Trumpocracy

by David Frum

  Two weeks before Zito’s formulation appeared, the Claremont Review of Books published one of the most important essays of the 2016 cycle, an impassioned plea to fellow conservatives to take Trump deadly seriously.

  2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

  Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.47

  Nor was this life-and-death alternative intended as a figure of speech. In the author’s telling, not only Clinton but all of Trump’s Republican rivals and recent predecessors epitomized

  a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.48

  The “Flight 93” essay captured attention across the political spectrum. Limbaugh read the whole essay aloud on his radio program; it was debated across print and television. No writer more forcefully articulated the apocalyptic despair of conservatives in the Obama era—or their disenchantment with the compromises and concessions that sustain constitutional government.

  Only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying.49

  The author of the “Flight 93” essay had used a pseudonym, Publius Decius Mus, a hero from Livy’s annals who intentionally sacrificed his own life to win a battle for the Romans.

  The true identity was soon revealed as an alumnus of the George W. Bush administration and a colleague of mine from the 2008 Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign, Michael Anton. Anton’s contributions would shortly be recognized with a communications job on Trump’s National Security Council. It was a strange assignment for a man haunted by visions of civil war and impending dictatorship. Yet such visions haunted more dreams than Anton’s. The seditious revolution that this latter-day Publius dreaded beckoned to more than one lost boy as a last best hope.

  Chapter 11

  Believers

  Election 2016 looked on paper like the most sweeping Republican victory since the Jazz Age. Yet there was a hollowness to the Trump Republicans’ seeming ascendancy over the federal government and in so many of the states. The Republicans of the 1920s had drawn their strength from the country’s most economically and culturally dynamic places. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge won almost 56 percent of the vote in cosmopolitan New York State, 65 percent in mighty industrial Pennsylvania, 75 percent in Michigan, the hub of the new automotive economy.

  Not so in 2016. Where technologies were invented and where styles were set, where diseases cured and innovations launched, where songs were composed and patents registered—there the GOP was weakest. Donald Trump won vast swathes of the nation’s landmass. Hillary Clinton won the counties that produced 64 percent of the nation’s wealth. Even in Trump states, Clinton won the knowledge centers, places like the Research Triangle of North Carolina.

  The Trump presidency only accelerated the divorce of political power from cultural power. Business leaders quit Trump’s advisory boards lest his racist outbursts sully their brands. Companies like Facebook and Microsoft denounced his immigration policies. Popular singers refused invitations to his White House; great athletes boycotted his events. By the summer of 2017, Trump’s approval among those under thirty had dipped to 20 percent.1

  And this was before Trump’s corruption and collusion scandals begin to bite.

  Whatever Trump’s personal fate, his Republican Party seems headed for electoral trouble—or worse. Yet it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. As the next presidential race nears, it will become ever more imperative to rally around Trump. The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.

  Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. 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, that upholds markets at home and US leadership internationally.

  In the most immediate sense, that means accepting that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and to work to reform it so that it costs less and protects middle-class families more. That means slowing the pace of immigration so that the existing population of the country does not feel it is being displaced and replaced. Economists will argue that a country with a slow-growing population needs more immigrants to sustain the growth of its labor force. But a population is a citizenry as well as a labor force, and when it grows slowly, it can less easily assimilate newcomers. Immigration is to natural population increase as wine is to food: a good complement, a bad substitute.

  A more responsible conservatism would recognize that reducing marginal taxes at the top—while in principle a desirable goal—cannot be a paramount priority at a time of wide and accelerating income inequality. Conservative ideology on taxes has left tax credits as almost the only policy tool, notwithstanding that they are typically inefficient ways to get things done. The mortgage interest deduction does not make middle-income housing more affordable, as most economic research has shown. Tax subsidies for college tuition incentivize above-inflation fee increases. Per-child tax credits are a very roundabout way of assisting families with their childcare needs. Instead of indirectly subsidizing things that cost too much already, from health care to college education, the party less dependent on the votes of government workers should dedicate itself to bringing those costs down.

  A post-Trump GOP will need to get serious again about honesty in government, after Donald Trump’s immolation of ethical standards. It should fiercely uphold US democracy and sovereignty against the sinister clandestine influences, foreign and domestic, that held so much sway over the Trump presidency. Those people implicated in Trump’s wrongdoing—and especially in his connections with the Russian government—need to be lustrated from political roles, quite separate from whatever legal jeopardy they may face.

