Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

David Frum, “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic,”   Harper Collins, 2018, 235 pp.

Author, David Frum, is a Never-Trump-Republican.  Frum was the Bush speechwriter who coined the term ‘axis of evil.’  He, along with many other former Republicans including George Will, and Charley Sykes, is now horrified by the election of Trump.

One of the more alarming thoughts, whatever Trump's personal fate, is that it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy.  Indeed, such defeats may strengthen Trump much like the London blitz strengthened Londoner's resolve.  The complaints of the people who voted for him, cultural and economic, are not going away.  If a Trump cannot pacify them, how about a Sanders? 

As I was reading this book it occurred to me how dangerous it is that we have lost a credible news mainstream media, particularly as regards TV and internet viewing.  Not that long ago, a $600,000 book deal for Newt Gingrich ignited a firestorm as it appeared to be a bribe.

My Notes:

Pg. xi:  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 operates not by strategy, but by instinct.  His great skill is to sniff his opponents’ vulnerabilities: ‘low energy,’ ‘little,’ ‘crooked,’ fake.’  In the same way, 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.  The mutual distrust among Americans has been Trump’s most important political resource. (I disagree: his most important resource has been the Republican Party’s willingness to acquiesce for the sake of party dominance).  So far that gamble has paid off.  Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment.

Pg. 5:  In June 2012, Obama abruptly reversed himself concerning immigration and deferred enforcement of the immigration laws against people under the age of thirty who had entered the US before age sixteen; he then extended this deferment in November 2014 to cover parents of the beneficiaries of the 2012 order.  He did this with an Executive Order as the Republican-dominated legislature would not act.  In 2016 a 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock left in place an appellate court’s ruling that Obama had indeed overstepped his powers.

Pg. 37:  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.  Only 19 percent had a college or post-college degree.  Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000.  Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000.  What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and their cultural anxiety. 

Pg. 42:  After the leak of the Access Hollywood video, some Republicans tried to leap off what they thought was a burning boat.  Yet when Paul Ryan separated himself from Trump on October 11, 2016, it was Ryan’s support—not Trump’s—that cratered, dropping a net 28 points among Republicans in only ten days.

Pg. 53:  The president’s jaunts to Mar-a-Lago are estimated to cost at least $3 million each, based on a General Accounting Office estimate for similar travel by former President Obama. 

Pg. 61:  Until the financial crisis of 2008, Donald Trump had almost no business interests outside the US.  That year’s crisis shattered what remained of his real-estate development activity.  His casino operation staggered to its final terminal bankruptcy.  Trump Mortgage had collapsed.  His licensed towers in Florida and Georgia were failing.  His companies defaulted on $334 million of debt repayments due Deutsche Bank on his last big personally directed project: Trump Tower Chicago.  But Trump remained a TV star on Apprentice.  The message went forth to where ever dirty money is gained and hidden: If you are looking for someone to shine you up, you can find him in Trump Tower.

Pg. 64:  Trump has successfully rolled back the ethical rules that have accreted around the presidency since Watergate.  Tax disclosure refused for the first time since Ford.  Conflict-of-interest rules ignored for the first time since Nixon.  Running a business corporation while in office for the first time since Johnson.  The first appointment of a relative to a senior government position since Kennedy.  The first acceptance of substantial foreign cash flows by the president in American history.  The most lavish spending on the person of a president in American history.

Pg. 77:  General Michael Flynn reportedly joined a conversation with top Turkish ministers to discuss the kidnapping and forcible removal to Turkey of a US permanent resident sought by the Ankara government for political offenses. 

Pg. 101:  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.

