David Frum

They'd had a pretty good track record of picking presidents to that point.

They got one wrong.

The Electoral College was maybe to blame.

And the thing to do was just to tidy up the mess and move on with as little recrimination and backward looking as possible.

There's another view, which is that failed.

that Trump came back.

The people around him, as he often said of himself, I became worse.

He did.

The people around him became even worse than that.

And we have now a full-throated attack on every American institution, the abuse of law.

And it's not clear to me you can just dust this off and tidy up and move forward without serious backward looking and accountability.

I wrestle with that question.

Do you have any guidance to offer or are you as

Are you as stuck in the predicament as I am?

Let me go back to the very beginning and raise something.

And this is something I think we share.

I think we both came to conservatism in great part because of our Jewish identity, because of our

inheritance of mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe in my case it was almost all of my father's my father's family came out and they lived and the vast majority of his family were left behind they died yeah had my father's parents made a slightly different decision in 1930 my father would have been married at about the time of his ninth 10th or 11th birthday

So that's the starting point, I think, of both of our politics, when we come to conservatism by our Jewishness.

The Trump presidency has raised some very special questions, very haunting questions for American Jews.