David Frum And The Never-Trumper’s Convenient Amnesia

David Frum, longtime columnist, pundit, and former speech-writer for president George W. Bush, penned an article in The Atlantic that, were I a psychology professor, I would present to my class as a prime example of projection. In the words of the great litigator Vincent LaGuardia Gambini: “Everything dat guy just said is b*****t.”

Following the assassination attempt on former President Trump, Frum published an article in The Atlantic titled “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator.” It would be easy to go through his article line-by-line and offer the classic admonition that people who point fingers often have three pointing back at them at every period. And, indeed, that is what projection is all about. 

Frum was my first editor at New Majority and FrumForum. He was a very nice guy and a generous host. His latest article is a disappointment and, in my view, irresponsibly slides right back into the “Trump is Hitler” narrative — in this case Mussolini — that brought the violence down upon the “Bad Orange Man” in the first place. He has learned nothing from what took place over the weekend, and what it truly means to those Americans not holed up in the Trump Derangement ward at Cedars Sinai. The assertions he makes are, quite simply, astounding in both their lack of self-awareness and distance from the experiences of the average American.

Here are a few that stuck out at me. Frum starts his piece by bringing up the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi — and the admittedly tasteless satisfaction some in the Trump camp expressed, as well as their floating a story that Pelosi was involved in a dispute with a gay lover. Is Frum saying political figures shouldn’t spread falsehoods, especially character assaults, for political points? He fails to mention the steady dirge of slanderous falsehoods aimed at Trump and his family for years, courtesy of the leaders of the party he pretends to oppose (he doesn’t) as well as the legacy media who serve as the DNC’s megaphone. He makes no mention of Mr. Pelosi’s mendacious wife, then-speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, who knowingly pushed the lie that Trump was a Russian agent, supported the fabricated Steele dossier and the subsequent two-year, multimillion dollar Mueller witch hunt. Or how, as speaker of the house, she labeled then-President Trump an “imposter” before tearing up his SOTUS address on live television.

Frum goes on to write an utterly inflammatory and demonstrably false statement that is far more applicable to the Democrats for whom he carries backbreaking volumes of water than the Trump supporters he apparently believes to be as “deplorable” as the woman he voted for in 2016.

Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

The hypocrisy beggars the mind. For months in 2020, in over 200 cities, leftist mobs from Antifa to BLM acted as the Democrats’ brownshirts; they rioted, looted, committed arson, assaulted over 1,500 police and murdered some two dozen innocents while committing $2 billion in property damage. How many “MAGA extremists” were in those crowds? How many Biden voters? In fact, I’d like to ask Frum a simple question: The night before the 2020 election, in cities throughout the USA, businesses were boarding up their windows and storefronts. What were they concerned about? Trump voters becoming violent if Biden won, or Biden voters losing it if Trump won? He knows the answer.

He goes on:

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution.

“Elderly liberalism”? One imagines a kindly New Dealer in a cardigan just trying to put a chicken in every pot versus a jackbooted authoritarian hellbent on destroying the Republic. If he were given a political version of a blind taste test and then asked to pick the authoritarian group, who would he pick? My guess is he would choose the side that weaponizes the IRS to harass political opponents, supports not a four-hour riot but rather months of mass mayhem, does everything in its power to prevent the duly elected president from governing as per the will of the people, either by tying him up in sham investigations courtesy of a corrupted intelligence and law enforcement apparatus, holds two show trial impeachments, deploys politicized AG offices to financially ruin and even jail his political opponents with ludicrous misapplications of the law. Perhaps even the side that tries to assassinate a political threat?

Frum, like many in the “Never-Trumper” camp, warns us of impending “fascism” as if we are back in 1933 Germany and a bitter, eccentric Austrian corporal is about to become chancellor. But he faces one hurdle to this hyperbolic prognostication: We already had a four-year Trump administration. So then, what policies did Trump initiate that he finds to be reminiscent of the Führer or Il Duce?

Frum’s Atlantic piece shows, opposition to Trump is emotional, even personal, not analytical. Certainly not if the one who is claiming that the party of “They’ll put y’all back in chains!,” “Basket of deplorables,” “Get in their faces!,” “Put a bullseye on him,” is innocent of the heightened political tensions that define these days.

I expected lesser minds than Frum to deploy an oblique way of simply saying “Trump had it coming.” Yet, it reveals just how deep the Ceti Eel of Trump-hatred has burrowed into the mind of the DC establishment and how Frum represents their interests.

In a display of utter detachment from reality and the voters upon whom he casts academically arrogant aspersions, he claims that Trump is different than other “dictators” (evidence of which has yet to be presented). He says they have no reason to be upset and thus should not gravitate towards the proverbial P.T. Barnum-like strong man. Things are great. He writes:

In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Did he read this aloud? We have 750 military bases in 80 countries; servicemen recently died in Jordan. Perhaps the American economy is “booming” in the sense that the stock market is on fire. But much of the gains have been offset by rising interest rates and inflation. He calls it “A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation.” Is he serious? So are Americans just imagining that their dollars today are only worth seventy-nine cents compared to just four years ago? Have wages risen 20% in that time and we missed it? As for the rest, notice everything he says is about horrific rises in crime and drug overdoses declining in 2024, as if this is Year Zero. How are the indices compared to December 2020? No matter, I’m sure he can reply with numbers tortured to say what he wants, as per the Paul Krugman approach.

Frum barely touches on the millions of illegals pouring into the country that are now swamping even his new-found Democrat allies’ cities. Indeed, for him the mass invasion is just a sign of how great things are!

And the obfuscation rolls on. This is because Frum starts with a premise that Trump is an evil dictator and his followers are too ignorant to recognize it. He then searches far and wide for data points to give his narrative legs while completely ignoring the plank in his camp’s own eyes.

Outside the beltway, however, millions of Americans have a slightly different view of things. And it is not because they are under the sway of an orange Rasputin. Rather, they live regular lives, struggling to make ends meet with a paycheck that is only 79% of what it was just four years ago, while trying to shield their kids from gender theory at school and fentanyl on the streets.

Frum does get something right. Political violence in this country is certainly nothing new. He just conveniently forgets who is the worst offender over the past decade. Setting aside the entire summer of burning cities, he curiously never mentions the Bernie Bro shooter who targeted GOP congressmen and women at a softball game, or the attacker who put Rand Paul in the hospital, or those who bombed pro-life centers, or the many instances of bloody assaults on Trump 2020 rally attendees, or the attacks on conservative speakers across college campuses. Would Frum need the same security detail to speak safely at Hillsdale College as Ben Shapiro would at U.C. Berkeley? And I wonder if he sees any nexus at all between the leader of the Senate Democrats threatening two Supreme Court Justices by name and the plot to kill one of them shortly after.

The bottom line is this: If you want to find out what your opponents are up to, look at what they are accusing you of doing. If they remain too blinded by hatred for the man who will upset their well-paying, insular DC apple cart, that’s a reflection on them, not you. Time to get up and “Fight!”

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Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader, author, columnist, and musician whose eclectic body of writing can be found in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, New York Daily News, Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and others. His latest book LIFE IN THE PITS: My Time As A Trader On The Rough-And-Tumble Exchange Floors is available on Amazon and soon Audible. 

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

This article has been edited for clarity.