Damned with faint praise
‘HE’S NOT A HYPOCRITE’ IS ABOUT THE ONLY CREDIT DAVID FRUM WILL GIVE TRUMP
A one-time speechwriter for George W. Bush, David Frum has been a loud critic of the current Republican administration, both in articles for The Atlantic, where he is a senior editor, and in his new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. In Toronto this week, he talked to Kenneth Whyte, a founding editor of the National Post (and himself a student of American presidents, including his recent biography Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times) about the dangers, and possibilities, of POTUS Donald Trump.
Q
You say in your book that when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, you actually saw some good in his candidacy.
A
I thought Trump would throw open the windows of what had become a stagnant party. When he declared in June of 2015, Jeb Bush was leading the polls. Everyone assumed that either he or somebody very like him, would be nominated and would campaign on a Mitt Romney platform — big tax cuts, big cuts in health-care spending — but that they’d amend it with a much more open immigration policy. I thought this was just bad policy and bad politics. Donald Trump, you got Trump, but along with him you got a discussion of a more generous approach to health care at a time of recovery from this terrible recession. He talked about drugs when no one else was. And he was an indication, and a warning, that some new approach was needed on immigration. What I assumed would happen would be that Trump would introduce these things, it would resonate with the Republican base, and then some responsible person, seeing that this was working, would steal his ideas and then do something with them, some Scott Walker figure, Ted Cruz even.
Q
So that didn’t happen. And you became a thorn in the side of the current Republican administration — after 25 years in D.C. aligned with conservatism and the Republican Party. What was that like for you personally?
A
Not getting invited to the White House Hannukah party is not the worst thing that can ever happen to you. And you have to find some way of working together. So I’ve been talking to other conservatives about what Republicanism, conservatism, looks like after Trump. He’s taking American conservatism on a path to the French National Front.
Q
And what’s there?
A
What’s there is a party of white nationalism, but joined to super-statist and dysfunctional and corrupt economics. On the other hand, if you let the congressional Republican leadership have their way, which they have had since 2001, they’re going to have a party of the monopoly. It’s going to be all top hats and striped pants and monocles. Trump is the product of their failure. If you’re going to have a workable, electable, decent conservative politics, a third way has to be found.
Q
You’re very hard on American elites in this book. Why are they more culpable than, say, the American people who voted him into office?
A
Well, I speak with love. My view is that elites are inevitable. Politics is inherently and inescapably, in any system, democratic or not, an elite game, because there’s some few people who, for reasons of interest or resources, will take a large part, and most people will take a less-interested part. But the job of the elites is to refine choices so that voters can make meaningful, democratic decisions. Abortion: legal or illegal? It’s hard to finesse that question. So you have to have an intelligent, responsible debate, without violence, without conspiracy theories, in a way that sharpens the question. What has happened in the United States and elsewhere has been that elites have drifted away. They’ve thought much more about themselves than the public-spirited elites that governed after the Second World War.
Q
You talk about Trump’s base and say that the largest and most loyal subset of it are men who feel devalued in the economy and disrespected in the culture, who chafe at being scolded for their privilege, even as they succumb to disability, drugs and early death. Why was Trump the one to discover, or at least mobilize, this cohort?
A
The cohort has been mobilized before, but never so effectively as by Donald Trump, never so explicitly. That cohort of men did, more or less, vote for Mitt Romney, but without enthusiasm, and without Mitt Romney speaking directly to them. They were mobilized very effectively by George W. Bush, but he was talking about patriotism and the threat from terrorism. Trump spoke to them as they are. And that’s why there’s this intense bond between him and this white, aggrieved base. It needs to be stressed that Trump’s most loyal voters are not poor people. They are a step above that. In fact, the best description I’ve ever heard of the classic Trump voter is “a successful man in an unsuccessful place.”
Q
And you say he’s broken faith with these people. How so?