Pg. 104:  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.  He owed the start of his political career to the Birther hoax.  He falsely insisted that he lost the popular vote only because of somewhere between three and five million ballots cast by illegal aliens.  He repeated false stories about New Jersey Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks.  He recited false statistics about the majority of terrorists since 9/11 entering the US from foreign countries.  And more…

Pg. 150:  Confidence in America has quickly eroded with the election of Trump:  At the end of Obama’s presidency, 88 percent of South Koreans expressed confidence that the US president would do the right thing in world affairs; this became 17 percent in June 2017.  The Japanese had expressed 78 percent confidence in the US; this became 24 percent with Trump.  Eighty-four percent of Australians became 29 percent. (This 29 percent might have been even worse for Trump if the poll had been conducted after the August 3, 2017, leak of a January telephone transcript in which Trump told Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that he found it more ‘pleasant’ to talk to Putin than to the leader of America’s truest and most militarily capable Asia-Pacific ally.)  The European numbers looked even more dismal.  In a span of months, trust in the US president to do the right thing dropped by forty-three points in Italy, fifty-seven points in the United Kingdom seventy points in France, and seventy-five points in Germany.  Trump has never understood that America’s power arose not only from its own wealth and its own military force but from its centrality to a network of friends and allies (p. 160).

Pg. 178:  The Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2015 that the president could deny a visa to an alien for no stated reason at all.  Aliens have no due process rights against the US, and no First Amendment rights against the US.  Yet, the lower courts are shredding Trump's travel ban anyway saying ‘the courts could not overlook significant evidence of religious animus…’.   (Bad presidents make bad laws).

Pg. 194:  Young white men do not watch Fox News.  Young people do not watch much traditional TV, period.  But the Fox News message of resentment, displacement, and humiliation—that did resonate, not through cable, but through newer online and social media.

Pg. 195:   In 2014, only 71 percent of men aged eighteen to thirty-four were employed, compared with 84 percent in 1960. 

Pg. 201:  After 2008 millions of white Americans were experiencing the worst social trauma since the Great Depression.  For the first time in American history, life expectancy was actually declining and most steeply among non-Hispanic whites.  Non-Hispanic white males, 31 percent of the population, accounted for 70 percent of the suicides in the US in 2014.  Of the 33,091 Americans who died in 2015 of opioid overdoses, 27,056 were non-Hispanic whites.  In the late 1990s, the risk that a non-college-educated white person would die in his or her early fifties was 30 percent lower than for a comparable black person.  By 2015, the non-college white person’s risk was 30 percent higher than his or her non-college black counterpart.  Behind these deaths of despair lay an unfolding economic malaise.  Working-class white men suffered a 9 percent income decline between 1996 and 2014.  Marriage, church attendance, civic participation, all plummeted.  Compared with any other ethnic group—and to whites with college educations—noncollege whites expressed most pessimism about their personal prospects in the decade ahead.

Pg. 206:  The Trump presidency only accelerated the divorce of political power from cultural power.  Business leaders quit Trump’s advisory board lest his racist outbursts sully their brands.  Companies like Facebook and Microsoft denounced Trump's immigration policies.  Popular singers refused invitations to his White House; great athletes boycotted his events. 

Pg. 214:  People born between 1930 and 1945 entered the workforce just in time to ride the longest boom in middle-class living standards from beginning to end.  They bought their first houses when housing was cheap and sold their empty nests in the real estate bubble of the 2000s.  On the other hand, the boomers had faced more competition from everything, from jobs to housing, and now faced an ominous retirement environment.  Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts.  “Keep the Government’s Hands off my Medicare” is easily mocked, but who but the government could lay hands on your Medicare?

Pg. 226:  Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan’s analysis of Trump:  “The president’s primary problems as a leader is not that he is impetuous, brash or naïve.  It’s not that he is inexperienced, crude, an outsider.  It is that he is weak and sniveling.  It is that he undermines himself almost daily by ignoring traditional norms and forms of American masculinity.  He’s not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and determined; he’s whiny, weepy and self-pitying.  He throws himself, sobbing, on the body politic.  He’s a drama queen.”  (WSJ, July 29, 2017).

Pg. 229:  Some fantasize that the two-party system is to blame for the ills of US politics, that the answer is for moderates and independents to join together for a sensible politics of the center.  Trump demonstrated that the independents are not moderates and that the center is not always so sensible.