These values were sorely tested during the Obama years. Although he was firmly seated at the AEI, Frum was already standing in uncertain relationship to the conservative movement. He respected Obama but did not support many of his more activist social policies, yet neither did Frum believe the GOP was positioning itself to appeal to most Americans. He made the case that the right should stop politicizing something that was good for the country and do its best to make the program better and more conservative-friendly.
And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds. The firestorm was immediate. The essay drew over a million views, crashing his site.
Frum was castigated by fellow conservatives and, days later, fired from the AEI. D uring the early years of the first Obama term, it seemed like both the left and the right were wondering precisely what was happening to David Frum. From that platform, he has continued his mission to goad the conservative movement to adopt a less ideological and more centrist space.
He has chronicled his intellectual evolution: about same-sex marriage, the environmental movement, the value of effective government, universal health care, and the nature of military conflict. The depth of his investigation into the amorality of not just Trump but Trumpism has clarified and intensified his sense of what politics ought to be about.
It has produced some of his best and most compelling writing. It also may have consigned him to post-Trump irrelevance within the Republican Party. Read today, the essay is notable for its fury and predictive accuracy.
They knew that Trump was ignorant, and coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. None of that dissuaded or deterred them.
He went on to describe it as baffling and sinister that any of his conservative friends were even considering voting for Trump, let alone publicly going over to the dark side, yet many did. Right from the start, Douthat said, Frum saw Trump as an urgent threat and argued that working with him, attempting the incrementalism of reforming the man by degrees, was not going to save the party. You had to confront the rot. I think the rise and success of Donald Trump suggests that David was more right about the scale of the rot than we were.
There is a faint melancholy there, a wish for the good old days when people could argue about ideas and rail against the injustices of this or that policy as opposed to having to continuously document the race to the bottom. There are no high roads or low roads. Every road leads to Trump, and all are cratered, muddy, dangerous thoroughfares to a destination not worth getting to. Trumpocalypse , published this May, is a strategy for erasing the stain.
Over the past four years, I have thought and spoken and written about Donald Trump almost more than I can bear. Not everyone has been particularly sympathetic. There are just so many ways that even a gifted writer can say Donald Trump is a bad president.
Many on the hard right loathe Frum, partly for the content of his criticism and partly because he broke ranks. The conservatives are part of a liberal tradition in North America. At one point near the end of our communications, I asked him whether, given the overall tenor of his policy positions, it had ever occurred to him that he might be a liberal stuck in the body of a conservative.
He will try to cause as much chaos as he can on his way to losing, and then after he loses, he will pardon criminal associates, he will try to pardon himself, he will move money to himself, and he will try to leave behind as poisoned an environment as possible. But what if he wins? I asked. What if he legally, legitimately wins?
So it will be a win either through massive voter suppression or a massively unfair outcome in the electoral college. How do you even talk about this being a democratic system of government anymore? The blunt reality is that, as a former warmonger, he will never be embraced by the left, and he is now loathed by the right as an apostate. There is no centre.
And it is probably true that my first assessment of any situation is the pessimistic one, and then I ask myself what my father would say, and then I try to talk myself into the more optimistic view.
I asked him what he actually thought he was achieving by criticizing his party and calling out the hollowness of its leadership, not just in the Trump years but effectively since the twilight of the second Bush term. Surely the goal is not to seek alienation from every point on the political compass, not to mention a chunk of his personal and professional peer group. He thought about that for a minute. Maybe the long game, then, is the only one left to play, the only one that might someday put Frum and his philosophy back at the heart of the matter.
I asked him if he ever saw himself working in government again. I want to be useful. December 24, September 14, November 13, November 3, January 29, Exclusive updates, a free tote, and more! Act Now. But as for same-sex marriage, my attitude follows the trajectory described nearly years ago by the English writer Anthony Trollope in his novel "Phineas Finn. Two of his characters are discussing a proposed reform that has just been defeated in Parliament.
The author of the reform is understandably dejected. His friend consoles him by pointing to the future:. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable; -- and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed.
That is the way in which public opinion is made. By coincidence, I am writing these words on the morning of my own 23rd wedding anniversary. Of all the blessings life has to offer, none equals a happy marriage. If proportionally fewer Americans enjoy that blessing today than did 40 years ago, we're going to have to look for the explanation somewhere other than the Legislature in Albany.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum. Share this on:. The case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. Most Popular. Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? Congress can subpoena records, question officials, and even impeach them.
