A common myth is that of the American republic. Although America was founded as a republic, the United States became an empire through imperial expansion, economic policy, the construction of international institutions, and by imposing regime change and military occupation in developing countries. In Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum romanticizes the past powers of an American empire that birthed Trumpism, embracing a future where neoconservative values are realized through resistance.
As a Bush speechwriter, Frum structured rhetoric for an administration that broke international law while entrenching the U.S. in two Middle East conflicts, neither of which has a foreseeable end. Trumpocracy treats President Trump’s election as an aberration to democratic custom, rather than the inevitable conclusion to neoconservative policies supported by Frum. Long before Trump belittled Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man,” Frum designated North Korea as the “Axis of Evil.” Long before Nikki Haley recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital without U.N. approval, Frum pushed for the invasion of Iraq.
To hear Frum decry the Trump administration’s airstrike on a Syrian airbase, when Frum himself once co-wrote, “Really, there is only one question to ask about Syria: Why have we put up with it as long we have?”, is not only hypocritical but a revision of his own role in creating a world where Trumpocracy could rise. Raising Frum’s hypocrisies is not intended as whataboutism to justify Trumpocracy, but to highlight neoconservatism’s role in radicalizing the Republican Party into an imperial apparatus.
Like On Tyranny — Yale professor Timothy Snyder’s slender pocket manifesto published a month after Trump’s inauguration — Trumpocracy shows how even the strongest democratic republics can be subverted into tyrannical states. Where Snyder draws on examples from 20th-century Europe, Frum analyzes select examples from a wealth of investigative reporting completed in the past two years.
With a seemingly endless barrage of leaks, scandals, and disinformation pouring from the White House, Frum looks at the overarching trends in Trump’s presidency: how the president exploited electoral vulnerabilities to achieve power, how the president dismantles the federal government’s inhibitions against corruption, and how the president’s sycophants and enablers have forever altered the nature of the executive branch. “Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on nonregulation, not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state,” Frum asserts from the onset.
It’s easy to get caught in the cogs of the news-entertainment industrial complex and miss the system in its entirety. Rather than seeing the forest for the trees, we are blinded by trash from the wasteland. Though many academics claim Trump lacks a coherent grand strategy toward the presidency, Frum argues the president’s prerogative is dismantling American institutions to enrich himself and his family. Trumpocracy threatens liberal democracy and American empire. To ardent leaders of the neoconservative movement like Frum, the empire is a vehicle to spread democratic ideals; its collapse is not just a national crisis, but also a global catastrophe. “[Trump] repeated a fantasy about opposing the war so strenuously that President George W. Bush sent representatives to Trump to beg him to be quiet,” writes Frum in addressing how even Trump’s presidential run was a threat to empire.
Trumpocracy is littered with Frum-pocrisies, the elephant in the room being neoconservatism’s role in spreading military empire through the facade of liberal values.
While Frum examines the rise of the Tea Party during the Obama years, very little is written about how the harmful policies of the Bush dynasty informed the modern political landscape or how Frum’s friend Bill Kristol recommended Sarah Palin to former Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Much is said about white populations ravaged by unemployment and drug addiction, but nothing about the generations of military families thanklessly deployed to Afghanistan. Rising levels of income inequality are analyzed without so much as mentioning Bush-era tax cuts that furthered oligarchy.
These systemic problems did not just materialize during Obama’s second term: They were reaped through disastrous Republican policies promoted by Frum.
“Bureaucracies always yearn to escape political control, and the national security agencies are the most powerful, autonomous, and well-funded bureaucracies within the American state. Trump has given them powerful motives to emancipate themselves,” warns Trumpocracy.
But in his 2003 book An End to Evil, co-authored with Richard Perle, Frum advocated for a state in which U.S. citizens carried national identity cards holding “biometric data, like fingerprints or retinal scans or DNA,” a government that could also bar a significant amount of travelers from Muslim or Arab countries. Though the powers of the executive branch have expanded under each presidential administration since World War II, the Bush White House signed the Patriot Act, which set the stage for the ballooning of the surveillance state under Obama. Such far-reaching national intelligence agencies have stripped domestic liberties and are now helmed by a madman.
Though it’s easy to see Never Trumpers as part of a larger progressive resistance against the Trump White House, both movements have conflicting ideals. In Trumpocracy’s conclusion, Frum clarifies the distinction by decrying how the Left’s embrace of French philosopher Michel Foucault enabled the Trump era’s culture of disinformation:
Michael Foucault and other advanced thinkers had shown that liberation would follow only once we accepted that ‘truth’ served merely as a euphemism for self-serving ideologies devised by holders of power. … Americans are discovering that it’s important also to distinguish between the normal tools of the politician’s trade — evasion, equivocation, the timely change of subject — and the inversion of reality that is routinely heard from Donald Trump.
Yet it was the Bush administration that constructed inverted realities toward terrorism, surveillance, and the powers of the executive branch.
Bush senior adviser Karl Rove told the New York Times in 2004:
[People like you are still living] in what we call the reality-based community. [You] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
The Trump era has further blurred the line between reality and fallacy, along with political affiliations. When neoconservatism’s values merge with progressivism, history is rewritten to romanticize regimes of atrocity. Trumpocracy is the empire naked, stripped from neoconservatism’s noble rhetoric, exposing our own hypocrisy in welcoming solutions from men like Frum.
Davis Richardson (@davisoliverr) has written for Vice, Uproxx, Paste, Observer, and Wired.
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