Trump presidency so far is more farce than tragedy

Like any strange and quarrelsome sect, the church of anti-Trump conservatism has divided and subdivided since Donald Trump’s election. Some members have apostatized and joined the ranks of Trumpists; others have marched leftward, with anti-Trumpism as a gateway drug to wokeness. There is a faction that is notionally skeptical of Trump but functionally anti-anti-Trump, a faction that insists it’s just calling “balls and strikes” and a faction screaming that the president rigged the game and needs to be thrown out.

But amid all these disputations the central question facing antiTrump conservatives — and not only us — can be simplified to this: Is what we’re watching a tragedy or a farce?

The case for tragedy is made this month by David Frum in his book “Trumpocracy,” which builds on his year-old Atlantic essay, “How to Build An Autocracy” and amplifies its central theme: that our president is a corrupt authoritarian, that his party has prostituted itself to wield unfettered power, and that this is an hour of great peril for the American republic.

I agree with much of what Frum writes — his diagnosis of how the Republican Party succumbed to Trump, his judgment of Trump’s enablers and toadies, his critique of Trump’s disgraceful behavior and its coarsening effect.

But I am not convinced by his overarching theme of looming crisis, his hour-is-late tone and the frequent implication (however hedged and qualified) that Trump might be on his way to establishing a regime to rival the populist authoritarianisms of other unhappy countries.

So as a counterpoint to Frum’s argument for tragedy, let me make the case for farce. Start with the central issue that disturbs many patriotic critics of our president: that Trump was elected with covert assistance from Vladimir Putin’s government, that he or his allies may have cooperated with Putin’s attempted sabotage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and that some combination of sympathy for Putinism, a debt to Russian hackers, and even some sort of kompromat make him effectively a Manchurian president.

A vast gulf between the things Trump says he wants — which are, indeed, often authoritarian — and the things that actually happen is the essential characteristic of his presidency’s first year.

The story of the Trump era so far is failure on every front save tax cuts, an outsourcing of policymaking to Hill Republicans, and a general incompetence that is bringing us yet another government shutdown. The recurrence of these shutdowns is, certainly, a symptom of the republic’s sclerosis — but it is not a Trump-specific problem, and he seems to have made it neither better nor much worse.

This is not how a truly dangerous authoritarianism works. It’s not how the imperial presidencies of the past worked, either.

But if this chapter is a prelude to an authoritarian future, that future has clearly not yet arrived. Trump is a dictator on Twitter, a Dear Leader in his own mind, but in the real world there is no Trumpocracy because Trump cannot even rule himself. And while real tragedy may arrive eventually, in this historical cycle a dismal sort of farce is what comes first.