OVERVIEW
Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic builds on the David’s March 2017 column, “How to Build Autocracy”, in The Atlantic to explain how Donald Trump has undermined America’s most important institutions as part of a carefully crafted plan to institute authoritarianism. In it, Frum explains how on-going changes to the presidency are likely to reverberate for decades, for Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the government, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but a filthy subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalise supporters. This book is the story of those who enable, empower, support and collaborate with Donald Trump. Trumpocracy, as Frum refers to Trump presidency, 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 favour of the powerful and has sought to intimidate media lest they report things the public most needs to know.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Frum is a senior editor at the Atlantic. From 2014 through 2017, he served as chairman of the board of trustees of the leading UK think tank, Policy Exchange. In 2001-2002, he served as speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush; in 2007-2008, he worked as senior adviser to the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaigns. Frum is the author of nine books, most recently Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. Frum’s memoir of his service in the George W. Bush administration, The Right Man, was a number one New York Times bestseller.
SEVEN TAKEAWAYS
The following are the key takeaways from the book:
- CAPITALISING ON NEGATIVITY
Trump gained the presidency thanks in large 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’. And for fear of them, Trump’s party stays bolted to him. Trump has intuited the weak points in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy, and that paid off. As the author writes, “Trump is the writer, producer and star of an extravaganza performance of the theatre of resentment. He summons all those who share that resentment to buy a ticket and enjoy the show” (p. 30). In addition, the election of 2016 popularised the concept of “negative partisanship”, which states that while a people may not identify with one or the other of two parties, virtually all of them dislike one or the other of those parties much more than they dislike the other. Trump cannily exploited negative partisanship to consolidate political support he could never have attracted for his own agenda or his own merits.
- FAMILY FIRST!
Costly as the Trump family is to the presidency, the presidency is correspondingly lucrative to the Trump family. Trump is the first president to run a family business corporation while in office since Lyndon Johnson, the first to appoint a relative to a senior government position since John F. Kennedy named his brother Robert attorney general, the first to appoint a son or daughter to a senior White House position since F.D. Roosevelt’s son James, the first to use presidential patronage to enrich the president’s family since Ulysses S. Grant and the first to sanction the most lavish spending on the person of a president in American history.
Trump also assigned his dubiously competent son-in-law (Jared Kushner) a chair at the principals’ committee of the National Security Council, the innermost ring of American power. Among Kushner’s duties included: reorganising the federal government, winning the war against ISIS and negotiating the Israeli-Palestinian peace. Kushner also took it upon himself to “attempt to create a clandestine back channel to the Russian leadership, using the facilities of the Russian embassy to elude detection by US security services” (p. 55). In another similar instance, Trump invited his daughter to fill his chair at the G20 summit in Hamburg when he exited the room. The theory of American government is that official role, not blood relationship, determines who does what. If the president dies in office, he is succeeded by the vice-president, not the first lady. There is no such role as “first daughter” despite Ivanka Trump’s use of that title occasionally. Yet at Hamburg, Ivanka posed with her father in group photographs with the chancellor of Germany, the prime minister of Canada and other leaders – none of them joined by spouses or children.
- NO CRITICISM, FLATTERY ONLY
Trump is quintessential megalomaniac who hates criticism and expects and rewards huge, heaping servings of flattery. The author writes “Such behaviour is profoundly shameful and honourable people will not do it. A president who rewards flattery and decries criticism is bound to hire dishonourable people and thrust honourable people into irretrievably dishonourable situations” (p. 65). After assuming office, the Trump administration settled for paralysing 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. This has led to a complete 24-hour shutdown of the government and another one cannot be ruled out. 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 lacking under Trumpocracy.
- PROMISES AND BETRAYALS
Trump flagrantly betrayed those who had believed his campaign promises and election pledges. Isolationists and anti-interventionists had lauded Trump as the candidate who would stay clear of the Syrian Civil War and wind down America’s overseas commitments. Instead, Trump plunged deeper into the Syria conflict than Barack Obama had ever dared, firing cruise missiles at Syrian government airfields and shooting down Syrian government aircrafts. Trump escalated the tempo of violence in Yemen and approved a surge of additional troops to Afghanistan. Trump mused aloud about military intervention in Venezuela and did not halt the US military build-up in Poland and Romania. He threatened preemptive war on North Korea and edged towards military confrontation with Iran.
Moreover, Trump promised to bomb ISIS and, less colloquially, deliver a plan within thirty days of taking office to finish the terror group once and for all. The plan was never presented. 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”. Trump’s distinctive change to US counter-terrorism policy has been to mock terrorism’s victims. In May 2017, Trump got into a Twitter feud with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, hours after an ISIS-inspired terror attack killed seven and wounded forty-eight.
