As we reach the fourth and possibly final year of the Donald Trump presidency, the appetite for books on the 45th president of the United States shows no sign of abating. The past few years have witnessed a plethora of tomes, most capitalising on the public fascination with the drama unfolding each day in the White House and the psychology of a man who has defied all presidential precedents of decorum and responsibility.
David Frum’s new book takes a different tack. Eschewing the well-worn path of focusing on the inner workings of the West Wing, Frum gives a different perspective – that of the conservative, Republican voice aghast at the man who has taken over the White House and his party.
Frum, a former speechwriter and special assistant to president George W Bush, comes from reliably Republican stock. Now a senior editor at the Atlantic, he is one of the best-known conservative voices in the US through his books and regular appearances on cable TV. Following his best-selling Trumpocracy , he has published this follow-up. He doesn’t hold back.
Trumpocalypse is a damning denouncement of the Trump presidency, the broken promises he made to the electorate and the damage his term in office has done to Republicanism in the United States.
Frum’s punchy, in-your-face style isn’t for everyone. His pages are packed with aphorisms and off-the-cuff judgments. Trump is “a very cruel man, no doubt about that,” he says blithely at one point, before swiftly moving on. This is definitely a man who could go head-to-head with Donald Trump in a tv studio debate – and win.
Trumocalypse offers a welcome recap of some of the most egregious actions of the Trump years – his encouragement to his supporters to beat up protesters, his abandonment of the Kurds in Northern Syria, the pernicious role of Fox News in American society.
While Frum is critical of special counsel Robert Mueller – his failure to delve to the bottom of the Trump-Russia connection encouraged Trump to try again to influence an election, this time with Ukraine, Frum writes – he blasts Trump’s assault on the FBI and his concoction of a “deep state” conspiracy theory. Trump’s resorts in Ireland and Scotland, and Mike Pence’s decision to stay in Doonbeg during his trip last year thereby helping the president’s business, also get a mention.
The overall political landscape
Frum is particularly strong on the psychology of the president. “For Donald Trump, life is a struggle for dominance. In every encounter, one party must win, the other must lose. The tough will prevail,” he writes, a binary view that extends to Trump’s vision of American foreign policy. “As president, Trump has imagined the whole American nation as an extension of his ego.”
He also comes close to explaining the question that has most confounded Trump’s critics: why his core support base has stuck with him. Like the person taken in by a scam, Trump supporters were “duped” and don’t want to look foolish, says Frum. “The pain of being seen as a fool hurts more than the loss of money; it’s more important to protect the ego against indignity than to visit justice upon the perpetrator. We human beings so often prefer a lie that affirms us to a truth that challenges us.”
But notably absent is any meaningful discussion of how senior members of the Republican Party have rowed in behind Trump. Though he cleverly analyses how Trump tapped in to the increasing anxiety of a party aware of its minority status as America’s demographics change, he is silent on the complicity of senior party figures in Congress like Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell who have enabled Trump.
Arguably the strongest passages of Trumpocalypse are where Frum strays from his evisceration of Trump and turns his analytical skills to the broader problems in the US and the overall political landscape. His overview of America’s healthcare problems is concise and on the money – his assertion that a baby born in China will have a healthier life than his or her American counterpart is just one illustration of how the US healthcare system is broken, despite its crushing costs.
Similarly, the undemocratic structure of the electoral college system and pervasive gerrymandering, particularly by Republican-controlled legislatures after 2010, is highlighted. As he writes bluntly: “They wrote maps to guarantee they would win even if they lost.”
Frum suggests a list of reforms that can help restore American democracy – obliging presidents to publish their tax returns, abolishing the Senate filibuster that stymies the enactment of legislation, adopting a modern voting rights act, which would tackle the problem of voter suppression by ensuring reliable access to voting technology and a reform of voter ID requirements.
Those of a liberal persuasion attracted by Frum’s denunciation of Donald Trump in Trumpocalypse, may be disappointed, however. As he delves through the problems of the current US political system, he is critical of the “woke” Democrats, arguing that the party has moved more left-wing over the past 12 years. He seizes on the pledge by virtually all the Democratic presidential candidates at a debate last year to give healthcare to undocumented immigrants.
In fact, Frum contends that legal immigration to the US is too high, stating that “the United States runs an immigration policy as if it were a country facing a desperate labor shortage. In fact, the United States faces a desperate social cohesion shortage.”
He is equally dismissive of the Green New Deal, the climate change proposal promoted by figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, arguing that the left uses it as an excuse to implement radical economic change, “a justification for a social transformation otherwise beyond its political grasp”.
Instead, Frum preaches the “urgency of moderation” and urges Democrats to come back to the middle-ground “and meet voters where they are”.
As for the future of the Republican Party post-Trump, Frum strikes a hopeful tone, even as he notes that the number of people voting Republican has steadily decreased. “We are all just exhausted with this worthless man,” he writes.
“‘The conservatism’ abused by Donald Trump and his supporters may go out of fashion for a while,” he argues. “But American conservatism contains truths too, and those truths will in time be rediscovered by people to whom Donald Trump will seem only a sad and squalid figure out of history.”
America and the Republican Party, it seems, will rise again.
Suzanne Lynch is Washington Correspondent
