5

Trump: stop the world, I want to get off

As democracy is perfected, the office of president resembles, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folk of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken, 1920

Mencken will have to wait a little longer. The word ‘moron’ was only coined in 1912, originally as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about eight to twelve. It does not apply to Donald Trump, whose cognitive skills often seem fully adult, apart from a very short attention span: ignorance is not the same as stupidity.

Trump’s most startling defect is not intellectual but emotional. By the age of eight or ten, most children are already displaying a higher level of emotional maturity than the US president, and the vast majority of American adults certainly do. So how did he persuade them to elect him to the presidency, and what (if anything) does that tell us about the future of democracy in America?

The first thing to be said about Trump’s election victory in November 2016 is that it was not a landslide, or even a very big change in the usual voting patterns. Hillary Clinton got almost exactly the same number of votes in 2016 as Barack Obama got in 2012, and Donald Trump only got 2 million more than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Most people, clearly, were voting for the same party they always voted for, even if some of them were holding their noses: party played a bigger role than personality. And the Democratic candidate led the Republican in the popular vote in both elections, although Clinton’s lead (2.9 million) was just over half the size of Obama’s (5 million).

Trump won in the Electoral College (which is what really counts) by taking only three key states from the Democrats, all in the Rust Belt and all by extremely narrow margins: Michigan by 10,704 votes, Wisconsin by 31,006, and Pennsylvania by 67,416. No big deal: that’s how the electoral system works. But here’s a significant fact: in all three states, Bernie Sanders won more than half a million votes in the Democratic primary. A very large post-election poll revealed that 12 per cent of those who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primaries then voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election.1 They probably provided Trump’s margin of victory in all three key states.

We can safely assume that it was not racism or sexism that attracted them to Sanders. According to the poll data, it was not his opposition to free trade, either. All those factors may have contributed to Trump’s victory, but it wasn’t what ultimately sent these voters in his direction. What Sanders and Trump did have in common was an anti-establishment stance and an explicit commitment to deal with the widening income gap between the rich and the rest. Maybe Trump was lying about his intentions, but it was definitely a big part of both men’s sales pitch. So there’s one clue: it’s really about the economy, stupid — and especially about the growing inequalities in the economy.

The most telling statistics from the 2016 election are these. Hillary Clinton still won a narrow majority (between 51 and 53 per cent of the vote) among Americans earning less than $50,000 a year — but there was actually a 16-point net swing to the Republicans among those voters earning less than $30,000 a year, and a 6-point swing among those earning between $30,000 and $50,000 a year. (Clinton, on the other hand, benefited from a swing to the Democrats among those earning over $50,000 a year, and especially among those earning $100,000-plus.)2 Large numbers of working-class, habitually Democratic voters who had backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, presumably believing that he would do something to restore their severely eroded earnings, seem to have decided by 2016 that the Democrats were hopeless and that Trump was more likely to help them than Clinton.

However, we are so far dealing in policy proposals as if Trump were an ordinary candidate, and he manifestly wasn’t. He is a serial liar: Toronto Star journalist Daniel Dale tracked his rallies from 15 September to 8 November 2016, and recorded 560 false statements, an average of about twenty a day.3 During the election campaign, he repeatedly demanded that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, be jailed (‘Lock her up!’), he claimed that the election was being rigged against him, and he spouted casual racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. He has filed for bankruptcy six times on various of his businesses (though that’s not uncommon in the property-development trade, and especially in the casino business), and he has refused to reveal his tax returns (unprecedented for forty years for a major-party presidential candidate). He is vulgar and vain, and so narcissistic that his staff have discovered that the only way to get him to read all the way through a proposal or briefing paper is to insert his name into every paragraph. In fact, he is, in the words of Tony Schwartz, the man who ghost-wrote The Art of the Deal, the book that first brought Trump into the public eye, ‘a sociopath’:

It’s been horrifying. In the nearly 30 years since the book was published, the main thing I felt was ‘I want to be as far away from this man as I can’, but I didn’t feel I created Frankenstein, because he was a real estate developer and reality television star. Who cares? It wasn’t that consequential to the world.

