Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

From Russia to South Africa, from Turkey to the Philippines, from Venezuela to Hungary, authoritarian leaders have smashed restraints on their power.

The crisis is upon Americans, here and now.

Not all premonitions come to pass. But if we are saved, we never know for certain what we were saved from.

He can’t do anything for fifteen consecutive minutes, let alone overthrow a system of government that has lasted more than two hundred years.”

the French philosopher Montesquieu, warned that a free society must guard not only against “crimes” by powerful leaders but also against “negligence, mistakes, a certain slackness in the love of the

homeland, dangerous examples, the seeds of corruption, that which does not run counter to the laws but eludes them, that which does not destroy them but weakens them.”1

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 operates not by strategy, but by instinct. His great skill is to sniff his opponents’ vulnerabilities: “low energy,” “little,” “crooked,” “fake.” In the same way, Trump has intuited the weak points

in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off.

My topic is President Trump’s power: how he has gained it, how he has used it, why it has not yet been effectively checked.

This book is the story of those who enable, empower, support, and collaborate with Donald Trump.

I propose we put the spotlight on the voters rather than the candidates;

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

Trumpocracy has left Americans less safe against foreign dangers, has diverted their money from its proper purposes to improper pockets, has worked to bias law enforcement in favor of the powerful, and has sought to intimidate media lest they report things the public most needs to know. 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.

Trump’s government has failed not only because of indifference and incompetence, although he abounds in both, but because from the start it has been redirected from the service of the public to the aggrandizement of one domineering man and his shamelessly grasping extended family.

Well said

societies can dissolve into rot, as well as erupt into violence.

Trump has not kept faith with those voters. But they have kept faith with him.

Yet whatever these powerful people say in private, they continue to enable him in public. It is their public actions, despite their private qualms, that sustain Trumpocracy.

President Trump has plunged the government of the United States into chaos that enhances his personal power.

He demands that high officials disregard the law in

favor of personal loyalty to him.

Each rule breaking then justifies the next,

Ill feeling over the Supreme Court decision that elevated George W. Bush to the presidency over Al Gore has never healed.

It was arithmetic too that reducing the federal government’s future contributions to Medicaid would drop millions of

enrollees from the program over the next decade.

Over President Obama’s eight years in office, the S&P 500 gained 235 percent, more than 16 percent annually—one of the very best returns in US history.19

Yet through those years, one heard the pounding drumbeat of discontent: the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Trump campaign. These movements had many points of

disagreement with each other, but even more important similarities, including a rising tolerance for violence. It could still shock the nation in 2009 when one man carried a loaded rifle to an Obama political rally in Arizona.20 Dozens of weapons were carried at the Black Lives Matter march in Dallas in 2016 that ended in the killing of five police officers and the wounding of seven more, as well as the injury of two civilians.21 Even more and heavier weapo...

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. “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.

Despite his inherited wealth and self-made global fame, the pre-presidential Donald Trump could never overcome the haunting suspicion that people laughed at him.

The United States was living through an epochal shift of economic power and cultural status, and Trump’s supporters perceived themselves as the targets and losers in that shift. It’s wrong to imagine those supporters as all displaced factory workers, all struggling coal miners. Many people solidly middle class or even rather affluent also felt that their world was turning upside down in the twenty-first century.

Whatever his faults, at least he fights.

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.

As 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.

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.

Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.15 Trump Republicans were

not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent described themselves as “very conservative”; 20 percent described themselves as “moderate.”16 Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.17 What set them apart from other Republ...

Sixty-three percent of Trump’s supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on US soil.18 More than other Republicans, Trump’s supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that Obama was born in the ...

The people who could write large checks had noticed Trump’s practice of diverting campaign funds to his own businesses: $12.5 million altogether, according to a December 2016 CNN review.24

No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump.

Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight—even though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.

In May 2017, Congress appropriated an additional $120 million to provide security to the Trump family, half of it to reimburse local police in Palm Beach and New York City for the extra costs imposed by President Trump’s weekend getaways and the decision by First Lady Melania Trump to maintain a separate residence in the first year of the Trump presidency.6

Even this record-breaking

allowance soon proved inadequate. By August 2017, the Secret Service reported it had exhausted both its budget and its agents’ human capacity for overtime work. Facing a wave of resignations and retirements, the Secret Service asked Congress to raise the cap on agents’ pay and overtime from $160,000 to $187,000. Kevin Johnson reported in USA Today: The president’s jaunts to Mar-a-Lago are estimated to cost at least $3 million each, based on a General Accounting Office estimate for similar travel by former President Oba...

The annual Kushner family ski vacation in Aspen in March 2017 cost taxpayers at least $330,000.8 An Eric Trump business trip to Uruguay in early January 2017 cost the Secret Service nearly $100,000 just for hotel rooms. It cost tens of thousands more to accompany Donald Trump Jr. to Vancouver in March 2017 and to protect Tiffany Trump, the president’s youngest daughter, on a German tour and Mediterranean yachting holiday in July.9

Costly as the Trump family was to the presidency, the presidency was correspondingly lucrative to the Trump family.

Jonathan O’Connell reported in the Washington Post in August 2017 that the Tr...

DC, collected $4.1 million more than projected in the first four months of that year.10 Foreign governments, US corporations, and Trump’s own super PAC made the Trump hotel their first choice of venue.11 Earnings from food and drink exceeded expectations by more than 37 percent. Despite a low occupancy rate—only 42 percent—the hotel managed to extract an average room rate from the guests wh...