BOOK REPORT: TRUMPOCRACY: THE CORRUPTION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC by DAVID FRUM

  

 CANADIAN BORN David Frum has written a hard-hitting examination of the Trump presidency and its effects on the democratic institutions of the American republic. He notes the deeply flawed character of the man who holds arguably the most important political office in the world. He examines the autocratic nature of the forty-fifth president of the United States, and the types of men and women he has brought into his administration, and how he is having a corrosive effect on the various levels of government that underpin American democracy. According to Frum, Trump has clearly positioned himself as an outsider, even within his own Republican party, and as a result he promotes the politics of division and confrontation, instead of compromise and agreement. Trump’s nativism and his resorting to tropes and analogies more often seen in less democratic countries by politicians who view the rule of law and the need for good governance as impediments instead of necessities,  Frum fears, bodes ill for the American polity going forward.

     During the 2016 campaign, after the Hollywood Access incident where Trump was caught by a hot mike making the most boorish comments imaginable concerning women, I felt, like a lot of people, that surely it was time for Americans to dump this unsuitable candidate and move on. And like a lot of people, I was wrong. Trump appealed to a large swath of Americans who have been left behind by the so-called “American Dream”, with job losses, foreclosures, failing communities and mounting despair. Their feelings of anger and frustration are in many instances justified, I feel.The liberal mainstream had (and has) little to offer these folk, so they turned to someone who seemed to be speaking to them and for them.

     Frum details the rise of Donald Trump’s popularity with meticulous and well-crafted prose, and adds that the

 

"...stability of American society depends on conservatives’ ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that can not only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible…."

He goes on to say that politics in America needs to return to the idea where you win some and you lose some, that election cycles are there to redress excesses or policies you disagree with that were made in previous years. In other words, that things balance out over time.  Frum feels that a president like Donald Trump has no patience for the give and take of democratic politics, and that this poses a grave danger for the continuation of the American project.

     I don’t want this review to run too long, but Frum quotes a Quartz magazine article written by Dale Baran who describes, in a withering passage, the current President’s character:

 

"Since these men, like Trump, wear their insecurities on their sleeve, they fling insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else.

Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this duality. Trump represents both the alpha and the beta. He is a successful person who, as the left often notes, is also the exact opposite—a grotesque loser, sensitive and prideful about his outsider status, ready at the drop of a hat to go on the attack, self-obsessed, selfish, abrogating, unquestioning of his own mansplaining and spreading, so insecure he must brag about assaulting women….

But, what the left doesn’t realize is that this is not a problem for Trump’s younger supporters—rather, it’s the reason why they support him.

Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the world works around them. A labyrinth with no center is a perfect description of their mother’s basement with a terminal to an endless array of escapist fantasy worlds

Trump’s bizarre, inconstant, incompetent, embarrassing, ridiculous behavior—what the left (naturally) perceives as his weaknesses—are to his supporters his strengths…

Trump is loserdom embraced. Trump is the loser who has won." 

And finally, Frum dedicates his book to his children in a most touching fashion:

"To my children, Miranda, Nathaniel, and Beatrice. You teach me more than I taught you. This battered world your elders bequeath you: you will make it better. In admiration and love." 

It is something we fervently hope for all our children.

Cheers, Jake