Can Republicans Quit Trump?

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on how President Trump will behave after suffering a humiliating defeat in the 2026 midterms. David warns that the final two years of Trump’s term could be filled with multiple constitutional crises.

Then David is joined by Bob Inglis, a former Republican representative, to discuss what it’s like to lose an election, the mindset of the defeated Republicans in 2026, and whether Republicans will do some real soul-searching after being wiped out by a blue wave. Frum and Inglis also talk about the future of faith-based politics in the GOP.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the novel All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, a story of a German family living out the end of the Second World War.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Bob Inglis: And I believe that’s what we’re going to see over the next two years. I think that the product is going to be so grotesque that Republicans say, Oh, how did we ever do that? And, Let’s find something new. And it is all about finding that new presentation that is able to say, No, no; we can actually help people, and we won’t just be about power and transactional nature. We’ll be about actually caring for people.

David Frum: Welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.  My guest this week is former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis, and we’ll be discussing the experience of defeat and what it does to a person to go through the kind of defeat that so many Republican members of Congress, so many Republican officeholders, have undergone in the past days.

This week’s book will be a novel by the German writer Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing, a story of a German family living out the end of the Second World War on its estate in East Prussia and the imminent destruction of the world they knew.

But before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the world Americans face after the election of 2026.

The question that I think will haunt many of us is, given the new political facts in Washington: What is President Trump’s next move? How will President Trump respond to the seeming closing in of the walls and the seeming constraint on his power? Over the past decade, Americans have seen that again and again—when Donald Trump is faced with some form of constraint, he acts out in some way. His power to act out has been reduced, but not eliminated. What might he do?

And one of the reasons this is so concerning to me is I think that—I include myself in this—we’ve never had enough imagination of what Donald Trump is capable of. Who thought, as you worried about the second Trump presidency, that roadside executions of peaceful protesters might happen? Who imagined that the United States would find itself on the verge of a war with Denmark or with Canada? These things seem to come out of nowhere, and they came out of constraints on the president’s ego and will. Now, they came at a time when he had the backing of majorities in both houses of Congress, and so a certain amount of impunity. And although one would like to believe that a new Congress and some constraints on his power will make him behave better, in the first presidency—when he lost the House of Representatives in 2018—he behaved worse. He staged his attempted coup against Congress in the overturning of the 2020 election after 2018. He didn’t behave better; he behaved worse.

You don’t appoint Stephen Miller as your White House chief of staff if your plan is to work with the Democrats on matters of mutual interest, if you’re going to pursue some kind of immigration deal, or if you’re going to try to balance the budget. That’s not the guy you hire for that job. Stephen Miller is your choice if your plan is to go to the wall: to refuse subpoenas, to refuse cooperation, to deny information, to fight, fight, fight with everything you have.

There are resources that remain at the president’s disposal. He still has considerable unilateral tariff power. He has, of course, his powers of war and peace. He still controls ICE and can deploy that force at his command. And while Congress has the power of the purse, the president can even weaponize that against Congress.

We are approaching in the spring of 2027, once again, the ritual of the renewal of the lifting of the debt ceiling. The United States has this strange practice where Congress votes the spending, Congress votes the taxes, and, if there’s a gap that must be covered by borrowing, Congress has to vote again to allow the borrowing to happen. This has often been a pretty automatic process, but again and again in the past 20 years, especially when Republicans have control of one or both houses of Congress, we’ve seen attempts to weaponize the debt ceiling—to say to the president, for Congress to say to the president, especially when there’s a Republican majority, We won’t raise the debt ceiling with all the catastrophic consequences that will follow, unless you do this or that. What we’ve not seen is a president try to weaponize the debt ceiling and say, I won’t sign a raising of the debt ceiling unless you do this or that for me. Presidents don’t usually do that. This is a different kind of president who’s capable of weaponizing anything, including the tools that previous Republican Congresses have used against Democratic presidents. There’s no inherent reason why it couldn’t go the other way around.

We might see President Trump abuse powers of war and peace, or powers of flows of information, to give Putin more, to give the Chinese more. We might see President Trump absolutely go on the rampage against Congress, even trying to extend the methods used against Ilhan Omar. But that technique, once pioneered against Omar, might be used against other people, too. Could you imagine a dozen investigations, a dozen attempted indictments against members of Congress whom Donald Trump doesn’t like? Kash Patel still leads the FBI. Congress cannot impeach everybody, and it certainly can’t remove everybody. Each of these provocations might be a way of starting an impeachment fight against someone other than the president in order to have a battle over that.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party will have to make some very difficult choices. Does it try to rebel against Donald Trump? Or does it say, We still need this guy. We have to preserve whatever remains of our unity after this defeat and continue to fend for him and protect him?

