They lost the Senate seat in Texas. They may be on the way to losing the Senate seat in Mississippi. They lost, of course, the Senate seat in Georgia. These states are very bound to the world economy. Mississippi is where Gulfport, the big hub for the Mississippi export trade and import trade is. Mississippi gets a fifth of all of its jobs are supported by international trade. And Canada is Mississippi's top trade partner. Texas, in the same way, very global state. Georgia, side of the Atlanta airport. South Carolina, where the huge BMW plant is. So the message here is, if Republicans took for granted their base in the South and the West, that taking for granted was put at risk by these crazy tariffs. Kansas, a farm state, hit hard by the tariffs. President Trump's tariff mania devoured the Republican voting base. So that, more than formal action by the House and Senate, is what will, I think, focus minds. Yeah, interesting. Curious as well to get your thoughts on President Trump's response to the midterm results. You know, a lot of people, yourself included, had voiced concerns about whether he might lash out, whether he might try to deny the election result again. Instead, you know, we saw a president come out just hours later. I mean, he accepted the result, though he took no responsibility for it, and then started talking about his new ballroom project and other construction projects that he's doing in Washington, D.C. I was sort of wondering, like, reminding myself, what are the stages of grief again? Like, is anger coming? Is it, like, what are you expecting from a lame duck President Trump? Anger is coming. So on Friday, President Trump announced that he was firing his existing chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who is a kind of Florida classic Republican operative, and replacing her with Stephen Miller, one of the most ideological people in the West Wing. And what I read by the choice of Miller is this is a choice to resist and defy subpoenas from the House and Senate committees. House and Senate will be asking for a lot of information about corruption, about insider trading, about who cut off information to Ukraine. And the White House has the option of complying with those subpoenas, as it is legally bound to do, or looking for ways to fight them and defy them and stonewall them. You pick Stephen Miller if stonewalling is going to be your strategy. Yeah. So you mentioned the chief of staff is out. A lot of people also wondering about Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, and whether his days might be numbered. We're expecting a Republican-led effort in the House this coming week to impeach him over his support for the war in Iran. But President Trump has said Pete Hegseth isn't going anywhere. What are you expecting? Well, the basis for impeaching Pete Hegseth would be not anything to do with Iran, which is, that's policy. But these attacks on ships or boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, where without any regard to any of American laws, any laws of war, the United States has been killing people on the high seas with no process of any kind. And some of these people may have been carrying drugs, but maybe not all of them. We don't know. There are stories that some of them were killed while trying to give themselves up. So that would be the basis for an impeachment effort. My guess is that Hegseth doesn't last that long, in part because he's not to blame for the decision to go to war with Iran, but the method in which the war has been carried out is very much reflective of Hegseth. The United States has burned through its stockpile of its most important, precious, and high-technology munitions, the munitions that would be used to defend, say, Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. That stockpile has been massively depleted to fight Iran, which is not a peer country. Iran could have been... dealt with by using much more sophisticated weapons if the president had the country behind him and Congress behind him. He didn't, so he went for a low-risk strategy, burning through the most advanced weapons. That's the tactical decision. It is very much Hegseth's fault. That's not an impeachment question, but that is a resignation question. Interested to get your take on as it pertains to how we should interpret the result that we saw from these midterms, you know, particularly from a Canadian perspective, trying to kind of gauge the temperature and the political mood in the United States. Was this a rejection of MAGA? Is this the beginning of the end of Trumpism? Or is that sort of over interpreting things in your view? It's maybe under-interpreted things. When the roof falls down the way it's done, when a Republican president sees his party lose in Mississippi and South Carolina and Texas and Kansas, that's a complete repudiation of almost everything this administration has done. The question is, what have they done that anybody likes? Do they like, no one likes the corruption. No one likes the tariffs. Of course. Very few people like, even if you agree that Iran had to be dealt with, the way the war has been prosecuted has been so incompetent and expensive. So, they're in trouble on every front, and what is going on now is a game inside the Trump administration, where people are trying to say that only one thing was to blame, and that was the thing that I wasn't responsible, not the decisions I was responsible for. They were conducting, in order to crack down on immigration, roadside executions of American citizens. And when they were challenged on the roadside executions, the answer was, well, the man had a gun in his back pocket. That was a legal gun, and you guys, you're in favor of the right of citizens to carry permits, to carry weapons. Maybe that may be shocking to Canadians, but in the United States, it is legal for a person to carry a gun in a holster on his side. You don't get killed by the side of the road without due process for that, but that's what this administration has done and has defended doing. As someone who's worked in U.S. politics for so long, you know, we know you... Left the Republicans, essentially, after President Trump showed up on the scene in 2016. How are you feeling on a personal level after everything that's happened this past week? I speak for so many people around the democratic world. I deeply believe in the idea of America. I don't think the democratic world can cohere and defend itself against as many dangers and adversaries without American leadership. But the damage that has been done to American leadership is not something that they can simply wish away and undo. Trump has happened twice. Anything that has happened twice, you have to plan that it could happen three times. So all around the democratic world, people are having to make arrangements that are not the ideal arrangements, not the optimal arrangements, but the arrangements that you have to make if you've lost your confidence in the former leader. And one of the things that Americans, I keep saying to Americans over and again, you can't be a leader if you don't have followers. And if your followers don't trust you, you won't have followers. David Frum, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. Thank you. Bye-bye.