Trumocalypse: Restoring American Democracy

David Frum, “Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy,” HarperCollins (Kindle Edition), 2020, 200 pp.

Another book by a former Republican that I follow, at least since 2015 when we both were abandoned by the Republican Party.

Over the course of the Trump presidency, many observers have wondered whether Trump has permanently changed the way politics is done. Won’t all politicians going forward rant and rave and shout? Lie without remorse. Always be polarizing. Speak only to your base. Never admit error. Grab every buck. Conceal every record. Answer to no-one.  Dismiss the non-loyal Inspector Generals, Ambassodors, and Attorney Generals.  Ethics are for schmucks. 

These are the leadership principles of Donald J. Trump. The country will not be safe again until these methods are recognized even by Trump’s most avid and passionate enablers as one-way tickets to political disaster.

My Notes:

Location 333-344: Trump ignored warnings about pandemics from the very first day he entered office. He dismantled the White House pandemic unit (in 2018).  When asked on March 13, 2020 if he felt any responsibility for the unfolding pandemic in the US, he answered: “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Those words are likely to be history’s epitaph on his presidency.

Location 432:  …the word “apocalypse” (the derivative for this book’s title) originally and literally means an uncovering, a revelation. For the Jews and Christians who introduced the concept into our religious traditions, an “apocalypse” was not the end. It was a beginning. It would inaugurate a new and better order in which justice would triumph at last over injustice. So those ancient prophets yearned. So let it be.

Location 461-475:  The Trump tax cut utterly failed to produce the promised surge in business investment. In the fall of 2019, manufacturing output began to contract (months before the pandemic.)   The gaps between city and country are widening fast. “Rural America is the new inner city,” the Wall Street Journal proclaimed in May 2017.  In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst among the four major U.S. population groupings (the others are big cities, suburbs, and medium or small metro areas).  Net farm income peaked in 2013 at $136 billion. By the end of 2018, it had tumbled to about $60 billion.  The $28 billion of subsidies Trump poured into the farm belt to compensate it for his trade war is more than double the aid given to the auto industry in 2009. The auto money was repaid. The farm money never will be.

Location 521:  Facebook and YouTube are the most important conduits for alt-Right and pro-Trump disinformation.

Location 535-538:  In 2016, fewer than half of Americans identified themselves as both white and Christian.  Almost 40 percent of people under age thirty in 2016 professed “no religion.”

Location 635:  In Obama’s last fiscal year, the United States altogether deported 226,119 people. In Trump’s first year, that figure rose to 256,085.39

Location 766:  Mueller made five crucial decisions that guaranteed his work would deliver no useful result. First, Mueller decided that he would look only for prosecutable crimes: conspiracy to violate election law.  Questions like “Do Trump businesses owe money to Russian entities?” were none of his business, because it’s not illegal to owe money to Russian entities. Second, even if he did find prosecutable crimes, he would not prosecute them if he deemed the criminal too ignorant to know the law—which is how Donald Trump Jr. escaped prosecution for soliciting campaign help from a Russian national at the famous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Third, Mueller decided he would look only at the period of the 2015–2016 election cycle. Questions like “Did Russian money save Trump from ruin in 2008?” were again none of his business, because that all happened (if it happened) too long ago. Fourth, the only crimes that Mueller would look at were crimes committed by persons near Trump, not Trump himself—since Mueller accepted the Department of Justice guidance that a serving president cannot be indicted. Fifth, Mueller would not even report evidence that Trump had committed crimes, on the following theory. Since the president could not be charged, he, therefore, could not stand trial.

Location 999-1055:  Except for Israel and the Philippines, there was not a democratic country on earth where the relationship with the US did not deteriorate between 2017 and 2020.  Half of Germans have come to regard China as a more reliable partner than Trump’s America.  Trump did not renounce war against other nations. He renounced cooperation with other nations.

Location 1371-1417:  The new rightist movements are implacably hostile to science, reason, and objective truth.  Loyalty is due to persons, not to impersonal institutions or constitutions.  When Colonel Alexander Vindman testified to the House Intelligence Committee about Trump’s extortion of Ukraine, Vindman was accused of disloyalty—not to the Constitution, to which he swore loyalty, but to Trump, to whom he did not. 

Location 1473:  Americans used to tell their national story as one of progress toward personal equality and political democracy.  That story is inscribed into the evolving text of the US Constitution:

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery.

The Fourteenth secured civil rights regardless of race.

The Fifteenth guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race.

The Sixteenth allowed the federal government to tax Americans as individuals on an equal basis. The Seventeenth instituted direct election of US senators.

The Nineteenth extended the vote to women. 
The Twenty-Third amendment enfranchised residents of the District of Columbia.

