Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

But if it’s potentially embarrassing to speak too soon, it can also be dangerous to wait too long.

The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.

Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off.

Even before Donald Trump thrust himself forward as a presidential candidate, American politics had been veering toward extremism and instability. Trump seized a dark opportunity, but that opportunity had been opened and enlarged for him by others.

To shrug and say, “What does it all matter?” is not only to dismiss the poor and the vulnerable but to submit your own interests to the mercy of the greedy and unscrupulous. It is to submit to life as a subject rather than a citizen.

Will this generation be found wanting in its hour on the stage of history? Someday, the time will come to write the history of that hour. I undertake this book before that time, as my contribution to ensuring that the hour’s ending is one to be prouder of than its sorry opening.

Constitutional democracy is founded on a commitment first and foremost to the rules of the game.

law professor at Yale. George W. Bush had been made president, Ackerman argued, only by the intervention of a conservative Supreme Court. If Bush then appointed further conservative justices, the court would be “packing itself.” For that reason, “when sitting justices retire or die, the Senate should refuse to confirm any nominations offered up by President Bush.”14 Ackerman limited his boycott idea to the Supreme Court itself, but Senate Democrats did him one better. No Supreme Court vacancies opened in George W. Bush’s first term, but a great many appellate court seats did. In a closely divided Senate, Democrats successfully blocked the consideration of ten of these appointees—an unprecedented move. Republicans struck back after gaining Senate seats in the election of 2004. They threatened to end the Senate minority’s power to filibuster lower-court judicial nominations. The two parties reached a deal. The appellate-judge filibuster was preserved in theory, but with an understanding that the minority would use it only in “extreme cases.” By then, the most controversial of the Bush nominees had removed themselves from consideration, so Democrats could score the exchange as a victory. This backstory explains why Senate Republicans a decade later felt entitled to use unprecedented tactics of their own against President Obama’s final nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. Republicans refused Garland even a hearing, never mind a vote, inventing a new principle against...

The famous line of Nancy Pelosi’s—“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it” (ripped from context in her case and distorted in its meaning by her opponents)—literally did apply to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

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.

“It’s even worse than it looks,” quipped a 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann.22 Such pessimism invited the reply, “That’s what you said last time.” Things have looked bad before without the world coming to an end. Why panic now? But it can equally be true that things were bad before, that things have gotten worse since, and that things may get even worse in the future. Like a man falling downstairs, each thump and tumble may be a prelude to the next, with the final crash still waiting for him even farther down. Since the election of Donald Trump, the hard and painful floor seems to be rising toward us faster and faster and faster.

in his business career, so in government, Donald Trump grabs the benefits for himself and a few associates, while offloading the costs onto those foolish enough to trust him—and anyone else who cannot wriggle away.

Trump did at last begin to send names forward for US attorney posts in July 2017. As he did so, it became obvious why the search for replacements had taken so long. Trump was seeking personal loyalists. Trump, normally indifferent to mid-level personnel, actually met in person with a candidate for US attorney for the District of Columbia, the US attorney with potential criminal jurisdiction over his staff and himself. In the words of CNN’s Laura Jarrett, such a meeting “some former Justice Department and White House sources say sharply departs from past practice and more generally is at odds with the understood custom of insulating U.S. attorneys from political influence.”51

The theory of American government is that official role, not blood relationship, determines who does what. If the president dies in office, he is succeeded by the vice president, not the first lady. There is no such role as “first daughter,” despite Ivanka Trump’s sometime use of that title. Yet at Hamburg, Ivanka posed with her father in group photographs with the chancellor of Germany, the prime minister of Canada, and other leaders—none of them joined by spouses or children.57

On the first day of his new administration, President Trump sought and got from his Justice Department an interpretation of the 1967 anti-nepotism law that allowed him to bring his daughter and son-in-law aboard. It held that the 1967 law applied only to members of “executive agencies”—and that the White House staff did not count as such.

It was just as Thomas Jefferson had warned after leaving the presidency, a bookend to Washington’s injunction against nepotism two decades earlier: Towards acquiring the confidence of the people the very first measure is to satisfy them of [the president’s] disinterestedness, & that he is directing their affairs with a single eye toward their good, & not to build up fortunes for himself & family: & especially that the officers appointed to transact their business, are appointed because they are the fittest men, not because they are his relations.59

Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on nonregulation, not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state.

To be unequivocal, however, is not the same as to be honest. Politicians equivocate precisely to avoid lying. Trump lies without qualm or remorse. If necessary, he then lies about the lie. (The Hillary Clinton campaign made a powerful online ad that contrasted repeated instances of Trump insisting, “I never said that” followed immediately by a clip of him saying precisely that thing.23) But whatever Trump says, he says without qualification, deceiving the inattentive into regarding him as a truthful man, rather than the most shameless liar in the history of the presidency.

It seems unromantic—until you encounter the alternative. “Unhappy is the land that breeds no heroes,” remarks a character in Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo. “No,” replies the title character. “Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.” If you seek revolution, go seek it in business, in technology, in the arts. The steadiness and predictability of well-functioning liberal democracy enables innovation in every other area of life.

Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence on the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you. Don’t be

afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.