I think we may be in for two years of unfolding constitutional crises of kinds I’ve just suggested to imagine, but of many kinds I can’t imagine. It’s a frightening scenario. And I think although many people who have been critical of this president will breathe a little easier knowing that there’s now a check on him—and such a powerful check—no one should imagine that this story has in any way reached its finale or in any way even reached its most discordant passages.

There are a lot of bumps ahead. And we’re all going to need our coolness and our courage to get through them and to remember that the American system is not a system of checks and balances. It’s not a system of institutions that work without regard to the people in them. The institutions are the people. And just as you used your vote to try to check the president in November of 2026, you’re going to continue to need to be civically engaged to make sure this story ends in the least catastrophic way possible. There are going to be a lot of bumps before the story is over, and that story is not over.

Now, my dialogue with Bob Inglis.

[Music]

Frum: My guest today is former Congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican who represented South Carolina’s fourth district, the Greenville-Spartanburg area, in two stretches: first from 1993 to 1999, and then again from 2005 to 2011. He arrived with the Republican wave led by Newt Gingrich and promised to serve only three terms.

He kept that promise, and ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate against Fritz Hollings. In his second stretch in the House, he broke with his party more often, especially on environmental and climate issues. In the Tea Party year, 2010, he lost a primary to Trey Gowdy for insufficient fealty to the party line. Bob has gone on to found RepublicEn, with a capital E, which promotes free-market answers to climate change. In 2016, he said he could not under any circumstances vote for Donald Trump. In 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris, calling Trump a clear and present danger to the Republic, but he is still a Republican and still in South Carolina.

Bob Inglis, thank you so much for joining The David Frum Show.

Bob Inglis: So great to be with you, David. Thank you.

Frum: So assuming there’s enough scar tissue that I can ask you this question without causing personal pain. We’ve seen a lot of Republicans lose their seat in this past cycle. Just on a human level, what’s that like? What are they going through?

Inglis: It’s like the political equivalent of a divorce, David. It’s people who have hugged you around the neck and told you they love you and are voting for you, and then they’re not. That’s what happens when you lose a primary. You know, that’s the worst. It’s not quite so bad when you lose a general. I’ve suffered the ignominy of losing a primary, you know? That’s where literally people that have told you that they love you, they’re praying for you, they hug you around the neck. Next time you see them, they’ve got the other guy’s sticker on them, you know? That’s really painful.

Now, if you lose a general, it’s not quite so bad. Because they’ll invite you to speak at the next Lincoln Dinner, because you fought the good fight against the blue enemy, and you lost, came up short, but you fought the good fight. When you lose in a primary, though—which explains why people are so afraid of losing primaries—there’s no invitation to the Lincoln Day Dinner, because you’re now a person without a home. You’ve literally been divorced from the party. That’s why I think so many have been so fearful of losing those primaries.

Frum: So let’s now talk about this as more of a collective than a human experience. So, Republicans have lost power up and down the ballot: House, Senate, states. The Republican Party as we’ve known it over the past two decades has not been a great learning institution. It finds it hard to absorb messages. Do you see opportunities or impediments to Republicans facing honestly what happened in 2026? Or are they going to, as has happened in the past, retreat into dream worlds and excuses?

Inglis: I think we have a chance of there being “no education in the second kick of a mule,” as Senator Fritz Hollings used to say. In other words, you don’t stand around and wait for the second kick of the mule. You move out of the way. And, so yeah, I think we have a chance of Republicans having learned something. And here, David, I’m talking not just about elected officials; I’m talking about the party itself, because that’s where we all complain about members of Congress. We say, They don’t listen to us. They’re not listening. No, no, that’s the problem. They listen very, very carefully, and they don’t want to offend us, the voters. And so what they had listened to—because of that fear of losing the primary, as I was describing—is they listened to the party faithful, and the party faithful were basically in the mood of, Yeah, let’s just follow Donald Trump wherever he’s going. And so that became the standard. And so I think now there’s a chance of a rethink.

