Washington book critic. After words is a weekly interview woman with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work. David frum, good to be with you. Thank you so much. I like the title of your book very much, it seems fitting that a president who is so brand conscious and likes to see his name on hotels, golf courses would get his own name with trumpocracy. With that in mind. Can you define trumpocracy and how you came up with this concept . Were all mesmerized by Donald Trumps outsized personality. Its natural to believe that the personality is the secret of whats going on. Trumpocracy which comes from the root of democracy and autocracy is a book about the study of power. Thats what the suffix means. This is the study of Donald Trumps power, how does he get it. Maintain it, how does he get away with it. Trumpocracy is the system of enabling, the system at the white house, between trump and congress, and the media that enabled him to create an audience. The system that involves the republican donor and between him and the core group within the Republican Party who enabled him to win the republican nomination and go on to the presidency. Now, there have been bad president s in American History that even borderline destructive president s in American History. When did you decide that trump sort of transcended this and sort of posed a threat to the american system of democracy itself. Its concerned with donald trump and with the larger system. Why i became concerned about it, why i started running with this, years before donald trump was fought thought of as a candidate for president. My interest in as i started covering the tea party and writing about that. It was plain to me that the ideology extremism of the Republican Party. So plutocratic. The first origins of the accelerating drug crisis, you could see a decade ago, an anticipating space for something dangerous. You could see it in europe, france, southeastern europe, hungary and poeland. I became obsessed that Something Like that was possible in the United States and it was coming. I didnt know it would be donald trump. I was surprised. When he showed up, i said this is what weve been waiting for. Im glad you raised that. Theres these two threads running through the book, right . One is the stuff about what trump doing and and you also write about these preexisting vulnerabilities, that trump sort of sagely identified and exploited. So when youre looking at the challenges to american democracy today under the Trump Presidency, how much are you worried about the man and the family and how much is it more institutional and systemic . When youre well and healthy, you take off infections that youre healthy. And there are ways that donald trump got into office, right now donald trump is receiving millions of dollars in payments from foreign business partners, philippines, turkey, united arab emirates, india, we dont who how much, whether its a flat fee or whether hes getting percentages, we have no id idea. What we do know is that the countries to which we draw these seem to get easier treatment than the countries he does not and in qatar didnt have the national day in the hotel and canceled a lease in the trump tower in 2014. Its obviously affecting American Foreign policy. You can imagine in a Healthy Society that congress would do Something Like this. That are emerging. Others see more of a chaos theory that is in the white house and others worry about the inplace ability of trump, this is the Hillary Clinton criticism that if you can bake a man with a tweet, etc. Obviously these things can overlap but after sort of year one of trump, is one of the tendencies that tends to were you most . Donald trump is negligent in different in everything a president should do but hes active, committed and widely about the things a president should not do. Theres truth to all of these points and there is chaos because donald trump cannot abide any restraint, even the kind of restraint that is in his own self interest. Thats the story that i tell in the book. These are all reported by other people and im very dependent and grateful on the reporting of others. One of the things i tried to do in the book was pay credit not just to the institutions but the individual reporter. Although this has become a challenge because one of the eggs of trump pioneered by your paper, because the president denies everything, the papers started quoting the two sources on the story. That means you get not only a doublebarreled byline but three barreled and even for barrel bylines. That poses a challenge. The Washington Post thank you for giving credit to individual reporters. Heres the story, hr mcmaster places michael flynn, National Security advisor and one of the first things he does is reaffirm the american commitment to nato. Has made a lot of noises that are nervous about how much he dislikes nato and he so much under russian influence, its a big problem so mcmaster arranges for trumps visit to nato headquarters in brussels where he will give a speech standing in front of them monument to article 5, a twisted girder of the World Trade Center and right in front of that monument he will read a full throated, no compromise commitment to the treaty. To make sure trump says the right things, mcmaster writes the passage himself or at least oversees the writing and its in the speech. On the way to europe, mcmaster briefs reporters, this is what the president is going to say. Trump gets to that portion of the speech and he skips the passage. Why . Ideological hostility to nato, some pressure from the russians or maybe he doesnt like being told what to do. We know. But thats where you see the confluence because what then has to happen is mcmaster now is in the situation where everyone expected this