CNN’s Christiane Amanpour spoke to The Atlantic’s David Frum this week about his past relationship with Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who is now Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate.
“Let me just ask you about Vance because you actually know him. He actually used to write for this old website of yours. So can you tell me how you viewed him then and how you view him today? Is he still the same person that you knew then?” Amanpour began.
“Well, when I knew him, which was quite a while ago, I think it may have been his very first bylines were in the website that I ran. We published him under a pseudonym, and for 15 years I kept the secret of the pseudonym until he revealed it himself in his own self-opposition research. I admired him, I thought he had a huge political future ahead of him. His abilities are not in question,” Frum began, adding:
Unlike, Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, there is nothing of the buffoon of the charlatan about JD Vance. He is a formidable, formidable intellect, a formidable talent, a man of great self-discipline, and a man of great ambition, even more than usual for a politician. But where he is different from most is he’s a man of extraordinary moral and intellectual flexibility, to put it mildly.
He has changed his mind on many issues, and the stories he tells about why he’s changed his mind are not true. Or at least they don’t line up with the dates, for example. He says the reason he is so in favor of betraying Ukraine now is because of his disillusionment with the Iraq war. Well, he was writing for me half a decade after he came back from military service, and he was then an advocate of traditional American global leadership. That changed sometime after, and probably within the past 2 or 3 years as a result of other forces.
“From your piece, you write when he got the endorsement recently of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who notoriously floated a conspiracy theory about California’s wildfires being started by space lasers associated with Rothschild Inc. He being, Vance tweeted, ‘Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags.’ So, you know, take the country back. We own the country. That is also a very sort of chauvinistic way of looking at politics, as if you’re the only ones who have the right to the country. So what do you think a JD Vance today and a Trump today will do with the Republican Party? And presumably he’s his heir, it’s going to shape the Republican Party for years and decades?” followed up Amanpour.
“The Republican Party. I became a Republican in the 1980s because I believed in American world leadership, because I believed in the workings of a free market economy, because I believe in the impartial rule of law,” replied Frum, a former speech writer for George W Bush.
“And because I believed in collective security, and, that all the democracies are stronger when they stand together. Those are the causes that led me in the late 1970s, at a time of Soviet adventurism, to follow people like Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and look to them as the leaders who stood for what I believed in,” he continued, concluding:
Well, those things are all jettisoned. We now have a party that stands for narrow, selfish particularism and nationalism, that rejects trade, that rejects collective leadership, wants to abandon Ukraine. Trump just in the past two days, said that he was reconsidering the American guarantee to Taiwan would put them up for bid. They assure us that they are steadfast for Israel. But, given their contemptuous attitude for all allies, but Israel. I’m not sure how comfortable and confident I would be if I were someone who cared about the security of Israel, which I am.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
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