Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

A rule-of-law state can withstand a certain amount of official corruption. What it cannot withstand is a culture of impunity. So long as officials believe that corruption will usually be detected—and if detected, then certainly punished—for just that long they will believe that corruption is wrong. It is for this reason that corrupt regimes swiftly evolve toward authoritarianism, and authoritarian regimes toward corruption. Outside of the Islamic world, the twenty-first century is not an era of ideology. The grand utopian visions of the nineteenth century have passed out of fashion. The nightmare totalitarian projects of the twentieth have been overthrown or have disintegrated, leaving behind only outdated remnants: North Korea, Cuba. What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-option of elites. Their goal is self-enrichment; the corrosion of the rule of law is the necessary means. As a shrewd local observer explained to me on a visit to Hungary in early 2016, “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”

The government of the United States seems to have made common cause with the planet’s thugs, crooks, and dictators against its own ideals—and in fact to have imported the spirit of thuggery, crookedness, and dictatorship into the very core of the American state, into the most solemn symbolic oval center of its law and liberty. The man inside that oval center did not act alone. He held his power with the connivance of others. They executed his orders and empowered his whims for crass and cowardly reasons of their own: partisanship, ambition, greed for gain, eagerness for attention, ideological zeal, careerist conformity, or—in the worst cases—malicious glee in the wreck of things they could never have built themselves. They claim the symbols of the republic as they subvert its institutions. They pin the flag to their lapels before commencing the day’s work of lying, obstructing, and corrupting. They speak for America to a world that remembers a different and better America. But that memory is already fading into a question of whether it was not perhaps always an illusion, whether this new regime of deceit and brutishness will not only form the future—but whether it also retrospectively discredits the American past.

Vice President Pence enjoined the 2017 graduating class at the US Naval Academy to “follow the chain of command without exception. Submit yourselves, as the saying goes, to the authorities that have been placed above you. Trust your superiors, trust your orders, and you’ll serve and lead well.”15 But that is not the American way. American officers are bound to obey only lawful orders. The unthinking obedience recommended by the vice president is the mentality of authoritarian states, not rule-of-law societies. Ten years after the ratification of the Constitution, the US Supreme Court rejected forever the “I was just following orders” defense. Instructions from a superior officer “cannot change the nature of the transaction, or legalize an act which without those instructions would have been a plain trespass.”16

Mattis’s own low personal regard for President Trump accidentally became public when video emerged of Mattis in a small-group conversation with military personnel in Jordan. After praising them, the defense secretary added, “You’re a great example for our country right now. It’s got some problems. You know it, and I know it. It’s got problems that we don’t have in the military. You just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other, and showing it—of being friendly to one another, of understanding what Americans owe to one another. . . . We’ve got two powers: the power of inspiration—and you’ll get the inspiration back—and the power of intimidation, and that’s you.”22

As Donald Trump settled into office, an American armored brigade was deploying in Poland, part of a repositioning of NATO forces that based a British-led force in Estonia, a Canadian-led force in Latvia, and a German-led force in Lithuania. The American force’s new home is the town of Zagan, only twenty-five miles east of the German border—about the most cautious possible move into Poland without altogether abandoning the idea. Still, there they are, facing a much bigger and more rapid Russian buildup to the north and east. A soldier or officer assigned to that duty—and their families back in the United States—must wonder about the integrity of the orders that could issue from a Russia-compromised president of the United States. If they should be called on to risk their lives to serve their country, will they wonder which country their Putin-infatuated commander in chief is ultimately serving?

What if the next president also looks like an outlier from the point of view of the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the NSA? Will the national security agencies respect a future president of the radical Left any more than they respect a President Trump? It is not only the ethno-nationalist Right that rejects the civic patriotic values the national security agencies uphold. Bureaucracies always yearn to escape political control, and the national security agencies are the most powerful, autonomous, and well-funded bureaucracies within the American state. Trump has given them powerful and righteous motives to emancipate themselves. Will they ever again fully resume the subordination that may feel by the 2020s like a relic from a bygone era?

Liberal democracy imposes limits and requires compromises. To people raised in wealthy societies, accustomed to having their wishes not only exactly met but delivered to their door, liberal democracy must seem grudging and unsatisfactory. You don’t get exactly what you want! You often must settle for something you dislike, in order to avert something you would dislike more.

We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.