Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy’s undoing.

From Russia to South Africa, from Turkey to the Philippines, from Venezuela to Hungary, authoritarian leaders have smashed restraints on their power. Media freedom and judicial independence have eroded.

But if it’s potentially embarrassing to speak too soon, it can also be dangerous to wait too long.

The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters.

Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off.

“Democracy,” as you were taught in high school civics, is a word that traces its origin back to two Greek words: the word for “people” and the word for “rule.”

An American president is not some tribal chief, ruling by personal charisma and brute force. He (or someday she) works through systems:

Yet the opportunity he discovered and the danger he presented will not end with Donald Trump’s career.

Diversity brings distrust—and the mutual distrust among Americans has been Donald Trump’s most important political resource.

I propose we put the spotlight on the voters rather than the candidates; on longer-term trends, not dramatic incidents; on the game as it is played, not the ballyhooed game changers who so seldom actually change anything.

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...

Trump’s government has failed not only because of indifference and incompetence, although he abounds in both, but because from the start it has been redirected from the service of the public to the aggrandizement of one domineering man and his shamelessly grasping extended family.

He repeated a fantasy about opposing the war so strenuously that President George W. Bush sent representatives to Trump to beg him to be quiet. It was all utterly untrue.

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.

Yet whatever these powerful people say in private, they continue to enable him in public. It is their public actions, despite their private qualms, that sustain Trumpocracy.

better men than himself, but not the right hands for the job of civilian government.

Democracy dies in darkness, opines a great American newspaper, but it would be more accurate to say that it dies by degrees.

Yet rather than bargains and compromises, all-or-nothing politics emerged as the order of the day.

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.

Sometimes when I talk to immigration advocates, they wish I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. But that’s not how a democracy works.3

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.

The hoax was accepted in some form or other by a large majority of Republican voters.

The denial also revealed that as the country diversified, its conservatives would insist ever more militantly that no matter who might reside within the United States, the country’s institutions and identity should belong only to those recognizably like them.

Ironically, while all attention was focused on President Trump’s raging and bullying, the most radical attack on American norms of governance in his first year was attempted not by Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Anthony Scaramucci, or any other late-night demon, but by the regular Republicans of the House and Senate.

Whatever other complaints might be brought against the ACA, nobody can say it was sprung on either Congress or the American people out of nowhere—or that senators lacked full information about its contents and consequences.

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.

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

They invited a crisis. The only surprise was . . . how surprised they were when the invited crisis arrived.

Donald Trump did not create the vulnerabilities he exploited. They awaited him. The irresponsibility of American elites, the arrogance of party leaders, the insularity of the wealthy: those and more were the resources Trump used on his way to power.

But it can equally be true that things were bad before, that things have gotten worse since, and that things may get even worse in the future. Like a man falling downstairs, each thump and tumble may be a prelude to the next, with the final crash still waiting for him even farther down.

Since the election of Donald Trump, the hard and painful floor seems to be rising toward us faster and faster and faster.

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.

Many more of them will rediscover that ideology after his administration ends, and condemn Trump retrospectively as “really a liberal all along.”

You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

But as Jimmy Stewart learns in It’s a Wonderful Life, “No man is a failure who has friends.” Donald Trump had some very useful friends indeed. Thirty-two minutes after Fahrenthold’s story appeared on the Washington Post’s site, the Russian-backed site WikiLeaks dumped its largest email cache of the campaign: a hack of the personal Gmail account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta.15

On Saturday, October 1, 2016, Trump’s confidant Roger Stone had tweeted: “Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.”16 On Tuesday, October 4, WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, posted a video announcement to preview his “October surprise.” The Drudge Report bannered an openmouthed photo of Hillary Clinton headlined “ASSANGE COMES FOR HER WIKILEAKS DANGER.”

My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.21

Surely the greatest gift of the WikiLeaks Podesta hack to the Trump campaign, however, was the accelerant it offered to right-wing cultural grievance—and the escape valve it consequently offered to Catholics and other Christians discomfited by Trump’s confessed sexual misconduct.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel.”

It would not have taken a miracle to bar him from the presidency; it took a negative miracle to tumble him into it.

Trump cannily exploited negative partisanship to consolidate political support he could never have attracted for his own agenda or his own merits.

Many people solidly middle class or even rather affluent also felt that their world was turning upside down in the twenty-first century.

Harvey Mansfield, the noted conservative in Harvard’s government department, wrote in the Wall Street Journal of July 30, 2016: “We are caught between distaste for a man who is not a gentleman and dislike of the political correctness that he so energetically attacks—yet whose effect he illustrates.”45

Trump’s supporters saw their cultural enemies as much stronger than themselves.

And although a morning show host has no army, no intelligence services, no power to issue orders and pardons, Huckabee Sanders’s version of the case nonetheless resonated with many millions of conservative Americans.

Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment.

“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?”

As in his business career, so in government, Donald Trump grabs the benefits for himself and a few associates, while offloading the costs onto those foolish enough to trust him—and anyone else who cannot wriggle away.