And I’ll substantiate that with a visit that I had last week in Dahlonega, Georgia, at the Lumpkin County GOP. Go there with me, okay? So you got this civic space, probably I guess it’s some kind of a hospital space or school space, auditorium. They’d nicely set up red, white, and blue tables, and there’re about 47 people I counted there. Nicely decorated with balloons and everything. Some people had made some chili. I was greeted very warmly, even though a quick Google search would find out the things you just said, that I was [part of] Republicans for Biden, Republicans for Harris.

But I was greeted very warmly. And the people were very nice, and somewhat deflated and also somewhat confused. And if you’ll permit me, I’ll tell you—one, for example, an evangelical Christian, standing near the prints of a portrait that was going to be given away or sold in a silent auction, of Jesus in the center handing what appears to be the U.S. Constitution to a child surrounded by the populace.

And so I’m talking to him about what he’s experiencing. He says, You know, the country is just going to pot, he says. And, It’s just terrible what’s happening. And I said, So how about here in Dahlonega? And he says, Well, it’s just so much growth here, you know? They’re chopping down trees. I’m thinking, Well, okay, so you’re a conservationist apparently. You don’t like that idea. They’re chopping down trees. He says he doesn’t like that.

And then he says, You know, and we’ve just got to follow Trump, because he’s something of a prophet. And that stopped me. I said, Wait, wait a minute. You’re a Christian? And he says, Yeah. And I said, How can Donald Trump be a prophet? Tell me, how? And he says, Well, we’ve got to fight fire with fire—something that he repeated after my remarks. He followed me out, and he said, See what happened to Charlie Kirk. You’ve got to fight fire with fire. And I said—so now I was really ready to confront the guy. I said, Is that what Jesus said? I thought he said something about “turn the other cheek.” And you could tell this guy was completely in—

Frum: Did this guy believe that Charlie Kirk had been killed by anyone other than the assassin who killed him?

Inglis: No, I don’t think he was into that. But he was just basically saying you’ve got to fight fire with fire. That in this whole fight, fight, fight thing, this whole us-against-them thing. And it was really—you could tell the dissonance that was happening in his head about how, well, it didn’t work for us. And so I said to him, You know, in my remarks I had said the way I was greeted here tonight, isn’t that the way the Republican Party should be? Warm, welcoming.

Like you said on a recent show, if you can show that you’re trying to help people’s problems and solve them, then people will like you, and they’ll vote for you.

Frum: So one of the things that I think the whole country and the whole world has had its eyes lifted to is South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia. These are places deeply integrated into the world economy. In South Carolina, you have the extraordinary investment by BMW. Georgia, is again, a knowledge center. It’s got one of the largest airports in the world. And the idea of these as lands of textile mills and shoe factories that respond to a message of protectionism and isolation of the world economy, and foreigners are to blame for all of our problems, misses what has happened in the past quarter century or 30 years in that Southeastern Atlantic seaboard.

Inglis: Yeah. Oh, it does. I’ll take you back to an encounter in Hartsville, South Carolina, earlier this summer. I sat down with four farmers—and this is all on behalf of RepublicEN.org, you know, our outreach to conservatives on climate—and so they were unwilling to say that the conditions we were experiencing in South Carolina was climate change. But, wow, were they disappointed with Donald Trump about the tariffs, because one of them had invested heavily in peanuts and had developed a really entrepreneurial way of processing the peanuts and servicing other farmers. And then he said, The tariffs meant that we lost China as a customer, and now they’re buying from Argentina. And this guy had invested serious money in this.

Interestingly enough, David, they weren’t really—the four farmers I was sitting with—weren’t ready yet to break with Trump. But I wonder now, after Darline Graham has lost the Senate race in South Carolina, whether they’re now more emboldened to say, Hey, this really is a wrong direction to go.

Frum: That’s my question about learning. So, I mean, you’ve watched the Republican Party go through a lot of things, and South Carolina such a bastion for a long time of Republican strength. Describe a little bit how that ebb and flow works—the resistance to learning, and when learning begins, what does learning look like?

Inglis: Yeah. It’s really a timely question, because this is what we really need. Republicans who want to bring the party back to itself. We really got to think through this, about how to approach these folks.

And so, again, at Dahlonega, Georgia, the other night, what I decided to do was—it was a veteran’s theme. And I found it very interesting that they played a little video clip of Veterans Day. And there were two presidents—and of course, you would expect I made a big deal of this in my 10 minutes’ or 15 minutes’ worth of remarks—two presidents’ voices were on that. One was Ronald Reagan. The other was JFK. They didn’t have Trump on that video. What would he have said that would be remarkable, or to be willing to be worth being heard, in the context of celebrating veterans? Answer: almost nothing.