Furthermore, he vowed to compel allies to contribute more to their defence. Days before the 2017 South Korean presidential election, Trump reneged on his own deal to install missile defences in the peninsula, demanding an additional $1 billion from Seoul toward the system’s costs. He threatened to rip up the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement in an interview given only a week before the election. Trump’s ill-timed words helped elect the more soft-line candidate, who promptly disregarded Trump’s policy and sought negotiated agreements with North Korea.
The most famous and electorally important of Trump’s campaign pledges was his vow to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. Frum says, “There will be no wall and Mexico will pay for nothing” (p. 70).
- DENOUNCING FREE PRESS AS “FAKE-NEWS MEDIA”
More than any other issue, more than on taxes, or health care, or immigration, or anything else he supposedly cares about, President Trump has made it his highest priority to defame those who accurately and responsibly report his tenure of his high office. Trump and his supporters hoped to drive independent media out of business altogether. Trump’s attacks on the media ventured beyond criticism to outright incitement of violence. His campaign rallies triggered furious audience outbursts at members of the media – and the strategic mobilization of anti-media rage defines the Trump presidency as well. 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 to the most meticulously documented truths. Trump’s supporters use “fake news” as an epithet to mean any reporting not wholly subservient to pro-Trump messaging. According to Frum, “what Trump demands from the media is not objectivity, but complicity. And from the right-of-centre, complicity is what Trump is getting” (p. 91).
Donald Trump is doing all this with the acquiescence of the institutional Republican Party and the support of conservatives across the country. What we are seeing here is not merely one man’s petty ego needs on display. “What we are seeing is a grant of permission from millions of people to the President of the United States to diminish, discredit, corrode, and ultimately subvert what the authors of the Bill of Rights listed among the very first freedoms necessary to their great experiment” (p. 91), analyses Frum.
- COOKING WITH CROOKS
The Trump presidency empowered dictatorships worldwide by dimming American ideals and by hobbling American power. As Frum observes, “The government of the United States seems to have made common cause with the planet’s thugs, crooks, and dictators against its own ideals – and in fact to have imported the spirit of thuggery, crookedness, and dictatorship into the very core of the American state” (p. 121).
Donald Trump and his chief campaign strategist, Steve Bannon, made common cause with populist nationalists working to end the European Union. President-elect received Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, before he met British Prime Minister Theresa May. Before Bannon joined the Trump campaign, he promoted the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen. Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orban claimed to have been granted a call with President-elect Trump in November before the President of France. On July 15, 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey on the one-year anniversary of an attempted coup that the Erdogan regime had used as an excuse for mass round-ups of political opponents and journalists. “New friendships sought among dictatorships; old friendships burned among democracies. That was the product of ‘thinking long and hard’,” writes Frum. (p. 114)
- THE SILVER LINING
Most of the book has dealt with the harm done by the Trump presidency and its enablers. According to Frum, “These are dark days for the United States, yet they are pierced by shafts of light” (p. 156). There are certain unexpected gifts that may yet be seized from this bad moment in American politics.
The first gift to gain from the Trump moment is the gift of wider vision. Cynically yes, but effectively too, Donald Trump seized more accurately than any other candidate 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. 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.
A second gift from Trump’s hand is the rediscovery of the preciousness of truth. Frum says, “He has jolted Americans to recover their best character. Americans do hate a bullying liar” (p. 160). His constant battle with the media and contempt for criticism has made Americans more conscious of the significance of the truth and its originality.
Furthermore, Trump has inadvertently checked the forward momentum of Europe’s nationalist authoritarians. His behaviours have brought “enough discredit upon his style of politics to buy time for conservatives, liberals and liberal conservatives to regroup, rethink, renew, and revive” (p. 163). So the President who most despised European democracy may end up by perversely and unintentionally preserving and enhancing it.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Trumpocracy shows Donald Trump's presidency as a gradual decline of democratic institutions, norms, and moral limits. This decline is driven by party loyalty, self-interest, and public dissatisfaction, rather than a sudden shift to authoritarianism. Frum argues that the real danger lies in normalizing corruption, eroding the truth, and the readiness of both leaders and citizens to accept the undermining of constitutional principles for short-term political gain. However, the book ultimately rejects despair. It suggests that this crisis has increased public awareness of democracy's weaknesses, renewed respect for truth, and highlighted social issues that political leaders had ignored for too long.
LINKS AND RESOURCES TO READ MORE ABOUT TRUMPOCRACY
- David Frum on why Republicans chose Trumpocracy over democracy.
- Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic by David Frum.
- Trumpocracy review: David Frum’s appalled analysis lacks fire and fury.