Never Trump Media Pundits: David Frum

Never Trump Media Pundits and the Bridges They’ve Burned (full series)
David Frum | Robert Kagan
Jennifer Rubin | David French

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Summary: Never Trump pundits who have previously identified as conservatives have had many homes within the regime media. Some have behaved in ways that make it hard to imagine them ever returning to their old alliances. But sometimes it’s wrong to assume traditional, limited-government conservatism was ever their home in the first place.

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Tightly defined, the “Never Trump” label refers to a breed of political, policy, or media professional who: (1) was identified as Republican or sympathetic to same for many years or decades before publicly abandoning the position after 2016 and then (2) pivoted to a career defined by relentless opposition to Donald Trump.

In many cases, what they’re saying now makes it difficult to remember if they were ever really limited-government conservatives in the first place.

The Lincoln Project and the Defending Democracy Together Network, profiled earlier in this report, demonstrate how these defections can be lucrative. A conservative estimate of the combined revenue taken in by just those two since 2018 exceeds $300 million.

Generally known from their TV appearances, though perhaps less well paid, are the Never Trumpers who were at or later found homes in regime media and think tanks. Some examples include David Frum at The Atlantic, Robert Kagan (also now at The Atlantic, but previously the Washington Post), Jennifer Rubin (until recently at the Washington Post), and David French (now at the New York Times).

They and others like them are the go-to “conservatives” when regime TV news needs a Trump critic that hasn’t always been a Democrat.

“Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why,” boasted David Frum in a March column.

Whether he really understands his subject or not, Donald Trump is now a big part of Frum’s career.

Examples that should not count as Never Trumpers include the likes of George Will, a conservative-libertarian voice at the Washington Post for more than half of the last century. What makes Will different is that his consistent opposition to Trump has been a recurring feature of his work, but never the obsession. Even Will’s essay criticizing Trump’s second inaugural address ended with healthy advice for Never Trumpers and MAGA folks alike.

“Today, many emotionally dilapidated obsessives experience either despair or euphoria about the inaugurations of presidents, who come and go,” wrote Will. “Both groups should rethink what they expect from politics, and why they do.”

Only three of Will’s nine columns over the month preceding mid-March 2025 were about the Trump administration.

No such nuance will do for career Never Trump journalists. Over the same period, David French went 11 for 11 at the NYTimes, and David Frum 7 for 7 at The Atlantic. Being Never Trump means needing Trump . . . for content and employment, if not also for maintaining a worldview defined only by what you oppose.

David Frum

As Republican résumés go, it’s hard to beat writing the words literally spoken by a Republican president.

David Frum was a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush. He is widely (though controversially) credited with thinking up the “axis of evil” line from Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address. Prior to that, Frum was a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, a now defunct neoconservative journal.

The link between the neoconservatives and limited-government conservatives can be quite loose, sometimes to the point of being nonexistent. Frum is far from the only traveler to have run down the path from NeoCon to Never Trump.

Similar to many Never Trumpers, it has also become hard to remember when or if Frum ever fit within the limited-government movement at all.

“It’s hard to remember now, but a dozen years ago the conservative world was pulsing with intellectual creativity,” Frum wrote in 2018. “Paul Ryan did not kill that vitality single-handedly, but he ranks high among the principal suspects.”

Ah yes, what conservative doesn’t wish to return to the pulsating, creative glory days of … … 2006?!?

The former House Speaker was always on the sober side of Republican rhetoric. Uneasy with Trump from the beginning, Paul Ryan called himself a “never-again” Trumper in 2022 and in June 2024 said he’d write in someone else rather than vote for Trump to return to the White House.

So, what was it that the rabble-rousing averse Ryan supposedly wrecked for Frum?

Frum fondly recalled his favorite year:

Those were days when Newt Gingrich wanted action on climate change. When Mitt Romney pioneered universal health coverage in Massachusetts in 2006—and Jim DeMint cited that accomplishment when he endorsed Romney for president in 2007. . . . “The age of Reagan is over,” Gingrich pronounced, and a startling number of conservatives seemed to agree.

Ryan, to Frum’s horror, brought all that icky “Reagan” stuff back, to the point where even Gingrich shrewdly conceded his crusade against carbon dioxide was “the dumbest single thing I’ve done in the last few years.”

“Republican gains in 2010 elevated Ryan to the chairmanship of the House Budget Committee,” recalled a disappointed Frum. “There he rolled out a sequence of plans ostensibly aimed at balancing the budget—plans that would severely constrain the future growth of Medicaid and remove the Medicare guarantee in its present form from middle-aged and younger workers.”

Thinking that he was convincing someone, Frum also provided a supposedly damning quote from Ryan:

America is drawing perilously close to a tipping point that has the potential to curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible. The tipping point represents two dangers: first, long-term economic decline as the number of makers diminishes and the number of takers grows—and second, gradual moral-political decline as dependency and passivity weaken the nation’s character…

Those words are too wonky to have come from Reagan or Trump, but otherwise Ryan was on the same page.

The Frum-advised Republicans would have prematurely surrendered to a crooked climate grift that is now being taken apart by a Republican president.

We know where this would have led. German adherence to the carbon dioxide cult brought them the disastrous Energiwende that was supported by political parties both right and left. It has partially demolished German energy infrastructure and left Germany dangerously dependent on Russia.

Balancing the federal budget by reforming runaway entitlement and welfare spending also wouldn’t have fit with Frum Republicanism. The Age of Frum would have been incompatible with the Age of Reagan.

“Let’s Make America Great Again,” was one of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogans, and he continued to use it in his 1984 reelection. Clearly, this was a breed of conservative intellectual creativity that had some staying power, so long as Republicans could stick with the program.

Frum was off that program early on.

He wrote “How to Build an Autocracy,” the March 2017 cover story The Atlantic. As the print date implies, a lot or all of it was probably written before Trump was sworn in the first time. When Trump derangement fiction is taught in English departments, this alternative history fever dream will be remembered as a foundational text.

“It’s 2021, and President Donald Trump will shortly be sworn in for his second term,” began Frum “The 45th president has visibly aged over the past four years. He rests heavily on his daughter Ivanka’s arm during his infrequent public appearances.”

And yet, Frum waited until two days after the November 2024 election to make this hilariously tardy social media statement: “De-registered as a Republican today.”

What has he been doing since?

“The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government,” wrote Frum, at the beginning of a March 2025 essay.

In the mawkish history of Frum’s Never Trump act, this was a typically sluggish opening sentence. Anyone who kept reading deserved all that they received.

One such masochist may have been essayist John Mac Ghlionn, who wrote this of Frum just a few days later: “The architect of the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ slogan now churns out cringeworthy think pieces about ‘saving democracy’ in The Atlantic.”

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In the next installment, Robert Kagan leaves the Republican Party and votes for Hillary Clinton.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/never-trump-media-pundits-part-1/