Latest David Frum Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I was in the White House, probably the only administration I'll ever work for. The administration was not a success, neither at home nor abroad. The Iraq War was not a success. The condition of the average person was not enough better at the end of seven years of George Bush than it was at the beginning, and certainly it all ended in the collapse that was the Great Recession. So I feel a sense of karmic obligation to the universe because of that.

  David Frum

  War, Home, House

• One of the reasons I've been interested in the US health care is that here is something you can do, that could lift one of the largest burdens of worry from the shoulders of tens of millions of people for whom the rest of the economy isn't working. A lot of the things that are in Obamacare that Republicans don't like were deliberately put there to force Republicans to negotiate. Republicans wouldn't negotiate, so we got Obamacare with all of the fur on it. Once it's there, of course, it's very hard to take health care benefits away from people, as the Republicans discovered.

  David Frum

  Worry, People, Care

• Donald Trump is the least unpopular thing about today's Republican Party. I mean, the idea that a Mitch McConnell or a Paul Ryan could say, "Let's toss Trump overboard and return to our program of plutocratic politics, health care removal, massive income tax cuts for the affluent, deregulation of finance" - if they cut loose from Donald Trump, it's like, you know, storm in channel, continent cut off. If they cut loose from him, they are much likelier to sink.

  David Frum

  Party, Mean, Cutting

• One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.

  David Frum

  Growth, Problem, Weak

• Obviously, Donald Trump won't be impeached or removed so long as the Republicans hold even one House of Congress. And even should they lose both in November of 2018, launching an impeachment - as the Republicans discovered with Bill Clinton - is very dangerous to the impeaching party. Unless you have a highly credible set of extremely damning facts, you turn a constitutional crisis into a political crisis. You rally potential supporters of the impeached president to him. You make his base bigger. So I imagine that he is likely to serve out the full term.

  David Frum

  Party, Long, House

• If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

  David Frum

  Crazy, War, Men

• Elites are inevitable in politics. That is how politics is going to work. The question is, are your elites responsible, public-spirited? Do they think about the interests of others, not just themselves? And the story of Western politics since the beginning of the century is that as elites become more separated, more selfish, as they leave behind their populations and don't think about them, they become discredited. And the people look for alternatives. But the alternative is worse. Those rules of the game protect us all. And they are more precious than almost any political outcome.

  David Frum

  Selfish, Thinking, People

• I am a very conservative person. And there are a lot of things that Donald Trump's government or administration is doing that I might agree with. The point is we have to defend the rules of the game. And one of the things that has empowered Donald Trump is that not enough people are serious enough about defending the rules of the game, maybe because they don't understand how endangered those rules are.

  David Frum

  People, Serious, Conservative

• I keep telling my American friends, "If you think of Donald Trump as only something that is happening inside the United States, you're missing it." Because there are Trump-like events happening across the Western world, in Warsaw Pact countries, in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands. As we speak, the second-largest party in the Dutch legislature - who's more level-headed than the Dutch? - is Geert Wilders's party, which is a very Trump-like party, and they've got 33 out of 150 seats.

  David Frum

  Country, Party, Thinking

• Donald Trump didn't have a polling operation until very late in his campaign. How did he know what to do? That the Ted Cruz people leaked their polls to Trump because they were looking forward to eliminating all the other rivals, clearing the way for a Cruz-Trump fight that they were certain Cruz would win. In the end, Cruz was the last man standing, it's true. If he had known at the beginning what he knew at the end, he might have thought twice. The Congressional Republican Party thought they could make Trump their tool to impose their very unpopular agenda. Instead, they became his tool.

  David Frum

  Party, Fighting, Winning

• The system we have is one that protects my rights under a president I don`t approve. That tomorrow we`ll do the same for you. And what people have in common is their commitment to those shared rules. And if you have someone who was a challenger to the shared rules, that`s unacceptable. And we`ve never seen that before. Not in a long, long time but we see it now.

