Trumpocracy

by David Frum

  In Des Moines, Iowa, at the third rally of his post-election “thank you” victory tour, Trump offered these thoughts about his recent appearance on the cover of Time magazine as its Person of the Year.

  I was lucky enough to receive the Time Person of the Year. They used to call it “Man of the Year,” but they can’t do that anymore, so they call it “person.” They want to be politically correct. That’s OK.6

  Trump used the phrase “politically correct” to mean many different things, from ordinary good manners to equal protection under the law. But other people heard other things, even a promise of liberation. The comedian D. L. Hughley—himself under fire for an untimely joke about the death of Debbie Reynolds—suggested in January 2017 that “PC culture” “probably is why” Donald Trump got elected. “People are tired of being told what to think and say.”7 The Washington Post invited readers who had voted for Donald Trump to explain why they had done so. The paper received 1,600 responses—and PC culture was mentioned impressively often.

  “I am a gay millennial woman and I voted for Donald Trump because I oppose the political correctness movement, which has become a fascist ideology of silence and ignorance,” wrote a twenty-one-year-old from Gilbert, Arizona. “He was an outsider. He spoke truth about political correctness,” wrote a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Sacramento, California. “I was afraid to speak my mind because of the possibility it might hurt my reputation socially and professionally,” wrote a twenty-two-year-old woman from Manchester, New Hampshire.8

  One of Trump’s conservative critics during the campaign published a beguilingly candid message on election eve. “Donald Trump is a boorish buffoon with dangerously fascist instincts and on Tuesday I will vote for him, sadly, but without a qualm.”9 Why? Over the next few months, this writer—Andrew Klavan of PJ Media—would return again and again to the justification of his decision:

  A few dopey intellectuals and their absurd little notions can have outsized power: the power of the echo chamber, the power of fashionable acceptance, the power of creating the atmosphere within the Beltway Bubble. And while Republicans frequently strut and fret about their opposition to leftist malarkey, they just as frequently acquiesce to it in the event. . . . Trump [is] deaf to the echo chamber, indifferent to media acceptance, immune to the atmosphere. In fact, some of the very things that make Trump unappealing to gentle folk like me—his belligerence, his recklessness, his bullish and even bullying insistence on his own vision—are also what sometimes lift him above the Leftist Crazy.10

  A lot of people in America felt bullied and humiliated. Not all of them were old white men either. Some were young white men.

  “There is nothing you can do to erase the problem of your own existence.” That line comes from a play pungently titled Straight White Men. Probably not one Trump voter in a hundred thousand ever heard of the play’s existence.11 But they heard its message loud and clear, replicated and repeated across the vast cultural mindscape of the United States, and they did not like it. “How does it feel to be a problem?” W. E. B. DuBois had mused at the beginning of the twentieth century. The short answer: bad.

  For all the talk of how millennials elected Barack Obama, Mitt Romney beat Obama in 2012 by seven points among whites under the age of thirty. Among white men under age thirty, Romney beat Obama by a hearty thirteen points.12

  Young white men do not watch Fox News. Young people do not watch much traditional TV, period.13 But the Fox News message of resentment, displacement, and humiliation—that did resonate, not through cable, but through newer online and social media.

  A George Washington University research paper tracked a 600 percent increase in the followership of American white nationalist accounts on Twitter between 2012 and 2016, the followers of these accounts overtaking those of pro-ISIS accounts as the leading radical users of the platform.14

  “When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” tweeted the sharp social observer Siyanda Mohutsiwa the morning after the 2016 election. “That’s why I never got one strategy of Clinton’s campaign: highlighting Trump’s sexism.” She continued: “Trump supporters love him BECAUSE of his sexism. Internet groups radicalized their sexual frustration into bigotry. These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”15

  The observation about sexual frustration was astute. Millennials were having less sex than their elders. The percentage of people in their twenties neither married nor cohabiting rose from 52 percent in 2004 to 64 percent in 2014.16 Pew reported in 2016 that for the first time since the nineteenth century, more people under thirty lived with a parent than with a partner.17 Despite the agitations and anxieties of their disapproving elders, millennials are not doing much “hooking up”: in the 2015 and 2016 General Social Surveys sponsored by the federal government, the percentage of people under age twenty-five with zero sexual contacts since turning eighteen had spiked to levels not seen since before the sexual revolution of the 1960s.18

  Sociologists and sex researchers vied to offer explanations in the op-eds of America, blaming smartphones and body image and online dating apps. It’s probably wisest to start with the basics: the dwindling rate of steady employment among young men since the Great Recession. In 2014, only 71 percent of men aged eighteen to thirty-four were employed, compared with 84 percent in 1960.19

  What happens to young men out of work and disconnected from women?

