David Frum has
written an erudite, scholarly, entertaining, coruscating, and,
ultimately, both deeply scary and hopeful book called Trumpocracy:
The Corruption of the American Republic (HarperCollins,
2018, 320 pages, $25.99/12.99). Using
elegant, nuanced writing and thoughtful analysis based on deep, and
wide research, fully thirty percent of the text is taken up by
footnotes, Frum carefully builds his argument using well-recognized
sources from across the political,
historical, and media
spectrum. He presents a
clear-eyed vision of Trump world from a Republican intellectual who
wants him to do well and achieve the conservative goals his party has
long felt powerless to achieve. Frum
carefully uses what Trump says about his goals both as a candidate
and as President, as well as a wide array of his allies, the media
from Fox & Friends to
Meet the Press, from
Hugh Hewitt to Mark Levin. He’s careful, judicious, and,
ultimately... damning.
David Frum
David
Frum,
born
in Canada, has degrees from the University of Toronto, Yale
University, and Harvard Law School. As he said in Newsweek,
“I'm
a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered
for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I've attended every Republican
convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society
chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of The
Wall Street Journal
and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the "Read My Lips"
Bush, the "Axis of Evil" Bush. I served on the Giuliani
campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported
the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in
retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I could go on, but you
get the idea.”
He
has been an American citizen since 2007, while having been active in
American politics for most of his adult life.
Frum,
who appears to be no admirer of Trump, nevertheless paints what seems
to me to be an accurate and un-frenzied picture of how Trump uses
real and imagined power along with blunt bullying and lying to force
people not his natural allies to line up with him and do his bidding,
while many of them have taken positions in the government which will
allow them to create no end of un-doing a generations long pattern of
increasing governmental oversight
of their enterprises. Meanwhile, useful regulations and protections
are thrown out with the bureaucratic overburden and there’s so much
self-dealing the public
becomes inured to it. He
demonstrates how the use of language in the Trump administration
masks the goals of those he’s appointed to make America a more
dangerous, dirty, and divided country.
The
structure of Trumpocracy
lays out the ways in which Donald Trump behaves to bring maximum
attention to himself while having limited interest in the history,
laws, traditions,
and
structure of our country. He consistently acts in such a way as to
increase his own power while not seeking advice or counsel from those
who truly understand how the government works, especially with
reference to our hallowed separation of powers and reliance upon them
to come to reasonable governance for all. Frum
writes that under Trump, “The
government of the United States seems to have made common cause with
the planet’s thugs, crooks, and dictators against its own
ideals—and in fact to have imported the spirit of thuggery,
crookedness, and dictatorship into the very core of the American
state, into the most solemn symbolic oval center of its law and
liberty.” He continues, “Trump’s hope was that an unconstrained
America could grab more power for itself (and thereby for him). He
never understood that America’s power arose not only from its own
wealth and its own military force, but from its centrality to a
network of friends and allies.” For
Trump there is no win-win, he can only win if someone else loses, and
he will never share his wins with anyone.
The
author treats extensively the web of associations, betrayals, and the
apparent idea that America itself must
not only be first, but alone at the top. “Trump
throws everyone under the bus in his eager embrace of...Himself! He
seems totally unaware of the intensely interwoven mutual dependency
that exists between the President
and members of Congress in seeking to enact his agenda. As a man with
no knowledge of how government works or the place of the Presidency
in it, he continues to show no interest in policy, the rule of law,
or political realities. Frum emphasizes his treatment of Carmen
Yulin Cruz,
the mayor of San Juan, and
Senator Jeff
Flake, from Arizona, as examples of people whose support he needed
who he gleefully
destroyed in his own interest. His cruel decision not to allow Sean
Spicer to meet the Pope stands as a testimony to his willful
nastiness. Trump’s
insistence on flattery and abject adherence to his neediness is
stomach turning. Frum details a televised cabinet meeting during
which a round-table of cabinet secretaries vomited out flattering
lies about
the fine job Trump was doing.
He contrasts that to George W. Bush’s deep skepticism to anything
that smacked of flattery.
A major advantage of
a book from a person like David Frum is that it steps back a little
way from the day-to-day cascade of cable news, or even from the
weekend talk shows to take a wider and more comprehensive portrait of
Trump and the Trump administration. As such, it can be both nuanced
and comprehensive. By
battling against everything the press says that could be mildly seen
as critical, Trump actively works to reduce the influence of the
press at home and abroad. His and his surrogates, particularly at Fox
News, encourage discrediting even the most reliable and honest
reporters. Furthermore, he actively supported authoritarian leaders
in other countries when abroad in their efforts to muzzle their own
press.
Ordinarily, I wait until publication date to post my reviews, however Amazon has a very attractive pre-publication price up, which will only last a couple of more days. Please remember, that if you order a book through a product link in my reviews or anything else through the Amazon portal near the top on the left, I receive a small comission, which helps keep this blog on the road. Thanks!
No comments:
Post a Comment