What is the Trumpocalypse?
What is the Trumpocalypse,
and is there a way out?
In his second book on the Trump era,
David Frum just wants this to end.
TRUMPOCALYPSE: Restoring American Democracy
By David Frum. Harper. 261 pp. $28.99.
In early 2018, as the first anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration approached, David Frum published “Trumpocracy,” a full-scale assault on a president and a party that, in the author’s view, had launched their own assault against American democracy. Trump and his Republican accomplices were forging a new U.S. regime type, Frum argued, one that challenged long-established political norms and mixed government, family and business “in the style of authoritarian Third World kleptocrat.” With a brand-obsessed president in the Oval Office, it seemed fitting that the system would carry his name.
Now Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has published a sequel, “Trumpocalypse” — an apropos title during a deadly pandemic that the president has struggled to counter. In the introduction, Frum notes how Trump played down the threat of the coronavirus, squandered critical time during the early days of the crisis and, typically, deflected accountability. “The Trumpocalypse of the title,” Frum asserts, “is now a Trumpocalypse in reality.”
Considering “Trumpocalypse” and “Trumpocracy” together is an instructive exercise, and not just as potential bookends for an administration or a chart of how the views of an influential Trump critic have shifted or hardened. If the first book described a system of governance, the second surveys the outcome of that system after nearly a full presidential term. One is prediction, the other, assessment.
Frum today is less concerned about presidential corruption, more pessimistic about the Republican Party’s future and far less sanguine about the country’s ability to bounce back from the world Trump has created — mainly because there is no going back, only a groping forward into a reality that, with or without this president, will look little like the before times. Even should Trump lose the next election, Frum cautions, “Trumpism will not be so easily removed from American national life.” He seems to believe that the president will be defeated, but it’s a belief born as much out of exhaustion as analysis.
From: The Washington Post
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