  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.20 In 2016, 19 percent of Americans under the age of thirty regularly smoked marijuana—twice as many as before the recession—and young men were twice as likely to smoke as young women.21

  Tallying the online consumption of pornography by Americans is more difficult, but here is a proxy: What would become the world’s largest porn site, Pornhub, launched in 2007. It reported one million daily visits in November 2007, five million in July 2008, ten million at the nadir of the recession in April 2009, twenty-five million in February 2012, and fifty million by February 2015.22 Americans led the world in per capita usage of the site: 191 page views per US resident, as compared with 165 page views per resident of the runner-up, Canada. (Pornhub reports the poignant fact that the single most frequently used word in the comments on its videos is the word “love”—the one thing that nobody will ever find there.)

  Shrewd entrepreneurs and politicians deftly capitalized on the accumulating resentments they perceived around them. The Breitbart provocateur and hustler Milo Yiannopoulos would punctuate his campus talks with imagined thanks from his audience. He imagined them saying,

  Thank you for standing up for me, and for boys who have no voice. . . .

  Thank you for speaking up against power. Because feminism is the power now, in many ways. Hillary Clinton is running for president on the back of racism against whites and sexism against men, touting the mythical gender gap we all know so well.23

  And, indeed, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy repelled whites and men unlike any candidacy before it, very much including the candidacy of Barack Obama. Peter Beinart measured the rejection in the Atlantic:

  The percentage of Americans who hold a “strongly unfavorable” view of [Clinton] substantially exceeds the percentage for any other Democratic nominee since 1980, when pollsters began asking the question. Antipathy to her among white men is even more unprecedented. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 52 percent of white men hold a “very unfavorable” view of Clinton. That’s a whopping 20 points higher than the percentage who viewed Barack Obama very unfavorably in 2012, 32 points higher than the percentage who viewed Obama very unfavorably in 2008, and 28 points higher than the percentage who viewed John Kerry very unfavorably in 2004.24
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  Male resistance to Hillary Clinton animated not only the Trump campaign, but also the Bernie Sanders campaign. Sanders outperformed Clinton among white men in every one of the twenty Democratic primaries for which exit polling exists.25 The margins were always large, sometimes huge. On average, white male Democrats backed Sanders by 26.4 points more than white women did.26

  Clinton had stayed married; Trump was twice divorced. Clinton was a lifelong Methodist; Trump could not correctly name the books of the Bible. Yet no group adhered more loyally to Trump against Clinton than evangelical Christians. The conservative columnist Ross Douthat marveled:

  In a different campaign or era, it would have been a race-altering moment; in this one, it was barely a scandal. There was Melania Trump, the potential first lady of the United States, posing stark naked in ’90s-era photos published by the New York Post—and then in the next day’s edition, canoodling lipstick-lesbian style in bed. Yet the press yawned, her husband’s latest outrage overshadowed it, and it only stayed a story because the date of the photos raised questions about the future Mrs. Trump’s immigration status.

  This election was supposed to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton, long a polarizing figure because she seemed to embody the cultural transformations of the 1960s—the liberal, feminist, working-mother spouse of the first boomer president.

  But in the year of Donald Trump, the religious conservatives who fought many of those transformations find themselves reduced to a hapless rump. The best have retreated to rebuild; the worst have abased themselves before a sybaritic, irreligious presidential nominee.27

  In the summer of 2016, an alumnus of the website I’d run in the first Obama term sat me down to explain what I was missing in Donald Trump. He’s the first postreligious conservative of my lifetime. The first who doesn’t hate gays, doesn’t care if women have abortions—the first who talks about things that matter now. 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.

  Say this for Trump: In all the vast arsenal of his faults, one was missing. There is no hypocrisy about Donald Trump. A parable he loved to repeat culminated in the zinger: “You knew I was a snake when you took me in”—and if his audiences missed the obvious application of the line to the man who pronounced it, that was hardly his fault. No Trump supporter could fairly complain that he or she had not been amply warned.