The Twenty-Fourth forbade poll taxes.

The Twenty-Sixth reduced the voting age to eighteen.

Along the way, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 policed state and local attempts at disenfranchisement.

Location 1483-1488:  While it remained theoretically possible that a candidate could lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College, that had last happened in 1888.  For twenty-seven consecutive presidential elections, 1892 through 1996, the person who won the most votes in total also won the most Electoral Votes.  Then, in the twenty-first century, the old architecture abruptly stopped working. In the election of 2000, 547,000 Americans had preferred former vice president Al Gore over Texas Governor George W. Bush. The Supreme Court pronounced Bush the winner, with a final Electoral result of 271–266.

Location 1653:  As the Republican Party becomes ill-adapted for political competition on equal terms, it has redefined its political goals. Instead of thinking about how to compete in cities, how to reach the religiously unaffiliated, how to appeal to nonwhites, it invests its energies in the brutal project of preventing those groups from voting.

Location 1707:  When Quinnipiac asked in September 2019 if it should be impeachable to ask “a foreign leader for help in defeating an opponent in an upcoming election,” 68 percent of Republicans replied, “No.”

Location 1731:  Instead of cleansing the process from the corrupt influences of party bosses, the primaries have empowered the most ideologically extreme factions of each party, and especially the Republican Party.

Location 1805:  Trump was not a victim of the deep state: a rogue government-within-a-government that sabotaged lawful authority. It was Trump who was his own deep state,

Location 1865:  Trump’s standing within the military deteriorated through 2018 and 2019, not only among officers but enlistees too. The December 2019 Military Times poll found that a plurality of troops of all ranks now disapproved of Trump’s presidency, and 45.8 percent “strongly disapproved.”

Location 1976:  What Trump meant by “the deep state” was nothing other than the rule of law.

Location 2044:  Now, thanks to the unpopularity of Donald Trump, liberal dreams again beckon on the horizon: Medicare for All, student loan forgiveness, taxes on wealth, amnesty for the undocumented, confiscation of AR-15 assault rifles.

Location 2066:  An NPR/Marist poll at the end of July 2019 found that not only did 93 percent of Republicans oppose government health care for illegal immigrants, but so did 40 percent of Democrats. Altogether, two-thirds of Americans rejected the idea endorsed by all the Democratic presidential candidates.

Location 2196:  In 2018, Congress reversed a twenty-two-year-ban and allowed federal funding for gun-safety research.  (For 22 years the federal government did not allow such funding!!)

Location 2209:  In five years from 2014 to 2019, support for same-sex marriage would rise from 52 percent to 62 percent.

Location 2277:  To confer statehood upon the residential areas of the District of Columbia, many people wrongly imagine that such a change would require a super-majority or even a constitutional amendment. But once the filibuster is ended, Congress could admit “New Columbia” to statehood by majority vote of two houses, plus a presidential signature.

Location 2307:  A two-hour queue to vote deters voters as surely as the old methods of threat and intimidation.

Location 2328:  Trump deployed the Department of Justice as a weapon against his perceived enemies. The Trump Department of Justice sought to bring a criminal case against former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe on grounds so flimsy that a federal grand jury refused to indict—a highly unusual rebuff.

Location 2365:  Trump arose because Americans felt their government was not delivering for them. Those feelings will not vanish when and if Trump does—especially not if the next president takes office amid a Trump-bequeathed recession, Trump-bequeathed trade wars, Trump-bequeathed debt and climate crises, a Trump-bequeathed crackup of US alliances, and Trump-bequeathed confrontations with China and Iran.

Location 2372-2376:  On the eve of the 2018 election, Gallup asked Democrats and Republicans to choose their top voting concerns from a pre-set list. Among Democrats, 87 percent selected health care as their top concern, tied equally with “the way women are treated in American society.” Among Republicans, 84 percent selected immigration, second only to “the economy” at 85 percent.  That disparity seems another proof of a society that cannot even agree on the questions, let alone agree on the answers.

Location 2389-2465:  Post-ACA, only slightly more than one-third of Americans agree that the US health-care system is something to be proud of.  By 2040, on the present trajectory, life expectancy in the United States will have tumbled to sixty-fourth place among the nations. By that time, Americans will be the only people in the developed world with an average life span of less than eighty years.  In 2019, the average (US) cost of health coverage for a family of four exceeded $20,000.  Health costs are also the nonobvious culprit for the crushing burden of student debt. Tuition costs are up at State Universities. in large part because State U. is receiving less money from the state government. In fact, over the thirty years from 1987 to 2017, state spending per university student declined by 25 percent, after inflation. Where did the money go? Short answer: to fund the skyrocketing costs of Medicaid.  The typical American heart bypass operation costs more than six times as much as the same operation costs in the Netherlands, just for one example.  The US government spends more per American to cover the people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and other government health programs than the Canadian government spends per Canadian to cover everybody.  Slogans like “Medicare for All” distract voters and officials from the real problem: not who finances health-care costs, but who negotiates those costs. The US government is the biggest health-care purchaser on earth. It’s time to start acting like it, and not just on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries, but on behalf of all Americans whose incomes and standard of living is devoured by the health providers’ state-capture and rent-seeking.