  Many Republicans and many conservatives have played honorable individual parts against Trump. But they formed an embattled and ultimately unpopular minority. Many of them—perhaps even most of them—ultimately succumbed to the imperatives of party, pocketbook, or peer group. Trump has contaminated thousands of careers and millions of minds. He has ripped the conscience out of half of the political spectrum and left a moral void where American conservatism used to be.

  Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.2

  Those words were spoken by Trump’s protégé Omarosa Manigault, but they could well have come from the man himself. Trump expressed his vision of political leadership in
an April 2016 interview with Bob Woodward and Bob Costa of the Washington Post:

  The coalition building for me will be when I win. Vince Lombardi, I saw this. He was not a big man. And I was sitting in a place with some very, very tough football players. Big, strong football players. He came in—these are tough cookies—he came in, years ago—and I’ll never forget it, I was a young man. He came in, screaming, into this place. And screaming at one of these guys who was three times bigger than him, literally. And very physical, grabbing him by the shirt. Now this guy could’ve whisked him away and thrown him out the window in two seconds. This guy—the player—was shaking. A friend of mine. There were four players, and Vince Lombardi walked in. He was angry. And he grabbed—I was a young guy—he grabbed him by the shirt, screaming at him, and the guy was literally. . . . And I said, wow. And I realized the only way Vince Lombardi got away with that was because he won.3

  I was not there, obviously, but I strongly doubt this story is true. Lombardi described his method of leadership as exactly the opposite of the Trump method:

  It is essential to understand that battles are primarily won in the hearts of men. Men respond to leadership in a most remarkable way and once you have won his heart, he will follow you anywhere.4

  The battle for men’s hearts is one that Trump never won, because he never fought it. There is only one sure and safe way to defeat internal opponents, and that is by making them your friends. This is how Barack Obama did it and Ronald Reagan and every governor or mayor who united a formerly divided party. This is what Trump could never do—and that his supporters never understood that a party leader must do.

  “All this garbage from you Never Trumper jerks out there,” Sean Hannity erupted in a pre-election radio broadcast. “I’ve had it. By the way, that’s more unfinished business. November 9th, I’ll have a lot to say about all of you.”5

  November 9 should have dawned a happy day for Sean Hannity. And yet he never did seem happy ever again. On Fox News, “Never Trumpers” came to play a role like that of Trotskyist wreckers in Stalin’s Soviet Union: simultaneously utterly irrelevant, doomed to defeat, and also all-powerful, the reason the shops have no potatoes.

  Thus Newt Gingrich and Hannity agreed on the night of November 9 that “the little, whiney, sniveling negative cowards who were ‘Never Trumpers’ are beneath our paying attention to them. Let them drift off into the ashbin of history while we go ahead and work with Donald Trump and with the House and Senate Republicans to create a dramatically new future.”6

  Off the Never Trumpers did drift—but not to the ashbin of history. They drifted to those places where we send guilty knowledge. And no matter how loudly they thumped their chests, Trump’s supporters could never still the sound of moral reproach.

  Speaking on Fox News in August 2016, Bill Bennett, a former education secretary under President Reagan (and the author, incidentally, of the mega-bestseller The Book of Virtues), denounced “some of my friends—or maybe former friends—who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”7 That same day, Trump’s future communications adviser Anthony Scaramucci complained on Twitter, “Never Trump putting their vanity and taste over the interest of the country with false moral superiority.”8 The columnist William McGurn fumed in the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 against “the cheap moralizing of Never Trump.”9 David Limbaugh, who had been an ardent opponent of Trump’s in the primaries, but turned his coat after Trump won, complained in a column in July 2017 of the “snobbish condemnation on social media”10 from anti-Trump conservatives.

  But it was not snobbery that drove the condemnation of Trump. It was conscience.

