Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

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

Diversity brings distrust—and the mutual distrust among Americans has been Donald Trump’s most important political resource.

Trump’s election was a system failure, but the system did not fail out of the wild blue yonder.

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.

Pretty transparently, Donald Trump had no credible plans for doing any of these good things. But even to articulate such challenges to party dogma amounted to a public service of a kind.

I expected the good sense of Republican voters to reassert itself.

The largest and most loyal subset of those voters were men who felt devalued in the economy and disrespected in the culture, who chafed at being scolded for their “privilege” even as they succumbed to disability, drugs, and early death.

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

The slowdown in economic growth since the year 2000 and the shock of the financial crisis and the Great Recession have embittered politics too; when there seems less to go around, people quarrel more ferociously over what remains.

The financial and economic consequences of the stoppage of payments by the largest purchaser of goods and services on planet Earth could not be calculated, could barely even be imagined. It would be a nuclear event—and Republican Party leaders were willing to threaten it not only once, but a second time again in 2013.

It’s a strange version of the Constitution that says the president gains greater power to say yes when Congress tries to tell him no.

Highly informed Republicans were actually slightly less likely to accept the fact of Barack Obama’s American birth than less-informed Republicans.

Nothing like this radical denial of the Americanism of a serving president had been seen since the Civil War era, if then. The denial also revealed that as the country diversified, its conservatives would insist ever more militantly that no matter who might reside within the United States, the country’s institutions and identity should belong only to those recognizably like them.

In 2017, House and Senate Republicans would try to jam through Congress a law every bit as far-reaching as the Affordable Care Act, without hearings, without debate, and (insofar as they could) without scores from the Congressional Budget Office.

the original ACA was lengthily debated, examined in committee, and fully scored by the Congressional Budget Office. It represented not novelty, but a somewhat more redistributionist update of the health care reform signed into law in Massachusetts by Governor Mitt Romney and originally sketched at the Conservative Heritage Foundation in the mid-1990s, as a Republican alternative to the health care plan offered by the Clinton administration.

Psychic alarms aside, the Obama years were actually a good time for the American affluent.

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.

Many more of them will rediscover that ideology after his administration ends, and condemn Trump retrospectively as “really a liberal all along.”

Altogether, about one-third of the Republican Senate caucus publicly called for Trump to quit the race.

Once in office, it was not his own cunning that enabled him to defy long-established standards of decent behavior. It was the complicity of his allies among the conservative and Republican political, media, and financial elite.

“I’m tired of these special snowflakes.” This was the last-ditch defense offered by hard-pressed Trump supporters, never mind that many of them were the most special snowflakes of them all.

The one-third of America that identifies as “conservative” will be isolated even more profoundly within an information ghetto of deception and incitement.

In desperation, the Jeb Bush campaign purchased 60 percent of all political spots aired in New Hampshire in the month of October 2015. That ad barrage pushed his poll numbers in the state from about 9 percent to about 8 percent.

Lopez-Sanchez, a repeat drug offender, had been ordered deported five times since 1993. He was at large that day in July because San Francisco’s sanctuary city law forbade local police to notify federal authorities when they released him after his most recent detention. Within a week of the Steinle killing, Donald Trump skyrocketed into first place in the Republican field.

“Republicans used to think Fox News worked for us. Now we are discovering we work for Fox News.” I first said that in 2010, and the observation held true for half a decade.

The predicament of Fox illustrates the larger crisis of conservatism in the Trump era. Gullibly or cynically, resentfully or opportunistically, for lack of better information or for lack of a better alternative, a great party has slowly united to elevate one man into a position of almost absolute power over itself.

what was left of the philosophy formerly known as conservatism beyond “fuck you, leftists”?

Candidates and presidents since Gerald Ford have followed the practice initiated by George Romney in 1968 and published their tax returns.

A rule-of-law state can withstand a certain amount of official corruption. What it cannot withstand is a culture of impunity.

“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 most lavish spending on the person of a president in American history.

Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.

Two months after that “if I did a tenth” comment, Michael Flynn reportedly joined a conversation with top Turkish ministers to discuss the kidnapping and forcible removal to Turkey of a US permanent resident sought by the Ankara government for political offenses.

Congressional committees that exhaustively investigated the deaths of US personnel at the Benghazi consulate in 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of the tax-exempt status of conservative groups that strayed too close to electoral politics, yawned away the ethical infractions of the Trump White House.

Representative Mick Mulvaney, a Tea Party radical who had pushed the United States to default on its obligations in the debt-ceiling battles of 2011 and 2013, was named the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Donald Trump has not had many successes as president. Convincing his supporters to regard honest media as “fake news” must rank high among them.

A president of the United States who gratefully welcomed campaign assistance from a hostile foreign spy agency denounced America’s free press as enemies of the nation.

Politicians equivocate precisely to avoid lying. Trump lies without qualm or remorse. If necessary, he then lies about the lie.

Emilio Ferrara of the University of Southern California observed the overlap between pro-Trump and anti-Macron social media accounts.

All presidents chafe against their press coverage. Donald Trump actually has less to complain about than almost any of his predecessors. No president—not Barack Obama, not John F. Kennedy—has benefited more from slavish and sycophantic coverage from the media organizations that influence his supporters the most: Fox News, Breitbart, Newsmax, and the English-language propaganda outlets of the Russian state, Sputnik and RT.

hence the weird participation trophies that even Trump-skeptical commentators awarded the president when and if he behaved in a relatively normal way for a few consecutive hours.

It was not out of the ether that Donald Trump confected his postelection claim that he lost the popular vote only because “millions” voted illegally.9 Such claims have been circulating in the Republican world for some time, based in some cases on purported statistical evidence.

“I’ll be the first one to come out and point to Russia if there’s clear evidence,” declared House intelligence chair Devin Nunes in December 2016.22 Instead, over the following months, Nunes actively collaborated with the Trump White House to sabotage his committee’s investigation, to the point where he was forced to recuse himself from further involvement.

I jokingly tweeted at the end of May that after all the excuses condoning Greg Gianforte’s assault on Ben Jacobs, we would next be called on to explain why treason is bad.27 That joke all too quickly proved prophetic.

“The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does,” tweeted the radio host Dennis Prager on July 14, 2017.

Only 50,752 ballots were cast by the 1.7 million people of South Carolina in the election of 1924, half as many as cast by 700,000 South Carolinians in 1872.

At the end of President Obama’s term, according to the Pew survey, 88 percent of South Koreans expressed confidence that the US president would do the right thing in world affairs. In June 2017, only 17 percent of South Koreans expressed such confidence in President Trump.

In a span of months, trust in the US president to do the right thing dropped by forty-three points in Italy, fifty-seven points in the United Kingdom, seventy points in France, and seventy-five points in Germany.

Whoever became president in 2016 would need extraordinary vision and tact to manage a more refractory world system, one in which year by year the United States and its core allies counted for less, and China, India, and other emerging economies counted for more. Instead, the United States stumbled into a presidency determined to smash that system.

In a 2014 speech, Trump’s future political adviser Steve Bannon proposed Vladimir Putin as the true leader of a new kind of global conservative movement.