Barney Frank Looks for the Bright Side of Trump's Win

Barney Frank, long known as America’s crankiest liberal, is actually not feeling too bad. Frank retired from Congress in 2012, after three decades of representing Massachusetts’s Fourth District, then wrote a memoir, became a director of the Signature Bank, and took his curmudgeon act on the road as a lecturer. But the election of Donald Trump has not shattered his confidence about the nation’s political future. “This was not a wipeout. People will tend to overinterpret it. Remember, we got more votes than they did,” he said, in an interview this week. “And there is one silver living for us. They have succeeded in blaming us for everything that goes wrong in the world. From now on, anything bad that happens is on them. They control the whole government—White House, Senate, House, Supreme Court. Some people think that maybe Trump can somehow evade that responsibility, but I think it will be hard to blame it on some Mexicans when something goes wrong.”

Still, Frank believes that politics did change in some fundamental ways with Trump’s victory. “Two major rules of American politics disappeared this year,” he said. “The first was that you had to argue that America has to be strong and assertive worldwide. Trump won while rejecting that view. And the second change was that you should only talk about growth for everyone and avoid talk of class warfare. The fundamental reason that Trump won is the anger in America and other developed countries at the unfairness of the distribution of wealth. It’s been building and building, and all of a sudden it broke through.”

In particular, Frank believes that Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign helped Trump’s portrayal of himself as a populist succeed in the fall. “Sanders wounded her badly,” Frank said, referring to Hillary Clinton. “His differing with her on the issues was entirely reasonable, but he’s the one who sold the argument that she was corrupt and bought by Wall Street. He had one ad which I called McCarthyite—where he essentially said Goldman Sachs got off so easy because they paid Clinton for speeches. Sanders helped Trump become the guy who says we are tired of rich guys getting away with everything. Sanders helped persuade people that she is on the wrong side of that issue.” Then, too, of course, there were the e-mails and the last-minute intervention of James Comey, the F.B.I. director. “If she hadn’t been using that e-mail system, she would have won, and Comey exacerbated the problem,” Frank said.

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