The Real Architects of Chaos: David Frum's Role in the Destruction of American Trust
As David Frum condemns Trump for inciting the violence which nearly killed him, let's take a look back at his neoconservative legacy. It reveals the deep roots of American distrust and division
The assassination attempt on Trump is a horror for any liberal society, the shooter’s gun as a death-rattle which risks consuming a democracy in a spiral of escalating violence.
Ordinarily the would-be assassin would be condemned outright, no ifs or buts, but these are not ordinary days in the land of the free. According to Bush era neoconservative, author of ‘Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic’ and now writer in The Atlantic, David Frum, Trump is responsible for his own near-death.
In his latest piece titled ‘The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator: Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others’, Frum argues that “Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well”
David Frum does this without a shred of self-reflection on his own historic role eroding trust in American democracy. Sorry, but I cannot let David Frum’s essay pass without serious rebuttal.
First I’ll outline precisely who David Jeffrey Frum is, his role serving in the Bush era White House. Secondly, I will examine some of the ways that he and his fellow neoconservatives engineered precisely the conditions that Trump exploits.
Frum’s Atlantic piece is a product of pure projection, so let’s get started.
Meeting David Frum
David Frum is the neoconservative writer who penned the memo to then-President George W. Bush in the aftermath of September 11th 2001, coining the pernicious phrase “axis of evil”. President Bush would lace the phrase into his state of the union address to articulate what became known to history as ‘the Bush doctrine’. Put simply, according to the 43rd President of the United States, America had the right to attack any country it suspected of preparing to attack it. In short pre-emptive war as the cornerstone of state policy.
Mr Frum’s contribution is all-too-often overlooked by historians today. At the time he wrote the memo after having been asked by Mike Gerson, White House chief speechwriter. Frum’s mission was to ‘aid 43’ in justifying the expansion of military operations. As NATO bombs reigned down on Afghanistan, Frum set to work on expanding the case for war. This time, engineering the consent of the American people for a new bombing campaign with Iraq as the second target after Afghanistan and - ludicrously - Iran as the third.
We might never have known about Frum’s particular role in crafting the malignant phrase ‘axis of evil’ were it not for the “wifely pride” of his spouse. Slate intercepted an email from Frum’s wife, author Danielle Crittenden, sent to her family where she waxed lyrical about Frum’s achievement
“…my husband is responsible for the ‘Axis of Evil’ segment of Tuesday’s State of the Union address. It’s not often a phrase one writes gains national notice—unless you’re in advertising of course (‘The Pause that refreshes’)—so I’ll hope you’ll indulge my wifely pride in seeing this one repeated in headlines everywhere!!”
In his 2003 book ‘The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush’ Frum attempts to assert that he was actually ready to resign the White House had it not been for the terrorist attack on the twin towers. He presents himself as a patriot simply wishing to do right by his President at a time of crisis. He reflected “I don’t know what I was ready to do,” in The Right Man, “whatever it is that speechwriters do in times of war. Type, I suppose—but type with renewed patriotism and zeal.”
In the same book Frum also insisted that the opposition to the war in Iraq was really merely the product of scepticism of Bush abilities intellectually; “A lot of the objections to this war rest on personal opposition to this man.”
But his following book, ‘An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror’ which he co-authored with Richard Perle truly gave his game away. Frum was not some struggling corporate conservative ready to resign had it not been for the attack of 9/11. Quite the contrary, he was a neoconservative project-man to his fingertips.
For those who don’t know, Richard Perle is a man to the right of not only Bush 43 but more likely also Attila the Hun. As far back as 1996 Perle wrote ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, advising Netanyahu’s government. In it he asserted Israeli security could only be secured by asserting “Western values” whilst weaponizing Damascene weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as justification for regime change wars in both Syria and Iraq. In short, for neoconservatives like Richard Perle, the 2003 Iraq war was never about- as Tony Blair put it - “the kaleidoscope of risk” changing post 9/11. For men like Richard Perle, 9/11 was simply the excuse for acting out their ideological fantasies.
In 1998 Perle was also instrumental in the Project for the New American Century with neoconservative allies Wolfowitz, Woolsey, Elliott Abrams, and John Bolton. But the real intellectual mover for this Project for a New American Century would prove to be Bill Kristol.
