Preserving the pain of Trump presidency
Former Bush speechwriter urges Americans to remain as troubled as he is by current occupant of Oval Office
WASHINGTON— David Frum used to work in the White House. Now he won’t even walk past it.
Frum felt “sick” when he spent time in the building near the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. He could see the bleachers for Donald Trump’s inauguration. There was a barbarian at the gates.
Some of Trump’s former conservative critics have softened since he took office. Not Frum. The Toronto native, a former speech writer for George W. Bush known for his role in creating the phrase “axis of evil,” has built a fan base among anti-Trump liberals for his daily denunciations of a president he regards as corrupt, cruel and, above all, dangerous.
He is so determined to keep feeling the revulsion he experienced on that day pre-inauguration, he says, that he takes a detour if his walking route is taking him too close to Trump’s residence.
“I know if I were to go there once, walk around the building, that sort of emotional memory would dissipate,” he says. “I’m actively trying to preserve the shock, the sense of wrongness.”
Frum’s new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (out Tuesday from Harper), is a plea for Americans to remain as troubled as he is. He argues that Trump is doing deep damage to the country’s democracy. He excoriates the “appeasers” and “enablers” he says keep Trump afloat. And he calls for alarmed citizens to turn fear into action.
Frum, a senior editor at the Atlantic magazine, spoke to me Thursday in Washington.
The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited.
There’s a sort of sanguine assessment that says even if Trump has the instincts of an autocrat, even if he would like to trample democracy, he has not been able to, because American institutions have held firm. What do you think of that case?
I think it’s wrong. First, institutions are being visibly damaged. Right now, the man that controls the American nuclear arsenal is credibly, plausibly suspected of having closer ties to Russia, and having given away more to Russia, than (late suspected spy) Alger Hiss ever did. American trade deals, American alliance structures have been damaged. The Department of Justice has been contaminated. So the damage is already very real.
If there’s one idea this book is trying to struggle against, it’s against either-or: either things are fine or it’s Hitler. There are a lot of stops on the train line to bad before you get to Hitler Station. You can have a lot of deterioration in the standards of American government that can be really bad without it being a spectacular authoritarian state.
We’ve already gotten used to so much. The case for reassurance is that nothing so bad has happened. So what about all of those things that have already happened but we’ve already forgotten about? You’ve been a prominent Republican in Washington for a long time. You must know many of the people you now consider enablers. What has this period taught you about them?
There are different stories about different people. In some cases, people who were fanatically ideological before have revealed themselves to be so fanatically ideological, in order to get their way on abortion or taxes or some other issue they care about, they’re willing to make some pretty serious compromises. A lot of people in Washington are about position and money and power, and they’re willing to do a lot to gain those things, and that’s not a surprise. Some of the criticism you get from the right is that people like you have abandoned the positions you professed to care about because you are deranged or otherwise irrationally disturbed by this man’s behaviour.
I think there are moral commitments that are deeper than the policy commitments. If somebody said to me, “You think the corporate income tax should be 21 per cent, not 35 per cent. I think we can achieve that if we round up 100 children at random and beat them to death” — I don’t want it that much. So all these people say, “We’re going to get the abortion laws we want, we’re going to get the gun laws we want, and all we have to do is make our peace with how the country is run.” Your policy preferences are too strong. Because they are overriding the fundamental human moral cost. You write, that, even before Trump, “American politics had been veering toward extremism and instability.” Some people on the left say you, as a former Bush official, as a partisan Republican for a long time, have not suffi- ciently reckoned with the role of the people you worked with, the president you worked for, in creating this environment. How do you respond?
I believe what I believe, and I’ve done the things I’ve done, and I don’t expect most people to care, but to the extent people care, I don’t expect people to agree. I’d also say I’ve thought a lot about the Bush years, I’ve put my thinking about it in writing, where I’ve changed my mind about issues I’ve written that. Why do you continue to be a Republican?
I’m not a liberal, I’m not a Democrat. I believe in school choice. I don’t believe that the Pentagon should be funded with bake sales. It’s not my culture. I also have been in the conservative world for a long time, and, you know, I have had a hand in making some of the present troubles. I’ve got to fix them. How have you had a hand in creating the present troubles?
American conservatism basically is a series of solutions to the problems of the ’70s and ’80s. So you deregulate airlines, trucking, shipping and rail. That works great. You deregulate the price of oil and natural gas. That works great. “OK, what else is around here?” You deregulate telecommunications. That works great. “OK, what else?” The financial economy. Let’s deregulate that. And that is a total calamity. So we can’t keep taking encore bows about things that were right to do in 1975 in 2025. We have to understand that that success generated big problems. It’s the nature of political ideas to become obsolete. You write about Trump as an avatar of people’s resentments. How does the party address those resentments while also moving closer to the kind of traditional centre-right party you want to see?
Economic elites in this country have to share more with everybody else. It can’t be that 100 per cent of the proceeds of economic growth go to the top two or three per cent of the country, and that’s what’s been happening. Addressing some real material concerns. A thicker social insurance network, so people can move from place to place more easily. We need to lift some of the worst anxieties off people’s minds. We need to get life expectancies rising again. The scourge of drugs is such a huge fact for that part of America that is so alienated.
I think it would be helpful if we stopped the scolding. I think the language of “white privilege” is unbelievably destructive. Because what it says to a group in the country that is experiencing dwindling income, lost opportunity, early death, drug addiction — it says you’re the Monopoly Man and we’re going to take things away from you. Haven’t you taken enough, they say. The fatalistic view is that these people cannot be reached by economic programs, improved opportunity. That they are racist, that this is about bigotry, they want to be superior to Black people, Muslims, Hispanics.
I think it is natural for human beings to be xenophobic, for groups to be suspicious of groups. That’s one of the reasons I’m a big immigration skeptic: when you have high levels of immigration and a very sluggish economic growth for most people, that’s a formula for disaster. So: yeah, human beings are a pretty racist species. So you have to work with that. You don’t get to fire human beings and replace them with some other kind of animal as citizens of your country. What is it like to be a fan favourite of people with #resist in their Twitter names?
I’m not sure that that’s exactly true. A lot of people with “#resist” remind me, which I certainly don’t forget, that I was a big supporter of the Iraq War. It’s true there are important differences. And I’m hoping there will be important differences again. The thing I most like to read is when people say, “I’m looking forward to when we can argue again about the appropriate level of regulation of business.” I’m looking forward to it, too.