endorsement and the question is why is the president reneging and the United States reneging and mcmaster says i dont know what youre talking about, the president did exactly what everybody expects. You get chaos, the necessity to live, you have the breaking of the white house staff, the discrediting of mcmaster and the in the eyes of the one of the most honorable soldiers of the generation. These thingscome together but i would emphasize , donald trump has driven about all by greed and by the desire for dominance. Very little by ideology. Could someone else have stepped in to do this . Is trump offers the only possible with donald trump . Could someone else do you think have, in skillfully a matter exploited these vulnerabilities . Somebody will. This is going on through the western world. We are seeing a global decline in democracy, belief in democracy and the effectiveness of democracy across the democratic world and in the United States , it happened to express itself in the more rightleaning party but in other countries ask express itself in the more leftleaning parties and a lot of the forces and donald trump you see in part is of the left in england and britain and the candidacy of Jeremy Corbin , leader of the labor party. In many things that worry me, show up in, the Democratic Party has been the more beloved party in recent years but one of the themes i stress in the book is that at the most fundamental level are racial, sexual and economic tensions. In sexual tensions i draw special attention to. If you follow the Bernie Sanders versus Hillary Clinton timeline, the gender gap between sanders versus clinton was bigger than the gender gap in the general election between Trump Supporters and clinton supporters and a lot of the things unleashed in social media work as or more misogynistic than the beams that were unleashed and you had a lot of disaffected men, a lot of isolated women and that is one of the sources of energy for these antidemocratic forces. In the book, you spend time on the conventional reasons of why trump did or didnt win in 2016. Are not entirely persuaded by the white workingclass theory for instance. What are the things you think we least understand about what compelled him to power . Guest you have to Pay Attention more to the nomination. That was the freakish thing. Once youre one of the two most likely on people in earth to be president , you got a shot. So and a lot of that was a lucky bounce. In the general election also, the question is not about donald trump, its about Hillary Clinton. Because barack obama in the fall of 2016 was pulling well above 50 percent. The economy was growing, personal incomes were rising, the party of the president , that doesnt matter, republican, democrat, dont tell me the names. The part of the president should win the third term, and Larry Clinton got 48 points something. Such a big gap between her performance and obamas, but thats the first thing that needs to be explained. Voter suppression is part of the story but theres more to it than that. Our weakness and even trumps lucky bounce, the aid from the russian culminating to have that impact. But even stronger, she should have been able to get it. But the nomination, thats the mesmerizing thing because trunk should not have win. What actually happened is Jeb Bush Campaign as paul ryan plus more immigration. The republicans, and he was set up, that was set up to pass. If you went to these tea party rallies, you saw Republican Base was signaling we want more healthcare, less immigration. And what they actually said was little less healthcare, more immigration than bush so he was vulnerable. The question is why didnt someone normal political actor get like that. It was a brief runner. And yet, not that we are both charismatic guy but he had a story. Or somebody else. Why doesnt somebody else into these themes that donald trump was intuiting . That Republican Voters want medicare protection. They want less immigration, not more. That they are going to need their social security. Why didnt such a person take those views and deploy them and be the one to rate jeb bush well . That is part of the story of the conditions that enable trump is the ideological rigidity of the Republican Party that even when the 50 bill is lying on the sidewalk in front of you cannot pick it up because you cant be there, its not possible that it could be there. The whole autopsy report explaining why by people with one connection or another. They wrote with jeb bush, the fix was in but that the shrewd or political character should have been able to see and this is terrible, this report. The report said that i thought the book by talking about earlier in the book, 2012 election, within 72hours , these republican parties have converged on the message changes nothing. We voted for mitt romney, he had a fabulous presence but Bernie Sanders took the campaign on a platform that included gradually rewithdrawing the medicare guarantee for everyone under 55 and its amazing he got 47 percent of the vote. The only got that much because people didnt understand what the role publicans were promising to do. He might have thought that the reaction to that vote was really to be a little less dismisses of people working for wages. We need to be more attentive to the fact that even our voters really like medicare and wanted to be available even to those were now under 55 cause they couldnt see that, they could only see the part of the romney platform they didnt like which was his moderately top line on immigration. Lets jettison that, they had a 100 percent rich person platform. Host as you say, its easy to fixate on trump. And these on the title, if your book is the classic overcoat shot on people, publishers love it these days yet you write an introduction