CNN Panel EXPLODES When Frum Says Vance Is Claiming Tim Walz ‘Is a Sexual Deviant’

Curtis Houck
August 12th, 2024 12:47 PM

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Monday’s CNN This Morning briefly came off the rails when pompous pundit David Frum of The Atlantic (perhaps the most pompous outlet in the liberal media) said that 2024 GOP vice president candidate JD Vance’s criticisms of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz over his policies and military record are coded language accusing him of being “a sexual deviant of some kind.”

Thankfully, conservative strategist Matt Gorman was on-set to unload on Frum for his “ridiculous” assertion.

Frum was teed up by Inside Politics and State of the Union host Dana Bash, who gushed over Walz as having coined “this term ‘weird’” and shown Democrats how they shouldn’t bring “a knife to a gunfight when it comes to the rhetoric of Donald Trump."

The smug elitist then claimed: “Vance spends way too much time online and spends way too much time with people who are online, so a lot — a lot of what he says he’s going when we in comprehensible to you unless you participate in or have some acquaintance with this strange underworld that he comes from.”

Frum made his move: “So, when — the point to — I’m going to say this — it’s not nice — it’s not true, but what he’s trying to suggest is that Tim Walz is a sexual deviant of some kind.”

Both Gorman and host Kasie Hunt were stunned, blurting out, “what?”

Gorman hit back, twice asking, “what are you talking about?”

Frum doubled down: “That — that’s what he’s trying to do. That’s what he’s trying to imply.”

“That’s ridiculous, David. David, no. That’s ridiculous,” Gorman replied.

Of course, Frum defended his outlandish conspiracy theory by blaming...Donald Trump Jr.?

Amid the cross-talk, Gorman noted the irony that it was Walz who “started this whole ‘weird’ line of attack” (plus eagerly forwarded the fraudulent lie about Vance and a couch) and the Harris-Walz team who created the “brat summer” news cycle (click “expand”):

GORMAN: That’s ridiculous, David.

FRUM: Of course, I —

GORMAN: David, no.

FRUM: — that is what he —

GORMAN: No, that’s ridiculous. Like, first of all —

FRUM: — well, look at — look at Donald Trump —

GORMAN: — a sexual deviant? No, first of all, Tim Walz —

FRUM: — look at —

GORMAN: — started this whole weird line of attack —

FRUM: — look at Donald Trump —

GORMAN: — and you talk about being online?

FRUM: — look — look at —

GORMAN: We just spent three months — 

FRUM: — look at Donald Trump —

GORMAN: — or three weeks on “brat summer”. And you’re going on sexual deviant? That is ridiculous.

FRUM: — if you want to —

GORMAN: That is ridiculous.

Frum eventually arrived at his point blaming Donald Trump Jr., suggesting this was fair game because the First Son’s “Twitter feed” illustrates “the underworld — the lava coming up from the ugliest parts of American life”.

Frum continued to implicitly invoke the couch falsehood as he finished with an ironic denunciation of Vance as being “so filled with rage and contempt for others": “[E]verything is couched as a personal attack of the most vicious kind and that’s what he’s doing with Tim Walz. That’s why people think he’s weird because he — he’s so brilliant, he is so capable, so why is he so filled with rage and contempt for others?”

Earth to Frum: Isn’t your entire magazine one long-winded elitist hatefest against those moronic rubes out there who aren’t as smart and wealthy as you are?

Before moving on, Hunt thanked Gorman “for pushing back on that.”

Earlier, Frum strongly implied Harris doesn’t really need to do any TV interviews and answer tough questions because she can just publish TikTok videos:

Frum said moments earlier that questions about Harris “slightly shift[ing] her opinions at various points in her career” (read: flip-flops) aren’t really a problem because “[t]he biggest flip-flopper ever on a presidential ticket” is Vance.

Showing how ensconced Frum’s worldview was, he vented that, “JD Vance used to publish on my website” and akin to “a Hollywood joke, ‘do you know Doris Day?’ ‘Why, I knew her before she was a virgin.’ I knew J.D Vance when he was a moderate Republican...As late as 2016, he was publishing articles in The Atlantic, our magazine, denouncing Trump”.

In one other note, Frum used a separate block to denounce Trump as clinically narcissistic and suggested without evidence that Trump is filled with “worthlessness and self-hatred”, but was countered with Gorman joking “we know a lot” about it since the panelists all work “in media and politics.”

To see the relevant transcript from August 12, click “expand”:

CNN This Morning
August 12, 2024
6:04 a.m. Eastern

KASIE HUNT: David Frum, the kind of swirl around Donald Trump this weekend, that Truth Social post he ranted against leakers as well. He clearly seems very rattled by Times piece, by the polling. What do you see here? I mean, these two campaigns are now so starkly different.

