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Canadian-born political commentator David Frum was a staunch conservative and Republican when he wrote speeches for U.S. President George W. Bush. But he’s no fan of the White House’s current occupant.
Frum is discussing his new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, at Southminster United Church, presented by the Ottawa International Writers Festival Thursday night. The event is sold out, but Frum, the 57-year-old senior editor at The Atlantic, discussed his concerns about Trump and more in the edited conversation below.
Q: People’s assessments of Trump range from a petulant man-child to a very stable genius. What’s your measure of him? What are the key descriptors of who he is?
A: I think there is a tendency, in the spectacular wake of Michael Wolff’s book (Fire and Fury) … to underestimate Trump’s savvy and his skill. He’s obviously not a well-informed person. He obviously does not have sustained attention, and he clearly has a lot of other psychological and moral issues. But this presentation of him as somebody who is just pitifully and helplessly in other people’s hands does dangerously underestimate him.
Trump is wily. He has the bully’s genius for identifying an opponent’s weak points and exploiting them. Whether that opponent or that target is Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton or the American Constitution, he knows how to tear it down.
The cover of David Frum’s new book, Trumpocracy
Q: What are some of the main points you want people to take away from reading Trumpocracy?
A: They need to understand Donald Trump does not rule alone. To understand why he’s able to do what he’s doing, you have to understand his relationship with his party in Congress, with his party in the country, not only with his famous voter base, but also with those Republicans who don’t much like him, but have decided to go along for the ride.
Q: Your book recaps and sorts out so much regarding the rise of Trump and his first year in office. But then there’s what’s happened since you went to press, or simply what’s happened in 2018. So much happens with the Trump story, practically on an hourly basis. How can we make sense of it all? How can we not feel overwhelmed by what Trump and his people are saying and doing?
A: The details are overwhelming. The misconduct and the improper language are overwhelming. Trump described a quarter of the planet as a shithole after I went to press.
But the shocking behaviour follows along lines that you could discern in the time that I had to write the book. The attack on the independence of law enforcement, the pre-history of the Trump Organization as effectively a giant money-laundering operation. Trump’s defiance of government ethics and disclosure standards. Those things all hold true, and similarly, what also holds true is the nature the bargain between Trump and Republicans in Congress. This book was written before the passage of the tax cut, but it describes the bargain that made the tax cut possible and that will make the next actions possible.
One of the things that the book also underscores, and this is going to be a big story for 2018 … Trump has had the least popular, least approved first year of any president in the history of polling. It’s very possible those numbers will improve in 2018. Because not only is the economy strong, but the strength of the economy is at last flowing into wages. And the Trump tax cut, while full of unfairness, both regionally and between occupations … It offers a huge break to architects and engineers that isn’t available to lawyers and accountants. Why not? It doesn’t make any sense. But in spite of all that, lots of lots of people, especially parents in red states, will see increased take-home pay, and they will like that.
Q: What other predictions can you make about about Trump?
A: Trump will never stop testing the limits of democratic government. He will never respect the idea of law. He wants the FBI to act as his personal security detail. I’ll tell you one way of understanding this. Shortly after President Obama took office, he had a reception for the new U.S. attorneys. These are the main prosecutors of the United States government. There’s some 93 or 94 or them. And they decide who has to face criminal process. It’s an awesome responsibility. And Obama said, “I appointed you, but you do not work for me.” Trump has never absorbed that idea and will never accept it. That’s the difference between a rule-of-law democracy, like Canada or Britain or Germany, and a plebiscitary presidency, like Argentina or Peru.
Q: So what will it take to counter Trump?
A: It’s going to be a struggle. It’s going to be a test. You asked me to make a prediction. I don’t make predictions because I can’t think about this like a spectator. We have to act as if he could succeed, and then we have to hope that if we act as if he could succeed, that he will fail.
Q: You mentioned Fire and Fury. How would you contrast your book with Fire and Fury?
A: Fire and Fury is a very engaging book and I think you can learn a lot from it. But it tightens the camera too closely on the person of the president. And there’s an inherent bias with any book that is based on insider sources, which is inevitably your sources become the hero of the story. That’s the bargain. They talk to you. You make them look good. But Wolff’s sources are every bit as much a part of the problem as Trump himself.
Q: You have less interest in the “palace intrigue” aspect of things.
A: I do talk a little bit about this. There are people in the Trump White House who shouldn’t be there who wouldn’t have been there in the past. But there’s also a game that a lot of the more sophisticated Trump staffers play, where they go on camera and they lavishly defend the president, and then they step away from the camera and confidentially chat with the media personalities, and assure them that they don’t believe anything they just said. I think for those people, what you said to hundreds of thousands or millions of people watching you is what is more important than what you whisper when the cameras are off. And by the way, what you say in public, that’s who you really are.
