David Frum

Updated at 8 p.m. ET on December 4, 2024.
This morning, I had an unsettling experience.
I was invited onto MSNBC’s Morning Joe to talk from a studio in Washington, D.C., about an article I’d written on Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d headed.

Updated at 10:17 a.m. ET on December 1, 2024
For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA.

Mexico has sworn in its first woman president. This looks like a bold step for equality and progress—all the more impressive because the new president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is of Jewish origin. Her father’s parents immigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in the 1920s; her mother’s parents escaped to Mexico from Axis-aligned Bulgaria in the early 1940s.
But Mexico is not advancing toward an egalitarian future. It is regressing into an authoritarian past.

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Tim Walz stumbled and struggled on the debate stage in New York last night, while J. D. Vance spoke smoothly and effectively.
I’ve known Vance for 15 years. In that time, I’ve witnessed many reinventions of the Vance story, heard many different retellings of who he is and what he believes. Last night, he debuted one more retelling. His performance of the role was well executed. The script was almost entirely fiction.

Kamala Harris has campaigned as the tough-on-dictators candidate for president. The Democrat scores points off Donald Trump for his truckling and cringing to Vladimir Putin, for swapping love letters with Kim Jong Un.
Today—this very day—the vice president has her best opportunity to prove her toughness and assert her national-security credibility. She can issue a statement on Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader and terrorist in chief.

Donald Trump’s former longtime adviser Michael Cohen has said of the ex-president, whom he has likened to a Mob boss: “He speaks in code.” Trump used the code last week to send a warning to American Jews. “If I don’t win this election,” he said, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”
Flanked by American and Israeli flags, Trump delivered this warning at an event in Washington organized by the Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson.

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Updated at 1:05 p.m. ET on September 18, 2024
A first draft of this story opened: “It’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweets at you.”
Backspace, backspace, backspace. Although it’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweets at me personally, it is almost every day that Senator J. D. Vance rage-tweets at somebody.

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On September 4, two students and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in Georgia. Nine others were wounded. The Apalachee High School shooting scarcely ranks in the top 20 deadliest such incidents in U.S. history. Apalachee was just another American massacre, an unhappy “fact of life,” in the words of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance.

Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger a Trump meltdown.
She succeeded.
Former President Donald Trump had a mission too: control yourself. He failed.
Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again.
Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues—and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome.

Donald Trump says something crazy or vicious almost every time he speaks. It’s his nature, but it’s also a political strategy. The flow of half-demented, half-depraved talk energizes those who enjoy it—and exhausts those who are horrified by it.
The mainstream media cannot report every outrageous remark, or they would do nothing else. Even those shocking comments that do get reported tend to  make just a blip.

That was a crazy public service provided by Elon Musk and X.
The X Spaces interview delivered Donald Trump without makeup or dress-up, talking unselfconsciously: manic, boastful, untruthful, aggrieved, abusive, obsessive, random, ignorant, tedious, bitchy—and ultimately, formless and endless. You might think a major-party presidential nominee would have other claims on his time, some sort of deadline, if only to get some sleep to ready himself for the next day’s campaigning. But no.

The documentarian Matt Ornstein interviewed two young Latino men in Long Beach, California, at the midpoint of the Trump presidency. They were both strong Donald Trump supporters. Why?
One answered, “Trump’s smart. He knows right from wrong.”
The other one scoffed, “No. No he doesn’t. He’s dumb as shit. But he’s got balls.”
In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump among male voters by 11 points. In 2020, Joe Biden ran about even with Trump among men. Clinton lost. Biden won.

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.
After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy.

So here’s the heartbreak.
Three-quarters of an hour of detailed, sophisticated answers. Mastery of detail. Knowledge of world personalities. Courtesy to the reporters before him. Accurate recall of facts and figures. Justified pride in a record of accomplishment. A spark of sharp humor at the very end.
Also: Verbal stumbles. Thoughts half-finished. Strangled vocal intonations. Flares of unprompted anger.

The first question about January 6 was asked at Minute 41.
Donald Trump replied with a barrage of crazy lies, ending by seeming to blame Nancy Pelosi’s documentarian daughter.
Then, just to be fair, CNN moderator Jake Tapper followed up with a question to President Joe Biden. Did he really mean to imply that Trump’s voters were a danger to democracy?
Biden fumbled the answer, as he fumbled so many other answers.

The wrong case for the wrong offense just reached the right verdict.
Donald Trump will not be held accountable before the 2024 presidential election for his violent attempt to overturn the previous election. He will not be held accountable before the election for absconding with classified government documents and showing them off at his pay-for-access vacation club.

