Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if some forward-thinking member of Congress had devoted his or her career in the late 1990s to fighting for the hardening of airline cockpits against hijackers. He or she would have battled a cost-conscious industry, faced election opponents lavishly funded by airline lobbyists, and might have prevailed just in time to prevent the September 11, 2001, attacks from taking the form they did—meaning that nobody would ever have known the service that member had rendered. Instead, he or she would forever be known as that bore who droned so uselessly about a threat that never materialized.

If (when?) his enablers withdraw from Donald Trump, he will be left isolated and helpless, a dead tooth in the gums of the US government. Yet the opportunity he discovered and the danger he presented will not end with Donald Trump’s career. The vulnerabilities Trump exploited will remain vulnerabilities still. Political decisions and economic trends have deeply riven the contemporary United States along lines of class, race, region, national origin, and cultural identity. Even the bonds between men and women have become attenuated. Those are not rhetorical claims; they are measurable facts. Diversity brings distrust—and the mutual distrust among Americans has been Donald Trump’s most important political resource.

Even before Donald Trump thrust himself forward as a presidential candidate, American politics had been veering toward extremism and instability. Trump seized a dark opportunity, but that opportunity had been opened and enlarged for him by others. Trump’s election was a system failure, but the system did not fail out of the wild blue yonder. Institutions do not matter for themselves. They matter because of the way they serve, or fail to serve, the people of the country. 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 gained the presidency thanks in great part to voters disgusted by a status quo that was ceasing to work for more and more of them. 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. Trump has not kept faith with those voters. But they have kept faith with him.

Debt ceiling fights had occurred often enough in sessions past. Back in 2006, then-Senator Obama had himself voted nay on a debt ceiling increase. But in those past fights, the congressional leadership had always ensured that there were sufficient votes to pass the increase before proceeding with the demagogic speeches opposing the increase. Using the debt ceiling vote as an opportunity for crass grandstanding was a venerable congressional tradition; using it as a weapon represented something startlingly new.

We are doing everything we can administratively. But the fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce. And I think there’s been a great disservice done to the cause of getting the DREAM Act passed and getting comprehensive immigration passed by perpetrating the notion that somehow, by myself, I can go and do these things. It’s just not true. . . . We live in a democracy. You have to pass bills through the legislature, and then I can sign it.4 In June 2012, Obama abruptly reversed himself. Facing an election in which his strategists advised that Hispanic votes would be crucial, President Obama issued the very order that he himself had so repeatedly denounced as beyond his authority. In the long history of presidential overreach, there had never been a case like it: a president asserting a power that he himself while actually serving as president had forcefully and repeatedly condemned as unlawful.

In almost every survey since the Iraq War began to go wrong in 2004, upwards of 60 percent of Americans assessed the country as on the “wrong track.” In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the wrong-track number spiked past 70 percent. It would return to that disturbing peak at intervals during the slow, weak recovery that followed.17 How removed from interactions with ordinary Americans did political elites have to be to plan the 2016 election as a return engagement between the two most famous political dynasties of late twentieth-century America: Bush versus Clinton? Yet the country’s wealthiest citizens committed hundreds of millions of dollars to secure just that outcome. Could they not foresee trouble? Apparently not.

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

Even as the truth about Trump loomed ever larger and more inescapable during the presidential campaign, he drew protection and support from conservative true believers. Some of those people had opposed him in the primaries for his deviations from conservative ideology. Many more of them will rediscover that ideology after his administration ends, and condemn Trump retrospectively as “really a liberal all along.” But for now, when it matters, they are locked in. They are locked in by their cultural grievances. Donald Trump has delivered very little by way of an affirmative conservative agenda.

Whatever else Trump may fail to do—staff a government, enact a program, safeguard US classified secrets, relieve disasters on Puerto Rico—there is one thing at which he never fails: provoking outrage among the people whom Trump supporters regard as overentitled and underdeserving: “the New York theater and arts and croissants crowd,” as Rush Limbaugh calls them.49 But don’t belittle theater! Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment. He summons all those who share that resentment to buy a ticket and enjoy the show.

The Founding generation warned against them. They warned too of “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”50 For more than two centuries, through more than fifty presidential elections, those warnings were heeded. This time, not.

