The Atlantic columnist David Frum, a relic from the thankfully bygone days of neoconservatism’s grip on the conservative movement, desperately clings to the notion that he’s the least bit relevant.
In an attempt to tantalize the one demographic that still listens to him — pretentious, “muh democracy” leftists — he wrote a piece titled “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator” in response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday evening.
As the provocative title might suggest, it indulges in every bit of cynical victim-blaming one would expect from someone who tries (poorly) to disguise his anti-Trump mania as a sincere concern for “everything decent and patriotic in American life.”
After listing off the usual litany of supposed instances of Trump condoning violence (Jan. 6, the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, etc.), Frum wrote, “Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well.”
Frum even felt the need to try to spin an objective display of personal courage into proof of Trump’s plot to bring down the republic: “Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to ‘Fight!’ to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.”
Much like every election since 2016, the 2024 race, for Frum, represents a “symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too
