Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

also revealed that as the country

deductibles. Their own

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy,

Trump tangled government, family, and business in the style of an authoritarian Third World kleptocrat.

Until the financial crisis of 2008, Donald Trump had almost no business interests outside the United States. That year’s crisis shattered what remained of his real-estate development activity.

But Trump remained a TV star, thanks to NBC’s Apprentice. His name had become a global symbol of ostentatious gimcrack luxe.

Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner claimed to have put in place ethical safeguards against conflicts of interest. These safeguards proved utterly derisory, when not wholly fictitious.

Trump promised to donate all foreign profits earned by the Trump Organization to charity. But as of midyear 2017, his company had made no effort even to identify such profits, much less disgorge them.41 Federal conflict-of-interest

of-interest statutes exempt the president and vice president from many of their strictures, partly for separation-of-powers reasons, partly for pragmatic reasons. A president’s scope of authority is so vast there is almost nothing he or she could do that could not affect his or her own economic interests in some way. Even so basic a decision as proposing a budget deficit or surplus could affect the relative values of stocks versus bonds. But these exemptions do not constitute a blank ethical check for the president. Since modern conflict-of-interest rules took form in the 1970s, presidents have volunteered near-total financial disclosure, including the publication of their tax returns.

Trump’s biographer Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg View estimated to NPR early in 2017 that Trump owes in excess of $1 billion to about 150 different financial institutions, vastly more than the $310 million indicated on the first disclosure he filed as president.46 Trump’s son-in-law and daughter also

Trump is one by one disabling the federal government’s inhibitions against corruption.

Donald Trump never accepted the concept that the law should be insulated from politics.

Nepotism fits naturally within authoritarian governments, poorly within republics and democracies.

The most troubling of all of Trump’s hires, however, was his principal national security adviser during the campaign, the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Books could and will be written about the tragic arc of the heroic battlefield commander who dwindled into shabby dishonor (and perhaps much worse) after failing at the capstone job of his to-then impressive career, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Over the course of 2017, the Trump White House one by one extruded its wild men and gradually assumed something more like orderliness under Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster. But even as the courtiers evolved toward higher professionalism, their king’s madness raged hotter and fiercer.

The Trump administration settled for an easier project: paralyzing the state either by failing to staff it in the first place or else by filling its ranks with incompetents and self-seekers, by trashing ethical rules, and by abdicating the responsibility of the president and White House to set policy and then confirm that policy is in fact executed.

No American president in history—no national political figure of any kind since at least Senator Joe McCarthy—has

has trafficked more in untruths than Donald Trump.

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.

The Russia-born journalist Masha Gessen has astutely noted the commonality of the dishonesty of Donald Trump and the man he admires so much, Vladimir Putin. “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”24

Trump’s diplomacy reserved its smiles for nondemocracies that offered commercial opportunities, not only in the Persian Gulf and the Philippines, but even in the case of as bad an actor as Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey, also home to a major Trump-branded project in Istanbul. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey on July 15, 2017, the one-year anniversary of an attempted coup that the Erdoğan regime had used as an excuse for mass roundups of political opponents, and especially journalists. In April 2017, a fraud-stained referendum had approved constitutional amendments that would empower Erdoğan to rule for life. Yet Tillerson had this to say at Erdoğan’s self-honoring anniversary ceremony: We’re all here in Istanbul at a momentous time. Nearly a year ago, the Turkish people—brave men and women—stood up against coup plotters and defended their democracy.25

From that point, speculation about Trump’s secret strategy almost entirely ceased. “More and more, he looks like a complete moron,” a veteran of Trump’s presidential campaign

If, as seemed increasingly possible, Trump had been helped into the presidency by a Russian intelligence operation, then the ultimate guarantor of the whole world order had revealed a system-shaking vulnerability—as if the Red Cross could not manage a blood bank, as if the Federal Reserve had run out of dollars. Every international actor, benign or malign, had to take the new information into account. America’s friends might hope that the Trump presidency would prove short, its activities limited and ineffectual.

At least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism—and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their country. They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United States. They’d rather see more of a states-based entity that the founders originally set up where freedoms were controlled at the local level. We the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s [Putin] talking about as far as traditionalism goes—particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism—and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward. You know, Putin’s been quite an interesting character. He’s also very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he’s playing very strongly to social conservatives about his message about more traditional values.34

The most disturbing personality in the Trump national security system, however, was always Trump himself.

The Trump White House is a mess of careless slobs. At the highest levels, one sees mutual sabotage,

easily decoded “on background” name-calling, false filings of disclosure documents, and institutionalized lying about readily ascertainable facts.

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 ...

At best, the dysfunction of the Trump team has actively advanced the public interest, by unintentionally thwarting the Trump administration’s more sinister instincts.

In the travel ban litigation, the courts asserted a new power to disregard long-established and long-accepted formal law if the president’s personal words created a basis for mistrusting his motives.

Tillerson would have been diminished by President Trump’s evident disregard for him and his own systematic deconstruction of the department he headed.

In a government so weak and mismanaged, the competence of its former military personnel exerted even more gravity than otherwise.

Vice President Pence enjoined the 2017 graduating class at the US Naval Academy to “follow the chain of command without exception. Submit yourselves, as the saying goes, to the authorities that have been placed above you. Trust your superiors, trust your orders, and you’ll serve and lead well.”15 But that is not the American way. American officers are bound to obey only lawful orders.

The unthinking obedience recommended by the vice president is the mentality of authoritarian states, not rule-of-law societies.

How much does the military now tell President Trump about what it is doing, and how exactly does it follow his orders, to the extent he issues orders?

The American force’s new home is the town of Zagan, only twenty-five miles east of the German border—about the most cautious possible move into Poland without altogether abandoning the idea. Still, there they are, facing a much bigger and more rapid Russian buildup to the north and east. A soldier or officer assigned to that duty—and their families back in the United States—must wonder about the integrity of the orders that could issue from a Russia-compromised president of the United States. If they should be called on to risk their lives to serve their country, will they wonder which country their Putin-infatuated commander in chief is ultimately serving?

In national security—as with ethics in government more generally—what is usually meant by the word “normal” is the norm that prevailed from Watergate to 9/11: national security operations closely monitored by both the executive branch and Congress.

Bureaucracies always yearn to escape political control, and the national security agencies are the most powerful, autonomous, and well-funded bureaucracies within the American state. Trump has given them powerful and righteous motives to emancipate themselves. Will they ever again fully resume the subordination that may feel by the 2020s like a relic from a bygone era?

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.

Hillary Clinton won the counties that produced 64 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Even in Trump states, Clinton won the knowledge centers, plac...

Triangle of North ...

As the next presidential race nears, it will become ever more imperative to rally around Trump. 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.

Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

A post-Trump GOP will need to get serious again about honesty in government, after Donald Trump’s immolation of ethical standards.

Trump has contaminated thousands of careers and millions of minds. He has ripped the conscience out of half of the political spectrum and left a moral void where American conservatism used to be.

Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.2

The battle for men’s hearts is one that Trump never won, because he never fought it.

This is what Trump could never do—and that his supporters never understood that a party leader must do.

Speaking on Fox News in August 2016, Bill Bennett, a former education secretary under President Reagan (and the author, incidentally, of the mega-bestseller The Book of Virtues), denounced “some of my friends—or maybe former friends—who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”