David frum why i am a republican

These funds were provided by a relatively small number of very wealthy people. Yet seldom in the history of fund-raising has so much bought so little, so fleetingly.

Between December and September , Jeb Bush plunged from first place in the Republican field to fifth. Between late September and mid-October, he purchased 60 percent of all political spots aired in New Hampshire. That ad barrage pushed his poll numbers in the state from about 9 percent to about 8 percent. As the governor of Florida, Bush had cut taxes and balanced budgets. At the same time, Bush passionately supported immigration liberalization.

The central event in his life history was his reinvention as an honorary Latino American when he married a Mexican woman, Columba Garnica de Gallo. He spoke Spanish at home. He converted to Catholicism. He sought his fortune with a Cuban American business partner. Big-dollar Republican favorites have run into trouble before, of course.

But Giuliani lost ground to two rivals equally acceptable to the donor elite, or nearly so: Mitt Romney and John McCain. In both cycles, resistance to the party favorite was concentrated among social and religious conservatives.

The mutiny of the election cycle has been different. By the fall of , a majority of Republicans favored candidates who had never been elected to anything: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina. A former CEO, she appealed to the same business-minded Republicans who might have voted for Romney in Carson appealed to the same religious conservatives that candidates like Mike Huckabee and Santorum had appealed to in prior presidential cycles.

What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements.

He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included! When Trump first erupted into the Republican race in June, he did so with a message of grim pessimism.

We need money … We have losers. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain … The American dream is dead. But it found an audience all the same. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant.

Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards. What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.

More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP.

Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. I call them the fools. He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past.

I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. He promised above all to protect their wages from being undercut by Republican immigration policy. I t cannot last, can it? Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession.

The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in Instead, it triggered an internal class war. The contest for the presidency turns on external events as much as—or more than—internal party politics. Jimmy Carter blamed his defeat on the debacle of the attempted rescue of American hostages in Iran.

So anything can happen. But that does not mean anything will happen. Barring shocks, presidential elections turn on the fundamentals of economics, demography, and ideology. The puzzle for the monied leaders of the Republican Party is: What now? And what next after that? None of the options facing the GOP elite is entirely congenial. But there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond.

They lead the party in very different directions. The premise of the past few thousand words is that the Republican donor elite failed to impose its preferred candidate on an unwilling base in for big and important reasons. But maybe that premise is wrong. He said, I don't know what you're talking about. The president said exactly what we wanted him to say, exactly what we expected him to say, nobody could listen that speech and hear anything other than defence of Article 5. Frum says that in the beginning he himself was 'Trump-curious'.

The Republican party, he argues, was not offering voters what they wanted, and he believed Trump's disruption could do some good. He was the first Republican to talk a lot about the opioid epidemic. Then I waited for some response… somebody to say the way I'm going to beat Jeb Bush is by taking Donald Trump's issues and using them to put together a different kind of Republican platform and then we'll have, you know, a normal kind of battle and we'll have a normal kind of nominee, and maybe a normal kind of presidency.

I didn't anticipate ever that he would actually win the nomination. That seemed like a joke out of the Simpsons. But he did. He says that those who most strongly objected to Trump at the start of the campaign — the Never Trumpers — went on to become his biggest boosters.

Negative partisanship is a term coined in the last decade, when rising numbers of Americans were disavowing both the Republican and Democratic parties and identifying as independents. It turned out there were no independents. That every American hates one party much more strongly than he or she hates the other party.

This is negative partisanship. I may be a weak Republican but I'm a strong anti-Democrat or vice versa. Once you've got the party apparatus, you can then say 'OK, maybe you don't like me but Hillary Clinton is literally Satan.

And when he said literally Satan, he meant literally Satan. And since she's literally Satan, obviously it's better to have Donald Trump than Satan. Listen to the full audio near the top of this page, where you can also share this article across email, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. Social Sharing. Read Story Transcript Donald Trump's presidency is corroding American democracy like "gum disease," according to a former speechwriter for George W.

Frum proposes a series of small reforms to governmental structure and bold policy trades, such as an exchange of tighter immigration rules for a comprehensive health care system or climate legislation. What are the critical fault lines in American society and government? Are the country's deep ideological fractures reconcilable or has tribalism pushed different political factions past the point of return? How does the coronavirus pandemic factor into Frum's proposed reforms and trade-offs?

What concessions need to be made by both sides, in his opinion, to make America "a more perfect union" moving forward? Leave a message before the program at During the live show, call , email thesource tpr.

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