Location 2490-2496:  As late as the year 2000, only 35 percent of people born between 1946 and 1960 described themselves as “conservative.” Then came the financial crisis, the presidency of Barack Obama, and the Affordable Care Act.  The proportion of baby boomers who called themselves “angry at government” surged from 15 percent before 2008 to 26 percent after the financial crisis struck. By 2011, 42 percent of baby boomers were labeling themselves as ‘conservative.’  What they meant is that government should be doing less for others and more for us.  What did these boomers mean by “conservative”? Basically: government needs to do less for others so it can do more for us.  Compared with those older Americans, boomers were less likely to agree with statements like “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.”  Why the difference between the 1931 to 1945 cohort and the 1946 to 1960 cohort? Unlike their elders born before 1945, the boomers would grow old in a country radically ethnically different from the country in which they were born. They looked at younger Americans and seem to have thought: “Not our country, not our problem. Let’s look after ourselves.” If a society allows its sense of “one of us” to weaken, so will its willingness to provide for members of that “us.” That is what is happening to the United States, not only in health care, but across the spectrum of social provision.

Location 2584:  By 2027, non-Hispanic whites will cease to be a majority among the under-thirty age group. By 2033, nonHispanic whites will be in the minority among under-forties. Regardless of immigration policy, the country as a whole will cease to be majority non-Hispanic white sometime in the mid-2040s,

Location 2594-2694:   American social insurance system grew most during the period 1930 to 1970, when the proportion of foreign-born in the population reached its lowest point. However, when immigration numbers swell too fast—if voters perceive that authorities have lost control of the borders— then citizens turn to authoritarians to impose order.  The Central American surge to the US border in the summers of 2014 and 2016 helped elect Donald Trump in 2016. To defeat Trump and to prevent new Trumps, the United States (and other advanced societies, too) must control their borders and strengthen their nationality and their social-insurance systems to foster the sense of belonging that has ebbed away as our societies become more diverse, more interconnected, more plutocratic.

To save democracy from illiberal authoritarianism, democrats must deny the authoritarians their most powerful weapons, their most appealing arguments. Against communism, that means responding to social concerns. Against fascists, that means responding to national concerns.  Illegal immigration must be curtailed, not with a wall on the border, but with inspections and meaningful penalties against employers of illegal labor.  It’s my personal view that the ceiling on legal immigration should be lower, should return to the pre-1986 figure of a little under 600,000 a year rather than the present 1.2 million.

But more important than the number of immigrants should be the composition of immigration: more people who come to meet a gap in the US labor market; fewer who come because a relative got here first.  The United States runs an immigration policy as if it were a country facing a desperate labor shortage. In fact, the United States faces a desperate social cohesion shortage.

In our time, there are two great sources of fear disabling democracy.  First, fear that the long-settled populations of Europe and the United States will be displaced by new immigration. The other fear haunts the younger and the environmentally minded: that humanity is destroying the environment

Location 2694-2711:  The 325 million Americans of 2017 gave birth to fewer babies than did the 160 million Americans of 1953.  Social Security, Medicare: those already cost more than a trillion and a half dollars per year, and will soon cost more.

Location 2979:  The most ambitious study—conducted on twenty-six thousand commuters by a British university—found that a twenty-minute increase in automobile commute time produces as much unhappiness as a 19 percent pay cut.

Location 3190:  Trump bequeaths an isolated America. The post-Trump vision must find a way to reintegrate the United States with the world, to inspire the rest of the world without either insulting or humiliating them.  Under the Trump presidency, instead, the Republican brand has cratered among every group but rural voters, white evangelicals, and white Catholics.

Location 3313-3344:  But it’s not only elections that the Trump Republican Party is losing. The party is losing its place in American culture.  The Republican map of 2016 could not look more different from the party’s map of 1924. Where new products are designed, patents filed, songs composed, science advanced—this is where Republicans are no longer competitive, a weird predicament for a supposed party of enterprise.  The Trump election built political success out of economic failure. A party dependent on the votes of the alienated and the resentful will find itself articulating a message of alienation and resentment.