Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

by David Frum

Much as Donald Trump would have enjoyed a world in which all media were reduced to the sycophancy of Fox & Friends and Hannity, the tactical lobe of Trump’s brain surely recognized the superior usefulness of the media as an enemy.

To be unequivocal, however, is not the same as to be honest.

But whatever Trump says, he says without qualification, deceiving the inattentive into regarding him as a truthful man, rather than the most shameless liar in the history of the presidency.

The term “fake news” entered common speech to describe a very real phenomenon: manufactured disinformation then disseminated by click-maximizing hucksters, racist trolls, and foreign intelligence agencies to susceptible users of social media.

Trump’s supporters use “fake news” as an epithet to mean any reporting not wholly subservient to pro-Trump messaging.

Fox News’ hosts compete to offer the most abject flattery to a president who watches more TV than any other in history.

The traditional media’s commitment to “both sides of the story” created within them an insatiable internal demand for positive comments about a president about whom there was otherwise so little good to say.

More than on any other issue—more than on taxes, or health care, or immigration, or trade, or anything else he supposedly cares about—President Trump has made it his supreme and highest priority to defame those who responsibly and accurately report his tenure of his high office.

Throughout their existence as members of a self-governing republic, Americans have fused a deep conviction that “here, the people rule” with a deep ambivalence about who exactly should be enumerated among “the people.”

But it is also true that the wrong actions of Donald Trump and his family were protected before the fact, and condoned after the fact, by the larger Republican and conservative world.

Collusion between a US president and a hostile foreign power would constitute the gravest espionage crisis in American history—and one of its blackest pages of treason.

In Putin’s system, if you have to cheat in the vote counting, you’ve left things far too late.

In the Hungarian elections of 2014, for example, the party of the prime minister won 133 out of 199 parliamentary seats, with only 44.9 percent of the vote. In such states, state resources are directed in ways that support the party of the leader. State-owned and state-influenced media spread disinformation and defamation about opponents. Rather than discuss issues, ethnic grievances are stoked—and when outsiders report on what is happening, the regime exploits the opportunity to denounce a hostile external world for defaming the nation.

In the United States as in other countries, the great threat to constitutional democracy has not been the demands for largesse by the many, but the fears for their property of the few.

“Among free men,” Abraham Lincoln famously wrote, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such an appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”39

In 1994, the average gun-owning household owned four weapons; by 2015, the average gun-owning household owned eight.41

The American economic system might feel “rigged” against Trump supporters. But the American political system of 2016 had in important ways been rigged in Trump’s favor.

At the end of President Obama’s term, according to the Pew survey, 88 percent of South Koreans expressed confidence that the US president would do the right thing in world affairs. In June 2017, only 17 percent of South Koreans expressed such confidence in President Trump.7

78 percent of Japanese had expressed confidence in Obama; only 24 percent in Trump. Eighty-four percent of Australians trusted Obama; only 29 percent Trump.

Foreign leaders quickly perceived that Trump could easily be manipulated, but never reasoned with.

Given Qatar’s importance to Western regional strategy—it houses the largest American base in the Gulf, from which the Pentagon flies anti-ISIS air strikes—the Qatar matter called for utmost delicacy. Only . . . his head turned by Saudi flattery and gifts, President Trump had already taken a vehement public stand against Qatar.

The Trump presidency empowered dictators worldwide,

No foreign leader manipulated Trump more adeptly than Vladimir Putin. “Why should I tell Putin what to do?” Trump had demanded at a July 27, 2016, press conference.18 Yet it often seemed that Putin had found a way to tell Trump what to do.

As president, Trump sharpened his hostility to the European allies.

Trump often revealed ignorance of basic facts about the international order, but something more than ignorance was at work here.

From that point, speculation about Trump’s secret strategy almost entirely ceased. “More and more, he looks like a complete moron,”

To protect the United States from a compromised national security adviser, nine senior intelligence officials agreed to burn an important American national secret.

Donald Trump says more things that should not be said than any president in American history.

Donald Trump may not be a proper president, or a competent president, or a patriotic president, or even a legitimate president in any larger ethical sense of the word “legitimate.” But he is the lawful president, charged with public functions. In order to stop him from betraying his office and the country, the professionals around him have also effectively prevented him from fulfilling his office and serving his country, supposing he were ever minded to do that.

At best, the dysfunction of the Trump team has actively advanced the public interest, by unintentionally thwarting the Trump administration’s more sinister instincts. But at worst, the casual incompetence has risked authentic harm.

White Houses can be dangerous places under leadership that does not respect the law.

The terms of service in the Trump White House were not only dishonorable and humiliating, but also dangerous. People with sense and people with options preferred to stay away.

In order to save the constitutional system, its defenders are at risk of corroding it.

In a government so weak and mismanaged, the competence of its former military personnel exerted even more gravity than otherwise.

Under a president who despises law even more than the most impatient general, a general’s instincts become even more dangerous to him, to the government, and to the nation.

No paper record has ever been found, but some historians of the Watergate period believe that as Richard Nixon’s personality dissolved, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ignore any presidential directive unless also approved by him. Is anything like that happening now? How would we know? When would we know?

That “fire and fury” threat from Donald Trump—look at what happened next. Trump clearly intended it; he repeated it twice. Yet within hours, it had been disavowed by almost every other branch of the US government.

Men like Mattis and Kelly and McMaster have demonstrated an appreciation of and a commitment to liberal democracy exceeding that of their civilian commander in chief. Yet the principle of civilian supremacy remains indispensable even when the civilian in question has revealed himself as unfit for office.

Gouverneur Morris, stood the remedy of impeachment. “No one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay without being able to guard [against] it by displacing him.”24

Noncollege young men out of work reported spending an average of 3.4 hours per week playing video games before the recession. Their counterparts half a decade later played more than twice as much: an average of 8.6 hours per week.

What was “alt” about the alt-right was precisely this stripping away of religiosity, to reveal a politics of resentment and domination ungrounded in any traditional moral claim.

The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

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

the old ideological compass did not provide a very accurate guide to the new political map.

“Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.”

We versus them. Not state versus society. Certainly not revenues versus expenditures. We versus them.

These older white voters were more eager to protect what they had than to hustle for more. They wanted less change, not more. They cared about security, not opportunity. Protection of the status quo was what candidate Trump offered.

As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified.

Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse.