Conservative author David Frum announced Wednesday that he has left the Republican Party following President-elect Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election.
“De-registered as a Republican today,” Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote on the social platform X on Wednesday.
Frum, a former speechwriter for then-President George W. Bush, has held on to his party affiliation even as he has become a vocal critic of the former president and his influence on the Republican Party since the 2016 election.
In 2016, Frum penned an editorial announcing he was reluctantly supporting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and urged his like-minded Republicans to follow suit, writing, “Your hand may hesitate to put a mark beside the name Hillary Clinton. You’re not doing it for her. The vote you cast is for the republic and the Constitution.”
In 2018, he lamented what he described as a party broken in two in an interview on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
“The Republican Party is a broken party,” Frum said in the 2018 interview. “And there are people who have served the Republican Party that was, and there are people who are volunteering to serve the Republican Party that will be.”
“It is important to understand that something new is taking the place of the Republican Party,” he added.
In recent years, Frum has expressed concern about the state of U.S. democracy. In a piece published Wednesday following Trump’s victory, Frum said Americans who did not vote for Trump now “need to prepare to live in a different America.
He continued: “A country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies — blatantly, shamelessly — every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.”
“Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls have showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.”
