A Conservative’s Case Against Donald Trump
By ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGEJAN. 24, 2018
The Corruption of the American Republic
By David Frum
301 pp. HarperCollins. $25.99.
Donald Trump is the oddest president America has ever elected. He lived in a gilded tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue but nevertheless became the voice of the left-behind. He made his public reputation as a reality-TV star but nevertheless defeated one of the most experienced politicians in the land. Trump has done so many extraordinary things in his first year in office, from tweeting about nuclear war to conducting public business in sight of paying guests in a resort he owns, it’s easy to forget that, unless impeachment intervenes, he still has another three years — and perhaps seven — to go.
A Manhattan-based playboy who has had life handed to him on a silver platter might look like a strange vehicle for the pain of the American heartland. But Trump is a winner with the soul of a loser: He is consumed by imagined slights to his fragile ego, hypersensitive to the pretensions of smarty-pants liberals, a man who spends many hours a day watching cable news and seething with anger. He is also an anti-intellectual with the soul of a postmodernist: He believes that reality is something that can be bent into any shape you choose provided that you have enough power.
What does Trump want to do with all his power? The answer, Frum argues, certainly does not lie in helping the white working class that put him in the White House. His tax cuts will widen America’s already high levels of inequality. It lies instead in “the aggrandizement of one domineering man and his shamelessly grasping extended family.” The essence of Trumponomics is running a country just as you run your family business: appointing people with whom you have strong personal ties, ideally ties of DNA, directing business to your properties, using public resources to avenge private grudges.
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That's rather a bizarre review....more like a synopsis. The Orange One is damaging our way of government, slowly dismantling it department by department. He's ballsy in his defiance. To give the SOTU and boldly state there is no reason to act on the sanctions against Russia of a veto-proof vote of Congress is how he will work (again) with Putin to retain control of the three branches.
ReplyDeleteIt will take decades to recover.