As of June 30, 2015, Jeb Bush had raised in excess of $120 million, almost all of it in big gifts from a tiny number of wealthy families.4 Seldom in the history of fund-raising has so much bought so little, so fleetingly. Between December 2014 and September 2015, the heir to the most successful brand in Republican politics plunged from first place in the Republican field to fifth.5 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.

The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation’s biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. The winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes. While the party elite coalesced upon more immigration, less secure health coverage, and one more Bush, the rank and file were frantically signaling: less immigration, better health coverage, and no more Bushes. The other candidates for president in 2016 also missed the signal. Trump alone perceived it.

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”13 Trump’s harsh language scandalized almost every pundit who commented on his words. But three weeks later, on July 5, an illegal alien from Mexico, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, gunned down Kathryn Steinle, a young American woman, on a San Francisco wharf. Lopez-Sanchez discharged a stolen weapon. It’s not clear that he was aiming at Steinle. Aimed or not, Lopez-Sanchez’s bullet struck the thirty-two-year-old in the back and severed her aorta in front of her horrified father. She died in the hospital two hours later. It soon emerged that 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.

Senator Ted Cruz epically unloaded on Donald Trump on May 3, 2016, the eve of the Indiana primary. “This man is a pathological liar; he doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies . . . in a pattern that is straight out of a psychology textbook, he accuses everyone of lying. . . . Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it . . . the man is utterly amoral.”27 Even at the Cleveland convention, Cruz declined to endorse his former rival. By Election Day, however, Cruz had submitted. He formally endorsed Trump on September 23. “If Clinton wins, we know—with 100 percent certainty—that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country.”

Through the transition period, President-Elect Trump and his family used their new position to recognize old business associates and seek new ones. On November 14, 2016, Trump spoke for fifteen minutes to the president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri. According to reports in the Argentine media, Trump mentioned that a Trump-licensed building in Buenos Aires was stalled in the permitting process. The next day, Trump’s local partners triumphantly announced that the building was moving forward. It would later emerge that not only had Trump’s daughter Ivanka joined the call, but that Trump’s son Eric had arranged it, at the request of Trump’s lead partner in the Buenos Aires deal.

On November 18, 2016, President-Elect Trump would meet with Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, at Trump Tower. Photographs of the encounter between the two leaders showed Trump’s daughter Ivanka in attendance. Jared Kushner joined the group as well. At the time of the meeting, Ivanka Trump was in negotiations to license her clothing brand to a big Japanese retailer. That retailer was owned by a Japanese bank, which was in turn wholly owned by the Japanese government.24 (The deal would ultimately fail.25)

Power creates temptations, and that is true even for the smallest increments of power: the power of the building inspector, of the customs official, of the cop at the traffic stop. It took a lot of work by a lot of people over a long time to build even America’s highly imperfect standards of public integrity. Undoing that work would be a far easier task. Corruption is the resting state of public affairs; integrity a painstaking, unceasing struggle against cultural inertia and political gravity.

To work for Donald Trump, you must ready yourself to lie and lie. Remember Trump’s doctor Harold Bornstein? In August 2016, Bornstein put his signature to a medical assessment that Donald Trump’s health was “astonishingly excellent.” The assessment concluded, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”3 In fact, Donald Trump would become the oldest man to enter the presidency, and most likely the third most obese, after William Howard Taft and Grover Cleveland.

“It was a great honor traveling with you around the country for the last year and an even greater honor to be here serving on your cabinet,” gushed the secretary of the treasury. “Mr. President, what an incredible honor it is to lead the Department of Health and Human Services at this pivotal time under your leadership. I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me and the leadership that you’ve shown,” said the head of that department.28 A normal cabinet would balk at such self-abasement. A normal president would gag at it. (President George W. Bush, for whom I worked, especially distrusted flattery and flatterers. His eyes would narrow and a cynical smile would form, as if to say, “Now I see what you are.”) Donald Trump expects and rewards it. Such behavior is profoundly shameful, and honorable people will not do it.

Public service means making accommodations, but everyone needs to understand that there is a point where crossing a line, even an arbitrary line, means, as Sir Thomas More says in A Man for All Seasons, letting go without hope of ever finding yourself again. It goes without saying that friends in military, diplomatic, or intelligence service—the career people who keep our country strong and safe—should continue to do their jobs. If anything, having professionals serve who remember that their oath is to support and defend the Constitution—and not to truckle to an individual or his clique—will be more important than ever.36 Scarcely a week later, Cohen changed his mind. My about-face began with a discreet request to me from a friend in Trumpworld to provide names—unsullied by having signed the two anti-Trump foreign policy letters—of those who might be willing to serve. My friend and I had agreed to disagree a while back about my taking an uncompromising anti-Trump stand; now, he wanted assistance and I willingly complied.

