Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

a president who watches more TV than any other in history.

What we are seeing is a grant of permission from millions of people to the president of the United States to diminish, discredit, corrode, and ultimately subvert what the authors of the US Bill of Rights listed among the very first freedoms necessary to their great experiment in self-government.

African American electoral participation has steadily risen over the past decades, reaching a peak of more than 65 percent of those eligible in the presidential election of 2012. Four years later, only 58 percent of eligible black Americans cast a ballot, a decline unprecedented in modern times for any American ethnic group. Perhaps black voters were uninspired by Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. “Young Black Voters Voice Doubts About Clinton,” reported the New York Times on September 5, 2016.2 On the other hand, similar headlines could surely have been reported about John Kerry in 2004. Yet African Americans turned out for Kerry in greater percentages than for Hillary Clinton.

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.

No foreign leader manipulated Trump more adeptly than Vladimir Putin.

The leaders of the European allies knew early about Donald Trump’s long and disreputable financial connections to Russia.

Trump often revealed ignorance of basic facts about the international order, but something more than ignorance was at work here.

He never understood that America’s power arose not only from its own wealth and its own military force, but from its centrality to a network of friends and allies.

“More and more, he looks like a complete moron,”

Moron or no, Trump remained the president and still wielded the vast power of that office—or anyway could do so on days he bothered to show up, pay attention, and make decisions.

If a Donald Trump presidency

could happen, anything co...

American words could no longer be trusted, American reactions ...

They pin the flag to their lapels before commencing the

day’s work of lying, obstructing, and corrupting.

Donald Trump says more things that should not be said than any president in American history.

The Trump White House is a mess of careless slobs.

The failure of leadership at the top contaminates the whole enterprise.

Even the most routine work product of the Trump White House is strewn with errors of spelling, fact, and protocol, sometimes of quite serious consequence.

The most serious was a July 8 reference to China’s Xi Jinping as “president of the Republic of China”—the Republic of China being the official name of Taiwan, of course. Along the way, the Trump White House misspelled not only the names of many of its own newly appointed officials, but also that of the prime minister of Great Britain.

But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,”

“Trump supporters love him BECAUSE of his sexism.

These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”

The observation about sexual frustration was astute. Millennials were having less sex than their elders.

In 2014, only 71 percent of men aged eighteen to thirty-four were employed, compared with 84 percent in 1960.19

What happens to young men out of work and disconnected from women? Noncollege young men out of work reported spending an average of 3.4 hours per week playing video games before the recession. Their counterparts half a decade later played more than twice as much: an average of 8.6 hours per week.20

And, indeed, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy repelled whites and men unlike any candidacy before it, very much including the candidacy of Barack Obama.

The percentage of Americans who hold a “strongly unfavorable” view

of [Clinton] substantially exceeds the percentage for any other Democratic nominee since 1980, when pollsters began asking the question.

Antipathy to her among white men is even more unprecedented. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 52 percent of white men hold a “very unfavorable” view of Clinton. That’s a whopping 20 points higher than the percentage who viewed Barack Obama very unfavorably in 2012, 32 points higher than the percentage who viewed Obama very unfavorably in 2...

Clinton had stayed married; Trump was twice divorced. Clinton was a lifelong Methodist; Trump could not correctly name the books of the Bible. Yet no group adhered more loyally to Trump against Clinton than evangelical Christians.

Say this for Trump: In all the vast arsenal of his faults, one was missing. There is no hypocrisy about Donald Trump.

A parable he loved to repeat

culminated in the zinger: “You knew I was a snake when y...

and if his audiences missed the obvious application of the line to the man who pronounced it, that was hardly his fault. No Trump supporter could fairly complain that he or she had not been amply warned.

I said the exact same thing. You can't be mad because he told you what he was going to do and how he is.

It did not matter, for a reason brilliantly analyzed by Dale Beran in an essay for Quartz about the unexpected influence of the provocative 4chan message board from which so much of the alt-right slouched into existence: Since these men, like Trump, wear their insecurities on their sleeve, they fling insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else. Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this

duality. Trump represents both the alpha and the beta. He is a successful person who, as the left often notes, is also the exact opposite—a grotesque loser, sensitive and prideful about his outsider status, ready at the drop of a hat to go on the attack, self-obsessed, selfish, abrogating, unquestioning of his own mansplaining and spreading, so insecure he must brag about assaulting women. . . . But, what the left doesn’t realize is that this is not a problem for Trump’s younger supporters—rather, it’s the reason why they support him. Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel,...

fantasy worlds. Trump’s bizarre, inconstant, incompetent, embarrassing, ridiculous behavior —what the left (naturally) perceives as his weaknesses —are to his supporters his strengths. . . . Trump i...

there are simply not enough such crackpots in America to elect a president, no matter how lucky the break in the Electoral College. What boosted Trump was not the self-conscious white nationalism of the

media-savvy Sieg Heiler, but the pervading unease of whites devoid of any ideology at all.

The phrase “white privilege” transitioned from the academy into common speech in the Obama years—at exactly the moment that millions of white Americans were experiencing the worst social trauma since the Great Depression. For the first time in American history, life expectancy was actually declining, and most steeply among non-Hispanic whites. Non-Hispanic white males, 31 percent of the population, accounted for 70 percent of the suicides in the United States in 2014.36 Of the 33,091 Americans who died in 2015 of opioid overdoses,

27,056 were non-Hispanic whites.37 In the late 1990s, the risk that a non-college-educated white person would die in his or her early fifties was 30 percent lower than for a comparable black person. By 2015, the non-college white person’s risk was 30 percent higher than his or her non-college black counterpart.38 Behind these “deaths of despair,” as they came to be known, lay an unfolding economic malaise. Working-class white men suffered a 9 percent income decline between 1996 and 2014.39 Marriage, church attendance, civic participation, all plummeted.40 Compared with any other ethnic group—and to whites with college educations—noncollege whites expressed most pessimism about their personal prospects in

the decade ahead, and the prospects for their children after them.41 Elite America did not care, because it mostly did not notice. Between November 8, 2015, and November 8, 2016, the word “transgender” appeared in the...

Only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying.49

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 Tr...

The Trump presidency only accelerated the divorce of political power from cultural power. Business leaders quit Trump’s advisory boards lest his racist outbursts sully their brands. Companies like Facebook and Microsoft denounced his immigration policies. Popular singers refused invitations to his White House; great athletes boycotted his events. ...

And this was before Trump’s corruption and collusion scan...

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.