Bill Kristol via the neoconservative think-tank ‘Project for a New American Century’ (PNAC) lamented the foreign policy reordering imagined by his ilk would require “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” So naturally, a year later when 9/11 struck, Kristol and the neoconservatives had their “catalyzing” event, and eagerly began ramping up the calls for war.
This is the real context the country-club never-Trump neoconservatives would like you to never know. As men like David Frum and Bill Kristol today clutch their pearls, denouncing Trump as a unique evil, the elephant in the room with us is their projection and staggering lack of self introspection.
If Trump is the existential thread to American democracy men like David Frum insists that he is, it’s time we asked who is the responsible for the conditions that have enabled his rise. Which group of men, more than any other, are responsible for leaving a generation mistrustful of the media and government? Whose actions are most responsible for institutionalising lying inside government?
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J'Accuse...!
March 2024 marked the 21st anniversary of the fateful US-led invasion of Iraq. The victims of the conflict are too numerous to be approximately counted, but estimates put civilian dead between 280,771 - 315,190, although PLOS Medicine (peer reviewed medical journal) places the figure at 460,000. Beyond the dead were the more than 9.2 million to be displaced, and 4.7 million to experience moderate or severe food insecurity.
That unremitting human catastrophe defined people of my age group (I’m 35). We’re the ‘9/11 generation’, whose teenage years flipped completely on its head due to the worldview of certain neoconservative policymakers, advisors and even speechwriters in Washington D.C.
In 2006 54 per cent of Americans said the US had ‘succeeded’ in Iraq. Fast-forward to 2018 and that figure plummets to 39 per cent.
Pew Research (2019) revealed that 62 per cent of all US adults believe the Iraq war was not worth the fighting. Among veterans the number sits at 64 per cent. Likewise a clear majority of those who served in the war as soldiers denounce it in hindsight as a fools endeavour at 59 per cent.
Lurking behind all of these numbers is the cynical legacy of men like David Frum who helped produce the war in Iraq. It’s a legacy of subsequent surges in conspiracy theories, a rise in a political culture of gaslighting and of the engineering of consent by amoral actors.
The neoconservatives not merely wrecked whole countries (Iraq, Syria, Libya to name a few) but equally succeeded in hollowing out the foundations of democracy at home in the USA.
There is a cost to more than 1 million dead or displaced Iraqis and 59 per cent of soldiers who served saying it was all a waste of time. That cost ought to be clear to men like David Frum - if only he were capable of even a modicum of self-reflection. Whilst I cannot and do not seek to speak on behalf of ‘my generation’, nevertheless I can say with plenty justification that the neoconservative legacy poisoned the well of trust so to speak. For those of us of a certain age group the neoconservatives have primed us to have reduced trust in intelligence services and the connected corollary scepticism of claims made by western governments.
But reading Frum’s article in The Atlantic, ‘The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator: Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others’, it is abundantly clear the Bush era never-Trump exiles are the last to appreciate any of this.
As Frum and his neoconservative compatriots (Pearl, Kristol, Wasserman etc) all operated as advisors, speechwriters and policymakers, they created the very swamp that has proved such fertile ground for ‘national populists’ such as Trump to exploit.
After all, it really is a short leap from the Bush White House’s neoconservative-dominated ‘Office for Special Plans’, which co-opted incompetent journalists (Judith Miller) which gaslit us all into a war on a pack of WMD variety lies to Kellyanne Conway’s 2017 ‘alternative facts’ stand-up routine on CNN.
When Frum writes “Fascism feasts on violence”, I cannot help but agree but add that it also feasts on a lack of trust in the institutions of a liberal democracy. Frum makes no mention in his ‘Trump deserved it’ contribution post-assassination attempt of the historic collapse in trust in institutions. And we know why, because it was his lot who did most of that damage.
The Bush-Cheney White House so successfully manipulated the media, weaponizing access journalism and outright lies (Office for Special Plans) that on the run up to Iraq the media landscape was serially distorted. Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel’s 2003 research exposed that 71 per cent of American media sources were pro-invasion, 26 per cent neutral and a mere 3 per cent anti-war. That sort of consensus is what Edward Bernays called ‘the engineering of consent’, by neoconservatives such as David Frum.
In Bernay’s own words, he describes the engineering consent as "use of an engineering approach—that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs."
