The rise of Donald J. Trump, from middling real estate investor to President of the United States, is as impressive as it is bewildering.
Prior to his now-infamous entrance into the 2016 presidential race in the summer of 2015, few serious observers of American politics would ever have considered him a legitimate candidate for the highest office in the land. Despite unprecedented levels of media coverage throughout his nearly 17-month campaign, and an implausible string of primary victories over more qualified and credentialed opponents, both the conventional media and the entrenched political establishment (as well as the online betting community, incidentally) considered a Trump victory on election day to be improbable at best.
And yet, somehow he prevailed.
Why?
From a mathematical perspective, Trump’s narrow upset victory was due to unexpected wins by small margins in a handful of states that have been reliably blue in other recent elections. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, all supposedly part of the “Blue Wall” coalition of Democratic stronghold states, shocked the pollsters and went for Trump by about 44,300 votes, 22,700 votes, and 10,700 votes respectively.
We could attribute these results to brazen gerrymandering by Republican state legislatures, various voter suppression laws and tactics implemented by those same bodies and their financiers, or the surge in Republican turnout thanks to the entire party’s raging antipathy toward Hillary Clinton.
We could similarly attribute them to disillusionment on the part of Bernie supporters, general Democratic voter apathy and mistrust resulting from Clinton’s shortcomings as a candidate, or insufficient advertising and turnout spending in those critical states by the Clinton campaign.
On the third hand, we could blame Gary Johnson and Jill Stein for siphoning off just enough votes from Clinton to give Trump the edge. Certainly if their goal was to avoid electing Trump, staying in the race was a very stupid thing to do—Jill Stein’s performative post-election bleating about recounts and lawsuits notwithstanding.
However, while the relevant data can be packaged to support each of these assertions independently, they collectively fall short of capturing the underlying advantages that differentiated Trump’s campaign from those of his opponents. Despite his many shortcomings, Trump did two things especially well, and this combination of strategies is what really clinched it for him:
- Trump was and continues to be an expert manipulator of the media (both conventional and social)
- Trump correctly identified, and then proceeded to ruthlessly exploit, people’s fears and vulnerabilities
Neither of these practices was unique to Trump, and fear-based appeals to our baser nature are nothing new to Republican politics. But the extent to which Trump built his campaign around them, along with his absolute refusal to operate within the norms of the established American political structure, allowed him to repeatedly defy many of the challenges that a more conventional candidate would have found insurmountable.
His nakedly shameless approach was something new to modern national politics, and it proved surprisingly effective. Throughout his campaign he proceeded under the hypothesis that if he never admitted to any wrongdoing, he would never have to apologize, and if he never had to apologize, he would never have to atone for his actions or change his behavior.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, this unrepentant middle finger to the tenuous societal standards of dignity and decency was exactly what many of his supporters were looking for in a candidate. He has continued to govern in this fashion, to the detriment of American society and international standing.
Manipulating the media
The American mass media, and especially the right wing radio and cable cabal, is uniquely incompetent in its coverage of domestic political contests. Whereas media ecosystems in most modern democracies at least make some effort to analyze candidates’ statements and promises for their degree of truth and likely impact on the electorate, in the good old USA all we get is the horse race with a side of feckless, often intentionally idiotic punditry, usually deliberately slanted in your preferred direction.
Instead of “The Red Team Candidate said X, but do they really mean it, can they actually get it done, and most importantly, will it help the majority of Americans?” we get “The Red Team Candidate said X, so what does that mean for The Blue Team’s campaign, how will the Blue Team respond, and now let’s cut to 8 random talking heads for their red-faced ranting on these and other mostly irrelevant questions.”
This is not a subtle difference, but it’s one that many casual observers of American politics fail to appreciate, so ingrained is the partisan combat frame in their preconceptions of what political coverage looks and sounds like.
This perverse system exists primarily to generate revenue rather than to empower or inform. As a consequence, controversy and fear are features rather than bugs. These outputs are of course completely unhelpful for educating voters about issues and vetting candidates’ relative levels of sincerity and competence, but they’re great for stoking conflict and pumping up ratings.
And Trump, always the self-promoting reality TV personality at heart, recognized this and took merciless advantage of it.
He realized years ago that, rather than paying to create ads and then buying expensive network air time to run them, he could just say crazy and/or inflammatory shit on a regular basis and the ratings chasers would cover it for free. Ad nauseam, on loop, with nary a thought for anything but their precious market share stats and the advertising dollars they drive.
In any other developed country, Trump’s various deranged pronouncements would either have been ignored completely or reported under headings that accurately characterize the tone and content of his words.
In America they were presented almost entirely without filter or context, and only rarely evaluated for veracity or lack thereof. Yes, even on the “real” news channels, and even by the most lauded and sincere of journalists. Sadly, and disappointingly, even the well-intentioned talking heads were mostly complicit in Trump’s rise to power.
