Joining C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Thursday, David Frum accused President Donald Trump of being primarily motivated by desires of self-empowerment and self-enrichment. Unlike ideologically-driven dictators and authoritarians of the 20th century, contemporary autocrats, he said contemporary autocrats like Trump are more motivated by materialism and an appetite for power.
“If you were Donald Trump, and your goal was to become a trillionaire,” asked Frum rhetorically, before speculating how the president would “shut down legal institutions” towards that end.
Frum lamented how Congress had, according to him, “shut down all investigations of [Trump’s] money scandals… and the Russia connection” at the direction of the president.
Blending the innuendo-laden narratives of Trump as a knowing or inadvertent agent of malevolent Russian governmental influence and 2016’s presidential election being compromised by “Russian election hacking,” Frum described today as “a time when we’re dealing with the most successful foreign government penetration of the US government.”
Trump and his family were engaged in “massive self-enrichment,” said Frum, contrasting this alleged scandal of the president’s corruption with the Obama administration’s Fast and Furious operation, which he described as “not a scandal” and “an imaginary scandal.”
“What he’s interested in is building his own authority and using the power of the state to advance his family’s own business activities,” said Frum.
Trump’s business career was described by Frum as “one of failure,” with exceptional successes built on corruption: “Donald Trump’s own business career has been, is one of failure except where he was able to capture and take advantage of special concessions and special advantages for politically favored businessmen. That’s what he’s always been.”
Frum describes himself as a conservative Republican, a description repeated of him by left-wing and Democrat-aligned news media outlets. He is a somewhat regular participant in political discussion panels on television news media outlets in order to produce a pretense of ideological and partisan balance.
Last November, Frum wrote “The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton,” in which he described Hillary Clinton as a “patriot” who would protect the Constitution and American sovereignty.
Watch Frum’s appearance below.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.