I simply didn’t think that much about it until he decided to run for president and it became clear that this wasn’t going to just fade away, that he was actually in a position to win the nomination. That’s when I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve contributed to creating the public image of the man who is psychopathic and people don’t realise it.’ … He doesn’t have any core beliefs beyond his own aggrandisement and power.

Tony Schwartz, interview with The Observer, 16 October 2016

Schwartz is so guilt-stricken by his actions that he fears the Trump presidency could lead to martial law, the end of press freedom, and the risk of nuclear war, but there is an alternative way to view Donald Trump. People are rightly reluctant to compare him to Hitler. (Godwin’s law: the first person to mention Hitler or the Nazis in an internet debate automatically loses the argument.) Even comparisons with Benito Mussolini seem extreme, although Trump’s body language, his bombast, and above all his chin are reminiscent of the Italian fascist dictator. A less alarming hypothesis is that he’s the American Silvio Berlusconi.

The former Italian prime minister, who dominated that country’s politics for twenty years, was a businessman with a lot of legal problems — falsified tax returns, accounting irregularities, secret offshore companies — but he owned three of Italy’s six pre-cable television channels. It is widely believed that he originally sought political office mainly to make himself exempt from legal charges, and the product he was selling was simply himself. Unlike Trump, he did not hijack an existing political party; he just created his own, Forza Italia! (Go for it, Italy!) — but he then treated its members with the same contempt that Trump shows for old-school Republicans. Nevertheless, a large section of the public loved Berlusconi for his (often deliberate) ‘gaffes’, including frequent sexist, homophobic, and racist comments. And after the fact, like Trump, he often denied that he had made the comments at all, blaming a ‘hostile media’.

Like Trump, Berlusconi got his start in business as a property developer, although, unlike The Donald, he was not born into a rich family. He is far richer than Trump, but his political style was identical. He promised the world to the voters, with no idea how to deliver it and probably no intention to. He created a set of enemies whom he blamed for all his problems and setbacks — the media, the courts, the left, even politics as a whole — and presented himself as a plain-speaking, anti-establishment outsider who was a victim of ‘political correctness gone mad’. If he lost an election or looked like he was going to lose it, he started claiming fraud and ballot-box stuffing. And, like Trump, he really admired Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His prime ministerial career (four times in office) finally ended when he was convicted of tax fraud in 2013, and he would have gone to jail for four years if his age (over 75) had not allowed him to commute that to four hours a week of social service at an old people’s home.

If Trump is just another Berlusconi, the United States is in trouble, but not terminal trouble. Like Berlusconi, he has no credible economic strategy and hardly any discernible political strategy beyond self-promotion, so the American economy is unlikely to do any better under his stewardship than Italy’s did under Berlusconi. He is erratic and self-obsessed, but Berlusconi did not declare martial law, end press freedom, or start a war, and maybe Trump won’t either. On the other hand, he could be around politically for a long time because, like Berlusconi, he has discovered just the right way to appeal to a large and deeply disgruntled section of the electorate. But we cannot entirely dismiss the Mussolini hypothesis either.

Trump may be a disgrace as a human being, but the vast majority of the people who voted for him are not. So how on Earth did a man so spectacularly unqualified to hold the highest office in a democracy nearing its 250th anniversary gain the trust of so many decent people?

He’s playing you guys like a fiddle — the press — by saying outrageous things, and garnering attention. That’s his strategy — to dominate the news.

Republican candidate Jeb Bush, 29 November 2015

It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS … The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.

Les Moonves, chair of CBS television, 29 February 20164

Donald Trump received $5.6 billion in free ‘earned’ media coverage (not paid for, but ‘earned’ by making himself newsworthy) during the whole of his presidential campaign. This was more free coverage than was earned by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio combined.5 The more outrageous Trump’s remarks were, the more media attention he got. Since he boasted about it at the time, we can assume that this was a conscious strategy, so there is room for considerable doubt about how much he believes what he says. But he does say some remarkable things.

