FRANK: Trump is imploding, the congressman said!

THURSDAY, JUNE 4, 2026

We're not sure that's enough: In the last weeks of his remarkable life, Barney Frank, receiving hospice care in Ogunquit, appeared with Jake Tapper, on CNN, for a brief final interview. 

The interview itself was on videotape. The session started like this:

TAPPER (5/3/26): Welcome back to State of The Union. You will remember my next guest as a trailblazer for many things, including gay rights. He is the co-author of one of the most significant financial reforms since the New Deal.

But now, at age 86, 16-term former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, a Democrat who is battling congestive heart failure, just entered hospice care. And as he prepares for his goodbyes, he's directing his famously sharp wit not only at President Trump, but at his own party. 

[Videotape]

And joining me now is former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank. Congressman, how are you feeling today?

FRANK: OK. I have felt better. On the other hand, I anticipate feeling worse. I'm in no great pain, but my energy level is low. Essentially, after 86 years, my heart's just wearing out.  

God bless the late, unforgettable Barney Frank! You can watch the full interview by clicking here. For the transcript, just click this.

He said his heart was wearing out. But also, he said his party is doing some things which make the nation's recovery less likely.   

In the last year of his life, Rep. Frank wrote a book devoted to that very claim. The book will be published later this year. 

Whatever he actually says in the book, no one will pay it a lick of attention. But this is where his critique began in his short session with Tapper:    

TAPPER: Let's talk about your book. It's going to come out later this year. It's called The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy.

You are a progressive icon, but now you are expressing some reservations about where the progressive movement has gone. Tell us more. 

[...]  

FRANK: It's precisely because I have been on the left that I have undertaken this. 

I think we're in a situation where the mainstream, to my disappointment, for many years ignored inequality. And many of us fought to get inequality on the Democratic agenda. 

But the problem was, as we succeeded in bringing the mainstream of the left into a concern with inequality, we also enabled people who wanted to use that as a platform for a wide range of social and cultural changes, some of which the public isn't ready for. 

Even when I agree with them on the end, I think they make a mistake by taking the most controversial parts of the agenda and turning them into litmus tests.  

For the record:  From a pair of final print interviews, it seems that Rep. Frank was likely referring to economic inequality at the start of this brief capsule history. 

In this brief interview, what follows is his one example of the pursuit of changes, by some on the left, which "the public isn't ready for:" 

FRANK (continuing directly): My example is same-sex marriage. Obviously, I have been working for gay rights starting in 1972, when I filed the bill. And we in the movement to establish fairness for gay and lesbian and bisexual people, we picked to work on those issues which were more acceptable.

We didn't get to marriage until after these other things had been resolved. And that's what I'm suggesting that we do today. 

The analog is males and female transsexuals playing sports that are for women. I understand there's a lot of anger about that. And I think, in the interest of the transgender community, as well as others, it would be better to go at that in a more granular way, and not simply announce that, if you don't support it, you're a homophobe.  

According to Rep. Frank, some on the left have moved too fast with respect to "males and female transsexuals playing sports that are for women." He also seemed to say that there had been some unhelpful name-calling. 

Rep. Frank was hardly alone in this general perception. Rightly or wrongly, it's widely said that Candidate Harris was substantially harmed by an earlier position she had taken with respect to health care for undocumented transexual prisoners. 

Rightly or wrongly, the idea that progressives and Democrats moved too fast in this general area doesn't belong to Frank alone. There were, of course, many other ways in which Democrats and liberals helped the current sitting president make his way back to the White House.  

The ludicrous situation involving President Biden's late abandonment of his re-election campaign stands out as a giant example. Jill Biden is out there today, seeming perhaps to make this bad situation worse.

That said, many other examples exist, most of which go unmentioned in the "safe spaces" maintained for us Blue Americans in our own tribe's media warrens.  

What else has Rep. Frank said in his book? That remains to be seen. That said, we'd be inclined to disagree with what he told Tapper, a bit later on, about the sitting president.

The sitting president is imploding, the former congressman said:   

FRANK: Donald Trump, we originally thought was a joke. And then he turned out to be very good at one thing, exploiting voters' discontent.

And so he won an election based on that and, since then, has gone back to being a joke. The man is imploding. He has no program that he's seeking to adopt.

[...]

TAPPER: You said you think President Trump is imploding. And you told Politico that you regret that you're not going to see the continued implosion of President Trump because of your current health situation.

[...]

FRANK: I say in the book, early on, that the fate of liberal democracy versus authoritarian populism will depend in part on how Donald Trump does, and if he does badly, that discredits the whole operation. 

I am convinced that he does not have an appeal beside exploiting anger. But he's so angry, and his politics are so determined by this anger, that he doesn't see that. And so that's why I think he's imploding.   

The sitting president is imploding, the former congressman said. In our view, that seems to be true in the most obvious sense, but we think it miscasts the size and the shape of the problem.  

The president's approvals seem to be dropping—although, given his endlessly erratic performance, it seems to us that they remain shockingly high. In our view, it's also true that we Blues engage in a wide array of behaviors which help him retain those numbers.  

Will the president's ongoing implosion lead to a Democratic takeover of the House (and possibly even the Senate) this year? Assuming he lets elections proceed, that seems like an obvious possibility—but he would still be in the Oval Office for at least two additional years.  

Given his apparent unraveling, that undermines the significance of the "implosion" to which Frank refers. We see the situation this way:

The president can implode as much as we like. But what might he do after that? 

In our view, implosion isn't enough. After implosion, what's next?

Major heralded global world experts have begun to advance a simple proposition about our difficult situation. Their consensus goes like this: 

If people can't see that they're living in a failed state, that has no bearing on the reality of the situation

These international global top experts are offering several comparisons to our current situation:   

In the Oscar-nominated film, The Sixth Sense, the Bruce Willis character doesn't know that he's already dead. And in Camus' famous novel, La Peste, a plague has already entered Oran, but the citizens of the sun-splashed city are unable to see this.

So it goes, top experts say, in a nation in which The Five is aired each day, with no one commenting on the way it and its companion broadcasts affect the broader society.

We started this week's reports with a reference to the dim-witted clowning seen on The Five on Thursday and Friday of last week. (The garbage only piles harder as the evening hours wear on.)

The fun concerned the reported presence of maggots. Tomorrow, we'll return to that starting point. 

This involves a problem which has no name, given the failure of Blue America's slumbering elites to speak about what is occurring inside what deluded experts now see as an imploded failed state.

Tomorrow: "Who cares about maggots?" the messengers said. Here within our own Oran, things have slid downhill from there.