'Fascism feasts on violence': How 'martyr-in-chief' Trump will 'boost bid for power and vengeance'

Journalist David Frum, a Never Trump conservative and former George W. Bush speechwriter, has been sounding the alarm about Donald Trump's plans for a second term if he defeats President Joe Biden in November. Like many other Never Trumpers — from attorney George Conway to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson — Frum views Trump not as a traditional conservative, but as the leader of a dangerously "authoritarian" movement.

In an article published by The Atlantic on July 14, Frum argues that the "despicable shooting" Trump survived on Saturday, July 13 has made an already-bad situation even more perilous.

Frum warns, "Fascism feasts on violence….. The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance."

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The shooter, according to Frum, has made Trump even more powerful within the Republican Party.

"The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution," Frum laments. "To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority's passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers."

The former Bush speechwriter adds, "After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to 'Fight!' to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court."

Frum argues that "demagogues" of the past — from segregationist George Wallace to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) — haven't made the type of inroads that Trump has made.

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"(Trump) and his allies will exploit a gunman's vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones," Frum predicts. "Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable — and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet's trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy."

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David Frum's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).