It is customary, and for some people extremely satisfying, to dwell upon Trump’s more bizarre comments and to treasure them as proof of how vile and stupid he is. That is not the task I am engaged upon here, but it will do no harm to make these readers happy by providing a short list of the most egregious ones. Think of it as an aide-memoire.

16 June 2015 — ‘They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.’ Trump on Mexican immigrants.

18 July 2015 — ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.’ About Senator John McCain, who was shot down over Vietnam and tortured during his six years as a prisoner-of-war.

7 August 2015 — ‘You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.’ About CNN host Megyn Kelly.

9 September 2015 — ‘Look at her face, would anyone vote for that?’ About Carly Fiorina, one of his rivals in the Republican primaries. (A majority of white American women voted for Trump.)

21 November 2015 — ‘I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.’ On his baseless accusation that American Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks.

23 November 2015 — ‘Whites killed by whites — 16 per cent, Whites killed by blacks — 82 per cent.’ Image tweeted by Trump. The true figures are: Whites killed by whites — 82 per cent. Whites killed by blacks — 15 per cent.

3 December 2015 — ‘I’m a negotiator like you folks … Is there anybody in this room that doesn’t negotiate deals? Probably more than any room I’ve ever spoken.’ On Jews as money-grubbing merchants — Trump to Republican Jewish Coalition board members.

18 December 2015 — ‘At least he’s a leader. You know, unlike what we have in this country.’ On Vladimir Putin.

23 January 2016 — ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ On the devotion of his supporters.

6 February 2016 — ‘I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.’ On torture.

3 March 2016 — ‘I guarantee you, there’s no problem.’ On the size of his penis.

30 March 2016 — ‘There has to be some form of punishment.’ On what should happen to women who have abortions if a future conservative-dominated Supreme Court outlaws them. (A majority of white American women still voted for him.)

17 April 2016 — ‘If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?’ Trump re-tweet of a tweet by a supporter.

13 June 2016 — ‘I called for a ban [on Muslims] after the San Bernardino attack, and was met with great scorn and anger. But now many are saying that I was right to do so.’ After the attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando by an Afghan-American.

9 August 2016 — ‘If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.’ On the likelihood of Hillary Clinton being assassinated by anti-gun control fanatics if she wins the presidency and nominates pro-gun control judges to the Supreme Court.

10 August 2016 — ‘He’s the founder of Isis, OK? He’s the founder. He founded Isis and I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.’ On Barack Obama.

7 October 2016 — ‘I’ve gotta use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.’ Trump speaking to Billy Bush in the Access Hollywood tape released by the Washington Post.

16 October 2016 — ‘The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Hillary Clinton — but also at many polling places — SAD.’ Trump’s poll numbers were falling at this point.

Okay, that’s enough. Have a quick shower, and let’s get back to the business at hand. How did this character persuade 62 million Americans to vote for him?

Start with this fact: only 15 per cent of the additional wealth that the US economy has generated since the late 1970s has gone to the workers. The other 85 per cent has boosted corporate income, so the gap between rich Americans and other Americans has widened substantially. Top executives make more in the United States than in other developed countries, but the American middle class is not keeping up. Median income in Canada, traditionally 10–20 per cent below the US figure, caught up with the US median income in 2010. Incomes in northern European countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom still trail slightly, but the gap is much less than it was even ten years ago. As for the poor, an American family at the 20th percentile of income distribution now makes much less money than a Canadian, Dutch, or Scandinavian family at the same percentile; forty years ago the reverse was true.6

There has been a massive shift in income distribution in the United States in the past thirty-five years. In the great post-Second World War boom between 1945 and 1980, the bottom 90 per cent of the US population received a steady 66 per cent of national income, and the growth model was a ‘virtuous circle’, as US economist Thomas Palley put it: ‘[P]roductivity growth … drove … wage growth, [which] fueled demand growth, which created full employment. Full employment then spurred investment, which increased productivity and supported further wage growth.’7 The top 10 per cent of the American population did very well, too, but they only took 33 per cent of the national income.

