David Frum Profile picture
Aug 22 22 tweets 3 min read
Trump-Russia a hoax? Well, except for the part where ...
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where candidate Trump publicly beseeched Russian intelligence to purloin and publish his opponent's emails - and then Russia intelligence immediately did so. 1/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Trump's campaign manager shared proprietary campaign polling information so that Russian intelligence could target Facebook advertising more effectively. 2/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Trump's campaign team met with Russian agents in hope that those agents would share clandestine information about their campaign opponent. 3/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where the Russians dangled a huge real-estate payoff in front of Trump during the 2016 election campaign, and Trump repeatedly lied about it. 4/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where one of Trump's closest confidantes - who'd eventually receive a pardon from Trump - reached out to Julian Assange in prison to coordinate the timing another round of purloined Clinton emails just before voting day. 5/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where at exactly the time he was hoping the Russians would publish their purloined Clinton emails, he told the New York Times that he wouldn't defend Estonia (and by implication other new NATO members) against Russian aggression. 5/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the time when he met the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office, banned all US press, and then blabbed to them that Israel was running a super-secret operation inside ISIS. 6/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Trump's first nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, lied to the Senate about meeting Russia's ambassador, even though he himself had no reason to lie, because he knew something bad was happening, but he didn't know what. 7/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Kevin McCarthy, then the Republican number 2 in the US House, joked in a private meeting that "we all know" Russia pays Trump. The attendees laughed, until Paul Ryan hushed them. 8/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where President Trump's aides kept trying to prevent him from meeting alone with Putin, he did it anyway, and then Trump seized the translator's notes and destroyed them. 9/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where he said on TV that he fired FBI director Comey to shut down the investigation of Trump-Russia. 10/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where on TV he denounced Montenegrin accession to NATO as likely to provoke World War III, even though Montenegro is more than 2000 km from Russia, because Russian oligarchs liked to park yachts and launder money in Montenegro. 11/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Trump's son said that the family business was kept afloat during the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 by Russian money. 12/ x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Trump tried to sabotage weapons deliveries to Ukraine. 13/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where the Department of Justice indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for helping the Trump campaign in 2016. 14/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where senior Trump aides - including Trump's national security adviser - lied to the FBI about their contacts with Russian intelligence. 15/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where ex-president Trump - surely mindful of his reputation as a Russian stooge and aware that a few empty words would commit him to nothing - still could not bring himself to condemn Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 16/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where it's become a test of Trump-loyalty in the GOP to oppose military aid to Ukraine so Ukrainians can defend themselves against Russian invasion. 17/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Trump's most intense supporters also intensely support the network of European far-right political parties subsidized and coordinated by Russia. 18/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Russian TV regularly assures viewers that their country's best hope for winning in Ukraine is Trump's return to office in 2024. 19/x
Trump-Russia a hoax? Except for the part where Trump's own top security aides almost unanimously agree he'd have tried to withdraw from NATO in a second term, abandoning eastern Europe to Putin.

END FOR NOW.

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More from @davidfrum

Aug 20
Thing I just learned from Linda Colley's "The Gun, The Ship, and the Pen." When Aaron Burr stayed as a houseguest of Jeremy Bentham's after fleeing the US in 1808, he brought his host as a thank-you gift ... a bound copy of Hamilton's "Federalist Papers." wwnorton.com/books/97808714…
p. 206
Another jaw-dropper. In 1833, the elderly Burr married a wealthy widow - then proceeded to burn through her fortune with bad land speculations. She moved to divorce him. What I only just learned is that Mrs Burr retained as her lawyer ... Alexander Hamilton's son. 2/x
Read 4 tweets
Aug 15
Unwelcome but important fact to face

Trump absconding with the country's highest secrets - storing them unsafely - and then lying about returning them - SHOULD have upset his supposedly patriotic supporters.

It didn't.

If anything ...

1/x
If anything, the latest Trump scandal has strengthened Trump's hold, not only on his core support, but on the broader GOP.

A friend tightly connected to major GOP donors wrote me over the weekend about this.

2/x
My friend's observation:

"Among the Republicans I know and have polled, a majority of them were for DeSantis and now all for Trump, almost no matter what comes out. Maybe that doesn’t hold, but maybe it shockingly does. ..."

3/x
Read 15 tweets
Aug 10
Conspicuous lack of Trump supporters arguing that the president obeyed the law, did nothing wrong.
Instead, we're getting this weird line of defense: "The FBI is reportedly investigating Trump's illegal retention of classified documents -but we think the reports are wrong. We think the FBI is really investigating Trump's illegal attempt to overthrow a US election by violence."
EG, Wall Street Journal editorial page: "Multiple media reports suggest that Justice has opened a grand jury probe into the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump may be a target of that investigation." wsj.com/articles/the-f…
Read 4 tweets
Aug 1
Hawley: Running fast away from danger *is* my consistent self-defense policy, why do you ask?
The Hawley argument is that being a weak and unreliable ally in Europe will make the United States a more credible coalition leader in Asia.
Hawley started with the conclusion that would secure him guest spots with Fox News' anti-Ukraine evening lineup .. and worked backward from there. But the path he took is obscure and winding. You think an accomplished sprinter like Hawley would know - run in a straight line.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 27
In June 1939, King George VI and his wife Queen Mary made first visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch. On June 11, they came to lunch at the home of President Roosevelt. FDR served hot dogs - and invited the press to watch and photograph.
FDR was not a fancy eater. But his own personal taste for lunch ran to foods like ... americanheritage.com/fdrs-favorite-…
Read 7 tweets
Jul 23
This clip is attracting much derision, deservedly. Two things that have so far escaped comment:

1) Notice Chomsky's use of the phrase "Soviet Russia" - erasing the other peoples of the USSR. The so-called anti-imperialist reflexively uses the language of Russian imperialism ...
2) Chomsky does not complain that Americans cannot hear the voice of Alexei Navalny, silenced inside Putin's prison. He complains that they cannot hear the voice of PM Lavrov. Not only is that untrue ... eg BBC interviewed him just a month ago
... but it also is again a revealing tell that Chomsky identifies "Russian voices" as the most violent, authoritarian, and reactionary forces in the Russian state and society. Lavrov to Chomsky is authentic; Russian liberals, not.
Read 6 tweets

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