Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

But it was not snobbery that drove the condemnation of Trump. It was conscience.

Trump polled better among workers earning between $50,000 and $99,999 than with those earning over $100,000, a freakish outcome for a Republican.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton—excoriated by the right-wing media as a radical and a socialist—scored exceptionally well among the richest Americans, winning almost exactly half the votes of those who earn more than $250,000 per year. She did extraordinarily badly among white women without a college degree, losing that group to Donald Trump by the staggering margin of 27 points.17

As when they had resisted the draft in the 1960s, so now when they refused changes to Medicare, the politics of the baby boom generation were the politics of generational self-defense.

Self is the operative.word.here modern conservative is for nothing but that which effects him personally

but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.”

In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution.

Projects of social and economic reform crash into the reality that human beings most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity.

Donald Trump created in effect a three-party system in the United States, by building a new Trump party in between the Democratic and Republican parties.

One poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”

Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.

Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.38

the ravages of drug addiction, the costs of immigration, the cultural and economic decline of the industrial working class.

It was in very large part fear of communism that induced businesses to provide pensions and health care benefits to employees . . . that inspired the federal government to invest in great public universities . . . and that compelled the United States to uproot racial segregation. President John

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will,” as Frederick Douglass famously said. Along

“Post-truth is pre-fascism,”

“and to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

But if there is no truth, there can be no lying. And suddenly Americans are appreciating that “lying” is a concept very badly needed by democratic politics.

A leader who lies constantly can distort a nation’s perception of reality. “You are annihilated, exhausted, you can’t control yourself or remember what you said two minutes before. You feel that all is lost,” as one man who had been subject to Mao Zedong’s “reeducation” campaign in China put it to the psychiatrist Robert

“The president’s primary problem as a leader,” Peggy Noonan stingingly remarked, is not that he is impetuous, brash or naive. It’s not that he is inexperienced, crude, an outsider. It is that he is weak and sniveling. It is that he undermines himself almost daily by ignoring traditional norms and forms of American masculinity.

He’s not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and determined; he’s whiny, weepy and self-pitying. He throws himself, sobbing, on the body politic. He’s a drama queen.15

Trump has recalled Americans of the Left to an appreciation of the vital role of national security agencies.

The integrity of American voting systems is an even more vital part of the nation’s indispensable national infrastructure than power grids or gas pipelines.

But Romney was right and Obama wrong, as many in Obama’s own party now concede.17

harder, tougher, and less illusioned American Left: a strange gift from Donald Trump, but real.

Gifts have arrived too for the political Right. The Republican Party had dead-ended itself in the Obama years, which is precisely why it lay vulnerable to a manifest charlatan like Donald Trump. Many—perhaps most—conservatives will follow Trump down the MAGA path to whichever doom it leads. But the principled and creative have resisted—and after many years of frozen orthodoxy, now at last an opportunity for reform and renewal may open.

Trump has repelled a generation of young people from conservatism and Republicanism. He has imprinted upon his party his own prejudices, corruption, and ignorance. Republican candidates will pay a price for that legacy for years and decades ahead.

may seem a long shot, but, to borrow a line from the movie Argo, “this is the best bad plan we have.”

Yet Trump has at least checked the forward momentum of Europe’s nationalist authoritarians. His behaviors have brought enough discredit upon his style of politics to buy time for conservative liberals and liberal conservatives to regroup, rethink, renew, and revive.

The Trump administration may exist to fulfill just such a destiny: to remind other peoples in other countries that while constitutional government may sometimes look like an endless and pointless squabble, the promises of superior results from supposed strongmen are always self-serving lies.

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.

Vice Media, 118 video games popularity, 276–77n20 Vietnam, 154–55 Virginia Charlottesville, 13, 16, 80, 81, 142 Loudoun County, 143 voter fraud panel, 131 voting procedure revisions by Republicans, 126–28 in 2012 election, 126–28 in Wisconsin, 126 Voting Rights Act (1965), 127 Walker, Scott, 7 Wallace, Chris, 19, 20, 44