Those decades were not some lost American golden age of prosperity, tranquillity, and universal amity: they included the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, black uprisings in US cities, and the forced resignation of president Richard Nixon. But this was when car ownership in the United States went from one per five people in 1947 to one for every two people by 1980 because working-class jobs paid real money. (The population was growing, too, so car registrations quadrupled.)8 You may deplore the environmental damage done by all those cars, or indeed the sheer materialist greed of the whole process, but that kind of growth in consumption was seen as success by most people at the time, so they were pleased with the outcome.

And then the economic model changed.

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936

It was probably the major burst of inflation in the 1970s that gave the disciples of British economist Friedrich Hayek and American economist Milton Friedman (neither of them at all defunct) their chance to promote an alternative model to the Keynesian doctrines that had dominated the long boom. The doctrine they espoused was of particular interest to practical men, because it justified behaviour that would maximise their share of the economic pie, for the ‘neo-liberal’ model that took over during the Reagan expansion of the 1980s included four key policies. The goal of economic management henceforward would be controlling inflation, not maintaining full employment. Globalisation of the flows of capital, trade, and people was to be encouraged. Payments to shareholders should have priority over reinvestment in the business. And trade union power should be broken in order to allow more flexible ‘hire and fire’ labour markets. The benefits of these policies would allegedly be higher investment rates, higher productivity, higher growth rates, higher incomes for the rich, and an eventual trickle-down of wealth to the poor. The policies were duly implemented, but only one of those benefits actually arrived: higher incomes for the rich.

Investment rates did not rise. Relative to profits, they fell. Until the 1980s, dividend payments and share buybacks accounted for only 2 per cent of American Gross Domestic Product, while profits reinvested in growing businesses through expansion or new technologies accounted for about 4 per cent: twice as much. Now it is precisely the other way around: dividends and buybacks amount to 4 per cent of GDP, and investment to only 2 per cent.9

Probably as a result of this fall in investment, productivity growth also slowed. The Economic Policy Institute has calculated that during the thirty-one years between 1948 and 1979, non-farm labour productivity rose by 108.1 per cent. In the following thirty-four years, 1979–2013, under the new economic model, productivity grew by only 64.9 per cent.10 That’s a pretty impressive failure, but it pales by comparison to what happened to working-class incomes.

In the Good Old Days of 1948–1979, the incomes of ‘production/non-supervisory workers’ (as the US Census Bureau calls them) closely tracked the growth of productivity, growing by 93.4 per cent in constant dollars over the whole period. In those days, a rising tide lifted all boats. But in 1979–2013, under the Hayek–Friedman economic model inaugurated by president Ronald Reagan, working-class incomes became completely detached from productivity. Hourly-paid workers’ wages rose by only 8.6 per cent over the whole thirty-four years, while productivity grew eight times as fast. Somebody else reaped the rest of the benefit.11

Calculations of this sort are notoriously various and controversial, but George Monbiot, working with data gathered by the New York Times, came up with very similar estimates. According to Monbiot, between 1947 and 1979, US productivity rose by 119 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population (as defined by income level) rose by 122 per cent. Not bad. Whereas in the ‘trickle-down period’ of 1979–2009, he estimates productivity growth at 80 per cent — and observes that the incomes of the bottom fifth actually fell by 4 per cent.12 Yet another study observes that if median American household income had kept pace with productivity increases in the last forty years, as it did in the earlier period, it would now be $92,000 a year, rather than less than $50,000.13

And for what it’s worth, the trickle-down model also hurt US economic growth overall, down from an average of 3.8 per cent annually in the 1946–1979 period to only 2.7 per cent a year in 1981–2016.14 But it worked wonders for those at the top of the heap.

The share of national income going to the richest 1 per cent of Americans has doubled in the past thirty years to reach 20 per cent, a level last seen in the 1880s and 1890s, the so-called Gilded Age. America’s Gini coefficient, a widely used international measure of income inequality, is now the highest of any developed country.15 And a major factor in driving working-class incomes down (and destroying some jobs entirely) was free trade.