DAVID FRUM: What I see here is the story we’ve been living with for a decade. In 2016, Donald Trump got a smaller share of the vote than Al Gore, than John Kerry, than Mitt Romney. In fact, he finished — of the 12 people who have run for president in the six elections, from 2000 to 2020, he finished second from the bottom. And in 2020, Donald Trump got less — a smaller share of the vote than John Kerry and Mitt Romney, and Al Gore, and he finished this time third from the bottom of those 12 people. There was not a day in his presidency when, according to any reputable poll, Donald Trump had the support of even half the American people. The story of the Trump era has been how do you lever 46 percent of the vote into 60 percent of the political power? It worked in 2016. It didn’t work in 2020. And what’s going on in 2024 is the anti-Trump majority, which has always been bigger than the pro-Trump minority, is — but has always been less cohesive. Is it reassembling and reenergizing itself to stop the man who tried to make a coup d’etat from returning to the presidency?

HUNT: Matt Gorman, there are a lot of Republicans around Donald Trump who are trying to get him to do things a certain way, and he does not seem to be listening to them. I mean, what has stood out to you over the last —

MATT GORMAN: A couple of things, right? Like we — a month ago, we were all up in Milwaukee, and it was remarkable kind of the discipline that he had, but again, it was easy to have the discipline when you’re up, you know, two to five points.

HUNT: — winning is easy.

GORMAN: Exactly, right? And so, I think —

HUNT: Winning is very straightforward.

GORMAN: — and there’s an Axios piece that came out talking, kind of alluding to that same sentiment that The Times talked about, and he had J. D. Vance in the Sunday shows really effectively levering some strong and probably the best, I assume, polling messaging against Kamala, at least it certainly was when Joe Biden ran into that chameleon type attack. And then Axios piece publishers talking about how kind of Trump is kind of very fuming and angry and then he posts about, you know, Kamala and the rally and A.I. and so, what you have, I think, is Vance trying to have that traditional messaging, the one that follows where the Trump ads are. And then, you know, you end up kind of Trump kind of careens into a whole different set of things.

HUNT: We end up in Trump world, right? You’re referring to — they accused —

GORMAN: Yes.

HUNT: — Harris of putting out an A.I. photo —

GORMAN: Yes.

HUNT: — of her crowd at a recent event.

(....)

6:08 a.m. Eastern

FRUM: The Trump campaign has this weird problem. If your main line on attack on Kamala Harris is that she slightly shifted her opinions at various points in her career, who are we going to put this message in the hands of? Who’s going to deliver it? The biggest flip-flopper ever on a presidential ticket. I mean, many of us — I — J D Vance used to publish on my website. You know, there’s a Hollywood joke, do you know Doris Day? Why, I knew her before she was a virgin. I knew J.D Vance when he was a moderate Republican who supported the Iraq war, supported free trade, and that was not when he was in his 20s, that was as a — as a person of making his way in politics. As late as 2016, he was publishing articles in The Atlantic, our magazine, denouncing Trump as a fascist, a Nazi, a threat to everything good and decent. And then, he is the man you’re going to select to deliver the — she’s shifted from like this point on the center left to this slightly different point on the center left, this guy? Incredible.

GORMAN: Because he’s the one sitting for interviews, right? He’s had to answer that. Right now, the Kamala Harris kind of tactic is she does an anonymous aides sends out, which — essentially, the anonymous aid disowns everything she — that she talked about from 2019 to 2020. So, you haven’t had that opportunity in whatsoever. So, she’s had really a total 180 from when she ran in 2019 and 2020 and we don’t know why.

HUNT: Yeah. I mean, David, do you think Harris is going to have to sit down for these interviews? I mean, she hasn’t — she hasn’t yet, and it has not been her strongest forum in the course of her career.

FRUM: Yeah. I imagine she will. I don’t know. But the way you communicate presidential campaigns is also a little different, in the TikTok era from the way it was in the network television —

HUNT: Meghan is nodding. She doesn’t think candidates have to do these interviews at all.

FRUM: — in the network TV era. And you also sit down with different kinds of people that in the TikTok era from what you did — you know, it — look. this is television. I don’t want to say anything disrespectful of television. But if we were on radio in 1950, wondering when is the candidate going to sit next to — next — his or her next interview on the mutual broadcasting system, they’d say, well, there’s this thing called television that has come along and it may be changing politics. And TikTok has done the same thing.

HUNT: Really interesting.

(....)

6:17 a.m. Eastern

HUNT: David Frum, David Plouffe said this, “these are not conspiratorial rantings from the deepest recesses of the internet. The author could have the nuclear codes and be responsible for decisions that will affect us all for decades.” What’s up with this?

FRUM: Well, we often casually use the word narcissism to mean someone who’s self-involved. But that clinical narcissism is different. The clinical narcissist is struggling with deep inner feelings of worthlessness. And he constructs, or she constructs, a giant ideology of self-assertion to cope with their inner feelings of worthlessness. When anything threatens to puncture that — those fantasies, those fictions, the person can spiral into all kinds of mental collapse, into aggression, into violence, into self-hatred, but that’s — that’s the Donald Trump story. I think that down there is seething worthlessness and self-hatred. He’s constructed this fantasy of his life. And now, it’s being contradicted and he cannot cope.

HUNT: I will just say none of us are actually card-carrying psychologists. So, we’ll just — we’ll leave that there. I — I take your point.

