Frum talks next stages in the Trumpocalypse and how it may affect Canada

Story and photos by Sharon Harrison
A sold-out house was enlightened and amused as David Frum shared opinion, thoughts and facts about what goes on in Washington, with Donald Trump, and the future of democracy, during the trifecta fundraiser for the County library.

Frum was back in conversation with the County’s Tom Harrison, PhD, where the topic was the same, but different, than the two previous meetings. As was expected, Frum’s easy and talkative style made for good conversation with plenty of laughs and applause from the audience at the Wellington and District Community Centre which enjoyed his insight, anecdotes, observations and remarks.

Barbara Sweet, CEO of Prince Edward County Public Library introduced Frum, an internationally-recognized and awarded journalist and author of 10 books – including Trumpocalypse in 2020 and Trumpocracy in 2018. He served as a speech writer in 2001-2002 for U.S president George W. Bush and is currently a staff writer with The Atlantic. When not living in Washington, Frum spends summers in the County.

Tom Harrison, left, in conversation with David Frum

“What is less well known about David is that he is a long-standing and firm supporter of the County of Prince Edward Public Library and Archives,” said Sweet. “Tonight marks the third time that David has appeared in conversation with Dr. Thomas Harrison in fundraising events for the library. Our guests this evening hold the rare ability to assess, analyze and comment on important issues, with entertaining and informative insight and humour.”

Harrison began the conversation by recalling how in 2020, he and Frum “were thinking the election would probably be to resolve things, one way or the other” where he noted that at the end of Trump’s presidency, 72 per cent of Canadians disapproved of his presidency, a number that has now slipped below 60 per cent.”

Speaking to hope and possibility, Frum spoke in depth on a number of issues and points, including current president Joe Biden’s decision to step aside, women in politics, the Jan. 6 US Capitol attack, whether he thinks Trump will be the next president (he doesn’t), and perhaps most importantly, what does it all mean for Canada.

Frum spoke to how people remember 2018 and 2019 were quite good economic years on both sides of the border, and then “the glory about that story went, and as it worked out in the COVID story there was a series of price rises”, referring to a lot of “banging and clanking” as we return post-COVID and “it hasn’t been very agreeable”.

“One of the most important questions we have to remind voters of is to answer the question, who was president in the year 2020.” He ran his presidency the way he ran his family business, said Frum, “which was he was wealthy until the inheritance was squandered, and then he wasn’t anymore”.

In addressing the question of what does all this mean for Canada, Frum contrasted possible futures.

“If Trump should return, and I don’t believe he will, but if he does, that means that someone who tried to overthrow the government of the United States by violence gets a second chance to try it again.”

“And that’s not like some abracadabra thing, when you say ‘fine, I’ve won the electoral college, or maybe even had a narrow win in the popular vote, therefore I get to undo all laws and strengths’. It’s going to be contentious. It is going to be acrimonious. There’s going to be challenges in congress and in the courts. There are going to be street demonstrators, there is going to be chaos, and trouble. And there is going to be all of this at a time of great international tension, and international predators on the prowl, and Canadians are not going to be immune from that.”

One of the things, an important thing, Frum said he notices about politics, is that people tend to get more and more excited by issues in proportion to how unimportant they are.

Harrison mentioned how there were so many events during the Trump presidency and how it was fraught where every week seemed to bring a new crisis.

“With the return of American presidential elections in the last couple of months, we have seen a return to this once a week or even every few days, a new event that captures everybody’s attention,” added Harrison, noting among those things was Biden’s presidency and the performance he gave at the debate.

On Biden stepping away from the candidacy, Frum noted how time has no mercy for any of us in the end, “and it doesn’t care a lot about our human hopes and inspirations.”

He spoke in depth about Biden, the man, the president, about how he has been running for president one way or another since the late 1970s and described it as a “tremendously poignant human story”.

“He just couldn’t carry on and he didn’t want to accept it, but he was eventually brought to the point of accepting it, and that was a self- abdicating act and I think he must feel very complicated feelings about it.

“He just did it through willpower, he got through things, I don’t agree with a lot of what he did personally, but just by the numbers, he got more major legislation passed in his first four years than Barack Obama did in his first four years,” said Frum. “From the point of view of how big a pot did you win with what value of cards, Biden played the game better. The Biden administration played the game better than the Obama administration at the time.”

Harrison spoke to how Frum had written in the spring that Biden should debate Trump, where he noted Frum had said there was still a good chance that Biden would win.

“I have believed all along that the non-Trump coalition would win the election in 2024, but Biden’s declining health made that more difficult.”

Frum noted that while they are called “debates”, it is really a “joint media appearance. “The question is, should the president of the United States, with all the awe and pomp of that office, do a joint media appearance with a convicted felon?”

Think of them as two groupings, explained Frum.

“On one side is a smaller grouping with maybe two or three pieces. They are people who really, really like Trump, whatever they are -a fifth of the modulation, maybe a little more,” he said. “Then there are the people who don’t really love Trump, but mind him less then they mind other forces in American society, that’s maybe another fifth, or a little bit more.“

Then there’s a tiny little sliver of people who really don’t like Trump, but can be “persuaded to hold their nose and just give him one more chance”. “That maybe gets you to 46 per cent of the population, 47 per cent if Trump was having an especially good day, or the democrats were having an especially bad day.”

“Against that is a much messier assembly of many, many groups that add up to a much larger number (this is the anti-Trump coalition), but are much harder to listen to a democratic coalition, and a lot of them are not exactly democrats.”

Steering the conversation back to Biden first refusing to resign, Harrison spoke to what Frum wrote about a few weeks ago on what he calls the “Harris gamble” and potential ways to address risks.

