The award for the most despicable and vitriolic response to the assassination assault against former President Donald Trump goes to David Frum at The Atlantic, who titles his opinion piece on July 14 “The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator.” In it, Frum twists in pretzels about how those worried about “democracy” must “denounce violence,” while at the same avoiding “extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics.”
Frum begins by saying: “Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well.” He compares Trump and his supporters to a fascist movement, which, like religions, “they offer martyrs as their proof of truth,” and with Trump’s movement, “The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.”
Frum cautions readers against using “expressions of dismay and condemnation,” which “have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy…. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.” And instead of Trump having his “reckoning” in the courts, this event and sympathy it will evoke from Americans is “inscribing Trump into a place in American life he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021.”
Frum ends by arguing the ultimate sophistry: “Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”