Q: You write in your book that “Trump has repelled a generation of young people from conservativism and Republicanism.” What will it take for conservatism and Republicanism to make comebacks?
A: Of course, they will come back. Conservatism is part of the constitution of the human brain. There’s the ridiculed definition — a conservative is one who prefers existing evils as opposed to a liberal who would like to try new evils. That’s just part of the way our brain chemistry is. Some people are one way and some people are the other way and it will always be thus.
But the political conservatism that I grew up with was a set of answers to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and it’s behind us. There will be new questions. So the future of conservative politics, as with liberal politics, will involve different kinds of problems in the 21st century.
Americans are not going to be talking about crime any more. The crime problem is actually largely behind us in the United States. They will be talking more about drug addiction. Different people with different outlooks will talk in different ways about those things.
Q: In your book’s final chapter, you write in favour of “a sensible politics of the centre.” This is from the author of What’s Right and Dead Right. Have your politics changed or has the context for your politics changed?
A: Both are true. My politics have changed with events and my politics have changed because the context has changed. But if we were to have a bout of hyper-inflation again, if we had inflation as we had in the 1980s, and I had to answer the question, “What do we do about this?” I would still say Milton Friedman is right and John Kenneth Galbraith is wrong. If we had to deal with an urban crime epidemic of the kind that we dealt with in the 1990s, I would say that James Q. Wilson is right and the liberal school of criminology is wrong.
I would also say that when I talk about a politics of the centre, that doesn’t mean that I think everybody should have the same politics. Politics is competition, and voter sovereignty wouldn’t mean anything if the politicians couldn’t disagree.
What is different with Trump is … with competition, when American and United (airlines) compete, we want them to compete vigorously, but we don’t want them to be putting salmonella into the airline meals of the other, and saying, you know, fly United because on American you’re going to get sick. That’s not a legitimate method of competition. We want to make sure the rules of the game work in a way to encourage a socially useful kind of competition.
Q: You wrote much of Trumpocracy while you were in Wellington, in Prince Edward County, and you write of being happy there, even while you dealt with the “grim topics” of your book. Is it possible that you’re feeling more comfortable in your home and native land than in Trump’s America?
A: You know, I love Prince Edward County. We plant trees there because we inherited some land that’s not in great environmental condition, so we’re trying to restore it by planting a lot of trees, and I fully expect the trees I plant are probably going to be the most enduring impact I make on this planet.
But right now, the American political system is in a lot of trouble. And I think when there’s trouble, you have to run toward the trouble, not away from it.
phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum
查看原文...
Frum is discussing his new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, at Southminster United Church, presented by the Ottawa International Writers Festival Thursday night. The event is sold out, but Frum, the 57-year-old senior editor at The Atlantic, discussed his concerns about Trump and more in the edited conversation below.
Q: People’s assessments of Trump range from a petulant man-child to a very stable genius. What’s your measure of him? What are the key descriptors of who he is?
A: I think there is a tendency, in the spectacular wake of Michael Wolff’s book (Fire and Fury) … to underestimate Trump’s savvy and his skill. He’s obviously not a well-informed person. He obviously does not have sustained attention, and he clearly has a lot of other psychological and moral issues. But this presentation of him as somebody who is just pitifully and helplessly in other people’s hands does dangerously underestimate him.
Trump is wily. He has the bully’s genius for identifying an opponent’s weak points and exploiting them. Whether that opponent or that target is Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton or the American Constitution, he knows how to tear it down.
The cover of David Frum’s new book, Trumpocracy
Q: What are some of the main points you want people to take away from reading Trumpocracy?
A: They need to understand Donald Trump does not rule alone. To understand why he’s able to do what he’s doing, you have to understand his relationship with his party in Congress, with his party in the country, not only with his famous voter base, but also with those Republicans who don’t much like him, but have decided to go along for the ride.
Q: Your book recaps and sorts out so much regarding the rise of Trump and his first year in office. But then there’s what’s happened since you went to press, or simply what’s happened in 2018. So much happens with the Trump story, practically on an hourly basis. How can we make sense of it all? How can we not feel overwhelmed by what Trump and his people are saying and doing?
A: The details are overwhelming. The misconduct and the improper language are overwhelming. Trump described a quarter of the planet as a shithole after I went to press.
But the shocking behaviour follows along lines that you could discern in the time that I had to write the book. The attack on the independence of law enforcement, the pre-history of the Trump Organization as effectively a giant money-laundering operation. Trump’s defiance of government ethics and disclosure standards. Those things all hold true, and similarly, what also holds true is the nature the bargain between Trump and Republicans in Congress. This book was written before the passage of the tax cut, but it describes the bargain that made the tax cut possible and that will make the next actions possible.
