'Quit pretending': One-time Republican tells GOP to stop hiding how they feel about Trump

Many elected Republicans reacted with outrage to special counsel Jack Smith's indictment of former President Donald Trump -- but one-time Republican insider David Frum believes it's all for show.

Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, writes in The Atlantic that many Republicans secretly want the former president completely out of the national picture but are too afraid to say so due to wrath from their voters.

Frum now thinks it's time for Republicans to "quit pretending" to feel deep loyalty to Trump.

In his column, Frum outlines the dangers of trying to appease the MAGA base instead of simply leveling with them that the former president is a criminal who deserves to be held accountable under the rule of law.

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"These plans depend on the non-Trump political actors performing just convincingly enough that their audience is deceived, but not so convincingly that their audience is mobilized to actually do something inconvenient about it," he writes. "That undesirable something might be some kind of mass protest or even violence. Or possibly it would take the form of conservative voters losing faith in the system and withdrawing from voting and political participation altogether."

Frum goes on to explain how American conservatives put themselves in this position in the first place by wrapping their arms around a man who has shown time and again to lack basic ethics and moral character.

"The conservative world in the age of Trump has coiled itself into a labyrinth of lies: lies about Trump’s victimhood, lies about Trump’s popularity, lies about Trump’s election outcomes, lies about Trump’s mental acuity and physical strength," he writes. "The architects of the labyrinth presumed that they could always, if necessary, find an exit—and that their keys could someday turn the exit’s locks. Instead, they have found themselves as lost and trapped in the labyrinth as the deceived people they lured into it."