And this is an indicator, David, I think of something good happening. And really, that learning is possible. I was preceded by two College Republicans at the Lumpkin County GOP in Dahlonega, Georgia, and they spoke of how we’ve got to bring Georgia together, even though the previous introducer of them had said, basically, We’re really going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, we’ve now got a Democrat governor. We got a Democrat senator reelected. You know, he was saying that. The two College Republicans stood up and said basically, No; we have to bring this state together. We have to show that we’re a party of solutions. We have to—

And that really encouraged me. So as you can imagine, I really tapped into that in my 15 minutes’ worth of remarks, because I think there is an opportunity to learn.

Frum: Let me ask you about the intensifying radicalism of your own seat. How does that process work in that particular district, and where does that district stand now?

Inglis: Well, in the no-education, the second-kick-of-the-mule category, Greenville County, South Carolina, went blue in the Senate race. Greenville County, a majority of Greenville County, voted for Annie Andrews for the U.S. Senate and against Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed, of course, after Lindsey’s untimely death. And so, wow, something happening there that Greenville County—

Frum: What’s the social basis of that? So who is the person who would have voted for you, voted for [former Representative] Trey Gowdy, and then either stayed home, or—is that someone who benefits from the global economy? Is that a retiree who’s worried about inflation? Who is that person who’s either flipped or abstained?

Inglis: There’s two different categories. I think one is the stay-at-home, and I noticed this at the precinct. I live in a rural part of Greenville County, and I noticed all kinds of trouble about whether Should we vote early? Should we— Well, it turns out that we had to vote on Election Day. So off I go to the poll, walked right up to the voting thing and voted. It took me about seven or eight minutes. And I thought, Whoa, low turnout. Low turnout in this area. This is probably bad news for Darline Graham and good news for Annie Andrews, the Democrat.

Turned out to be, that’s the case. I think low turnout in some places that were just a little bit like: This is weird. Why are we talking about renaming Lake Ontario? Why are we talking about taking over Canada? Why are we talking about all these things? Why are we… I mean, I think that’s the—so the low turnout.

And then the other, David, is, yeah, I think the great success that you were citing in a place like Greenville, South Carolina, or Spartanburg, South Carolina, is: It brings some people that now are thinking, This isn’t working for us. They were leaving Trump and voting for a Democrat for the U.S. Senate. And I think it signals the ability to learn and an openness to, Hey, show us some ideas. Show us something that’ll work, and please stop talking the way you talk. You know, this nastiness.

Frum: We’ve seen, in parts of the Republican Party, an intensification of xenophobia and resentment, especially against Indian-Americans. There have been some spectacular instances of that. I don’t know how representative those are. As a party shrinks, it becomes more extreme. And there’s a kind of spiral that can happen—you shrink, you get more extreme, and that makes you shrink some more, and you get more extreme still. Is there a way out of that, or is there only an exit through more defeat and more pain?

Inglis: Yeah. That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? Whether, you know, for example, in the aftermath of this Darline Graham loss, there was a Spartanburg, South Carolina, GOP chairman who called the GOP in Greenville County—you know, sister counties, a little bit of competition there—called them “extreme.” And that’s actually, probably could be proven. And so there’s some awareness, I think, among people of goodwill, and there are people like that in the Republican Party who realize, Gee, this has just been a mistake, hadn’t it?

For example, in Dahlonega, I was followed out into the parking lot. That’s a little bit, unnerving, you know? I was followed out into the parking lot by a guy, I’ll call him B. He starts telling me about how we’ve been robbed by a lot of fraudulent voting at the Texas border, you know, in this last 2026 election. And I bluntly told him: Hey; too big to rig. Too big to rig. There’s no way it could be that. And so he sort of fell off of that. And then I said, Hey, let me ask you something, B. If I had come here tonight and said, “You people suck. This county sucks. This state sucks. I alone can fix it.” He got the connection. And I said, Why do we put up with that from Donald Trump?

And he said some very important, very helpful words to my thinking. He said, Yeah, he is all about himself, isn’t he? And you could tell he’s starting to think. And so I parted with him by saying, Why don’t we go back to what we learned in kindergarten? You know what I mean? What you learned in kindergarten is, you don’t want to hang out with somebody who goes around saying, You suck, and I’m the only one that can fix you. He actually said, Yes, you would’ve been thrown out of here tonight if you’d said that. I said, Why do we put up with that? And so I think people are starting to realize: How did this happen? Why do we come to put up with that stuff?