One of the things that the book also underscores, and this is going to be a big story for 2018 … Trump has had the least popular, least approved first year of any president in the history of polling. It’s very possible those numbers will improve in 2018. Because not only is the economy strong, but the strength of the economy is at last flowing into wages. And the Trump tax cut, while full of unfairness, both regionally and between occupations … It offers a huge break to architects and engineers that isn’t available to lawyers and accountants. Why not? It doesn’t make any sense. But in spite of all that, lots of lots of people, especially parents in red states, will see increased take-home pay, and they will like that.
Q: What other predictions can you make about about Trump?
A: Trump will never stop testing the limits of democratic government. He will never respect the idea of law. He wants the FBI to act as his personal security detail. I’ll tell you one way of understanding this. Shortly after President Obama took office, he had a reception for the new U.S. attorneys. These are the main prosecutors of the United States government. There’s some 93 or 94 or them. And they decide who has to face criminal process. It’s an awesome responsibility. And Obama said, “I appointed you, but you do not work for me.” Trump has never absorbed that idea and will never accept it. That’s the difference between a rule-of-law democracy, like Canada or Britain or Germany, and a plebiscitary presidency, like Argentina or Peru.
Q: So what will it take to counter Trump?
A: It’s going to be a struggle. It’s going to be a test. You asked me to make a prediction. I don’t make predictions because I can’t think about this like a spectator. We have to act as if he could succeed, and then we have to hope that if we act as if he could succeed, that he will fail.
Q: You mentioned Fire and Fury. How would you contrast your book with Fire and Fury?
A: Fire and Fury is a very engaging book and I think you can learn a lot from it. But it tightens the camera too closely on the person of the president. And there’s an inherent bias with any book that is based on insider sources, which is inevitably your sources become the hero of the story. That’s the bargain. They talk to you. You make them look good. But Wolff’s sources are every bit as much a part of the problem as Trump himself.
Q: You have less interest in the “palace intrigue” aspect of things.
A: I do talk a little bit about this. There are people in the Trump White House who shouldn’t be there who wouldn’t have been there in the past. But there’s also a game that a lot of the more sophisticated Trump staffers play, where they go on camera and they lavishly defend the president, and then they step away from the camera and confidentially chat with the media personalities, and assure them that they don’t believe anything they just said. I think for those people, what you said to hundreds of thousands or millions of people watching you is what is more important than what you whisper when the cameras are off. And by the way, what you say in public, that’s who you really are.
Q: You write in your book that “Trump has repelled a generation of young people from conservativism and Republicanism.” What will it take for conservatism and Republicanism to make comebacks?
A: Of course, they will come back. Conservatism is part of the constitution of the human brain. There’s the ridiculed definition — a conservative is one who prefers existing evils as opposed to a liberal who would like to try new evils. That’s just part of the way our brain chemistry is. Some people are one way and some people are the other way and it will always be thus.
But the political conservatism that I grew up with was a set of answers to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and it’s behind us. There will be new questions. So the future of conservative politics, as with liberal politics, will involve different kinds of problems in the 21st century.
Americans are not going to be talking about crime any more. The crime problem is actually largely behind us in the United States. They will be talking more about drug addiction. Different people with different outlooks will talk in different ways about those things.
Q: In your book’s final chapter, you write in favour of “a sensible politics of the centre.” This is from the author of What’s Right and Dead Right. Have your politics changed or has the context for your politics changed?
A: Both are true. My politics have changed with events and my politics have changed because the context has changed. But if we were to have a bout of hyper-inflation again, if we had inflation as we had in the 1980s, and I had to answer the question, “What do we do about this?” I would still say Milton Friedman is right and John Kenneth Galbraith is wrong. If we had to deal with an urban crime epidemic of the kind that we dealt with in the 1990s, I would say that James Q. Wilson is right and the liberal school of criminology is wrong.
I would also say that when I talk about a politics of the centre, that doesn’t mean that I think everybody should have the same politics. Politics is competition, and voter sovereignty wouldn’t mean anything if the politicians couldn’t disagree.
What is different with Trump is … with competition, when American and United (airlines) compete, we want them to compete vigorously, but we don’t want them to be putting salmonella into the airline meals of the other, and saying, you know, fly United because on American you’re going to get sick. That’s not a legitimate method of competition. We want to make sure the rules of the game work in a way to encourage a socially useful kind of competition.
Q: You wrote much of Trumpocracy while you were in Wellington, in Prince Edward County, and you write of being happy there, even while you dealt with the “grim topics” of your book. Is it possible that you’re feeling more comfortable in your home and native land than in Trump’s America?
A: You know, I love Prince Edward County. We plant trees there because we inherited some land that’s not in great environmental condition, so we’re trying to restore it by planting a lot of trees, and I fully expect the trees I plant are probably going to be the most enduring impact I make on this planet.
But right now, the American political system is in a lot of trouble. And I think when there’s trouble, you have to run toward the trouble, not away from it.
phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum
查看原文...