As has been researched and reported elsewhere, this cycle-driving approach allowed Trump to rack up billions of dollars worth of free publicity during his extended presidential run—easily surpassing the aggregate paid and unpaid air time accrued by every other candidate in history.
This is what made him relevant early in the race and kept him relevant later on, and he could not have won without it.
On the one hand it seems dreadfully unfair, but on the other you kind of have to admire the guy. Every other candidate was working within the same system; he just worked it better than they did.
His talent for exploiting permissive systems is probably Trump’s greatest strength. It is unfortunate for the rest of us that he chooses to use it only for the most selfish and depraved of reasons.
Since any discussion of Trump’s media manipulation would be incomplete without a section on Twitter, it also bears mentioning that Trump’s use of Twitter as a line of direct communication to the American people (and especially his more technologically literate supporters) turned out to be a net asset, rather than the liability his critics were so sure it would prove to be. This has been addressed in detail by others, so I will not dwell on it other than to say that a) Trump was and is able to capitalize on Twitter’s unique features better than most other celebrities and all other politicians, and b) there is no reason that others can’t learn from his approach and turn it against him, both on an ongoing basis and in future election cycles.
Preying on fears and vulnerabilities
From the outset, the core of Trump’s carefully crafted message to the American public has been “I too am scared of black and brown people, and I will do my best to protect you from them.” Make America Great Again may as well have been Make America White Again, given the obvious bias and baggage the slogan has always carried with it. (I originally recorded this thought in 2018, and it has aged disappointingly well).
Never mind the plain truth that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than natural-born Americans, and never mind the equally obvious truth that the primary drivers of American job loss and transfer are technological progress, globalization, and automation.
And of course, pay no heed to the fact that Americans (especially white ones) are far more likely to be killed by a white American citizen with a gun (including themselves, it turns out) than they are to be victims of a terrorist or other violent attack by foreigners, dark-skinned or otherwise.
Emotions are not rational, and that’s kind of the point. Politicians, strategists, and marketers have used this to their advantage for centuries if not millennia.
In recent US history, Republicans’ racist dog whistles and coded “traditional values” language were targeted toward an older, whiter sub-segment of the population who grew up with ingrained racial biases and a general distrust of foreign peoples and cultures. Until 2016, the overriding presumption among the party elite was that explicit appeals to racism and overt discrimination on a broad national scale would backfire.
Trump proved this assumption dead wrong.
It turns out bigots know they are bigots and they don’t care if you know it too. They are enthusiastic about their intolerance rather than ashamed of it, and they’re not shy about expressing their hostility toward people who don’t share their skin color, first language, or religious beliefs.
It is true that we can’t expect everyone to agree all the time, and it is also true that some people do come by their biases more or less honestly. There will always be those who, due to a lack of exposure or a small number of highly negative personal experiences, continue to quietly hold unwarranted prejudice against entire groups while understanding in some way that it is wrong to do so.
But one of the most disheartening side-effects of Trump’s ascendancy has been the revelation that the putrid festering underbelly of American racial hatred is not only alive and well, but apparently still proud of it.
Unlike previous right-leaning figures making appeals to these people veiled in the language of cultural transformation or nostalgic remembrance, Trump just came right out and said that people who don’t look, speak, or worship like “us” are generally criminals or criminal-adjacent, and for that reason we should not treat them with compassion and understanding but rather with suspicion and contempt.
We may wish to be charitable and give Trump fans the benefit of the doubt, and to categorize their antagonism toward their non-white peers as an expression of the fear they feel thanks to decades of deliberate stoking by cynical politicians and their media puppets at Fox News, Sinclair, Breitbart and the like. But the American prerogatives of independence and personal freedom place the responsibility for such views and their accompanying behaviors squarely on the shoulders of those who hold and perpetrate them, respectively.
While many of these individuals are not “bad people” per se, Trump’s overt appeals to their worst demons serve to normalize views and actions that would otherwise be considered shameful and indecent, and create the permission structure for additional harmful actions to be taken toward those they perceive (and whom Trump enthusiastically condemns) as somehow scary, undeserving, or less-than.
This is certainly a distressing, but unfortunately not a surprising, development in the long saga of US in-group antipathy toward any group generally perceived as outside the prevailing ethnic or religious majority.
It is distressing because it represents a tangible shift in the scope of views and policy preferences that are seen as acceptable in non-partisan public settings (the ‘Overton Window’ for those who are unfamiliar).
Overt racism and hostility toward immigrants might have been shrugged off at the RNC Convention or on Fox News prime time shows, but they were generally regarded as unacceptably gauche in places where non-partisans were likely to be present or otherwise able to observe these views on display (fun fact: gauche means ‘left’ in French).
Trump is baiting us toward a place where this is no longer the case. And while it is fair and reasonable to lament the degradation of public discourse for its own sake, the far greater threat to the fabric of society comes from the knock-on effects of such degradation. Open hostility toward one’s fellows makes shouting matches, physical altercations, and other forms of spontaneous interpersonal conflict much more likely. Throwing a highly contagious virus into the mix doesn’t make things better, either.