Frum: Do defeated members of Congress stay in touch with each other, or does each go his or her own way?

Inglis: You stay in touch with your closer friends. And that’s been a blessing for me, to have some friends that I keep up with. Interestingly enough, David, the weird thing is you don’t have any great way to stay in touch, because you always contacted through your schedulers. They had the contact information. So you don’t end up with a lot of other members’ cellphone numbers. But your friends, you do have their cellphone numbers.

Frum: But you can’t form like a kind of AA chapter of defeated Republicans who can say, You know, we’re all out of work because of that guy. Maybe we should all band together and do something about that guy. Maybe he should be out of work, not me.

Inglis: I think that’s a good idea. Let’s start that. Let’s start that. I think that that really is—I think there’s some power in that. Of people who could come together and say, You know, we just took a wrong turn. But it must be done. Seems to me, David, it’s not just the former members of Congress; it’s those people in Dahlonega or the people in Hartsville, at the GOP in Hartsville, South Carolina.

It’s being able to say to them—not go to them and say: Well, you dumb-dumb, why’d you do this? You know, Why’d you follow him? Not that at all. It needs to be: Okay, so we made a m—not even, don’t even say “mistake.” Okay, so that was then. Let’s figure out a new path. In other words, give them some grace, because most people are not able to say, I made a mistake. They’re not going to be able to say that.

Frum: We’re seeing early indications of 2028 interest from, obviously the vice president is thinking about it very hard. Maybe Secretary of State Marco Rubio, probably Senator Ted Cruz, and there’s certainly a lot of noises from [Florida] Governor Ron DeSantis. And they’re all looking for ways to say what went wrong. DeSantis and, interestingly, Vice President Vance have been the first and most emphatic out the gate. And DeSantis has been making noises that it’s all about corruption.

Do you have a sense of whether one of those other messages is likely to prove more powerful with the people that you see?

Inglis: It depends more on presentation than on the substance of the message, actually. I think it depends on the feel of it. And I think those two individuals you just mentioned have made the mistake of patterning after the current style of Donald Trump, in their bellicosity and their in-your-face kind of stuff. This is my theory. Call me back in 2028, and let’s see if I was right.

I think the next is going to be a Jimmy Carter–esque person. Not to say that Jimmy Carter’s a great president. I’m a Republican, and I don’t believe Jimmy was such a great president. But there’s something authentic about Jimmy saying, This is my house. You know, it’s a three- or four-bedroom ranch house here in Plains, Georgia. I go to church right back here at Maranatha Baptist Church, and I teach Sunday school over there, and I’m a peanut farmer.

In other words: somebody really down to earth, completely not a Mar-a-Lago, gold-gilding billionaire. Not that. I think that’s the next.

And so we change presidential styles in America the way we change clothes styles, you know? Bill Clinton wore baggy suits. Barack Obama wore tight suits, you know? And so we change styles. Even when it’s a pleasant transition, for example, Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush. George H. W. Bush said he was going to be a kinder, gentler nation.

Frum: But when we make those changes, there’s always an implicit critique. George H. W. Bush in 1988 said, I’m going to keep some things about Ronald Reagan, and I’m going to change others. And then there’s a question about, well, which are the things?

So Vance and DeSantis, especially, are both saying: We need to change something about Trump. And Vance is saying, Too much Israel, but we’re going to keep the tariffs, keep the crackdown on immigration, defend ICE. So no change in that kind of style and tone of politics, but we’re changing the foreign policy. And DeSantis’s message has been, We don’t need to change the foreign policy so much. What we really need to do is, less corruption.

So those are two theories about what needs to change. So you can’t change unless you have a theory about what needs to change, because you can’t change everything. Some things will continue. And it’s a big question, which is: What?

So how does the Republican Party decide what was the thing that we think was wrong, and what is the thing that we think we need to change? Is Vance right? Is DeSantis right?

Inglis: I think what they should all do is listen to your show recently, where you talked about what happened in redistricting after the legitimate win in 2010, and the decision to go gerrymander the way we wanted to create districts the way we wanted. And then, as you said in that show, what you end up with is people who aren’t serving and aren’t taking care of the needs of their people. They’re trying to create a power structure. And people figure that out.