Frum stated a lot of political science has stated women candidates tend to do better with running the local race, but, “the higher up the political echelon you go, the more that tends to go in reverse,” and cited Hilary Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton paid a price for it, and Hillary Clinton’s problem was she was chasing this moving target. She had to be a woman in some ways, but not in other ways; some expectations kept shifting around and she was constantly trying to guess, who do I need to be in a game where every answer came with demerit points.”

He explains how with Kamala Harris the same problem exists again, adding, “there’s no such pretending it’s not, and that’s why many democrats that hope to move Biden out, hope to move her out.”

Frum also touched on how there was also a sense that Biden in 2020, had not fought hard enough for his presidential pick in the terms that there was a fairly hard chance he was not going to finish his term, so was not picking a running mate, but picking a possible future president.

Frum stated how a lot of people who were close to that decision say he refused to do that, and so he picked someone with no administrative experience (Harris had been an attorney general, she had been a US senator, but she’d not been a governor, and she had not had administrative experience and she’d never been in politics in a really competitive state).

“Biden short-circuited a lot of those deliberations for whatever reasons, so she’s a gambler,” he said. “Now, she has had a very good opening and she is running against Donald Trump who has his own weaknesses, so we will see, and she’s tried to correct that with her vice-presidential pick.

“One of the things that a woman in politics at the top level faces is how harsh are you allowed to be? We like to think we are reasoning creatures, and in our best minutes on very specific subjects, we are.”

Frum talks about the dominance game Trump is playing, and how he is always specializing in dominant exercises.

“Because it’s a dominance game, and women can respond to it in some ways, they can’t respond to it in others, so she is looking with (running mate governor Tim) Walz to be somebody who can replay the dominance game and reverse it, and Walz has been running these very types of dominance games, especially against his opposite number, republican running mate J.D. Vance, but also against Trump.”

Speaking to the whole “weird campaign”, he said too that is a dominance game.

Harrison said Frum has a sense of optimism, a sense of possibility of what’s going to happen in the short-term that things are going to move toward starting to address some of the big problems. He wondered if there were to be another Jan 6; another contested transition of power.

Frum’s said if the election is close, there will be a lot of skull-duggery.

He pointed to dozens and dozens of Trump-inclined people in potential swing states like Arizona and Georgia, who are already on record, and in the past have demonstrated, they are willing to sabotage election mechanics.

“There is a possibility of contested elections or non-certification of results. I think that’s a very high likelihood if the election, if Harris wins in any degree in a way that is close.

“Now, all of that will have some teacher of legality to it. It will not be violent, it will be wrong, it will be anti-democratic, it’s not the way the system’s supposed to operate, but there will be some colour of law to it; that’s a different thing from outright violence,” Frum said.

Speaking to Jan. 6, Frum said it was the result of the failure of Trump in trying to do things like this through fraud, and by and large, they had not worked, or worked in the way he needed them to work.

“So, he turned to violence as a last resort and it wasn’t a great plan, but he wasn’t in a great situation.

“The idea on Jan 6 was to create a big commotion. You scare people and that forces the secret service to bundle vice-president Pence, who’s the person who’s supposed to preside over these proceedings, and to take him to some safe place some distance away.

“They can turn off the violence and it’s too late for Pence to get back and you can then substitute the person who will be next (the oldest senator). The plan was to scare Pence into getting out of town, get the secret service to remove him –remember, Pence refused to let the secret service take him out of the building, because this is what he feared. He refused to go and the secret service were doing their job, and not part of any sinister plot, that was their job. If there is a commotion, get the vice-president out of harm’s way.

“Because he knew that the plot was to get Charles Grassley in the chair, and then Grassley says, ‘we don’t have a conclusive result’, and that means this election goes to the house of representatives when we vote by states, and there are more republican states than democratic states, so Trump wins, and that would have put the cat among the pigeons.”

Speaking to the greatest potential threat to Canada politically brought on by instability, such as economic changes, Harrison asked Frum to expand further.

Frum indicated that economically Canada is going to face a bumpy or bumpier road depending on who is president.

He noted how Donald Trump was the most protectionist president since the Second World War and Joe Biden was the second most protectionist president.

“Although, it’s a little hard to know what Kamala Harris thinks of those issues, people seem to be aligned with the most protectionist factions within the Biden administration, said Frum. “People want to make it harder to move goods and services across the border and they have visions, and this is unfortunately something that has become more and more broadly shared, much more industrial policy approach to American, much more American led, lots of favouritism to American firms, either way, that’s going to be bumpy.”

But he doesn’t think that is the greatest threat Canada faces.

“The greatest threat for everyone is always internal, it’s about self-belief, so it’s self-validation,” he said. “The things I worry about in Canada is the loss of self-belief, the loss of confidence that the country has something to offer, a loss of the will to say, you are welcome to come here, but here are the rules of how we do things.

“I think the beginning of every good politics is gratitude, and people scarified a lot, so we can enjoy this; we owe them thanks, even if we think maybe we would have done better.”

Devon Jones, library board chair, concluded the evening by thanking both Frum and Harrison for participating in the fundraiser.

“Thank you for sharing your views on what must be, or seems to be to Canadians, one of the most disturbing, maybe threatening, political situations that is going on in the United States today,” said Jones.

“In 2018, and in 2020, and tonight, you shared political conversations about the uneasy state of politics in the states which has only become more fraught in our minds since then.

“Its 94 long days until the election, and we can only hope that the possibility is truly there that sane minds will prevail and world law and democracy will flourish.”