It was very unpopular to say this at the time. ‘Liberals, social democrats and moderate conservatives are on the same side in the great battles against religious fanatics, obscurantists, extreme environmentalists, fascists, Marxists and, of course, contemporary anti-globalisers,’ wrote Financial Times columnist and former World Bank economist Martin Wolf in his book Why Globalisation Works (2004). Globalisation probably would have worked reasonably well if all the countries in the world had been at more or less the same level of development, with roughly similar wage costs, but of course they weren’t. There were rich countries with relatively high wages (and high living costs, too), and many more poor countries where $3 a day would be regarded as a living wage.

The supporters of free trade, who at one time included almost the entire commentariat, argued that it offered these poor countries the opportunity to bootstrap themselves into the global middle class by exporting their products to the formerly closed markets of the rich countries, and it did work that way for China and a few countries in South-East Asia. They denied that the competition of these low-wage economies would drive down the incomes of working-class people in Western countries, but of course it did. For some of the larger companies in the West, it was an opportunity to reduce their costs by moving jobs abroad, or threatening to do so if the workers did not accept wage cuts. It’s not possible to quantify how much of the decline in middle- and working-class American incomes in the past thirty-five years was due to globalisation, because there were a number of other factors operating as well, but the victims certainly saw free trade as a large part of the problem, and that eventually had major political consequences.

There is a moral aspect to the trade debate, because trade with the richer countries really is one of the few ways that poor countries can work their way out of poverty, but the alternative to untrammelled free trade on the model dictated by free-market radicals is not no trade at all. It is trade done in a more selective way, with due concern for domestic interests that may be gored by bad choices — or compensation for those who are being gored, if you really want to do that deal. In other words, international trade as it was conducted under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) from 1947 to 1994. It consisted of lengthy rounds of international negotiation — seven in all — after which large numbers of specific tariffs were reduced or removed, if all the parties agreed. There was plenty of room for countries to opt out — and few instances where domestic wage rates took a major hit from an international trade deal. ‘GATT’s purpose was never to maximise free trade,’ wrote economist Dani Rodrik in 2010. ‘It was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations doing their own thing. In that respect the institution proved spectacularly successful.’16 Indeed it was: international trade grew at 7 per cent a year for over forty years under GATT, compared to about half that in the years since it was renamed the World Trade Organization and taken over by the free-marketeers.

It should be noted at this point that practically nobody supporting the neo-liberal economic project, from Hayek and Friedman down to the humblest aspiring millionaire, ever said to themselves: These policies will screw most of the population, and especially the poor, but who cares? They will make me richer. Or at least they never said it, or even thought it, in exactly those words. What happens in practice is that various not-yet-defunct economists lay out their wares, as they are supposed to do, offering analyses and prescriptions that are shaped by their intellects but also by their values and experiences. Then along come the customers (the public), and they choose the ideas that resonate most strongly with their values, experiences, and ambitions. So people who are poor or care a lot about the poor gravitate to Keynes, and people who are rich and care less about the poor are drawn to Hayek and Friedman. Self-interest is served, but not quite consciously in most cases.

Admirers of Ayn Rand can claim an exemption on the grounds that they are fully conscious of the implications of their choice, but for most neo-liberals the choice is wrapped in fictions such as the ‘iron laws of economics’ and rationalisations that suggest all this is really good for the poor. ‘We don’t want to turn the safety net [of the welfare state] into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency,’ explained former Republican vice-presidential candidate and current Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, in 2013. ‘That drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.’ Give them enough food stamps to see them through the whole month, and they’ll just lie around playing online games. Hunger (in modest doses) is the spur that will save them.

As time passed and evidence accumulated that income growth had stalled for the majority of Americans, and that many were down-shifting to minimum-wage jobs or falling out of the work-force entirely, it became harder to ignore the fact that the neo-liberal project was not working as promised. But it was still working for the well off and the rich, so one presumes that the more self-aware among them just hoped the poor wouldn’t notice. But they did, of course.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.17

Barack Obama as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, April 2008

Obama said that at a private fund-raiser in San Francisco, and he paid a high price in adverse publicity when his remarks were made public. What he said was quite true, but he didn’t get the votes of those small-town Pennsylvanians because he never really confronted the neo-liberal experiment head-on. Obama inherited the crash of 2008, and as president he saved the banks and the automobile industry from bankruptcy (much thanks he got from neo-liberal Republicans for his trouble), but he seemed not to grasp that these periodic asset bubbles and crashes were happening because wage growth had been stifled. The rich had much more money than before, but tended to put it into assets rather than consumption, so the only possible source of increased demand in the economy was debt: keep the interest rates at rock-bottom, and encourage everybody to borrow for increased consumption.

