David Frum’s last anti-Trump book, Trumpocracy, was brave and fascinating because its author hoped President Trump’s inevitable self-destruction would soon render the book easily forgotten. Having failed at that singular aspiration, Frum now takes even bigger risks with Trumpocalypse: the risk not only of looking ahead to a post-Trump America, but of doing everything he can to make politics boring again.
Swaths of Trumpocalypse read as predictable never-Trump conservatism. America needs “partners” abroad and “national renewal” at home. There are all-caps calls to “DETER GERRYMANDERING” and “DEPOLITICIZE LAW ENFORCEMENT,” and long passages crammed with statistics to justify, among other things, a carbon tax. There are quotes from President Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and “the veteran political observer Norman Ornstein.” He urges the rising generation to reject extremism on both sides.