The bright side
All of that said, there is, as always, a silver lining. The bigotry and naked aggression on display at public events and in the twittersphere are not the final layer of the onion. They are driven by the underlying vulnerabilities, felt by everyone to some extent but evidently by Trump and his supporters to a much greater one, that manifest when we sense something core to our identities being actively threatened.
And this is the real secret behind Trump’s seemingly unique ability to appeal to a certain swath of the population: although he would never admit it, and likely doesn’t even recognize this weakness in himself, in some ways he feels just as vulnerable as they do.
In his case, this feeling would appear to be unjustified; after all, he is a wealthy white man who wants for nothing in the material world. He runs an apparently profitable company, is commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet, and can deploy his and the nation’s resources to protect himself from any challenge or threat, save perhaps those of unanticipated physical violence or eventual electoral defeat.
So why would he feel vulnerable?
It’s simple. Despite his strident claims of exceptional intelligence, unparalleled negotiating savvy, and superior business management acumen, he has a gnawing, nagging sensation that none of it is actually true.
He sees others who have achieved the levels of wealth and success he believes he is entitled to, and because he can’t match their level of achievement or overcome the power of their raw intellect, he falls back on insulting them and complaining about how they are somehow treating him unfairly.
Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates don’t go on national TV to tell you what a good brain they have or what a very stable genius they are, because they are perfectly secure in their knowledge of their own intelligence.
Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg don’t tweet about how rich they are, because they know they’re rich, and so does everyone else, and they know they have nothing to prove.
Trump, on the other hand, is constantly shouting about how rich and smart he is. Because he isn’t particularly smart or particularly rich when compared against the smartest and richest people whom he erroneously considers his peers. Far from it. His wealth is largely inherited and his intelligence largely imagined.
(Incidentally, many of these smartest and richest Americans are actually foreign-born—look it up if you are so inclined.)
Trump is cunning and determined and ruthless in his way, and is by all accounts an extremely gifted salesman and self-promoter. But his long and dubious business career shows quite clearly that he is rarely able to make good on his promises. The shiny gold objects he so successfully suckers people into buying mostly turn to dust.
Trump Steaks, Trump Wine, Trump Magazine, Trump Shuttle, Trump University, Trump Diamonds, Trump Vodka, all the Trump Atlantic City hotels and casinos, the list goes on and on and on…all spectacular failures, and also examples of instances where Trump himself profited handsomely even as he fleeced contractors, bilked investors, and defaulted on debts to all manner of financial institutions. (The Diamonds one is fake but I bet you didn’t know that til you read this sentence–John Oliver where you at).
Trump’s disastrous Atlantic City boondoggles and resulting bankruptcies alone caused his company’s investors to lose more than $1.5 billion and torpedoed an assortment of regional small businesses. But Trump still walked away the richer for it because he had structured his organization in such a way that he got paid even if his investors got wiped out.
Plus, as a bonus, because he failed so spectacularly, losing nearly a billion dollars in a single year, he got to avoid paying any federal taxes at all for years and years afterwards. Smart? Sure, if the alternative is having to pay taxes like everyone else. Admirable, patriotic, or praiseworthy? No. This is not the behavior of a leader or a talented executive or a “persuader,” as his more clever apologists would have you believe. This is the behavior of a con man and a thief.
The simple truth that cuts most deeply against his claims of self-made grandeur is that Trump has achieved the majority of his wealth (the part he didn’t inherit, anyway) by lying, cheating, stealing, and screwing over everyone around him, with a smaller proportion accrued through shrewd real estate investment and various self-promotion ploys including his stint in reality TV.
This is a major reason why he doesn’t want anyone looking too closely at his finances, and continues to litigate aggressively against the release of his tax returns. (this, too, was written in 2018, and remains unfortunately true)
It is also a pattern that he has woven into his presidential administration. Just like his casino and hotel failures, his one major legislative victory, the “Trump Tax Cut” of 2017, was financed almost entirely by debt and primarily went to benefit himself and his rich friends rather than the people he promised to help.
Unfortunately for America and the world, the story of Trump’s business career, and now also of his presidency, is essentially a sordid tale of him running his gold-painted tugboat into a series of icebergs and then making off with the only lifeboat, laughing maniacally as the women and children go down with the ship.
The only comfort we can take from this sad, shameful chapter in our history is that, in November or some time thereafter, this reality will catch up to him, and he will eventually get what he deserves.
So do your part. Register to vote, and then get out there in November (or better yet, request and then return your mail-in ballots as far in advance as possible!) and kick his deplorable, deceitful ass to the curb.
God willing, with a little help from the faithful electorate, this greatest of all Trump cons will finally crumble, and Humpty Trumpty will have his fall.
