What is Trumpism?: A Selection from David Frum’s Trumpocalypse (2020)

“Almost any set of ideas, when taken to extremes, can justify authoritarianism and violence. The antiwar movement of the 1960s mutated into the bombings and robberies of the Weather Underground. The civil rights movement produced the Black Panthers. Advocates of animal welfare committed eleven hundred violent acts against persons and property between 1976 and 2004, according to the FBI. The authors of those acts are responsible for their own crimes. The moral test comes in the way that law-abiding advocates of a set of ideas react to lawless people who share some of their ideas. Are they unambiguous in their condemnation? Do they recalibrate anything in their message that might act as incitement? Do they cooperate with law enforcement to punish wrongdoers and prevent future wrongdoing? This is what was asked by American conservatives of American Muslims in response to Islamic terrorism. The targets of the new extremist violence can now pose the same demand to President Trump and his supporters.

Trump’s left-wing critics sometimes argue: Racism and authoritarianism were always present within American conservatism. Trump only ‘says the quiet part out loud,’ making explicit what was always implicit. In a way, Trump is an improvement, at least now everybody can see what the issues are.

But the move from unspoken to spoken is a big move. It’s one thing to hold an unconscious, unexamined bias. It’s a different thing to articulate that previous bias as a conscious and willing belief. The winning conservatism of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the two Bush presidents may sometimes have drawn power from deep and dark energies in the American soul. That conservatism also contained those energies. Hate crimes against Muslims spiked in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Thanks in great part to leadership by President George W. Bush, including a mosque visit within a week of the attacks, the spike after September 2001 was quickly curbed in 2002.

Trump conjured the dark energies that his predecessors had sought to contain. Did he fully control them? Did he even understand them? He imagined support for him as a ‘Trump’ movement, which is why he imagined he personally could get away with anything—even shooting a man on Fifth Avenue—and why he deluded himself that he could bequeath that movement to his underachieving children as a family property.

But Trump belonged to his movement as much as or more than his movement belonged to him. It’s bigger than him, it’s more dangerous than him, and it will have to be reckoned with even after Trump himself departs this scene.

How to describe this movement? What to call it?

Its supporters like to call it ‘nationalist’—but it is anything but ‘nationalist.’ The new movement’s version of ‘nationalism’ attaches them not to the multiracial American nation with its capital in Washington, DC, but to a multinational white race with a capital in Moscow. The most fundamental concept in the politics of the new movement is the divide between friend and enemy, but for the new movement, the divide cuts through nations, not between them. Fellow citizens can be enemies; faraway co-racialists can be friends.

This replacement of nation by race may explain why so many Trump supporters felt untroubled by Russian help for the Trump candidacy—or the flow of foreign money to Trump personally. The Trump movement linked itself to similar movements around the world. It cared as much or more about Britain quitting the EU and Muslim migration to Europe as about anything happening in this country. . . .

Its detractors called the movement ‘white nationalist,’ but again, this is not quite right. The Trump movement is crammed with people of wholly or partially non-European origins, people who would not conventionally be regarded as white. . . .

Nuremberg-law whiteness is not necessarily required by the new white supremacist movement. You don’t have to be ‘white’ to join up. You just have to agree that ‘white’ is best. . . .

Hitler was not blond; Stalin was not Russian; Napoleon spoke heavily accented French. We are all familiar with the case of the alienated outsider who identifies himself as the ultra-insider, even committing murder to prove his point.

So how to define and describe the new movement? It is, first, radically masculinist and misogynist.

In every advanced country, the twenty-first century has proved a bewildering time for men. Job opportunities and pay have diminished for less-educated men. Management and the professions have been thrown open to women, who have enforced new norms of behavior in the workplace upon better-educated men. The ancient domestic division of labor has been upended. Men and women are more likely than ever to live apart, their sexualities no longer uniting them in marriage but antagonizing them against each other in sequences of mutually disappointing relationships.

These resentments provided an indispensable political resource to Donald Trump. In 2015, he retweeted the insult: ‘If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?’ Although he soon deleted it, the brutal message that Clinton was not sexy enough to lead reverberated through Trump world. Yet at the same time, she was also too womanly: faint, weak, ill. . . .

The new movement, second, is implacably hostile to science, reason, and objective truth. The leaders of Italy’s Five Star movement are anti-vaxxers. Poland’s Law and Justice Party is animated by the belief that the plane crash that killed a former president in 2010 was a plot by Poland’s then government, rather than the accident all independent experts agree it was. The Alternative for Germany dismisses the science of climate change as an elitist hoax. The brainpan of Donald Trump, of course, bubbles with false information of all kinds. . . .

Should we call this new movement fascist? We can see parallels, especially the fascination with violence, an essential element to fascism old and new. This is most especially true in the United States, with its cult of the gun and dress-up paramilitaries. . . .

Fascism fetishized youth and energy. These new illiberal movements are movements shaped by the nostalgia of the elderly. They look backward to a supposedly better time, not forward to a utopia of national redemption through conquest and war. . . .

Trumpists believe both: ‘This country needs to be governed in the name of the great majority of its everyday plain people, not self-satisfied elites’; and ‘Voting is a privilege not a right, the United States is a republic not a democracy, and we should not choose our leaders just by counting who got the most votes.’

You might think it would provoke a headache to hold on to both those seemingly contradictory beliefs. Trumpism is not even aware of them as contradictory. Embedded in Trumpism is the distinction between ‘people’ and ‘the people.’ Not all people belong to ’the people.’ More and more people emphatically do not belong—which is why Trump’s absurd claims about illegal voting resonated so powerfully. The Trump supporters who hear that claim may not have believed that literally millions of illegal aliens voted. But they could easily believe that millions of people voted who should never have been accepted as voters in the first place. . . .

As the Republican Party becomes ill adapted for political competition on equal terms, it has redefined its political goals. Instead of thinking how to compete in cities, how to reach the religiously unaffiliated, how to appeal to nonwhites, it invests its energies in the brutal project of preventing those groups from voting. . . .

The entire state of South Dakota is home to fewer people than Maryland’s Prince George’s County. The American political system does not treat the people of Prince George’s County as the civic equals of the people of South Dakota. Indeed, people in South Dakota would regard it as a hideous injustice if they ever were treated as equals to the people of Prince George’s County. The people of the American interior are the ‘real Americans,’ who deserve unceasing flattery and extra consideration.

‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ said Sarah Palin in her vice presidential acceptance address at the Republican convention in 2008. . . . Can you imagine for a second the hell that would erupt if anyone spoke in similar terms at a political convention about America’s big cities or great universities? ‘We grow good people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.’ . . . It is unimaginable. . . .

The compliment paid to the old ‘silent majority’—that they are the people who do the work and pay the taxes only to see their hard-earned money siphoned away for the benefit of people entrapped in dependency hundreds of miles away—that hardworking and tax-paying silent majority now lives on America’s coasts and in America’s cities.”—David Frum, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020)