A
The most urgent problem that this group of people face in their own lives, the most immediate, is the threat of drugs, this terrible opioid epidemic that is just ravaging all sorts of these unsuccessful communities. And Trump, although he talked about it a lot on the campaign trail, can’t even staff the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House. His first nominee to head it was someone who, as a member of Congress, actually made it easier to distribute prescription drugs. His only claim to the job was that he was the first congressman in Pennsylvania to endorse Trump. He then named as his top guy in the office, its chief of staff, a 24-year-old with a falsified resumé, who lost his last job because he hadn’t come to work. That’s not how you act when you care about a problem.
Q
This cohort of disenchanted, middle-aged white males, does the Republican Party want them, need them, going forward? Are they part of the coalition?
A
You absolutely need them. You also need their wives and children, and some people who are not white.
Q
What, of the many things you identify that Trump has done wrong since he got to office, is the most dangerous?
A
The most dangerous is his attack on American world leadership. Donald Trump won’t even defend the United States against Russian cyber-aggression — how safe can Estonia feel? The whole system of global security built over the past three-quarters of a century is dissolving.
Q
You have a long litany as well of the ways that Trump has plundered the presidency for personal gain. Again, the most egregious example?
A
I think the most disturbing, the most significant, is that Trump continues to receive undisclosed and untold millions of dollars of payments from foreign business partners who have licensed his name in semi-authoritarian countries. There are four Trump projects in India. There’s a Trump project in Istanbul. There’s a Trump project in Manila. In all of these places, his business partners are subject to pressure from local governments.
Q
It is astonishing to me that he owes upward of $1 billion to some 150 financial institutions. That’s a lot of opportunity for him to be compromised.
A
The way you bribe Donald Trump is by forgiving his debts.
Q
If you had to say something good about Trump and the Trump administration, what would you identify?
A
One good thing I would say about Donald Trump as a human being is that he’s not a hypocrite. He does not pretend to be a good man, a good husband, a good father. He doesn’t pretend to be kind or considerate.
Q
There’s a certain integrity in that.
A
(Laughs.) That’s one of the things that’s so amazing about his evangelical support. He doesn’t try to fool them. Trump’s biggest accomplishment, I think, is the reduction in illegal border crossings. That is not something that he did, but in reaction to perceptions of what he might do there has been a substantial drop, maybe as much as half, in illegal crossings at the southern border. That’s welcome.
Q
Does he get credit for an economy that by most measures is doing well?
A
The economy has been on a consistent growth path since the recovery began in 2010. And 2017 was a good year. But the rate of growth in 2017 was not better than the rate of growth in 2014, ’15 and ’16. And the economy looks like it may be slowing down. The other ominous news is that the Republican tax cut, which was enacted in time to affect December, should have produced an uptick in business investment and it doesn’t look like it’s doing that. That surprises me.
Q
You mention toward the end of the book that you do see several possibilities for good coming from this presidency. What are they?
A
I think potentially some problems that got overlooked. I don’t want to dismiss concerns that any group of people have, but in 2016 there were six times as many stories in The New York Times about people with transgender issues as about the opioid drug epidemic — which in three years has killed more people than the Vietnam War. But we’re talking about opioids now, that’s welcome. For a long time it’s been undiscussable that there might be any downsides to the United States taking nearly two million legal and illegal immigrants a year; it’s discussable. I think it’s positive, too, that many people on the American left who used to make heroes of people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange now see governments need secrets. And that these so-called whistleblowers who end up in refuge in Moscow, or under protection of the government of Ecuador, are agents — they’re not working for you, they’re working for somebody else. I think the renewed emphasis on the preciousness of truth, and the discrediting of the idea that you have a truth, I have a truth, we each have our narratives, who can judge? I think people have had to confront the fact that the opposite of truth is not truths, the opposite of truth is lying.
Q
We still seem to have a long way to go on that one.
A
We have a long way to go, but these are possibilities. I also think you’re going to see a more businesslike Trump White House, we’ve already seen that, and that he will discover, because he is wily, how to use the power of his office in a way that is less counterproductive. I think he’s going to get stronger. I think the realization that people who oppose what he’s doing have to collaborate and have to discover broad principles, that’s going to get stronger too.
THE WAY YOU BRIBE TRUMP IS BY FORGIVING HIS DEBTS.