FRUM: But some of us have known narcissists.

GORMAN: We’re in media and politics. We know a lot of it. Yes.

HUNT: But, Matt, I mean, this is like — I mean, come on.

GORMAN: No, I mean, look. I — and I took — I approached from — as I said in the first block, from a communications point of view, right? You have — you have lining it up, Vance, and you have this kind of progression with your messaging and then it gets thrown kind of away and that was — again, that was what we didn’t see a month ago, as much as Democrats kind of — when we were talking in Milwaukee, Democrats are begging for things like this to intrude, to kind of distract from the Joe Biden is old, Joe Biden might drop out narrative. And, you know, we’re having out in spades now and I think that’s the tough part, because, again, I think a lot of Republicans I’ve talked to are very frustrated because there’s really potent attacks on Kamala and Tim Walz right now. There’s a lot of them. And Vance is giving — as we saw on the Sunday shows, a pretty good articulation of them. But when you have the top of the ticket veering off of this stuff, this is why you spend eight minutes talking about this stuff.

MEGAN HAYS: And people want to know how they’re going to make their lives better, how each of these people are going to make their lives better, and how their economic policies and what their vision is for the future and when you are not talking about the issues and talking about this nonsense, it is a distraction and you lose voters.

GORMAN: Yeah, that’s what we talked about like —

HAYS: Yeah.

GORMAN: — we had that same problem with Joe Biden, right? When you’re only talking about like Joe Biden during that whole month, that was what you’re distracted from, and Trump was remarkably on-message with that stuff.

HUNT: I mean, the sort of irony here, David, is that it just serves to highlight —

FRUM: Yeah.

HUNT: — the crowd she’s getting that he’s doing this.

FRUM: And also, look. the basic grammar, the basic math of the Trump era has never changed. 46 percent of the country either likes him or will put up with him. And a majority of the country dislikes, disrespects, fears him. And that what we are watching is the anti-Trump majority, which has always been there. This is not new. We’re not seeing momentum. We’re not seeing momentum. We — we are seeing — we are seeing the coalition of the decent coming to life.

(....)

6:38 a.m. Eastern

DANA BASH: But, I guess — look, the point is, is that he’s not afraid to play in this sandbox and that is why the Tim — Tim Walz actually came up with this term weird because Democrats for so long have brought a sort of a knife to a gunfight when it comes to the rhetoric of Donald Trump, and they’re trying to be more in that space.

FRUM: Also, look, J.D. Vance spends way too much time online and spends way too much time with people who are online, so a lot — a lot of what he says he’s going when we in comprehensible to you unless you participate in or have some acquaintance with this strange underworld that he comes from. So, when — the point to — I’m going to say this —

BASH: Yeah.

FRUM: — it’s not nice — it’s not true, but what he’s trying to suggest is that Tim Walz is a sexual deviant of some kind.

MATT GORMAN: What?

HUNT: Wait, what?

GORMAN: What are you talking about?

FRUM: That — that’s what he’s trying to do.

GORMAN: What are you talking about?

FRUM: That’s what he’s trying to imply.

GORMAN: That’s ridiculous, David.

FRUM: Of course, I —

GORMAN: David, no.

FRUM: — that is what he —

HUNT: No.

GORMAN: That’s ridiculous. Like, first of all —

FRUM: — well, look at — look at Donald Trump —

GORMAN: — a sexual deviant? No, first of all, Tim Walz —

FRUM: — look at —

GORMAN: — started this whole weird line of attack —

FRUM: — look at Donald Trump —

GORMAN: — and you wanna talk about being online?

FRUM: — look — look at —

GORMAN: We just spent three months — 

FRUM: — look at Donald Trump —

GORMAN: — or three weeks on “brat summer”. And you’re going on sexual deviant? That is ridiculous.

FRUM: — if you want to —

GORMAN: That is ridiculous.

FRUM: — if you want to understand this — just — just as a point of analytic understanding, not — look at Donald Trump Jr’s Twitter feed to understand what the underworld —

GORMAN: Oh yeah.

FRUM: — the lava coming up from the ugliest parts of American life are, and what they’re trying to suggest. The — the point that J.D. Vance — when he says I want to talk about policy, it — he’s in a — he’s a candidate who’s trying to say, when I said that the unemployed are a bunch of lazy loads swilling beer on the couch at 9:00 a.m., what I meant to say is this country needs to do a better job of creating work for people, you know, that everything is couched as a personal attack of the most vicious kind and that’s what he’s doing with Tim Walz. That’s why people think he’s weird because he — he’s so brilliant, he is so capable, so why is he so filled with rage and contempt for others?

HUNT: You’re saying that JD Vance’s is — is brilliant, you’re giving him credit for that?

FRUM: Yes, he is brilliant.

HUNT: Okay.

FRUM: He’s a very, very intelligent man.

HUNT: I — I — I will —

FRUM: Why is he so filled with rage and contempt?

HUNT: I — I appreciate Matt — you — being — you pushing back on that. I want to kind of bring it back to Dana’s interview[.]

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