Conservative Trump critic discusses his impact on the GOP and a divided America

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• Amna Nawaz:

  With primary season in full swing and a seemingly unstoppable GOP nomination for former President Donald Trump , Judy Woodruff explores what another Trump nomination and presidency could mean for the Republican Party and for the country.

  It's part of her series America at a Crossroads.

• Judy Woodruff:

  It's not even February, and former President Trump appears to be on his way to sewing up his third GOP nomination to the highest office in the land.

  Donald Trump , Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: Well, I want to thank everybody.

• Judy Woodruff:

  After wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, polls show him leading in South Carolina and beyond.

  Elected Republican leaders are scrambling to climb on board. Texas Senator John Cornyn joined over half the GOP members of the Senate and most of those in the House.

• Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA):

  I have endorsed him wholeheartedly.

• Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC):

  I think he's the right person to fix the problems.

• Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC):

  We need Donald Trump !

• Judy Woodruff:

  But not all those in Republican and conservative circles are joining up, including "Atlantic" magazine writer David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a longtime Trump critic.

  David Frum, Senior Editor, "The Atlantic": Trump has — he's got some skills, and one of his skills is understanding where the pain points are in people, that — the things that make him upset, both his friends and his enemies. How do you make your enemies upset? Because it's often a great asset or a resource to a politician like him to have upset opponents, to make the opponents crazy with rage too.

• Judy Woodruff:

  How does he fit into the tradition of conservative thought in the United States?

• David Frum:

  If conservatism means protecting things that are precious in America, being mindful of the hazards of change, setting limits on power, setting limits on appetite, well, Donald Trump isn't any of those things.

  Donald Trump is exactly the person and exactly the thing that conservative thought has always sought to exclude from power. The whole point of conservative politics has been that you want to have power distributed, you want to have power decentralized, you want to make sure that the people who come to power are people who both understand the constitutional restraints on power, but also have the personal, the character restraints on their own appetites.

  The anger and rage, the desire to target, the willingness to use methods that are anti-constitutional, the fascination with violence, these are characteristics of a different kind of politics than the kinds of politics in the past we have called conservative.

• Judy Woodruff:

  How do you explain the loyalty that Donald Trump has today?

• David Frum:

  Well, we have seen that kind of loyalty before in state-level politicians, Mayor Curley in Boston, who somehow got the support of a certain segment of Irish Catholic Boston, Huey Long in Louisiana.

  What these kinds of leaders do is they associate their hurts and grievances with other people's hurts and grievances, and they use hurts and grievances as permission to break rules, and because they have convinced people that the people who are enforcing the rules are your cultural enemies. And even if I did break the rule, the fact is, you're still — I'm on your side and they're not.

  I don't think we have ever seen this before with a federal — successful federal politician who said, I want to speak to hurts and grievances across the whole culture, across the whole country, and everyone who tries to enforce rules on me is an enemy of yours.

• Judy Woodruff:

  For someone who has been at the center of conservative thought, of watching conservatives, watching the Republican Party progress over time, tackle tough issues, do you feel that you should have seen something like Donald Trump coming along?

• David Frum:

  I did my grieving for my Republican Party in 2010, '11, and '12. So I'm now deep into my widowhood. I can think about this pretty analytically.

  I went to Tea Party rallies and I said, not only do I not recognize this. Actually, on second thought, I do recognize this and it's everything I'm against. So that was hard. But when Trump came along, look, I was shocked because he was so personally wicked.

  But I was not shocked in that this was a completely different thing from what I'd been seeing before.

• Judy Woodruff:

  There's an animosity, a personal nature to the differences that people feel now about politics. What is the effect that Donald Trump is having on that?

  And if he were reelected, what effect would it have?

• David Frum:

  Well, I wonder whether there's really more division in the country today than at other points in the past.

  Remember the feeling about Vietnam and the draft. I bet families had a tumult sitting down over dinner in 1969, '70, and '71. Debates over civil rights and the integration of schools in the early 1950s and early 1960s, I bet there are families that had difficulty reconciling about that.

  But back then, the political system saw its job as managing. Leaders knew, this is an incredibly diverse country, rural versus urban, race upon race, ethnicity upon ethnicity, religion upon religion, sometimes men against women, young against old, rich against poor, all of these potential fault lines.

  And it's the job of the people who meet in the buildings down the road here to manage that, to say, we keep — while everyone else is getting excited, we keep our cool. And we remember that what is really important are dams and roads and high schools and defense plants. And we're going to make the deals based on that. And we're all just going to lower the temperature at the center.

  But the political circle at the top no longer sees these conflicts as dangers to manage. They see them as resources to exploit. And Donald Trump is better at this than just about anybody, that they take this dangerous stuff, and they say that is going to be not something I'm going to try to contain, but something I will use for fuel.

• Judy Woodruff:

  What effect does that have on today's divisions?

• David Frum:

  We will be more fractious, we will be more argumentative, because all the demons that exist in any society will not only be liberated by the political system, but will be encouraged, because Donald Trump will be looking to his constituency of very upset people in order to impose his lawless will upon the constitutional system.

  I want to get away with Watergate. I want to pardon myself. I want to fire prosecutors. I want to do all the things that Nixon did and many of the things that Nixon never dared to do. And I'm telling you in advance I'm going to do them. And I want my followers to frighten the political system into letting me have my way.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And if Trump does use the criminal justice system to shut down investigations into his own conduct, including alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the consequences will be dire, according to Frum.

• David Frum:

  The country will be in the streets. Congress will be in an uproar. We will talk about nothing else. There will be no other policy. There will be no other topic. You won't be able to accomplish anything. There will be resignations from the Department of Justice. There may be resignations from the military.

  It is going to be chaos, and the chaos will never stop.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And if, conversely, Joe Biden wins reelection, what happens to the current state of our country, of our polarized state?

• David Frum:

  Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychiatry, is supposed to have said that the purpose of psychiatry is to convert hysterical obsessive neurosis into ordinary unhappiness.

  If Joe Biden wins, we get all our usual problems back, rich versus poor, urban versus rural, climate change, deficits, structure of world peace, trade with China. Not a single problem will be fixed, but we will have a working set of institutions with which to address the problems. And our disagreements won't go away.

  You will just have non-sociopathic, non-psychopathic people saying, OK, the people outside this room disagree a lot. We are going to sit down at the table and find something we can agree on, so that I can take something to my people and you can take something to your people.

• Judy Woodruff:

  No guarantee, however, that the divisions among the American people would ease up.

  For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Judy Woodruff in Washington.