Obama, like Bill Clinton before him and Tony Blair in Britain, was a ‘triangulator’ who tried to steer a course (or a ‘Third Way’, as Blair put it) between the demands of neo-liberal doctrine and the needs of his own voters — but none of these sort-of-left-wing leaders questioned the doctrine itself. They had accepted that you could only push this equality thing so far before the rich rebelled, and used their vast political and media resources to shout it down. The best they could hope for was the halfway houses of democracies with huge practical differences of income and privilege that most of us live in today.

They were right in principle. The failed communist experiments had convinced most people that the social, political, and human cost of trying to make old-style absolute equality work is just too high. We’ll have to settle for what you might call ‘managed inequality’. That is politically viable because human beings in large modern democracies are more tolerant of inequality than hunter-gatherers: their basic needs are covered, they tend to associate mostly with people of the same economic and social status, and the reality of considerable economic inequality in the broader society is softened by the agreeable fiction of ‘equality of opportunity’. That is manifestly a fiction, however, and if the gulf between the rich and the rest gets too wide, the patience of the majority may run out. As you would expect if you know human beings, the breaking point is defined not by absolute levels of wealth but by disparities of wealth, and the patience ran out in 2016.

The people whom Obama so vividly described in his Pennsylvania comments quite rightly identified Hillary Clinton as the incarnation of neo-liberalism (even if they did not use that word). She pushed free-trade deals, she hobnobbed with bankers, she was part of the ‘establishment’ that exploited them, lied to them, and secretly despised them. They knew she saw them as irredeemable: ‘You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up,’ she said in New York two months before the election.18 You couldn’t have paid them to vote for her, although they might have voted for Bernie Sanders. And they would have voted for Donald Trump, no matter which party he was running for.

Donald Trump has been all over the political map in his long career, but from 2001 to 2008 he identified as a Democrat, and as late as 2010 more of his political donations went to Democrats than to Republicans.19 If he had chosen to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, he would certainly have had the support of most of those small-town Pennsylvanians and people like them all over the country. It is conceivable that he could have beaten Obama to the nomination, although many in the Democratic Party would have been appalled. But then, many Republicans were appalled when Trump won the presidential nomination for their party eight years later. It made no difference. And if he had won the Democratic nomination, it is entirely possible that he could have won the 2008 election.

Donald Trump is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. He is the populist voice of the disappointed and frustrated ‘angry white men’ of both sexes in the United States. He said so himself in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination: ‘I am your voice.’ By themselves they were not numerous enough to give him political victory, but he could have taken over either of America’s main political parties and combined its habitual supporters with his own devoted followers to win the presidency.

I do think that when you combine that demographic change [white people ceasing to be an absolute majority of the American population] with all the economic stresses that people have been going through because of the financial crisis, because of technology, because of globalization, the fact that wages and incomes have been flatlining for some time, and that particularly blue-collar men have had a lot of trouble in this new economy, where they are no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory and able to support their families on a single paycheck — you combine those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear. Some of it justified, but just misdirected. I think somebody like Mr. Trump is taking advantage of that. That’s what he’s exploiting during the course of his campaign.

President Barack Obama, 21 December 201520

Every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the Molotov cocktail they have been waiting for, the human hand grenade they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them … Trump’s election is going to be the biggest ‘fuck you’ ever recorded in human history.

Michael Moore, 10 November 201621

But as Michael Moore also remarked, it is not wise to use the vote as an anger-management tool.

Donald Trump is in the White House for four years, or maybe for eight. That is not to be excluded: the vehemence and near-unanimity with which the mainstream American media denounce him just proves to his core supporters that he is their champion against the ‘establishment’. What we do not yet know (and probably he doesn’t either) is whether he will turn out to be a Berlusconi or a Mussolini.

