Pioneering gay Rep. Barney Frank made bombshell claim on his deathbed and it involves Donald Trump
A flood of tributes is pouring in for Barney Frank, the Bayonne, New Jersey native born on March 31, 1940, who stepped down from politics in 2013. Former Rep. Frank passed away aged 86, his sister confirmed to NBC Boston.
“He was, above all else, a wonderful brother. I was lucky to be his sister,” Frank’s sister Doris Breay said of her brother who made history as one of the first openly gay members of Congress.
Frank was a longtime Massachusetts representative who helped overhaul Wall Street regulations after the 2008 financial crisis. He was also known for paving the way for other openly gay elected officials in the United States.
He entered the history books in 2012 as the first member of Congress to wed a same-sex partner, Jim Ready.
In a phone interview with NBC News, Frank said not long ago, “It was life-changing, lifesaving for me.”
He added: “I think the key to our having made the enormous progress we made in defeating anti-gay prejudice had to do with us all coming out and people discovering the gap between our reality and the way we were painted.”
Speaking of Frank, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. who served as speaker when Frank guided the Dodd-Frank legislation through Congress, said, “He has been about idealism and pragmatism to get the job done.
“He was a real mentor to so many of us here,” she added and noted that Frank had called her last month to let her know he was entering hospice care. “I was with him” on the Banking Committee “in the beginning. I learned so much.”
Among those who paid their tributes to Frank was former President Barack Obama who wrote on X that the late rep. was one of a kind.
“For more than three decades in Congress, he fought tirelessly for the people of Massachusetts, helped make housing more affordable, stood up for the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans, and helped pass one of the most sweeping financial reforms in history designed to protect consumers and prevent another financial crisis.”
Obama continued, “Barney’s passion and wit were second to none, and our thoughts are with his family today.”
During his final weeks, which he spent in hospice care, Frank did a series of media interviews in which he spoke about his life’s work and political outlook, and which included sharp commentary on Donald Trump.
In an interview with Politico in his home in Maine, Barney Frank said one of his regrets was that congestive heart failure would take his life before he could see the fall of Donald Trump.
“One of my regrets is that I won’t see the continued implosion of Donald Trump.”
In a separate interview with with Boston-area radio station WBUR, Frank called the president an “idiot savant.”
“As to Trump, I have developed my theory about him: It’s not just that he’s bad on all these values, but he is an idiot savant,” Barney Frank said. “He has just one talent: an ability to exploit anger that got him into power. But having gotten into power, he’s got nothing left, and that’s why now he’s just floundering.
“I can’t think of an issue on which he’s popular. The Iran war, the fight with the Pope, the economy, even immigration, where the left was dead wrong in its excessive openness, he’s managed to make himself more unpopular,” the now-late politician continued. “His anger, his narcissism, all of the negative parts of his personality have asserted themselves, and he really doesn’t have much of a positive vision of things to offset that.”
While their political tenures didn’t coincide, Frank and Trump had been trading barbs since at least 2011. As Trump’s influence in the GOP grew, he frequently targeted Frank with insults about his physical appearance.
“Barney Frank looked disgusting–nipples protruding–in his blue shirt before Congress,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Dec. 21, 2011. “Very very disrespectful.”
Two days prior to Trump’s tweet, Frank had drawn media scrutiny for delivering a House floor speech on the post-2008 banking collapse wearing an ill-fitting blue sweater. His team later told The Atlantic that he couldn’t properly put his suit jacket on due to a bandaged hand following a surgery.
“Look, Donald Trump, we originally thought was a joke. And then he turned out to be very good at one thing, exploiting voters’ discontent,” Frank said on CNN’s State of the Union on May 3, People reported. “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.”
Frank also told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump and his political movement could be beaten, arguing Trump only excelled at one thing while failing at everything else.
“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,” Frank said. “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.”
Rest in peace, Barney Frank.