David Frum and J.D. Vance would appear to be Republicans from two different eras. Frum, who comes from the GOP’s neoconservative wing, was a speechwriter under President George W. Bush, has claimed credit for coining the phrase “Axis of Evil” and has since become a sharp critic of the Republican Party of the Trump Era.
J.D. Vance began his political career much later, and despite his early Trump skepticism, is now a U.S. senator and critic of the MAGA wing of the party. However, the two men once worked together. Frum ran a website called Frum Forum, and a pre-Hillbilly Elegy J.D. Vance was one of its writers, albeit under a different name. Ironically, this hidden history came to light as part of an opposition research leak, which studied Vance’s “vulnerabilities” during his Senate race.
“His abilities, I never underestimated,” Frum wrote of Vance in The Atlantic in 2022. “What he was willing to do for political advancement, I did.”
David Frum/ J. HD. Vance’s Thin Skin Makes Him Vulnerable https://t.co/K56GnRPSVF
— Robin MacNab (@RobinMacNab) September 29, 2024
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Now, Frum is talking about how Tim Walz might find a weak spot when he debates Vance on Tuesday night. Frum appeared on CNN, where he talked about a familiar topic: Vance’s vulnerabilities.
In the interview, Frum called Vance a “phony.”
“He’s someone that, when he’s exposed, becomes very petulant, very peevish, very angry, and very controlling,” he added. “That’s going to be the task at this debate: Is can Walz successfully hold the mirror up, keep it there, and let America see what its choice is?”
The idea is to do to Vance what Kamala Harris did to Donald Trump in their debate, when she got under her opponent’s skin, leading Trump to make a series of errors.
Trump laid out that case in another Atlantic piece this week, with the headline “J. D. Vance’s Thin Skin Makes Him Vulnerable.”
“It has been said that the Trump-Vance ticket is the angriest in recent history,” Frum writes in the Atlantic piece. “But Vance doesn’t rage and roar onstage the way Trump does. Instead, he seethes with petty peevishness. His disdain for women who deviate from his script for their life is barely disguised, or not disguised at all. It’s an unattractive look. Walz’s job is to provoke Vance into showing that ugly side to a huge national audience.”
He went on to suggest that Walz remember that Vance cares a lot about his reputation and how he is perceived.
“Vance wants to be seen as more than just another Trump henchman. His reinvention was meant to ingratiate himself with Trump and the MAGA movement. That shape-shifting is a pain point for him.”
Photo courtesy of Political Tribune photo library.
