David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is ripping into business leaders and politicians in Washington D.C. for brushing aside President-elect Donald Trump's attempts to illegally remain in power four years ago.
Writing in The Atlantic, Frum argues that the results of the 2024 election have now created incentives for everyone in D.C., including Democratic lawmakers, to pretend Trump's coup attempt never happened.
While Frum acknowledges that Republicans have long turned the page on the deadly January 6th riots in which Trump supporters illegally broke into the Capitol and sent lawmakers fleeing for their lives, he says that Democrats are now likely to stop bringing it up as well given that doing so provided no electoral benefit.
"Many will argue that the best way to win in 2028 is to attack Trump and his administration as servants of the ultrarich—in other words, by dusting off the playbook that Democrats have traditionally run against Republicans," he writes. "Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all campaigned against Trump as a kind of aberration; all welcomed the support of non-Trump Republicans. Next time, things are likely to be different."
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Frum also thinks that this will extend to many mainstream media reporters who will become more dependent on Trump and his allies for inside information that they depend upon for scoops.
"If you’re a normal journalist trying to report on inauguration plans or the staffing of the Cabinet or the administration’s first budget, your job depends on access, and access depends on playing ball to a greater or lesser degree," he writes. "If you keep banging on about an attempted coup that happened four years ago, you are just making yourself irrelevant."
That said, Frum personally vows at the end of his piece to not whitewash what Trump and his allies did that day.
"Not all of us, however, have to live in the world of Washington transactions," he writes. "Some of us need to volunteer to keep talking about the inconvenient things...It did happen. It should still shock us how much it did happen."