Trump did not merely fail to organize his government. He actively sabotaged organization wherever it began to take form. He let his former personal secretary schedule his telephone calls, subverting the accustomed role of the White House chief of staff.64 He staffed his National Security Council with sinister oddballs. He mocked the stature of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and questioned the IQ of the secretary of state.

The normal politician calculates that lying is counterproductive over the long term. Lie too often, and you develop a reputation as a liar. Donald Trump gained just such a reputation in his pre-political career. “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized,” said a deputy mayor of New York. Innumerable investors, lenders, customers, and graduates of Trump University would say the same. In national politics, however, Trump benefited from the hesitation of reporters and journalists to call a lie for what it is. In a CNN interview in September 2016, Kellyanne Conway shut down a searching inquiry about Trump’s tax returns by Alisyn Camerota with the taunting challenge, “Are you calling him a liar?”25 Trump’s explanations for not releasing his returns were indeed blatant and untenable lies. But to say so outright on TV? It violated every instinct in a responsible and fair-minded TV interviewer’s being.

The 2016 presidential campaign introduced Americans to fake news as a tool of power. A term that had originated to describe intentional lying was redefined by Trump to dismiss honest reporting. Trump deployed the term as a weapon against everything from errors made in good faith and promptly corrected (like a mistaken report that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office)46 to the most meticulously documented truths. Trump’s aide Sebastian Gorka called it “fake news” to describe the Muslim travel ban as a travel ban even after President Trump himself had resumed using the term.47 Sean Hannity blamed CNN for staging a “fake news” incident even as he acknowledged that the incident was a hoax and CNN was blameless.48 Increasingly, Trump’s supporters use “fake news” as an epithet to mean any reporting not wholly subservient to pro-Trump messaging.

Enabling many of these changes was a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that put an end to the most biting section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That section required nine states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) as well as some forty counties (in states including California, Florida, New York, and North Carolina) to gain preclearance from the federal Department of Justice for changes to their voting rules.

The conservative journalist Chris Caldwell articulated a more lucid explication of Bannon’s 2014 message at Hillsdale College in February 2017: So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination. Populist conservatives see him the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the one person who says he won’t submit to the world that surrounds him. You didn’t have to be a Communist to appreciate the way Castro, whatever his excesses, was carving out a space of autonomy for his country. In the same way, Putin’s conduct is bound to win sympathy even from some of Russia’s enemies, the ones who feel the international system is not delivering for them. Generally, if you like that system, you will consider Vladimir Putin a menace. If you don’t like it, you will have some sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism. That turns out to be the big battle of our times.35 In that battle—if a battle is the right metaphor—Donald Trump has aligned with Putin against almost all of America’s most important allies, and the US national security apparatus has demonstrated an incapacity to constrain or moderate

Enraged by information that law enforcement agencies had surveilled his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, President Trump emitted a bizarre sequence of tweets on March 4, 2017. Trump alleged that former president Obama had ordered listening devices installed to monitor Trump himself. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate stuff. Bad or sick guy!”47 In an effort to substantiate Trump’s wild and false claims, press secretary Sean Spicer repeated at the White House briefing podium an assertion by a Fox News personality that Britain’s signal agency GCHQ had carried out the “tapping” at Obama’s behest. That assertion was in turn based on rumors circulated on Russian television and pro-Moscow websites. An obviously embarrassed Spicer raced through a mumbled reading of the allegation.

“Both FBI and NSD [the National Security Division within the FBI] confirm that they have no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017, tweets.”49 But if Trump was not “tapped,” his future campaign chair Paul Manafort apparently had been surveilled, for reasons most likely arising from Manafort’s work for the pro-Russian regime in Ukraine overthrown in 2014. That surveillance may have swept up conversations with candidate Trump.

If what Frum admits here is true, it doesn't sound like what Trump claimed is false.