And I think that that’s why I would say the two people you mentioned, Vance and DeSantis, have that problem of sounding that way. Of sounding about, I’m just going to get power, and we’re going to stuff it down their throats. I think eventually people figure out that, Hey, could be my throat next. Or it’s just so yucky, and they don’t want yucky.

And so this was an election where they—at the end of the Senate race in South Carolina where Darline Graham made the terrible mistake of going into some profanity-laced statements, it was not her. There was some consultant, told her to fight, fight, fight or something. And it was a dumb thing to do, because Annie Andrews, meanwhile, stayed the pediatrician who’s trying to help people. And so that’s the affect that we—that I think the GOP—should try to develop and learn from this. And say, Not Trump; not this thing again.

Frum: Let me revert to your story about the signage you saw of Jesus Christ handing down the Constitution to the populace. You’re active in Christian life. You’re serious about it. Change your aperture from “Where do Republicans go from here?” to “Where do American Christians go from here?” Trump really connected to American Christianity—especially evangelical Christianity, especially white evangelical Christianity—in a way that more intensely than anybody, more intensely even than Ronald Reagan. How does that community feel? Where do they go?

Inglis: Yeah. I surely hope that that’s where we definitely need to have “no education, the second kick of a mule,” is that. I don’t know so, David; I can just hope so. That there’s some maturation there, some awareness that: Hey, this has just been a wrong path to take.

Frum: Why did it work in the first place? I mean, it seems when Trump appeared in 2016, it was very obvious he had never read the Bible, had no idea even of the names of the chapters. I think in 2016 again, maybe it was 2020, he was asked: Have you ever asked God for forgiveness? And he said, No, not especially. And so these are pretty fundamental—I mean, man needing forgiveness from God is a pretty basic Christian doctrine. Knowing the names of the chapters of the Bible is something that I think Christians would be surprised if their leaders didn’t have. And yet, where did that connection come from?

Inglis: I think it came from fear. It’s all about fear. It’s in Dahlonega, Georgia, at the Lumpkin County GOP. He’s just fearful that the world is falling apart, and that he doesn’t have a place in this future world. That’s what really—he was fearful. And so they sort of thought, Well, we need a strong man, somebody who will say it like it is, and won’t be diplomatic. And so that’s what they went with.

And I think there’s still a percentage out there—let me not overstate my optimism—there is a percentage out there, and it must be around 35, 37 percent, I don’t know, that still like that style. That still believe that that’s the way it should be. And so that’s going to be the challenge, is how do you overcome that 37 in a primary? If you cede that 37 to a Ron DeSantis, or a J. D. Vance type, if you want to be sounding like Brian Kemp, let’s say, of Georgia—or try to get [Kentucky Governor] Andy Beshear to get some crossover—how do you deal with the fact that you’re starting with a 37 percent problem?

David, I’ll predict this for you. In the next two years—we got two more years, as the expiration date, the shelf life of Trumpism, comes to its end. That article on the shelf is going to start looking more and more moldy. I mean, it’s going to be clearly—clearly—at the expiration date. I mean, it’s going to be like the bread with some mold in it. And I think that’s when it’s going to look worse. And Stephen Miller being appointed as chief of staff, I think that’s great, because it’s going to fill it up. Fill it up, Donald. Go ahead and fill up the cup.

Frum: Well, let me test a historical analogy on you, and tell me if you see any merit to this and if there are any lessons from it. So in the first two decades of the 20th century, evangelical churches north and south mobilized on behalf of a cause. And the cause was alcohol prohibition. And they won. They got national alcohol prohibition. And it was put into effect. And the result of that—this Prohibition was, of course, a disaster—but the result from the evangelical churches was they saw a collapse in male interest in evangelical religion.

And part of it was the Depression and the war and those social changes. But if you were a young man in 1940, you were a lot less likely to go to church than if you were a young man in 1910. And that caused, in the generation—and again, the Depression and the war are as much a part of the story as Prohibition, so I don’t want to oversimplify—but we saw a real withdrawal of evangelical churches from the political activism they’d had in the two decades before Prohibition.

From 1930 to 1970, they’ve become very depoliticized. A lot of that is the personal influence of Billy Graham, who’s very opposed to church participation in politics. And then they go in, in a big way, and they have many successes. Roe v. Wade is overturned; other things. But they get Donald Trump, and now they have once again this extraordinary secular generation where churchgoing, especially among men, is really radically on the wane, as compared to what it was 20 years ago.

