David Frum Quotes

I was in the White House, probably the only administration I'll ever work for. The administration was not a success, neither at home nor abroad. The Iraq War was not a success. The condition of the average person was not enough better at the end of seven years of George Bush than it was at the beginning, and certainly it all ended in the collapse that was the Great Recession. So I feel a sense of karmic obligation to the universe because of that.

President Trump watches a lot of television. I mean, really a lot. His favourite channel is Fox. Now just imagine somebody wants put a message in front of the president. You can hire a lobbyist or you can buy a minute on Fox or you can even pay somebody at a think tank to articulate your message and then pay a booker at that think tank to get that person on Fox and put the thought directly in the president's ear.

Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

One might almost say, to adapt von Clausewitz, that modern warfare is PR by other means. And war-winning strategies mean that modern armies most stop treating their communications operations as secondary assignments or (as still too often happens) dumping grounds for officers who have failed at everything else - but as missions absolutely essential to success.

One of the great drivers of the alienation that has made Donald Trump possible is that the growth in the American economy has been weak. In the decade from 2005 to 2015, there was not one year when the US hit three per cent growth. And to the extent there's been growth, virtually all of it has been collected by the top 10 per cent of the population. Obviously, if we knew how to make growth faster, we would. We don't. And it's very difficult to make growth more broadly shared. Because it's not just the US that has this problem.

A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.

If you go on TV and say there's no other country in the world where you can be born poor and become rich, you get a huge megaphone. If you tell the truth, which is that most of the studies show actually the United States is worse than anybody except Britain in upward mobility, there is no audience for you.

We've all been wrong- I certainly have- and we should thank those who set us right. Not always fun, but always best in the end.

Donald Trump's big goal is to become the richest man in the world, abusing the powers of the presidency.

You can have these fake engagements, these virtual engagements that substitute for actual engagements. You don't have to participate, you can hit a button, send you 200 dollars to the Barack Obama for President campaign and think it's like you knocked on a door. But you didn't knock on a door.

Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox

One of the questions I often get asked is, "Were you surprised that Trump won?" I always answer the same way: "I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised."

We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.

No one is murdered in Hungary and there are no illegal arrests, but people have begun again, when they talk to you in a public place looking around to see who's listening. You see that in Slovakia, you're beginning to see that in Poland.

The great power the president has is that he is the most prominent person in the biggest media event on the planet. He has the attention of the nation and the world. When he speaks, everybody listens.

The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

I do think Hillary Clinton, I mean the Clintons, I`ve got a lot of critiques of the Clinton foundation. I do think they bend the law. But Hillary Clinton accepts the concept of legality, she accepts that courts are supreme, laws must be complied with and the power of the state is not to be used for persona revenge or personal enrichment. And that`s something - not something I trust Donald Trump to do.

The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel).

You've worked hard all your life. You've paid Medicare taxes for almost 30 years. But under the Republican plan, Medicare won't be there for you. Instead of Medicare as it exists now, under the Republican plan you'll get a voucher that will pay as little as half your Medicare costs when you turn 65—and as little as a quarter in your 80s. And all so that millionaires and billionaires can have a huge tax cut.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

In America, you will see in area after area, media under pressure, businesses under pressure not to criticize Donald Trump lest he reduce their stock value with an angry tweet.

While there is an attempt by the Trump people to say that California isn't really America. California certainly seems like America to me.

More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.

Those who seem to despise half of America will never be trusted to govern any of it. Those who cherish only the country's past will not be entrusted with its future.