The secret purportedly exposed an Israeli penetration of ISIS communications. The Russians might have shared that information with their clients inside Syria and their partners in Iran. But would any of those actors—Russia, Iran, or the Assad regime—have shared the information with ISIS? Perhaps ISIS in turn has penetrated the Assad regime. Still, all those risks were more roundabout than what happened next: the possible divulgence of the substance of the secret to the news media by disgusted national security professionals. (I’ve used hedged language here because it is not impossible that the secondary round of leaks consisted of deliberate disinformation from national security professionals, frantically trying to minimize the harm of the president’s mistake.)

The executive office of the president has until now almost always been staffed by committed people who take their jobs highly seriously. There are few slackers at a White House. The smallest jobs must be done with the greatest care; a future election can turn on whether the president has offended a local notable by mispronouncing her husband’s name. 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 protocol, sometimes of quite serious consequence. Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star compiled a list of some thirty such goofs. The funniest was perhaps a July 12, 2017, release attacking the accuracy of the Congressional Budget Office that misspelled the word “inaccurately” as “innacurately.”

When President Trump banned travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, he was exercising a lawful power of his office. It’s well-established law that the president has power to bar “any class of aliens” both as immigrants and as nonimmigrants and to impose on their ordinary comings and goings “any restrictions he may deem appropriate.”6 Some argued that Trump violated the Constitution by imposing a restriction that disadvantaged adherents of one religion from traveling to the United States. But the Constitution applies only to Americans. The Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2015 that the president could deny a visa to an alien for no stated reason at all! Aliens have no due process rights against the United States, and no First Amendment rights against the United States.7 Yet the courts have shredded Trump’s travel ban anyway. In the words of the first of a series of federal judges to rule against the Trump administration: the courts could not overlook “significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order and its related predecessor.”

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. In response to the danger posed by Trump, other holders of American power are tempted to jettison their historic role too, and to use any tool at hand, no matter how doubtfully legitimate, to stop him. In order to save the constitutional system, its defenders are at risk of corroding it.

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. Ten years after the ratification of the Constitution, the US Supreme Court rejected forever the “I was just following orders” defense. Instructions from a superior officer “cannot change the nature of the transaction, or legalize an act which without those instructions would have been a plain trespass.”16 Most American officers do understand and will comply with that principle—which leads to the second directional risk to civilian-military relations under President Trump: the risk that the military will quietly cut an unfit president out of the chain of command.

Will the national security agencies respect a future president of the radical Left any more than they respect a President Trump? It is not only the ethno-nationalist Right that rejects the civic patriotic values the national security agencies uphold. 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? Chapter 10

One of Trump’s conservative critics during the campaign published a beguilingly candid message on election eve. “Donald Trump is a boorish buffoon with dangerously fascist instincts and on Tuesday I will vote for him, sadly, but without a qualm.”9 Why? Over the next few months, this writer—Andrew Klavan of PJ Media—would return again and again to the justification of his decision: A few dopey intellectuals and their absurd little notions can have outsized power: the power of the echo chamber, the power of fashionable acceptance, the power of creating the atmosphere within the Beltway Bubble. And while Republicans frequently strut and fret about their opposition to leftist malarkey, they just as frequently acquiesce to it in the event. . . . Trump [is] deaf to the echo chamber, indifferent to media acceptance, immune to the atmosphere. In fact, some of the very things that make Trump unappealing to gentle folk like me—his belligerence, his recklessness, his bullish and even bullying insistence on his own vision—are also what sometimes lift him above the Leftist Crazy.10 A lot of people in America felt bullied and humiliated. Not all of them were old white men either. Some were young white men.

Trump offered this one promise above all others to the disaffected young men who followed him: a world that had been turned upside down by forces beyond their control, he would turn right-side up again. “You’re going to hear it once,” he told protesters at Virginia’s Radford University, “all lives matter.”32 Trump was not speaking there to some racist fringe. He was speaking to those who just wanted things restored to normal, as they understood normal.

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.

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.

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 Those words were spoken by Trump’s protégé Omarosa Manigault, but they could well have come from the man himself.

Four years later, he became the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote in two consecutive presidential elections. Along the way, he would win votes from many people who would cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2016. He left those voters—as he leaves history—with a troubling question: Was he right or wrong in 2004? Are we still “one people” even if we no longer speak one language? Or share one religion, or any religion at all? Even if we no longer can agree on national heroes and villains? Or on the meaning of such basic concepts as free speech, equality under the law, and the right to bear arms? Even if some of those who live among us do so without legal right—even as they receive a panoply of legal benefits? Even if some of us seem to be lavished with all the benefits of a new, more global economic order, while others bear all the costs?