Does this kind of history have any parallel? Do you see something like this going on? Are evangelical churches able to learn? You know, when we commit to a candidate, we ride our fortunes with that candidate. And if that candidate’s fortunes fall—and they always do fall—our message is discredited, and we lose people, men or women.

Inglis: Oh, yeah. I think it’s totally discredited. And the means of discreditation will be a guy named [Senator-Elect] James Talarico, I think. As he gets more and more airtime. You know, for example, I have a daughter who—well, David, I tell you. If you ask my five kids “Nastiest people on the planet?”—they’d say Christians involved in politics. Because they’ve seen what happens. When you couple faith and power, you end up with trouble. That seems to me, in my five trips to Iraq and four trips to Afghanistan, that’s what I saw. You couple faith and power, you corrupt the faith faster than you corrupt the state. And it ends up in just a grotesque mess, right?

But one of my daughters just told me yesterday that she spoke positively. She said, Yeah, if the Democrats could present like a Christian Democrat message—wow, that could work. In other words, somebody that actually cares for people. You know, somebody that says, No, we’re going to try to solve this problem. We’re going to deal with health care. We’re going to try to somehow figure out how we deal with the fact that we have enormous wealth disparities.

I mean, how are we going to deal with that, you know? Somebody that comes with some sort of moral framework to that, rather than the Trumpism. Which, my biggest problem—or the reason I got on that list in 2016. There was a circulated list of former members of Congress who wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. I said: Get me on that list. I want to be on that list. I want to be at the top of that list, because I want my children to know I was on that list. I wanted all of them to know I was on that list.

And my main problem with him—the person of Donald Trump—is his transactional view of life. That life is a transaction. And to be 80 years old and to not know that life is not a transaction—that it’s about deeper, more meaningful things than that—just shows the shallowness of the man and his incapacity to govern a nation. I mean, you need somebody at the top who understands better what the human condition is. And to think that somehow it’s all a transaction is just such a perversion.

And so, David, what I’m hoping is that as the shelf life gets truly to the end, the expiration date of Trumpism, and the bread in the wrapper really starts to look moldy—and it will—that those pastors who might have been sort of saying, Yeah, we’ve got to fight fire with fire, or something like that, will be saying, Uh, let’s look again at some of these passages about actually loving people and caring for them. And find that to be a winning message.

Frum: That’s still engagement. That’s a different question from what—the question I asked is, when do the pastors say, You know what? We shouldn’t be telling people, talking to people about how to vote at all. We should be talking about how to live.

Inglis: Yes, exactly. That’s the big message that I hope they get. Is that, Gee, this has been such a mistake. And those statistics you just cited, yes, should help them to see—because, you know, everybody’s got a constituency. Politicians have a constituency, journalists have constituencies, and pastors, rabbis, imams have constituencies. If they start seeing that decline you were just documenting, I think they’ll figure out that, Hey, we’re off message here. The message that works is something deeper in the human soul, not this thing that is about raw use of corrupt power. Particularly as the corruption becomes more clear.

You know, as now there are going to be some investigations. Perish the thought that Democrats would actually impeach Donald Trump. I hope they don’t make that mistake. But to look into the corruption and then to realize that, gee, not only is the bread, the shelf life, it’s gotten to the expiration date—but it is really rotten in there. That’s when maybe there’s some real education among those pastors, that: Wait, we took the wrong path. We shouldn’t have been talking about power. We should’ve been talking about love and the beauty of faith and the forgiveness and loving your neighbor. That’s what we should’ve been talking about.

Frum: There is this ironic question that a lot of this breakthrough has been so centered in the Southeastern states, which have so often been thought of as the most conservative part of the country. From the cradle of the old Confederacy, conservative vote in the ’70s and ’80s, and now. Alabama sort of is an outlier, but Georgia, North and South Carolina, Texas. If you were to speak about what has happened to the region, are there true generalizations we can offer about the South of the 21st century, and how it has been different from the South of the 20th?

Inglis: Well, yes, I think that it’s a different day now. And I was just hearing recently about the shift in demographics in a place like Georgia or Texas, South Carolina. I mean, we have a tremendous inflow of people. There was some thought that that is—I mean, I have two conflicting thoughts that hopefully somebody at The Atlantic can sort out for me. On the one hand, it’s “birds of a feather flock together”; you know, the Big Sort that could be happening. But on the other hand, it seems that there’s a diversification of the population that’s going on by some other numbers. And those numbers are the one I’ve heard most recently. In a place like Georgia, it’s a very diversified state now, and it’s becoming more so. Asian population, Latino population really on the increase.

