U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrive by helicopter at Trump International Golf Links, in Aberdeen, Scotland, Britain, July 28, 2025. Jane Barlow/Pool via REUTERS
President Donald Trump's escalating use of government force against his political critics should shock and alarm the whole nation, anti-Trump conservative and former President George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote for The Atlantic.
This comes just a week after Trump's housing finance director leveled a questionable "mortgage fraud" accusation against a Federal Reserve official who didn't go along with Trump's rate cuts — and after the FBI raided the home of Trump's former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a frequent critic of the president whom Trump has previously demanded should be in jail.
"In this second Trump term, things keep happening that would have seemed outrageous — impossible — just a few months before," wrote Frum. "Every day, there’s a new movement away from the rule of law, toward arbitrary and corrupt personal rule. Among the fearful questions pressing upon the country: How does America ever turn back?"
In retrospect, Frum wrote, part of the problem is how little blowback Trump got for his blatant lawlessness in prior years. Congress passed some minor electoral count reform after Jan. 6, but left it at that, while the National Archives dragged its feet on Trump's classified documents removal. He was later prosecuted for both these things, but late enough that he could use the election to shut them down.
"There was a certain logic to this widespread loathness to act," wrote Frum. "From the perspective of, say, 2022, Constitution-respecting Americans could congratulate themselves that their system had withstood and overcome the Trump test. Trump’s party lost control of the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump was then himself ejected from office in 2020. When his abuses of his authority came to court, federal judges — including those appointed by Trump’s own party — struck them down. Trump was dissuaded by his own appointees from dissolving NAFTA and quitting NATO. His scheme to overthrow the 2020 election failed. He sabotaged the Biden transition every way he could, but he ultimately did exit office on January 20, 2021."
But with Trump back in power, Frum wrote, he is busy purging the civil service and bullying and threatening every organization that posed challenges for him last time — and more worryingly, he's burying any sense that America has moved beyond him.
"After Teapot Dome, after Watergate, the supporters of the implicated president accepted that he had done wrong, that the guilty should be punished, and that these misdeeds should never be repeated," wrote Frum. However, "any aftermath of the Trump presidency seems more likely to resemble the aftermath of the Civil War: The reactionary losers who tried to overthrow the U.S. Constitution may acknowledge themselves beaten, but they won’t acknowledge themselves wrong."