... a dreadful title for a serious book ... Frum’s intellectual journey is what makes this book so fascinating. He can look at our current condition with fresh eyes, earned through humiliating experience. It is a humility to which the rest of us should aspire ... divided into two parts. The first is a brutal takedown of Donald Trump, occasionally to a fault...Frum’s best observations are more subtle ... Frum is on shakier ground when he places Trump internationally, as part of a 'fascoid' movement — an awkward coinage he uses to indicate a diluted form of fascism — that is based not in nationalism, but in white racial identity 'with a capital in Moscow.' Well, maybe ... Happily, Frum remains a small-c conservative, not a radical. The solutions he proposes in the second half of Trumpocalypse are bold and provocative, but not wild-eyed ... [Frum] has done something crucial: He has recognized that a new national conversation is coming, and, with Trumpocalypse, he has provided a thoughtful way to start it.
Trumpocalypse voices irreconcilable grievance. Still, Frum’s dismay is not directed at the president’s supporters, at least he tries not to. Frum understands that even if the incumbent loses re-election, the great American divide is not disappearing anytime soon ... Frum observes that in theology, the apocalypse was not 'the end' but the harbinger of a 'new and better order'. We’ll see. But Trumpocalypse is an apt title for these blighted times.
Frum brings a degree of nuance to his observations of the president ... It’s hard to imagine anyone in 2020 still needs to be told that Trump is incompetent, malevolent, or dangerous ... So who is this book for, then? Leftists aren’t going to read it, and neither are the president’s die-hard supporters ... This is the context in which Trumpocalypse makes most sense: as a manifesto of the Never Trump movement. As such, it is most interesting when it turns its attention away from the president and toward actual prescriptions, some of which any liberal—or even leftist—might endorse, and some of which are considerably more troubling. On the positive side of the ledger, Frum deserves credit for advancing a suite of reforms that would break the GOP’s undemocratic stranglehold on the federal government and reduce corruption ... Never Trumpers...are comfortable suburban white people across the country who have migrated to the Democrats out of personal distaste for Trump, and they hold—and moreover, deserve to hold—the balance of political power nationally. Trumpocalypse is a book for them, meant to express their worldview and flatter their very specific notions of right and wrong.
