Trump’s political operatics worked because he understood deeper weaknesses in American society. The white working class is suffering from two great hammer blows. The first is to its economic well-being: A group that thrived during the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s has seen its incomes stagnate and its job security disappear. Great swaths of white America now suffer from maladies that are all too familiar to black America: broken homes, drug addiction, listlessness, early death. The second hammer blow is to its psychological well-being: Even as their economic position has declined, members of the white working class — particularly white working-class men — have seen themselves denounced, often by people who spend more on college education in one year than they earn shoveling dirt, as agents of privilege and oppression. What better way to respond to being defined as a problem than to vote for a man who promises to punch back?

Trump grasped that America is suffering from an epistemological weakness as well as economic ones: The line between truth and falsehood is becoming dangerously blurred. Again, America’s knowledge elite is partly responsible for this: Armies of postmodern academics had prepared the way for Trump by arguing that truth is a construct of the power elite. But the biggest culprit is technological progress. Digitalization is not only creating a deafening cacophony of voices. It is also making it harder to finance real journalism while simultaneously making it easier to distribute tripe.

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.

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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. Trump’s appointments to the White House staff included his former bodyguard, Keith Schiller, and a former contestant on “The Apprentice.” Perhaps the most telling moment in his first year was when he asked his daughter Ivanka to sit in his seat at a G-7 meeting, thereby reducing a great republic to the level of a family property.