  It did not matter, for a reason brilliantly analyzed by Dale Beran in an essay for Quartz about the unexpected influence of the provocative 4chan message board from which so much of the alt-right slouched into existence:

  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.28

  Trump drew support from crackpots, extremists, racists, and neo-Nazis. On election night 2016, one of them was caught on video throwing a Hitler-style salute into the air and shouting “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!”29

  But there are simply not enough such crackpots in America to elect a president, no matter how lucky the break in the Electoral College. What boosted Trump was not the self-conscious white nationalism of the media-savvy Sieg Heiler, but the pervading unease of whites devoid of any ideology at all.

  Many people doing well enough in material terms still felt displaced in an unfamiliar and even hostile landscape. Shortly after Obama’s first inauguration, the Daily Show on Comedy Central featured a mock focus group with white schoolchildren, hosted by the show’s “senior black correspondent,” Larry Wilmore. Wilmore interviewed the children about the risks to their “once proud race” from a demographic future as a minority group. One little girl answered, “We’re not upset in any way, shape or form.” Wilmore replied, “You will be.”30

  Wilmore was right. A 2013 survey for the Rockefeller Foundation asked Americans to estimate the consequences for the United States of rising ethnic diversity. Half of those surveyed predicted that rising diversity would lead to more crime. A majority predicted intensified competition for jobs. More than 60 percent feared that government services would fall short.31

  Trump offered this one promise above all others to the disaffected young men who followed him: a world that had been turned upside down by forces beyond their control, he would turn right-side up again. “You’re going to hear it once,” he told protesters at Virginia’s Radford University, “all lives matter.”32 Trump was not speaking there to some racist fringe. He was speaking to those who just wanted things restored to normal, as they understood normal. He promised to restore cultural power to those who believed themselves the rightful bearers of that power.

  “You can say again Merry Christmas because Donald Trump is now the president. You can say it again. It’s OK to say!” enthused Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to Fox’s Sean Hannity on December 6, 2016. “It’s not a pejorative word anymore!”33

  That had been Trump’s promise, literally dozens of times: “We’ll all be saying Merry Christmas again!”34 Yet the Christmas Donald Trump celebrated was not exactly a celebration of peace on earth and goodwill to men. At 4:46 a.m. on Christmas morning, 2016, Trump tweeted his holiday greeting: a photograph of himself standing in front of a decorated Christmas tree, his fist raised in a gesture of militancy and dominance.35

  The phrase “white privilege” transitioned from the academy into common speech in the Obama years—at exactly the moment that 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 United States in 2014.36 Of the 33,091 Americans who died in 2015 of opioid overdoses, 27,056 were non-Hispanic whites.37 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.38 Behind these “deaths of despair,” as they came to be known, lay an unfolding economic malaise. Working-class white men suffered a 9 percent income decline between 1996 and 2014.39 Marriage, church attendance, civic participation, all plummeted.40 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, and the prospects for their children after them.41 Elite America did not care, because it mostly did not notice. Between November 8, 2015, and November 8, 2016, the word “transgender” appeared in the New York Times 1,169 times. The word “opioid”—only 284.42

  Rush Limbaugh offered a pungent description of what Trump had to offer. He was speaking tw
o weeks before Trump entered the presidential race, and about an entirely different subject: Bruce Jenner’s self-transformation into Caitlyn. Yet Limbaugh’s words applied much more broadly than that.

  Folks, one of the motivations, one of the reasons—purposes, if you will—of defining a new normal is also defining the new weirdoes. . . .

  Who do you think the new weirdoes are? I don’t think there is any doubt that this is a studied attempt. At least from those that are doing all of this with a political agenda attached, the objective here—and it’s not new. It’s been happening for quite a while right in front of our eyes. It is to portray conservatives/Christians/Republicans as the real weirdoes. “They’re the real oddballs! They are the ones! They’re the ones that are not cool. I mean, they’re antiques. They’re from a long-gone era that has long ago been bypassed. They’re just relics, and they’ve got to be just phased out.”43

  Salena Zito, writing in the Atlantic in September 2016, postulated that Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally.44 The phrase would become one of the most famous of the Trump era, and also an all-purpose excuse. The Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro complained in May 2017 that President Trump “cannot speak—or his staff cannot speak—without someone going through it with a fine-toothed comb.”45 The pro-Trump blogger Gavin McInnes had expressed a similar complaint in March 2017. On a tour of Israel with the Canadian website Rebel Media, he uploaded a video titled “Ten Things I Hate about Jews.” He was—of course—just kidding. “It’s frustrating that everyone takes everything you say 1000 per cent literally.”46