Quotes from David Frum

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.

Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.

Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

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.

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

My view on candidates on money is unless it's proven that the donor stole the money, the campaign keeps the money.

There is no right to work in a think tank, and these are very privileged positions.

A presidential speech is always the work of many hands.

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

Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.

When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels," tweeted the sharp social observer Siyanda Mohutsiwa the morning after the 2016 election.

The one-third of America that identifies as "conservative" will be isolated even more profoundly within an information ghetto of deception and incitement.

Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy's undoing.

The financial and economic consequences of the stoppage of payments by the largest purchaser of goods and services on planet Earth could not be calculated, could barely even be imagined. It would be a nuclear event—and Republican Party leaders were willing to threaten it not only once, but a second time again in 2013.

And then humbly consider this second troubling question: If the Trump administration were as convinced as you are that you would do the right thing—would they have asked you in the first place?

No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight -- even though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.

Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment.

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.

Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse.

The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation's biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. The winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes.

Embedded in Trumpism is the distinction between "people" and "the people." Not all people belong to "the people." More and more people emphatically do not belong—which is why Trump's absurd claims about illegal voting resonated so powerfully.