David Frum’s Genius Plan

David Frum and I have never met, but our degree of separation is fractional. I know several people who knew him well when he was a Yale undergraduate. One of our mutual acquaintances told me that the first time she heard him speak in the Yale Political Union, she assumed from his demeanor and range of knowledge that he was a graduate student. He was actually a first term freshman.

I mention these facts in the hope of rendering plausible the thesis that I am about to advance: that Mr. Frum has concocted an ingenious scheme to undermine President Biden under the guise of denouncing Donald Trump. An ostensible (not to mention ostentatious) display of Trump Derangement Syndrome will lure readers of The Atlantic into accepting a set of premises that, when applied to the incumbent President, can easily lead to the conclusion that he is engaged in ongoing collusion with Communist China, just as President Trump is believed by the Progressive Elect to have formed a partnership with Vladimir Putin.

The Frum essay is titled “It Wasn’t a Hoax”. Its subtitle asserts, “People with scant illusions about Trump are volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.” The “Big Lie” is “Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a ‘Russia hoax’”.

The argument that there was no hoax, that is, that the progressive media’s years-long insistence on the existence of a sinister Trump-Putin connection, which is now being rowed back with maximum stealth, had an overwhelmingly strong basis in reality rests on this chain of reasoning:

1. The Trump Organization did a great deal of business in Russia, some of it with persons “whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering”, and the Trump Presidential campaign “accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures”.
2. Once he began running for President, Trump tried to minimize the extent of his involvement with Russia.
3. Trump was eager for Russian assistance, particularly for leaks of the thousands of e-mails that Hillary Clinton had sedulously wiped from her home-brewed, dubiously secure home server.
4. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, “Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to ‘harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.’” Trump scoffed at notions of Russian interference.
5. During the campaign, “Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals.”
6. “Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.”

Let’s assume that the circumstantial evidence thus outlined is true and convincing. It will surely convince most of the Atlantic’s audience. They will slide easily past the dog that didn’t bark: Regardless of what candidate Trump said before the election, very little that President Trump did after he took office can have been pleasing to Neo-Tsar Vladimir. He would not, of course, be the first business partner to be outsmarted (or, from another perspective, bilked) by Donald Trump, so the dog’s silence doesn’t definitively refute the collusion hypothesis, though it certainly renders it less significant. Mr. Frum’s chain of circumstances would have been greatly strengthened if, for instance, President Trump had stifled American energy production or refused to enforce sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Having nodded in agreement through Mr. Frum’s piece, what are progressive readers to think if they encounter Miranda Devine’s Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide, which draws on the ample materials obtained from the famous mislaid laptop of Biden fils to document the under-the-counter business dealings between Biden père and Communist China?

Next consider that, during his own Presidential campaign, Joe Biden said:

China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west. They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.

We don’t have any intelligence committee declarations that Xi Jinping “ordered an influence operation” to help the Biden campaign. Unless we have moles close to Xi, we couldn’t know that. For that matter, we couldn’t know about Russian influence operations in 2016 without a mole in Putin’s suite. It would be nice to think that we do, but, notwithstanding the passage that Mr. Frum quotes, I doubt it.

What we do have, more plainly than one could ever say of Trump and Russia, is a Biden policy direction that aligns with the interests of the CCP. Jim Geraghty laid out the evidence last Friday for “The Functionally Pro-China Biden Administration”. After leading off with quotes from the Washington Post’s report on the Administration’s efforts to water down Congressional proposals to ban imports of Chinese goods produced by slave labor, he adds (links omitted):

And yet, month by month, the Biden administration is proving more and more reticent to confront the Chinese government in substantive and consequential ways. The investigation into the origins of COVID-19 is effectively dropped, and Biden didn’t mention China’s refusal to cooperate with the WHO’s separate investigation in his teleconference summit with Xi Jinping.

Biden did not mention China, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong, or the origins of COVID-19 in his address to the United Nations.

Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal in September that she thinks “robust commercial engagement will help to mitigate any potential tensions” with China. Biden rescinded Trump’s executive orders targeting TikTok, the popular app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

In defending his decision to withdraw all U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, Biden kept insisting that China wanted the U.S. to keep its troops in that country and that Beijing saw Afghanistan as a quagmire tying up limited American military resources. But now that U.S. forces are out, China is dramatically expanding its economic ties and diplomatic in leverage in Afghanistan – developing plans for state-run Chinese firms to move in and mine Afghanistan’s lithium deposits.

Does the Chinese government look upset that the U.S. no longer has any presence in Afghanistan?

Elsewhere, Biden nominated Reta Jo Lewis to run the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Senator Marco Rubio contends that, “Reta Jo Lewis is currently a strategic advisor for the U.S.-China Heartland Association, which is a conduit for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD), which aims to influence key Americans at the subnational level and ultimately undermine America’s national interests.”

From these and other facts, Mr. Geraghty concludes, “It is fair to wonder how much of the administration’s heart is in the effort to confront Beijing.” Something of an understatement. If the facts cited by David Frum are convincing proof that Trump-Putin collusion wasn’t a hoax, isn’t it fair to wonder how deeply compromised Joe Biden is in his relationship with Peking?

As I said at the outset, David Frum is quite capable for formulating a plan to catch progressive spiders in their own web.