Frum has been writing sharp but sympathetic books on that land since his first, Dead Right, on the weaknesses of Reaganism, in 1994. The central theme in Frum’s excellent new book, Trumpocracy, which draws on his Atlantic articles, is what Trump’s career tells us about the deeper structural problems of America in general, and conservative America in particular ... Frum argues that Trump’s greatest talent — his genius really — is spotting and exploiting weaknesses ... What does Trump want to do with all his power? The answer, Frum argues, certainly does not lie in helping the white working class that put him in the White House ... It lies instead in 'the aggrandizement of one domineering man and his shamelessly grasping extended family.' The essence of Trumponomics is running a country just as you run your family business... But the bigger task is to eliminate the weaknesses that have produced Trumpism. Frum rightly points out that these are broad as well as deep.
David Frum’s Trumpocracy is an attempt by the former speechwriter for George W Bush – author of the term 'axis of evil' – and never-Trump Republican to come to grips with this [Trump's chaotic executive power]. He laments what he views as 'the corruption of the American Republic' and painstakingly catalogs the threats he sees posed by Trump to America, liberal democracy and Europe ... Frum is not sanguine about a return to old norms in a post-Trump America ... At the same time, Frum confronts the disconnect between white working class voters and America’s elites... Yet it is over the very issues of class and the country’s red-blue divide that Frum appears to miss part of the picture ... The author is on stronger ground when he examines Russia’s role on the global stage, the 2016 election and the intellectual moorings of Trumpism.
...Frum purports to offer more than a rushed assessment of the last year. After all, he says, President Trump is not a cause but a symptom. Like another new book, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, Trumpocracy is, in part, an exploration of the reasons for the president’s electoral upset and the roots of his rule ... Among Frum’s fellow Republicans who read this book, all but the most determined Trump enthusiasts should feel pin pricks of recognition and, depending on how much hypocrisy they can live with, a queasy discomfort ... The book seems to have been written in haste, a patchwork of bits and pieces from his Atlantic columns, additional examples of Trumpian malfeasance, and new ways of expressing old outrage ... Frum has the pamphleteer’s flair for the scathing epithet, which can be energizing or enervating, depending on your tolerance for hyperbole. Even sympathetic readers may feel besieged when he works himself up to full throttle.
Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, by respected conservative author David Frum, offers a persuasive and detailed account of how Trump is undermining American institutions, including the presidency itself ... Neither is it going to encounter any questions about the thoroughness or methodology of Frum’s reporting. His [Frum's] attributions are meticulous, his footnotes are extensive, his willingness to call out deviations from his conservative brethren is commendable ... Therein lies the power and credibility of Frum’s conclusions. They are supported by verifiable facts, grounded in historical context, devoid of ideological hue ...a must-read for Americans who are in denial about the threat to democracy posed by a president absorbed in narcissism and recklessly indifferent to the institutions and norms of ethics and propriety that have sustained the great American experiment for 2½ centuries ... Frum does not attempt to psychoanalyze Trump, but the author pointedly identifies his shortcomings, especially his one-way view of loyalty.
...David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, sees a presidency bent not on the ideological deconstruction of the state but on its wreckage and exploitation — a system he calls Trumpocracy ... These initial assessments of the Trump presidency focus not just on the man in the White House but on his enablers within the GOP ... The president, Frum writes, left a moral void where American conservatism used to be ... So what are we living under? Trump’s rhetoric is populist and nativist, his urges autocratic, his policies plutocratic, his mandate democratic. He contains multitudes. 'Trumpocracy' fits.
And so we have Trumpocracy: an angry assessment by a die-hard 'Never Trumper' of what Trump’s use and abuse of power is doing to America’s political culture ... There is much to pick over in the analysis, with many valuable insights and observations ... Why have so many people in positions of responsibility and authority caved in so quickly and completely to Trumpism? Frum’s answer is institutional: they didn’t want to alienate the angry and resentful Republican base and they needed Trump to rubber-stamp their agenda ... If Frum’s book is more concerned with the big picture, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury goes in the other direction.
His is a far more polemical book than Wolff’s, and Frum is a skilled polemicist, capable of producing lines that carry rhetorical precision and force but stop short of screaming for attention.
The first, Trumpocracy by David Frum, devotes long pages to cataloguing alarming, deceitful and plain unseemly acts and statements by Mr Trump, his cronies and enablers ... The clear prose style is just as well, for Trumpocracy, which draws heavily on quotes from published news reports, can resemble a first draft of articles of impeachment ... Not Mr Trump. Mr Frum describes the president in near-animal terms, as sniffing out his opponents’ weaknesses—'low energy,' 'little,' 'crooked'—in the same way that he instinctively sensed the weak point in modern politics ... Neither book [Frum's and Levitsky's and Ziblatt's books] flinches from tracing the role that race, class, education and culture play in what are ostensibly political arguments ... Neither book blames all American ills on racism — they are more nuanced than that. But the authors of both do argue, in effect, that America has never tried to maintain democratic norms in a demos as diverse as today’s.
Atlantic senior editor Frum finds the Trump White House pointed evidence of declining faith in democracy ... Clearly, the author holds Trump in contempt; just as plainly, he gives Trump credit for the political cunning that enabled him to leverage such things as the birther hoax to capture a sizable segment of an embittered, angry populace ... The author goes on to reckon with a host of factors that led to the current debacle... Against all this, refreshingly, Frum finds hope that the Trump administration will be remembered 'as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse' ... Evenhanded, ideologically consistent, and guaranteed to generate a slew of angry tweets should a copy land at the White House.