  In 2004, an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama delivered an eloquent appeal to national unity at the Democratic convention in Boston:

  There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.11

  Those words propelled Obama to a national career that would culminate in the presidency. In 2008, he would win the most decisive mandate of any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Four years later, he became the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote in two consecutive presidential elections. Along the way, he would win votes from many people who would cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2016. He left those voters—as he leaves history—with a troubling question: Was he right or wrong in 2004? Are we still “one people” even if we no longer speak one language? Or share one religion, or any religion at all? Even if we no longer can agree on national heroes and villains? Or on the meaning of such basic concepts as free speech, equality under the law, and the right to bear arms? Even if some of those who live among us do so without legal right—even as they receive a panoply of legal benefits? Even if some of us seem to be lavished with all the benefits of a new, more global economic order, while others bear all the costs?

  “The divide is not between the left and right anymore, but between patriots and globalists,” declared Marine Le Pen, announcing her candidacy for the president of France in February 2017.12 Those words sat ill in the mouth of a candidate funded by secret Russian money, but they contained at least this much truth: the old ideological compass did not provide a very accurate guide to the new political map.13

  Trump polled better among workers earning between $50,000 and $99,999 than with those earning over $100,000, a freakish outcome for a Republican.14 He posted the best showing among union households by any Republican since 1984.15 He performed surprisingly well among Latino and black men, boosting his share in those two demographics above the level of Mitt Romney’s in 2012.16

  Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton—excoriated by the right-wing media as a radical and a socialist—scored exceptionally well among the richest Americans, winning almost exactly half the votes of those who earn more than $250,000 per year. She did extraordinarily badly among white women without a college degree, losing that group to Donald Trump by the staggering margin of 27 points.17 How could this be? In the fall of 2016, New York magazine interviewed six women who had decided not to cast a vote in the Clinton-Trump election. One, identified as a thirty-year-old teacher, had this to say:

  I do not believe that feminism can “trickle down”—that having more women on corporate boards will make life better for working-class women. If your primary concern is creating gender parity within the upper class, it’s rational to support Hillary Clinton. If you are a working woman, things aren’t so clear.18

  Throughout most of their lives, members of the postwar baby boom generation (those born between 1945 and 1960) held views considerably more liberal than those of the generation before them (born between 1930 and 1945). As late as the year 2000, only 35 percent of baby boomers described themselves as “conservative.”19

  Then struck the financial crisis, followed by the presidency of Barack Obama. The proportion of baby boomers who called themselves “angry with government” surged from 15 percent before 2008 to 26 percent the next year. By 2011, 42 percent of baby boomers were labeling themselves “conservative,” the same percentage as the next generation up.20

  It’s important to understand what right-leaning baby boomers mean by the word “conservative.” On social issues such as gay rights and the role of women, boomers, like all Americans, continued to evolve in liberal directions in
the Obama years.21 Nor did aging boomers adopt a more pro-business outlook. On the contrary, boomers in the 2010s expressed much more suspicion of business than the same demographic cohort did in the 1990s, when they were younger and otherwise more liberal.22 Boomer conservatives exhibited little enthusiasm for the “on your own” ideology of the mainstream GOP. In fact, 64 percent of boomers complained in a 2011 poll that the government didn’t do enough to help older people, a much higher proportion than in any other age group, including their elders.23

  Boomers adamantly rejected any cuts to entitlement programs—and by larger margins than their elders of the 1930–1945 cohort.24 If necessary to protect those programs, a majority of boomers would breach the ultimate conservative taboo: they would accept tax increases on high earners.25 Paul Ryan conservatives they were not.

  Here’s what those right-leaning boomers did mean by “conservatism.” If read a list of fiscally liberal statements like, “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” boomers became increasingly likely to deliver a stern no over the twenty years between the 1990s and the 2010s. In fact, by 2010, they had become the age cohort most likely to answer no, more so than either their elders or juniors.26 They were the cohort most likely to attribute individual economic troubles to those individuals’ own personal failings, rather than to ill fortune, racism, or any other systemic cause.

  It would be easy to caricature these views as the politics of “I’ve got mine.” But look again at the contrasting generational experiences: 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. The youngest of them had qualified for Medicare before the Republicans took control of Congress in 2010, and all of them were exempted from the cost cutting projected by Paul Ryan. The boomers had faced more competition for everything, from jobs to housing, and now faced an ominous retirement environment. If they acted like shipwreck survivors in an already overcrowded lifeboat . . . well, the boat really was jammed awfully tight.