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One of the questions I often get asked is, Were you surprised that Trump won? I always answer the same way: I was surprised, I am surprised and I will never stop being surprised.

David Frum

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David Frum
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: June 30
Blogger
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Speechwriter
City of Toronto
David Jeffrey Frum
Stop
Often
Always
Never
Surprised
Questions
Answer
Asked
Trump

More quotes by David Frum

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The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.
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The habit of going to your congressman's town hall and asking questions, that's powerful in a way that shouting slogans or getting arrested is not, that is completely counterproductive.
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An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein - and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans.
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My mom was truly an iconic figure, a great journalist and a pioneering woman who died at 54 of cancer without ever having revealed to viewers that she was ill.
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The Canadian middle class is under less pressure than any other middle class in any developed country on the planet. So they feel good. They feel optimistic. They feel secure.
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Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king.
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Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents.
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Democracy requires you to learn how to lose as well as how to exercise power when you win. And that requires restraint all around. One of the reasons it works is because when you win you don't do things that are so upsetting to the losers that they feel like they have less, they have more to gain by turning over the system.
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Venezuela has gone from being a democratic country 15 years ago to being totally not a democracy today. Usually that de-democratization doesn't take the form of a heavy handed police state.
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World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.
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Civil unrest, civil turmoil is not a challenge to President Trump. It's a resource for him. He needs to create an image of a polarized country in which the people who are against him are somehow alien or anti-system.
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Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach?
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By abrogating all moral standards in their war against Israel, Arab and Muslim leaders initiated a process of moral collapse that has ended by soaking their own societies in blood. The terror they intended to inflict only upon others has rebounded with a hundred times greater horror upon their own lands.
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Donald Trump is not supposed to save jobs one by one. He's supposed to build a sound macro economy in which private enterprises create jobs.
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So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.
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Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.
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Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally.
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Republicans have to move to a point of greater unity.
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[In politics,] when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak.
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To balance China, the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy, youthful population, and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.
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