The danger of this is so great that its danger to democracy has been expressed in a textbook on American government:
“Under modern conditions of political advertising and manipulation, it has become possible to talk of the engineering of consent by an elite of experts and professional politicians. Consent that is thus engineered is difficult to distinguish in any fundamental way from the consent that supports modern totalitarian governments. Were the manipulated voter to become the normal voter, the government he supports could hardly be said to rest on his consent in any traditional sense of that word”1
If only men with such influence such as David Frum had ever once paused to consider the dangers of their engineering of consent on the run up to the Iraq invasion?
Prior to the invasion 71 per cent of the US media supported the attack on Iraq and 71 per cent of American’s consequently said using military force was correct. As of 2018 only 43 per cent of Americans still thought so.
There is a price for that, it’s a feeling that the ‘mainstream media’ are not to be trusted, that they lie or at least never speak the whole truth. Due to nonsense like Frum’s '“axis of evil” bullshit and Bush 43’s neoconservative populated administration’s desire to act out fantasies of regime change wars dating to 1996, public trust has collapsed in media.
Don’t believe me? Just look at Gallup data on trust in major US institutions. If only 11 per cent of Americans have ‘a great deal or quite a lot’ of trust in television news, it’s impossible to just blame the pandemic or Trump being a cult leader.
16 per cent have faith in newspapers, only 23 per cent in the Presidency, 11 per cent in television news and 7 per cent in Congress. These numbers are the end product of the neoconservatives like David Frum institutionalising lying inside the US government.
An ‘alternative facts’ legacy
The legacy which has produced Trump is largely if not entirely the fault of men like Frum. A discredited media, institutionalised lying to engineer consent for policy agendas, 1 million dead and displaced Iraqis, institutionalised gaslighting driven by politicians, their client journalists (Judith Miller) and Washington pro-war ‘think tanks’.
All while 2003 forward we witnessed neoconservatives pander to rising Islamophobic rhetoric inside the GOP in order to justify the Bush era neoconservative regime change wars.
It’s not hard to imagine how we ended up with a man like Trump who can stand up and scream ‘fake news media’ and be taken seriously. He is speaking to a generation of centre-right American conservatives who know full-well they have been utterly manipulated by the ‘establishment Republicans’ who now clutch their pearls at MAGA fascism.
There is a swamp, but much of it was created by men including David Frum. I am old enough to remember when his face alongside Bill Kristol’s were persona non grata in centre left circles which I inhabit. But despite them having wrapped the GOP car around the metaphorical tree, they are suddenly feted as ‘respectable republicans’ simply because they murmur ‘never Trump’.
Sorry, but my memory is too long. I know what these so-called respectable Republicans did and how we all ended up where we are. I accuse David Frum and the other neoconservatives like him of being responsible for creating the conditions which have enabled Trump’s own brand of cynical ‘national populism’.
In my book I am still in the process of writing (Wrecking Syria) I document the horrors of extraordinary rendition, torture programmes, rampant US human rights abuses and worse. My editor laments that my progress is slow, but hopefully it will be drafted out by years end.
In the meantime, I cannot help but observe having read Frum’s Atlantic piece that he is guilty of projection of epic proportions. For all that he claims Trump is guilty of, his neocon gang are equally guilty. Whether it be lying as a reflex, gaslighting voters into supporting dangerous ideas, engineering an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ environment, or populating a country with conspiracy theorists who have zero trust in institutions, he helped do it all.
In conclusion ladies and gentlemen…
Frum ends his essay observing that while he welcomes Trump not losing his life to the assassins bullet, “Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021”
One could easily say the same of David Jeffrey Frum, speechwriter for warmongerers, neoconservative instigator and most infamously author of “axis of evil” that paved the way for the unipolar moment of US pre-emptive war. The widow-song can still be heard across the levant, mothers murmured grief over the countless graves of lost sons and daughters. Testament to the ‘respectable Republicans’ like Frum who say ‘never Trump’.
When Frum decries the diminution of trust in mainstream media sources, he did it.
When Frum moans about the rise of conspiracy theorists becoming mainstreamed, he is significantly responsible for it.
As he denounces the men of violence in our politics, he served under one of the most bloodied and cynical politicians of my lifetime.
David Frum, a man whose actions “in American life” that “should have forfeited beyond redemption” any hope of rehabilitation. Yet there he is, Staff Writer for the Atlantic.
But sure, let’s all pretend that it’s all Trump’s malevolence that has cast American democracy into such a fragile light.
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John C. Livingston & Robert G. Thompson (1966) The Consent of the Governed, 2nd edition, page 11, Collier Macmillan