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.14 He posted the best showing among union households by any Republican since 1984.15 He performed surprisingly well among Latino and black men, boosting his share in those two demographics above the level of Mitt Romney’s in 2012.16 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.

In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution. I wrote those words after the 2012 election, and they apply even more forcefully after 2016.31 Of the US residents who lacked health insurance prior to the 2008 financial crisis, 27 percent were foreign born.32 As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.”

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. In the decisive state of Pennsylvania, for example, Trump and the successful Republican candidate for US Senate, Pat Toomey, won almost exactly equal numbers of votes: 2.97 million for Trump; 2.95 million for Toomey. But Trump and Toomey won their votes in very different places. In Pennsylvania’s four richest counties—Chester, Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware—Toomey received altogether 177,000 more votes than Trump. In all the rest of the state, Toomey ran well behind Trump.

To date I have read (albeit at a slow pace) Paine’s Common Sense, Slack’s Liberty’s First Crisis, and I am in the middle of reading John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty.” I would have taken none of those actions prior to this last election. These are dark days for the United States, yet they are pierced by shafts of light. A new spirit of citizen responsibility is waking in the land. Americans are turning off cable networks that lie to them to consume instead more and better news.1 Instead of theatrical street protests, concerned citizens have turned to productive political action: phone calls to congressional offices, registration to vote.

Cynically yes, but effectively too, Donald Trump seized more accurately than any candidate in 2016 on issues neglected by more conventional politicians: the ravages of drug addiction, the costs of immigration, the cultural and economic decline of the industrial working class. As America evolves toward a more unequal, more plutocratic society, its politicians—and certainly its federal politicians—inhabit the world of a remote upper class. Even when they start poor, as Bill Clinton did, they do not stay that way. Despite his flamboyant claims to wealth, Donald Trump succeeded in speaking to and for huge sections of the American electorate that other politicians spoke only about. He identified forgotten and angry parts of America. His hurts, his grievances, his resentments, enabled him to channel theirs. It was fraud, but it was not all fraud.

“Post-truth is pre-fascism,” wrote Yale historian Timothy Snyder in a viral Facebook post just days after Donald Trump won a majority in the Electoral College, “and to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”4 Profound words, and true. But it was not only Donald Trump who had left truth behind, who scorned the very concept of truth. Trump entered a culture prepared for him; he filled a cavity excavated by the work of thousands of toiling academics and intellectuals. An example of their handiwork: The idea that there is a single truth–“the Truth”–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.5 That is an extract from an open letter drafted by students at Pomona College to justify the use of force and threat of violence to prevent a campus talk by a scholar they disliked. The most radical thing about that statement was precisely how conventional its contents were.

Long before Trump and his deceitful crew appeared on the scene, a conspiracy against the ideal of truth had gained the upper hand among those entrusted with the education of the young and the sustaining of high culture. If revulsion against Trump’s lies should at last discredit and overthrow that conspiracy, what a fine second gift that would be.

The candidate who won the most support from young voters in 2016, Bernie Sanders, noisily promised to upend that status quo: With your support and the support of millions of people throughout this country, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially, and environmentally.21 Sanders promised a politics of ever-accelerating change, of boundless goals, a politics that offered answers to the existential questions. In a constitutional democracy, these questions should fall to each of us to resolve individually, outside of politics, not collectively and by means of politics. People who have never suffered the tyranny and terror of utopian politics may hearken to radical and revolutionary slogans. We see them in black masks, professing to be “antifascist” even as they emulate the street violence of Blackshirts and Brownshirts against the targets of their own totalitarian ideology. The Trump presidency may administer a much-needed booster shot to enhance the anti-authoritarian immunities of a younger generation apparently lacking in them.

should be noted that the “I take him at his word” formula was originally coined by Hillary Clinton back in 2008. In an interview with Steve Kroft on CBS’s 60 Minutes, she added a new twist: asked whether Obama was a Muslim, she replied, “There’s nothing to base that on”—and then added lethally, “as far as I know.” 60 Minutes, CBS, March