  David Frum

  Commitment, Long, People

  Source: www.msnbc.com

• I do think Hillary Clinton, I mean the Clintons, I`ve got a lot of critiques of the Clinton foundation. I do think they bend the law. But Hillary Clinton accepts the concept of legality, she accepts that courts are supreme, laws must be complied with and the power of the state is not to be used for persona revenge or personal enrichment. And that`s something - not something I trust Donald Trump to do.

  David Frum

  Revenge, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.msnbc.com

• Donald Trump, as a businessman, he's not much of a builder and he's not much of dealmaker and he certainly isn't very good at making expenses line up with income. But he is a marketing genius. He must have seen an empty market niche that no one but him filled.

  David Frum

  Marketing, Genius, Niche

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The system has evolved to protect parties from people like Donald Trump. It really is true that people without well-established public records, without proven capability in public service, without tested beliefs and at least apparently under the influence of a foreign power, such people are screened out by major parties.

  David Frum

  Party, People, Belief

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Trump is not just unlike a Republican, he's unlike a presidential candidate. The whole elaborate presidential process is designed to screen out people like Donald Trump. And that process broke down in ways quite unlike anything in the recent experience of the United States.

  David Frum

  People, Presidential, Republican

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• One of the questions I often get asked is, "Were you surprised that Trump won?" I always answer the same way: "I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised."

  David Frum

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• In America, you will see in area after area, media under pressure, businesses under pressure not to criticize Donald Trump lest he reduce their stock value with an angry tweet.

  David Frum

  Media, America, Pressure

  Source: www.npr.org

• I don't think that disasters have to be spectacular. They can be a slow corrosion.

  David Frum

  Thinking, Disaster, Spectacular

  "David Frum: 'How Donald Trump Could Build An Autocracy In The U.S.'". “Morning Edition” with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. January 31, 2017.

• When we talk about authoritarianism, we conjure up out-of-date visions from the 1930s. But we are no more likely to do authoritarian government the way they did in the 1930s then we're likely to address or talk or do any of our other business in the way they did it in the 1930s.

  David Frum

  Government, Vision, Addresses

  "David Frum: 'How Donald Trump Could Build An Autocracy In The U.S.'". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. January 31, 2017.

• Normally what happens in a new presidency is the president has a big agenda, and Congress is full of people with human weaknesses. And so the president indulges the human weaknesses of members of Congress in order to pass his agenda. This time it's the other way around. Donald Trump does not have much of an agenda. Congress burns with this intense Republican agenda and so does Congress that has to put up with the human weaknesses of the president in order to get a signature on the things it desperately wants to pass.

  David Frum

  Order, People, President

  "David Frum: 'How Donald Trump Could Build An Autocracy In The U.S.'". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. January 31, 2017.

• We live in an age of de-democratization. The number of democracies in the world has been going backwards since 2005, and even many existing democracies including in Europe have been becoming less democratic.

  David Frum

  Europe, Numbers, Democracy

  "David Frum: 'How Donald Trump Could Build An Autocracy In The U.S.'". "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep, www.npr.org. January 31, 2017.

• That is the way successful countries, and Canada has been one of the most successful countries over the past quarter century, they operate. That when you win, you win within limits, when you lose, you accept the outcome.

  David Frum

  Country, Successful, Winning

  Source: www.cbc.ca

• We all have more at stake in the rules of the game than we do in the outcomes of the game. When that changes, that's when you begin to lose democracy.

  David Frum

  Games, Democracy, Outcomes

  Source: www.cbc.ca

• Democracy requires you to learn how to lose as well as how to exercise power when you win. And that requires restraint all around. One of the reasons it works is because when you win you don't do things that are so upsetting to the losers that they feel like they have less, they have more to gain by turning over the system.

  David Frum

  Exercise, Winning, Upset

  Source: www.cbc.ca

• I am not a person of the left. But one of the things, the central idea of democracy is that you have a bigger investment in the system as a whole than you do in any particular outcome.

  David Frum

  Ideas, Democracy, Outcomes

  Source: www.cbc.ca