The views of Nikki Haley Republicans—pro-Ukraine, pro-Israel, pro-market—reflect all those things that Republicans used to think in that bygone era when Reagans and Bushes and Romneys roamed the earth. But few feel any emotional bond to Haley. If she gives a Ted Kennedy style “dream shall never die” speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee this summer, they won’t tear up. They’ll wonder what the hell she imagines she’s talking about.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr gave an interview to CNN on Friday to explain why he plans to vote for Donald Trump after previously denouncing him as unfit for office. Trump might be an unfit president, Barr conceded. Trump had only recently belittled Barr personally. But President Joe Biden might overregulate kitchen stoves, Barr complained, and faced with that dread possibility, Barr had to prefer Trump as the lesser evil.
Barr feels how he feels.

Ukraine won. Trump lost.
The House vote to aid Ukraine renews hope that Ukraine can still win its war. It also showed how and why Donald Trump should lose the 2024 election.
For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party. Senators might have loathed him, governors might have despised him, donors might have ridiculed him, college-educated Republican voters might have turned against him—but LOL, nothing mattered. Enough of the Republican base supported him.

Israel stopped an Iranian drone and missile barrage last night, with help from the United States Navy, Britain’s Royal Air Force, and Israel’s Arab allies.
Israel’s Arab allies is a strange phrase to write in the midst of the war in Gaza, but it’s important to understand. The Jordanian air force shot down many of the Iranian drones, Reuters reported—meaning Arabs flew and fought to protect Israel.

Axios recently reported that President Joe Biden carries cheat sheets with him into meetings with supporters and donors. Some of these supporters have expressed alarm that a president would do such a thing. Perhaps these cards—aide-mémoire, after all—are a sign of age and frailty?
From 2001 to 2002, I had the job of writing speeches for President George W. Bush. Bush was 54 years old when I started working for him—almost 10 years younger than I am now.

After weeks of backroom maneuvering, the Republican split over foreign policy has burst into full view. The immediate stakes are the survival of Ukraine and the credibility of NATO. But behind the crisis of today is a larger crisis of tomorrow: U.S.-led defense of collective security, global trade, and the vitality of democracy as a force in the world.
That split in the GOP emerged over the weekend in two starkly contrasting stories, each pointing toward a very different American future.

On January 17, House Speaker Mike Johnson led a candlelight vigil at the Capitol to mark the recent passing of the 100th day of hostage-holding by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Members of Congress assembled shoulder to shoulder with families of hostages. The Republican speaker delivered a heartfelt speech. “We must stand together in solidarity with the Jewish people,” he said.

In 2016, Republicans could profess some uncertainty about the kind of president Donald Trump would be. Maybe the office would change the man? Maybe the party elite could bend Trump to its will?
But in 2024, there’s no uncertainty. Trump’s party is signing up for the ride, knowing exactly what the ride is. Pro-Ukraine senators are working to elect a president who will cut off Ukraine, knowing that he will cut off Ukraine.

Donald Trump won the presidency with fewer votes than his opponent?
We’re a republic, not a democracy.State Republican parties in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and other states gerrymandered themselves into supermajorities?
We’re a republic, not a democracy.Forty-one senators block laws favored by 59? A single senator blocks promotions across the Defense Department?
We’re a republic, not a democracy.

“The experience of being disastrously wrong is salutary,” John Kenneth Galbraith wrote. “No economist should be denied it, and not many are.”I’m not an economist. But I was wrong about the litigation to bar Donald Trump from the ballot as an insurrectionist. I wrote in August that the project was a “fantasy.” Now, by a 4–3 vote, the Colorado Supreme Court has converted fantasy into at least temporary reality.

War with Mexico? It’s on the 2024 ballot, at least if you believe the campaign rhetoric of more and more Republican candidates.In January, two Republican House members introduced a bill to authorize the use of military force inside Mexico. They were not know-nothings from the fringes of the MAGA caucus. One was Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy Seal who received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

It’s as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral.Who believes that Governor Ron DeSantis—so badly trailing in the polls behind former President Donald Trump—is genuinely upset by his rival’s federal indictment? Or that Speaker Kevin McCarthy—so disgusted by Trump in private—does not inwardly rejoice to see Trump meet justice?The Fox News talkers have been trying for months to sideline Trump and promote DeSantis.

In September 2009, a Republican congressman from South Carolina named Joe Wilson inserted himself into history. He interrupted President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress by shouting, “You lie.”The outburst shocked viewers. Wilson, not Obama, was the top trending item on Twitter in the aftermath of the speech. Wilson apologized, “I let my emotions get the best of me.

The Chinese spy balloon observed over Montana is not a new departure. It is a provocative measure because countries claim more rights over the lower atmosphere above their territory than they do over the space beyond that. But the balloon’s presence is not exactly a step on the road to World War III. In fact, this type of surveillance is much more likely to prevent, rather than provoke, conflict.