And so in Dahlonega, Georgia, the other day, what I said to them was—you know, on the climate-change thing, I said, You know, right now it’s been a “hoax and con-job” story. But, I told them, you know, that didn’t work on Tuesday in the Atlanta suburbs. And it’s not going to work in 2028 in those suburbs.

And so what we, I told them, what we as Republicans have to do is figure out: How are we going to get a message that works in those places? Because the reality is Georgia is different than it was. South Carolina is different than it was. Greenville County, South Carolina, went blue in 2026.

Frum: Where do you see your region in 10 years? Do you think that the changes that we saw in ’26, do they hold? Or are they still up play, up for grabs? How could all of this reverse if it does reverse?

Inglis: I think it can reverse—by the product on the shelf I keep referencing—getting so grotesque-looking that people really turn away from it. And I believe that’s what we’re going to see over the next two years. I think that the product is going to be so grotesque that Republicans say, Oh, how did we ever do that? And, Let’s find something new. And it is all about finding that new presentation that is able to say, No, no; we can actually help people, and we won’t just be about power and transactional nature. We’ll be about actually caring for people.

But it’s going to be—it’s a big switch that’s going to have to happen. But I think we’ve seen that shifts do happen. And, so, I got a lot of hope-so, not know-so here, though, David. That’s what I surely have.

Frum: Thanks so much for joining me today.

Inglis: Great to be with you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Bob Inglis for joining me today on The David Frum Show. This second week in November is a time heavy with historical anniversaries. November 11th, the anniversary of the armistice in the First World War, Veterans Day in the United States, Remembrance Day in Canada, marked all through the English-speaking lands. November 9th, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the great pogrom in Germany that marked the beginning of murderous violence against the Jewish community, already the subject of discrimination and exclusion. The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of so many other important events in German history: the proclamation of the German Republic after the First World War, and the crushing of the German hopes for a liberal Germany in 1848.

I thought it fitting to mark this heavy week of anniversaries with a German novel, All for Nothing, published by a great German writer, Walter Kempowski, in 2006.

The novel was the last of Kempowski’s life. Kempowski lived a life that was full of all the tragedies of the 20th century. He was born in Germany during the Second World War. He was a member of the Hitler Youth. He was arrested after the war and spent years in a communist prison. He eventually was released and began to reconstruct a kind of life as a writer and an archivist. And All for Nothing, his last novel, draws on both his own experiences and the things he observed. It is the story of a world about to end.

We are in 1945 in East Prussia, on a manor house owned by a family that has lived there for generations. And so much of what is normal in their life continues. The family is living in a kind of denial, just refusing to accept that all of this could be about to end, that everything they know could ever have been destroyed. We hear about their postage stamps. We hear about their plates. We hear about their meals. We hear about the continuity of their rural way of life, so similar to country-house life everywhere in Europe before the Second World War, before the First World War. But also now built on crime and atrocity and murder and invasion, and all about to end.

The central character in the novel is a boy, drawn, one assumes, from Kempowski’s own experience, who understands and does not understand what is happening to the adults around him, who picks up on the sense of dread but doesn’t quite understand what there is to dread. The novel will come to a culmination with a series of catastrophic events that claim the lives of central characters and end in a kind of catastrophe, and leave those characters who do survive wondering what all of this was about. Because they were really too young to understand it, except to understand the magnitude of what was lost.

What is lost to them is not the same as what was lost to others. They were not the victims of invasion. They were the invaders, and yet they also had the capability to be disoriented, to be displaced, and to suffer and to think about what they did it for. All the crimes, all the evil—what was all of that for? How did all of that end? It’s a haunting question told in a very simple, matter-of-fact way, a very undramatic, gentle way of writing. But each word lands with greater impact because it is so unemotional in the telling. The effect of the emotion culminates at the end from the experience we have lived through together in this quiet way through the pages of the novel.

I find it a greatly moving book and one of the great books about both the universal experience of dislocation and destruction, and a very specifically German experience of an end of the war, and the end of a way of life.

Thanks so much for watching and listening to today’s David Frum Show. As ever, if you are minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic to support the work of all of my colleagues. I hope you’ll consider it. We will see you soon, I hope, on future editions of The David Frum Show. That’s it for now. Bye-bye.

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