ISSF Policy Series: Trump’s Ascendancy as History
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
–G.K. ChestertonHow did this happen? Donald Trump–a real estate mogul with a television show and no political experience–is America’s forty-fifth president. “Those that did not foresee” his ascendancy “are going to find it hard to discipline themselves to a balanced projection of his forthcoming first term,” Jonathan Haslam declared in a recent essay The Significance of the Trump Presidency. I’m in that group; maybe you are too. Polls aside, no major newspaper or magazine endorsed Trump’s candidacy, and a big chunk of the Republican Party establishment actively resisted his nomination. The GOP’s previous standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, said Trump was a charlatan, and Speaker Paul Ryan kept the candidate at arm’s length throughout 2016. Neither George W. Bush nor George H.W. Bush supported Trump, and President Barack Obama campaigned against the GOP nominee while enjoying an approval rate that hovered near 60%. Trump’s victory was unexpected because it was improbable. For some reflections, Matt Taibbi, “Extracts from Insane Clown President” …
The 2016 presidential campaign, simultaneously the most thrilling and disgusting political event of our generation, proved to be a monstrous affirmation of the Derangement. The stunning rise of Donald Trump marked the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement.
Every mechanism our mighty oligarchy had devised to keep people like Trump out of power failed. This left the path to power wide open for anyone who understood, or sensed, the depth of the crippling weaknesses in our political infrastructure.
I’d struggled with this issue from the first time I was sent out by Rolling Stone to cover a campaign, in 2004. One of the first things that struck me was the way the candidates and the “traveling press” moved around the country in what was essentially a roving prison.
This particular forum, focused on the significance of Trump’s rise, has proffered an array of insights. Participants have already covered everything from the President’s rhetorical habits to his human rights record. Many have analyzed what Trump means to IR Theory. I’d like to contribute to the conversation by historicizing Trump’s ascendance, lingering on the riddle of how the 2016 election happened. I am not interested in revisiting the tit-for-tat of the presidential campaign; that seems sadomasochistic. This essay takes up a different challenge by considering the conditions that facilitated Trump’s election, and it explores how our methodological choices as scholars inform the stories we tell about the present.
Three metaphors frame the essay: a chessboard, a looking glass, and a wave. The first section explores the politics that preceded the 2016 election, and considers Trump’s victory as the unintended consequence of an earlier Republican strategy to subvert Obama’s presidency. By resisting Obama so comprehensively, GOP leaders cultivated the backlash that facilitated Trump’s emergence. The second section considers ideology, and contextualizes the president’s worldview as an outgrowth of the so-called culture wars. His attacks on multiculturalism, liberalism, and internationalism draw on a distinct, coherent narrative of U.S. history, which has arguably incubated within the conservative movement for decades. Finally, the essay’s third section considers the forty-fifth president in the context of American grand strategy. Some analysts have suggested that the 2016 election repudiated the logic of American world power, and Trump’s animosity toward the U.S. foreign policy establishment begs a reassessment of American power–and its future. Viewed together, these three metaphors provide complementary insights into Trump victory, but they gesture toward very different conclusions and lessons.
I should admit at the outset that I did not vote for Trump. Moreover, I am critical of the administration’s political style and policy goals. But this essay is not intended to be polemic against the President; it is an attempt to historicize the present.
Breaking the fever
The chessboard is a popular metaphor. Politicians invoke it because it suggests that everything happens for a reason. Powerbrokers play different roles and events reflect coherent plans that can be neatly reconstructed after the game ends. Historians use the chessboard metaphor because it makes the past seem rational, hierarchical, and orderly. Even better, while chess requires forethought, it can be very unpredictable. Under the right circumstances, a pawn can slip through a player’s defenses and become a queen.
How did Trump happen? For one answer we might study a single chess move from January 2009. According to Obama, he entered the White House believing that the United States’ economic crisis–prompted by the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry–had created the conditions for bipartisan cooperation. And cooperation had been the central premise of his 2008 campaign; “Yes We Can” was not a progressive call to arms but a promise to change America’s political culture. In interviews, Obama’s inner circle has been fairly explicit about what this meant. The president hoped that Republicans would design a stimulus bill with Democrats, which, in theory, would fulfill the promise of his famous 2004 address at the Democratic National Convention and reaffirm the premise that Democrats governed better than Republicans. “Probably the moment in which I realized that the Republican leadership intended to take a different tack was actually as we were shaping the stimulus bill,” Obama recalled in 2016.
[Read full article]
○ Obama on Race, Identity, and the Way Forward: ‘It’s What We Do More Than What We Say’
‘I’m in Fear for the White Man,’ Supporter Confesses
Race was not high on the list of concerns listed in analyses of Donald J. Trump’s victory, but the self-described only black reporter who covered Trump in the field wrote that, to her, the subject was omnipresent.
“As the only black reporter who covered Trump in the field (except for the last week of the election), I lived in a nebulous space,” Candace Smith, a reporter for ABC News, wrote in a “Reporter’s Notebook.” “I was a reporter and, by virtue, derided by crowds.”
“In this, my experience was not unique. Nearly all those who covered Trump have been booed, given the middle finger, told we are `s–.’ At rallies, people have called for us to be killed, along with Hillary Clinton. Social media was much worse. My Jewish colleagues were the recipients of horrifying memes that digitally placed them in gas chambers.”
[Source: The Only Black Reporter Covering Trump]
For heavens’ sake, why put blame for the Alt-Right at the doorstep of the Kremlin? Fess up!
