Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator.

I'm delighted to be joined today by David Frum, who is senior editor at the Atlantic,

and a very influential commentator on American politics today.

And we're going to be discussing the dangers of a Trump presidency and the future of America.

David, I saw you said on Twitter yesterday that Trump is like a magic mirror in a fairy tale,

and that when you look at it,

it reveals who you really are. And at the risk of being too personal, I thought to start by

ask you, when you look at the Donald Trump magic mirror, who do you think you are?

Well, it doesn't matter who I think I am. It matters what I would think I am. But what we've all

discovered from this is what really matters to us. Many of my friends on the

conservative side have discovered that bothering liberals matters to them more than holding

together the Western Alliance, preserving the institutions of American democracy, and preserving

the integrity of American government against corruption.

And while under most circumstances, I too would have been happy to see the entitled candidate Hillary Clinton lose on election night, what the price of that defeat is so serious, not just

for the present generation of Americans, but for the future, and not just for Americans,

but for the world, that bothering liberals seems like a very small puny and actually rather

tawdry pleasure in comparison.

Yes.

I suppose what I was getting at is that on the left and the central, whatever terms

are right, there seems to be a sort of call for resistance, and I think you've made this call yourself, and it's an understanding. I don't use that language, because I think it borrows a lot

of moral prestige from people who paid, who risk much more than we are called on to do. This is not

...