to the book is not for trump or necessarilytrump, its the story of those who empower support and collaborate with donald trump. Who are they . Who are the enablers, how do you break them down . Guest start with first, there are those who immediately serve him who live for him. And i think often for understandably the noble reasons like hr mcmaster. Lying to conceal the fact that the president of the United States does not want to honor the nato treaty. They are the larger executive branch , outside the white house. The department of justice and the fbi, people who arelike Ron Rosenstein. Theyve never seen, Ron Rosenstein seems like a conscientious, not very imaginative person willing to do the right thing while also mollifying the president. Not understanding what a spirit of destruction, what hes negotiating with, how m placeable so a lot of people are baffled by this in the executive branch. Or people in the fbi trying to follow their traditional rules in the place of a president like him and we widen it some more and these republicans in congress not doing their job, not insisting. Basic things like if the president of the United States is on the payroll of foreign businesspeople, the United States needs to know that and its the donor police who believe they could use them didnt understand that he would use them and in fact didnt understand, it made them normally whats happened in the first year of the presidency is the president has an agenda and wants to accomplish it. Hes surrounded by people of human weakness so if youve seen the lbj movies, the president wants a civil rights bill, the member of the house of representatives once a dam and the deal is done. This is the other way around. Paul ryan has the agenda, but theyre the enablers. Those donors who believe this guy would be the vehicle for achieving what they wanted , and the price would be something bearable. And finally, the enablers are, im sorry. The enablers are the conservative intellectual world which developed a series of rationalizations. That in justifications and excuses. If they cant defend him, they attacked his opponent. If they cant attack his opponents, they change the subject. Then they go quiet altogether and lastly, there are in the country these americans who are in their millions, drawn to a radical politics of authoritarianism as a way of achieving what things they want to achieve and then punishing people there want to punish. Host a lot to unpack there. Lets start with the president a little bit. You write that once in office, it was not from stone cutting that allowed him to defy longestablished vendors, it was the complicity of his allies in the Republican Party and the ones great party elevated one man into the position of old absolute power over itself. I believe the Republican Party is, the establishment thought they were getting some sense out of this deal. What have they gotten beyond a tax bill. Out of this deal. It on the tax bill, substantial deconstruction of a lot of obama era regulations, theyre looking forward to more of those with that obama left behind because he couldnt tax legislative restrictions on carbon emissions. He left behind an elaborate epa scheme regulating carbon and like we see, it had this intrusive and burdensome and often irrational. And a big project of the coming year will be shutting it back down. They got relief from some of the parts of obamacare and some hope that although obamacare could be repealed, maybe it could be damaged enough to collapse. They get important favors for the financial industry. And above all, the breaking of the protection of Consumer Finance protection board. That has just been dismantled, donald trump has his own b director serving at the same time as the director of the Consumer Protection board. Paralyzing that money. So i think yes. They got neil corset, thats probably more important tothe right file in the donor police. But theyre getting stuff. Theyre getting substantial, tangible benefits. One of the things that, and theres this corporate, lets not minimize how big a deal that is. One of the arguments is its already been argued by economists who pays, is paid by workers, consumers, is it paid by shareholders. We now havean answer. When the stock market goes up , 30 percent on the exploitation of Corporate Income tax, the stock market is saying wethink the shareholders are getting merciless. Because even if were going to workers and customers , the stock market shouldnt have reacted at all. You write that trump has ripped out the conscience of half the political spectrum and left a moral void where american conservatism once was. Did trump do that or was there already, when did that excavation of the moral conscience of the republicans begin to mark youve been a critic of the party for a while through the obama years, the former colleague at aei read a book several years ago about, what he viewed as a moral bankruptcy of the party already. When did this begin . The trend begins i think in reaction to the disappointment of the presidency in which i serve. It began from economic disappointment from the iraq war which i supported and the party began to move in a more radical direction. And when i say radical toward economic individualism, toward more plutocratic politics. At the same time that the american middle class from which the republican had a stark strength was getting into bigger and bigger trouble. Especially white america, of course theRepublican Party again , thought was in particularly big. It got diseases and it became an addiction. The party had moved away from the voters and thats the beginning. Thats the beginning of fraud. The book opens with a series of the steps down which the american political system trump went and again, although this is primarily