As in the case of other Republican pundits who have supported an ever-more extremist agenda but are appalled by the collateral damage being exacted on the nation by Donald Trump as he implements pieces of that agenda, I’ve never been and still am not a fan of David Frum. Many of these men and women appear to want us to forget the garbage policies they’ve proposed and cruddy politicians they’ve endorsed. You can bet once Trump’s gone, all the lionizing some liberals have been bestowing on them is going to look pretty pathetic. Of course, in the effort to topple Trump, temporary allies get a temporary handshake. Anything they say that advances the cause against him is a good thing. They are no doubt more persuasive with fellow Republicans than lefty partisans can ever hope to be. But there is no need to adore them. They aren’t heroic.
It’s hard to know how many Republicans will be persuaded by Frum’s latest piece in The Atlantic. The former George W. Bush speechwriter has joined people who for some time have been saying what he says. Frum’s headline, A Gangster in the White House, which is replicated in the final paragraph of his essay, ought to become a relentless meme, along with “Putin told me.”
Frum points out that in the midst of rage-tweeting on Thursday and Friday, Trump was retweeting comments that named or linked to the articles that named the CIA whistleblower in the Trump-Ukraine scandal. Retaliation against whistleblowers is outlawed, and, writes Frum, “a coordinated campaign of vilification by the president’s allies—and the president himself—surely amounts to ‘retaliation’ in any reasonable understanding of the term.”
He concludes:
Trump is organizing from the White House a conspiracy to revenge himself on the person who first alerted the country that Trump was extorting Ukraine to help his reelection: more lawbreaking to punish the revelation of past lawbreaking. [...]
Donald Trump will not be bound by any rule, even after he has been caught. He is unrepentant and determined to break the rules again—in part by punishing those who try to enforce them. He is a president with the mind of a gangster, and as long as he is in office, he will head a gangster White House.
Yes, he is, and yes, he will.
It’s worth remembering that former FBI director James Comey said in an ABC-News interview with George Stephanopoulos in April 2018 that when he met Trump, it was a flashback to his time “investigating the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra.” And Michael Cohen, now six months into his three-year prison term for fraud and campaign finance violations, used to refer to himself as Trump’s personal “Tom Hagen,” the consigliere to Don Vito Corleone, played by Robert Duvall in the movie version of The Godfather. Of course, the Don had something The Donald does not—smarts and self-control. He is more like a cross between dull-witted Fredo and impulsive Sonny. Whatever. Thugs are thugs.
So, a belated welcome for moving beyond anti-Trump into the tiny but growing he’s-a-gangster crowd, Mr. Frum. Maybe you will even spur one or two GOP senators to see the light.
TOP COMMENTS
QUOTATION
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.”
~~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Poor in Georgia? Don't expect anything but humiliation from the state:
The fact that today, just 27 percent of Americans who are poor enough to qualify for cash benefits under Temporary Assistance to Needy Families actually receive those benefits is one of the great successes of welfare reform, if you measure success by the "get everyone off of welfare at whatever cost to their health and well-being" standards the reformers intended. And by that measure, Georgia is amazing: Less than 7 percent of Georgia families living in poverty receive TANF, Slate's Neil deMause reports.
In 2004, the state hired a new Department of Human Services commissioner whose overriding goal was to get people off of welfare. Not to make them not need it, just to keep them from receiving it. (Again, in the spirit of welfare reform.) Under her leadership, 60 percent of those who had been receiving benefits—a number that had already plunged in the immediate wake of welfare reform—dropped out of the program, and the percentage of applications approved dropped from 40 percent to 20 percent. Today, Georgia receives $330 million a year from the federal government for TANF, but it doesn't go to TANF.