Trumpocalypse review: David Frum bushwhacks a new axis of evil
Nearly 100,000 Americans lie dead, almost 40 million people are out of work, home mortgage delinquencies are soaring and the Mall of America is stiffing its lenders. The US looks like one of the president’s brandname casinos. When Donald Trump said “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he meant the coronavirus.
He could have been referring to the American Dream itself.
The Atlantic writer David Frum argues that “democracy is tested by its ability to deliver security, prosperity, and justice”. By that metric, the Trump presidency is a shambolic failure.
In a book mostly written before the pandemic, Frum details the efforts of the 45th president to gut the rule of law and institutionalize “white ethnic chauvinism”, leaving the country reeling, the constitution bruised. Trumpian alchemy has turned gold to lead.
Trumpocalypse recalls that in 2016, Senator Ted Cruz compared Trump to Benito Mussolini, then “went to work” in his “cloakroom”. Most recently, the president has threatened Michigan and Nevada over absentee balloting and waged war on government inspectors general. Sacking Rome was quicker than building it.
Frum’s journey is emblematic of our ongoing political realignment. The Republican party’s embrace of rural and white working-class voters has been met with an exodus of college graduates and suburbanites. Reliably red Arizona is tilting toward Joe Biden because of defections among seniors and four-year degree holders.
Anti-closure protesters have toted Confederate flags, slung arsenals on their shoulders and left state legislatures in lockdown. Their avatar brags of medicating with hydroxychloroquine, a drug with side-effects that include paranoia, hallucinations and psychosis. Peloton moms are repulsed.
Over the past half-century, the GOP has morphed into the heir of George
Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor and presidential candidate, and Pat Buchanan, Richard Nixon’s paleoconservative speechwriter. The party of Abraham Lincoln and the upward arc is gone.
Frum was a speechwriter to George W Bush and helped coin the phrase “axis of evil”. Now he declares that 21stcentury conservatism has “delivered much more harm than good, from the Iraq war to the financial crisis to the
Trump presidency”. Yet he remains committed to his Burkean worldview, of individual autonomy fused to social cohesion.
Trumpocalypse quotes the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that it is “culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society”. By the same measure, “politics can change a culture and save it from itself”.
Frum criticizes the effective disenfranchisement wrought by the electoral college but does not call for its abolition. That would be futile. Although the Republicans lost the popular vote in six of seven presidential contests since 1992, they captured the White House three times. Few surrender power for the asking.
After the debacle of 2000, Frum’s boss extended an olive branch to blue America. Bush sought to broaden his mandate. Trump still spits in half the country’s eye. Conciliation is not part of his DNA, or even his playbook.
Frum questions the legitimacy of the process if Trump wins re-election but finishes second again in the popular vote. He also homes in on the contradiction at the heart of Trumpian populism.
On the one hand, it is rooted in the belief that the silent majority should come first, not the elites. On the other, its operative dictum is “we should not choose our leaders just by counting who got the most votes”. Shades of Animal Farm: some folks are more equal than others.
Said differently, the people’s preferences should not be equated with “will of thepeople”. In the end, Frum says, Trumpism is about defending a “distinct way of life”, one challenged by modernity.
Frum makes clear that this outlook is shared by the cosseted segments of Trump’s base. Trumpocalypse quotes Peter Thiel, a pillar of Silicon Valley and an early Trump supporter, who sees democracy at odds with his libertarian ideals. Thiel has written that he