Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

“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.