Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

What the party elite had somehow failed to notice, unfortunately for them, was that their voters did not share the donors’ and pundits’ policy consensus.

Polled in the fall of 2015, half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP reported having stopped their education at or before high school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov.

Trump’s inaugural committee collected $107 million, double the previous record of $53 million set in 2009.

These donors hoped to buy access and goodwill, even protection from a thin-skinned and vindictive president. But by writing those checks, they also bought into the Trump financial system of pelf and predation.

After the election, Fox’s coverage descended to new sub-basements of abjectness.

Fox’s on-air talent abased themselves to argue that even proven collusion by the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence would be—at worst—“alarming and highly inappropriate.”

By August 2017, what was left of the philosophy formerly known as conservatism beyond “fuck you, leftists”?

The Kennedys’ many faults were joined to an undeniable grace and generosity of spirit, to authentic public service and a large vision of America. Not so for the Trump family. They came to loot. If rules stood in their way, the rules could go smash.

Politicians accepted these new stricter post-Watergate standards because they assumed everybody else accepted them. But what if somebody decided to reject them? What would happen then? Donald Trump guessed: nothing much.

A rule-of-law state can withstand a certain amount of official corruption. What it cannot withstand is a culture of impunity.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao.

Donald Trump and his Kushner in-laws are perceived as fabulously wealthy. But while they do own substantial assets, they also owe enormous debts, and it has never been clear for either family how those two figures balance.

Russian banks also acquired a keen new enthusiasm for Kushner family projects. Over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, Kushner had a number of conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. Two would be disclosed on Kushner’s application for a security clearance. The rest would not—not until press reports compelled Kushner to correct the record after the fact.

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

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.

Trump has successfully rolled back—and then some!—the ethical rules that have accreted around the presidency since Watergate.

Beyond all the many and grave evils of corruption at the top of government is the near impossibility of confining corruption within one office.

But while resignations in disgust are one possible response to Trumpocracy, so too is the attitude “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

Trump was seeking personal loyalists. Trump, normally indifferent to mid-level personnel, actually met in person with a candidate for US attorney for the District of Columbia, the US attorney with potential criminal jurisdiction over his staff and himself.

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.

George Washington laid down a definitive rule against it: “I would not be in the remotest degree influenced, in making nominations, by motives arising from the ties of amity or blood.”55

2017, the president brought Jared Kushner into his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—leaving his national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, waiting outside the door of his suite in the King David Hotel,

At the G20 summit in Hamburg, Trump invited his daughter Ivanka to fill his chair when he exited the room.

There is no such role as “first daughter,” despite Ivanka Trump’s sometime use of that title.

The Kushners accepted the prestige, power, and perks of the White House, but not its ethical obligations.

Thomas Jefferson

Towards acquiring the confidence of the people the very first measure is to satisfy them of [the president’s] disinterestedness, & that he is directing their affairs with a single eye toward their good, & not to build up fortunes for himself & family: & especially that the officers appointed to transact their business, are appointed because they are the fittest men, not because they are his relations.59

The satisfying assurance that the president is appointing the fittest individuals—and not seeking “to build up fortunes for himself and his family”—is precisely what is most lacking under Trumpocracy.

To work for Donald Trump, you must ready yourself to lie and lie.

As a former DIA director, Flynn had to understand what Donald Jr. would later claim he did not appreciate: that he was witnessing—and being invited to participate in—a Russian espionage attempt against the US political process.

Enabling the bad people in the Trump orbit were the weak people.

Chief of staff Reince Priebus allowed Trump’s favorites to build self-aggrandizing empires of a kind never before seen in the West Wing.

But even as the courtiers evolved toward higher professionalism, their king’s madness raged hotter and fiercer.

Trump hates criticism and expects huge, heaping servings of flattery.

(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.”)

Perhaps there was ambition mixed in, or some other lesser motive—we are all human—but they could fairly assure themselves that they dealt with the devil for the noblest of reasons.

One thing was clear: everyone who entered the Trump administration for nonselfish motives would sooner or later find himself or herself betrayed by a president who demanded loyalty in its most servile form, but who never returned it.

Instead, the US military continues to execute Obama-era plans against ISIS in Iraq, capturing Mosul on exactly the timetable Trump had once derided as too slow and “so dumb.”44

Normal presidents arrive in Washington with an ambitious policy agenda they seek to enact through Congress. They propose; Congress disposes. Trump had no such agenda, but Republicans in Congress did: a big, ambitious, and radical agenda.

All those actions and many others would require the signature of a president who neither understood nor cared about most of them.

We’ll protect your business if you sign our bills.

the Republican majority in Congress had locked itself within a closed information system. A party that listens only to itself, and speaks only to itself, deprives itself of the power to persuade anybody else.

The Trump Organization had habitually lived in chaos, careening from crisis to crisis.

Trump himself insisted on reviewing the résumé of every candidate for every sub-cabinet and sub-sub-cabinet job—a process that held the entire staffing process hostage to Trump’s short attention span, weak work ethic, and ferocious demand for abject personal loyalty.

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.

Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on nonregulation, not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state.

Donald Trump has not had many successes as president. Convincing his supporters to regard honest media as “fake news” must rank high among them.

No American president in history—no national political figure of any kind since at least Senator Joe McCarthy—has trafficked more in untruths than Donald Trump.

Trump’s grandiosity led him to escalate his allegations against the press. They were not merely “unfair” or “fake”—they were outright enemies.