The Atlantic columnist David Frum, a relic from the thankfully bygone days of neoconservatism’s grip on the conservative movement, desperately clings to the notion that he’s the least bit relevant.
In an attempt to tantalize the one demographic that still listens to him — pretentious, “muh democracy” leftists — he wrote a piece titled “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator” in response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday evening.
As the provocative title might suggest, it indulges in every bit of cynical victim-blaming one would expect from someone who tries (poorly) to disguise his anti-Trump mania as a sincere concern for “everything decent and patriotic in American life.”
After listing off the usual litany of supposed instances of Trump condoning violence (Jan. 6, the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, etc.), Frum wrote, “Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well.”
Frum even felt the need to try to spin an objective display of personal courage into proof of Trump’s plot to bring down the republic: “Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to ‘Fight!’ to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.”
Much like every election since 2016, the 2024 race, for Frum, represents 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.”
To his credit, Frum showed the bare minimum of restraint by not outright comparing Trump to Hitler in the piece — he compared him to Mussolini instead.
“Fascism feasts on violence,” Frum declared. Well, Frum oughta know — his career sure has.
While working in the Bush White House, Frum enthusiastically played his part in goading the U.S. into invading Iraq in 2003. He claims to have helped coin the infamous term “axis of evil” used in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address to paint Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as existential threats to world peace.
In a piece for National Review titled “Unpatriotic Conservatives” — published five days after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom — Frum shamed anyone who dared to question the wisdom of invading Iraq for “terror denial,” “conspiracy-theorizing,” “yearning for defeat,” and, of course, antisemitism.
“They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies,” he wrote.
While refraining from accusing his enemies of being outright Nazis, he did compare them to the bootlicking Vichy French.
“Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen,” he wrote of those who chose not to accept every lie the government spoon-fed them about Saddam and supposed “weapons of mass destruction.”
“War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them,” the armchair Patton concluded.
Long after the allegations had been proven to be completely false, Frum still maintained that Saddam Hussein had possessed a treasure trove of WMDs.
Rather than walking away from the Republican Party in an indignant huff when the base refused to heed his word as gospel during the 2016 election, as was the case for so many Never Trumpers, Frum began to show his true colors after the defeat of John McCain in 2008 and the emergence of the Tea Party.
Rather than accepting the criticism of Bush-era intrusive government and the terrifying acceleration of that trend under Obama, Frum apparently decided to take it as a personal slight. Frum doesn’t even bother trying to hide his disdain for these small government yokels who should know their place and listen to enlightened sages like David Frum.
“The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff,” he wrote for New York Magazine in 2011. “These tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn.”
“Right now, tea party extremism contaminates the whole Republican brand,” he wrote for CNN after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012. “It’s a very interesting question whether a tea party bolt from the GOP might not just liberate the party to slide back to the political center — and liberate Republicans from identification with the Sarah Palins and the Ted Cruzes who have done so much harm to their hopes over the past three election cycles.”
Of course, he hasn’t held back on Trump or Trump’s supporters, throwing every cliché scare word imaginable at them. He wrote two whole books, Trumpocracy and Trumpocalypse, chronicling every quibble he’s had with Trump’s character and policies.
“A healthy patient would not have succumbed to the opportunistic infection that is the Trump candidacy. The Republican Party is ill, and it has been ill for a long time,” he wrote in The Atlantic in July 2016, forecasting an impending defeat of a Trump ticket and blaming GOP voters for it.
“Donald Trump is God’s judgment on the United States for not being good enough citizens,” Frum declared to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
After reading way too many ponderous David Frum articles as research for this piece, it became apparent that Frum’s default tactic is to intellectually belittle anyone who doesn’t fall in lockstep with his own ideas. They’re to blame for all the ills of the Republican Party — not, you know, Frum’s ideological clique that sent us barreling into two disastrous wars and an even more disastrous recession.
It’s a petty egotism borne out of the frustration of a man convinced of his own genius but seemingly unable to persuade the rest of the world.
He decried the efforts of the Tea Party to shift the conservative movement back to the days of Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater, but he has become just as stuck in the past as they were. Frum is stuck in March 2003, when neoconservatism was riding high and American bombs and guns and tanks were poised to crush a Middle Eastern nation for not liking democracy enough.
Twenty years later, he provides no insight other than perhaps a peek into the mind of someone who is incapable of intellectual humility.
If there was any justice, we’d airdrop Frum into Iraq and let him deal with the natives who have suffered for decades under the violence and instability he helped incite.
Or, The Atlantic could take a lesson from the one kernel of wisdom ever displayed by MSNBC when it yanked “Morning Joe” off the air. A quick deportation back to his native Canada (a maple leaf-shaped red flag in itself) would be nice, too.
