Ex-Bush Speechwriter Sounds Alarm On Trump 2.0 With Frightening Historical Comparison

David Frum — an ex-speechwriter for George W. Bush — used an op-ed in The Atlantic to share a frightening forecast of a post-Donald Trump America, underscoring the “terrifyingly clear message” he’s sending in his second term.Frum looked back to the Teapot Dome corruption scandal under Warren G. Harding and the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon, noting that the implicated president’s supporters “accepted that he had done wrong, that the guilty should be punished, and that these misdeeds should never be repeated.”“Any aftermath of the Trump presidency seems more likely to resemble the aftermath of the Civil War: The reactionary losers who tried to overthrow the US Constitution may acknowledge themselves beaten, but they won’t acknowledge themselves wrong,” he wrote.“If they won’t acknowledge that, what confidence can anyone feel that they won’t try again if they get the chance?”Frum — a frequentcritic of the president since the 2016 election — pointed to Trump’s revenge tour in his current administration, his recruitment of loyalists to the federal government and the recent FBI raid on the home of former National Security Adviser John Bolton.“In this second Trump term, things keep happening that would have seemed outrageous—impossible—just a few months before. Every day, there’s a new movement away from the rule of law, toward arbitrary and corrupt personal rule,” wrote Frum, a staff writer for The Atlantic.“Among the fearful questions pressing upon the country: How does America ever turn back?”Former Bush speechwriter David Frum.Frum stressed that the “government is changing fast” under Trump as well, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement morphing into an “an enormous paramilitary force staffed by people hired for pro-Trump zeal” and his family raking in “hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, gratuities, and payoffs” while ignoring post-Watergate ethics rules.“Even if the House changes hands in 2026—even if a president is elected in 2028 who possesses a healthy respect for the rule of law—Trump’s second-term perversion of the government will not be easily undone,” he wrote.He went on, “Trump is teaching his many supporters that public office is just a game of revenge, that there’s no difference between the government pleading with an ex-president for 17 months to return stolen secret documents and a serving president using claims about documents to target a critic for retaliation.”Read more of Frum’s op-ed in The Atlantic here.

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