David Frum – a speechwriter of former President George W. Bush and now left-wing political pundit who casts himself as moderately conservative – has taken to the pages of The Atlantic to cast President Donald Trump’s inauguration address as “hollow” in his latest column.
After mocking American reverence for the peaceful transition of power between federal administrations, Frum does his part to further the broader narrative – pushed by CNN, The New York Times, the Obama administration, and similarly minded sources – of Trump’s presidency as illegitimate.
Frum begins by recalling the presidential election’s popular vote outcome:
“But given the heavy emphasis of the American system on plebiscitary legitimation of the president (“the people have spoken, let us all unite behind their choice”), it’s especially stressful if the winner of the Electoral College fails to win a popular-vote majority, as now has occurred twice within a political generation. France is the only other advanced democracy that has a non-parliamentary executive, and France uses a run-off system to ensure the ultimate winner gains an absolute majority of the vote.
That stress of the anti-majoritarian potential of the presidency is intensified if the popular-vote defeat is not narrow, as in 2000, but dramatic, as in 2016. (If Hillary Clinton had caught the lucky bounce, her popular-vote margin would have been greater than those of John F. Kennedy in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, or George W. Bush in 2004.)”
Frum concludes by framing Trump as a de facto operative – witting or otherwise – of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s by quoting Federalist 68 and The New York Times:
“Adding further to the stress is that the incoming president represents exactly the kind of figure that the 1787 contrivance was designed to bar from office.
From Federalist 68:
Cabal, intrigue, and corruption: These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”
…
“From Friday’s New York Times:
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.”
Frum states as a matter of fact that Trump’s presidency is “[owed]… in some large part of a hostile foreign intelligence operation.”
A regular presence on the left-wing and Democrat-aligned news media circuit, Frum is a favorite guest of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. He is regularly described by his colleagues as a “conservative.”
Days before the 2016 presidential election, Frum called on conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton – who he described as a “patriot” – in order to protect American sovereignty, the Constitution, and the republic at large.
To Frum’s credit, he is of a small handful of “mainstream” media personalities who at least partially identified forces of political disruption related to changing demographics in the West wrought by policies related to immigration (both legal and illegal), visitation, and border security.
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