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by
David Frum
Read between
February 19 - February 20, 2018
If (when?) his enablers withdraw from Donald Trump, he will be left isolated and helpless, a dead tooth in the gums of the US government. Yet the opportunity he discovered and the danger he presented will not end with Donald Trump’s career. The vulnerabilities Trump exploited will remain vulnerabilities still. Political decisions and economic trends have deeply riven the contemporary United States along lines of class, race, region, national origin, and cultural identity. Even the bonds between men and women have become attenuated. Those are not rhetorical claims; they are measurable facts.
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I propose we put the spotlight on the voters rather than the candidates; on longer-term trends, not dramatic incidents; on the game as it is played, not the ballyhooed game changers who so seldom actually change anything.
The affluent and the secure persisted with old ways and old names in the face of the disillusionment and even the radicalization of the poorer two-thirds of American society. They invited a crisis. The only surprise was . . . how surprised they were when the invited crisis arrived.
Donald Trump did not create the vulnerabilities he exploited. They awaited him. The irresponsibility of American elites, the arrogance of party leaders, the insularity of the wealthy: those and more were the resources Trump used on his way to power.
They are locked in by their cultural grievances. Donald Trump has delivered very little by way of an affirmative conservative agenda. But how much did that failure matter compared to his successful exploitation of
conservative anger and alienation?
For the remainder of the Trump presidency, American allies will have to make their plans on the assumption of American untrustworthiness. That kind of planning can be habit forming. For the remainder of the Trump presidency, military and intelligence leaders will work around a president who makes impulsive decisions, issues reckless statements, and cannot keep secrets. Those who serve in government will perceive that public integrity has gone out of style, polluted by a president who resents and resists the enforcement of rules. The one-third of America that identifies as “conservative” will
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The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation’s biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. The winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes.
Polled in the fall of 2015, half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP reported having stopped their education at or before high school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree.
Inaugurations cost money, but the largest costs are paid by taxpayers. The ceremony on the Capitol grounds is funded by Congress. The parade along Pennsylvania Avenue is paid out of the military’s budget. Security is covered by the federal government. So how was Trump’s record-breaking $107 million inaugural haul actually used? Good question, and one to which few will ever learn the answer. Many inaugural donors voluntarily disclose their gifts, but there is no obligation upon the inaugural committee to disclose how funds are spent. Nor are there many legal restrictions on how such funds can
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The inaugural committee could, for example, transfer millions of dollars to pro-Trump PACs without disclosing that fact to anybody. Or it could spend huge amounts at Trump’s hotels and businesses. Or it could simply hoard the money for some future secret use. The Trump inaugural committee promised that any unused funds would be donated to charity.26 No charity ever announced receipt of any gift from this source, nor did Trump’s inaugural committee offer any accounting for the money it received.
Like Ted Cruz, Republicans overcame any distaste they felt for Trump by convincing themselves that a Hillary Clinton presidency represented an unthinkably catastrophic outcome. Every stance and principle that had seemed so important in the long run-up to 2016 was junked in order to avert the Clinton apocalypse.
In December 2016, Kelly disclosed that after Trump’s August outburst against her, she had faced death threats serious enough that she had hired armed guards to protect her three young children, all then under the age of seven.38
While the core Fox audience watches to have its prejudices ratified, many occasional Fox viewers have become impatient with a news network that distorts, misrepresents, and oftentimes outright ignores the country’s most exciting domestic news story.
base. A popular columnist for the conservative site Townhall.com tweeted to his 115,000 followers a pithy explanation of the justification for the about-face on arbitrary executive power: The main reason for President Trump to pardon Sheriff Joe was fuck you, leftists. The new rules, bitches. followed by a smiling sunglasses-wearing emoji symbol.44 He made a cogent point too. By August 2017, what was left of the philosophy formerly known as conservatism beyond “fuck you, leftists”?
Politicians accepted these new stricter post-Watergate standards because they assumed everybody else accepted them. But what if somebody decided to reject them? What would happen then? Donald Trump guessed: nothing much. He not only declined to release his tax returns, but directed campaign funds to his own businesses.
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.”
A normal cabinet would balk at such self-abasement. A normal president would gag at it. (President George W. Bush, for whom I worked, especially distrusted flattery and flatterers. His eyes would narrow and a cynical smile would form, as if to say, “Now I see what you are.”) Donald Trump expects and rewards it. Such behavior is profoundly shameful, and honorable people will not do it. This fact forces a president who wishes to do it to hire dishonorable people—and
and to thrust honorable
people into irretrievably dishonorabl...
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Then, at the last second, Trump balked. He stood in front of the monument. He read the speech. He omitted the pro–Article 5 language. Why? Ideology? Russian influence? Truculent resistance to the advice of others unless swaddled in extravagant flattery? Who knows?
We’ll protect your business if you sign our bills. That was the transaction congressional leaders offered Trump. They failed to appreciate until too late that Trump, not they, had the stronger hand in this bargaining.
As much as any crank on Facebook, the Republican majority in Congress had locked itself within a closed information system. A party that listens only to itself, and speaks only to itself, deprives itself of the power to persuade anybody else.
In modern authoritarian states, unapproved candidates are deterred from running; disfavored people are discouraged from voting. Votes may be counted honestly enough, but voting systems are tilted in favor of the party of the leader.
Rather than discuss issues, ethnic grievances are stoked—and when outsiders report on what is happening, the regime exploits the opportunity to denounce a hostile external world for defaming the nation.
How were allies to interpret all this? A president caught in surveillance because he had accepted pro bono campaign services from the same operative who had previously served Putin’s many in Kyiv? Something had obviously gone terribly wrong inside the American national security apparatus.
Yet in important ways, President Trump already is being displaced—first by his own disavowal of ordinary responsibility, then by the countermeasures being put in place against him by the national security agencies. Perhaps everything will return to normal when and if Donald Trump departs the scene. But perhaps it will not.
National security professionals do not always trust the competence, commitment, and integrity of their political counterparts, and in the first year of the Trump presidency, those professionals have been given abundant reasons for that distrust. Will they post-Trump revert to their pre-Trump—really pre-9/11—form?
Yet Trump and Ailes remained in close communication throughout the campaign. The two men shared a deep understanding of the imperatives of television—and an even more intimate connection to the resentments of the white American male.
Not so in 2016. Where technologies were invented and where styles were set, where diseases cured and innovations launched, where songs were composed and patents registered—there the GOP was weakest. Donald Trump won vast swathes of the nation’s landmass. Hillary Clinton won the counties that produced 64 percent of the nation’s wealth. Even in Trump states, Clinton won the knowledge centers, places like the Research Triangle of North Carolina.
The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.