Congress can protect the American system from an overbearing president. As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in and , George W. Bush from through —usually got their way. And congressional oversight might well be performed even less diligently during the Trump administration.
The first reason to fear weak diligence is the oddly inverse relationship between President Trump and the congressional Republicans. This time, it will be Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, doing the advancing—and consequently the overlooking. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades.
The greatest risk to all their projects and plans is the very same X factor that gave them their opportunity: Donald Trump, and his famously erratic personality. What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. Who doubts Trump would do it? Not Paul Ryan. Not Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. For the first time since the administration of John Tyler in the s, a majority in Congress must worry about their president defecting from them rather than the other way around.
A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.
Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans. The Senate historically has offered more scope to dissenters than the House. Yet even that institution will find itself under pressure. Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.
In both cases, the early indicators seemed to favor the women. Yet in the end it was the men who won, Hannity even more decisively than Trump.
Kelly landed on her feet, of course, but Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. From the point of view of the typical Republican member of Congress, Fox remains all-powerful: the single most important source of visibility and affirmation with the voters whom a Republican politician cares about. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.
Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pac s, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones.
So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited. Donald Trump will not set out to build an authoritarian state. His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics.
Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to. If Congress is quiescent, what can Trump do? Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, who often articulates Trumpist ideas more candidly than Trump himself might think prudent, offered a sharp lesson in how difficult it will be to enforce laws against an uncooperative president.
I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. That statement is true, and it points to a deeper truth: The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so. The powers of appointment and removal are another.
The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies.
He appoints and can remove the 93 U. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice. Yet the hedges may not hold in the future as robustly as they have in the past. But the U. And while the U. Yet in the years ahead, these restraints may also prove less robust than they look. Republicans in Congress have long advocated reforms to expedite the firing of underperforming civil servants.
If reform is dramatic and happens in the next two years, however, the balance of power between the political and the professional elements of the federal government will shift, decisively, at precisely the moment when the political elements are most aggressive.
It would be a mighty power—and highly useful. As Donald Trump correctly told reporters and editors from The New York Times on November 22, presidents are not bound by the conflict-of-interest rules that govern everyone else in the executive branch.
Presidents from Jimmy Carter onward have balanced this unique exemption with a unique act of disclosure: the voluntary publication of their income-tax returns. At a press conference on January 11, Trump made clear that he will not follow that tradition. His attorney instead insisted that everything the public needs to know is captured by his annual financial-disclosure report, which is required by law for executive-branch employees and from which presidents are not exempt.
They are written with stocks and bonds in mind, to capture mortgage liabilities and deferred executive compensation—not the labyrinthine deals of the Trump Organization and its ramifying networks of partners and brand-licensing affiliates. The truth is in the tax returns, and they will not be forthcoming.
Even outright bribe-taking by an elected official is surprisingly difficult to prosecute, and was made harder still by the Supreme Court in , when it overturned, by an 8—0 vote, the conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. McDonnell and his wife had taken valuable gifts of cash and luxury goods from a favor seeker.
McDonnell then set up meetings between the favor seeker and state officials who were in a position to help him. The McDonnells had been convicted on a combined 20 counts.
The Supreme Court objected, however, that the lower courts had interpreted federal anticorruption law too broadly. Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States. A spokesman for the Argentine president denied that the two men had discussed the building on their call.
But illegal, post- McDonnell? How many presidentially removable officials would dare even initiate an inquiry? But as written, this seems to present a number of loopholes. First, the clause applies only to the president himself, not to his family members. Second, it seems to govern benefits only from foreign governments and state-owned enterprises, not from private business entities.
If Congress is apprised of an apparent emolument, and declines to do anything about it, does that qualify as consent? Finally, how is this clause enforced?
Could someone take President Trump to court and demand some kind of injunction? Will the courts grant standing? The clause seems to presume an active Congress and a vigilant public. What if those are lacking? It is essential to recognize that Trump will use his position not only to enrich himself; he will enrich plenty of other people too, both the powerful and—sometimes, for public consumption—the relatively powerless.
Venezuelan state TV even aired a regular program to showcase weeping recipients of new houses and free appliances. Americans recently got a preview of their own version of that show as grateful Carrier employees thanked then-President-elect Trump for keeping their jobs in Indiana.
Bray, a year-old Carrier employee, told Fortune. A lot of the workers are in shock. It felt like a victory for the little people. Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter.
He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption. That, over time, is what truly subverts the institutions of democracy and the rule of law.
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