Conventional wisdom says that Trump cannot defy the US constitution and assume supreme power himself. The constitution is too strong and too deeply embedded in American consciousness for Trump to trample on the division of powers and get away with it, although he is clearly impatient with the restrictions it places on him. Congress, including even Republican senators and representatives, would resist strongly, the courts would condemn his actions, and the majority of the public would remember its democratic ideals and refuse to accept it.

On the other hand, Trump’s ambition is boundless (if rather unfocussed), and his narcissism is such that he would not be daunted by the prospect of supreme power: ‘I alone will solve (the terrorist problem) — and fast!,’ he tweeted after the Brussels attacks in March 2016. Three months later, he said, ‘I alone can fix it’ (about the whole system this time) at the Republican National Convention. This is not a man who doubts his abilities — and Executive Directive 51 is still in effect. This ‘homeland security–national security presidential directive’, posted on the White House website by George W. Bush’s administration without comment on 9 May 2007, claims that the president has the right to declare a ‘catastrophic emergency’, but does not specify who has the power to decide that it is over.

It defines a ‘catastrophic emergency’ as ‘any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy or government functions’. For the duration of the emergency, the president or his appointee would ‘coordinate’ the efforts of the executive branch with those of the legislative and judicial branches through a ‘Continuity Policy Coordination Committee’. This appears to centralise power in the president’s hands, although there are a number of classified ‘annexes’ that may constrain this. The directive was obviously written to deal with some extreme contingency such as a terrorist nuclear attack that wiped out much of the senior leadership of the US government, at a time when there were exaggerated fears of such an event, but the definition of a ‘catastrophic emergency’ is very broad, and is left to interpretation by the president.22

But why would President Trump want to take over everything? In the normal course of events he probably wouldn’t. Trump enjoys power, but he doesn’t enjoy the work that goes with it: ‘I thought being president would be easier than my old life,’ he lamented after a few months in the White House. But he could face demands for impeachment if the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government finds a smoking gun, and there is a significant possibility that senior Republicans might then pressure him to resign. (They would really much prefer to have Vice-President Mike Pence, a bona fide Republican, in the presidency.) Which way Trump would jump in that event is hard to predict.

It is also hard to predict what the popular reaction would be if an attempted Trump takeover was presented as a necessary but temporary suspension of normal freedoms to cope with some great threat or emergency. (This is the way that constitutional coups are normally justified in less fortunate countries.) Americans like to see themselves as the freedom-loving people par excellence, but the reality is rather more complex.

The World Values Survey of 2011 bluntly asked Americans if they approved of ‘having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections’ — and 34 per cent agreed that that was a good idea. Among those who had only a high school education, 42 per cent agreed. If you take these answers at face value, one-third of Americans would prefer a dictatorship to democracy.23 That is probably not an accurate representation of what Americans think at the moment, but it is generally agreed in the relevant academic circles that people’s authoritarian tendencies become more intense when the familiar social order is disrupted, or when there is an external threat to their welfare. The traditional social order has been well and truly disrupted in the United States in the past several decades, not only in economic terms but also in terms of the formerly high status of whites, and especially straight, white working-class males. And terrorism, while of little importance in reality, is regularly portrayed by the media as an existential threat.

There could be considerable support for Trump as a strongman, if he played his cards right. If this conclusion seems to conflict with the previous examination of our human heritage as the descendants of egalitarian hunter-gatherers, bear in mind that democracy is really the political expression of egalitarian values. If a society becomes too unequal, democracy is not working, and people may seek their equality elsewhere. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed some time ago, ‘Americans are so enamoured of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.’

If this entire discussion seems a trifle far-fetched, however, that is because it is. Donald Trump’s character is not the stuff of which dictators are made — unless, of course, he is secretly a highly disciplined person with a strong and clear political vision, cleverly hiding behind a facade of ignorance and fecklessness until his rendezvous with destiny finally arrives. That seems unlikely. He is much more likely to be a Berlusconi: what you see is what you get. In that case, the United States is in for a prolonged period of misgovernment, and none of the trends in politics and the economy that have delivered the country into this sorry state will be reversed in the near future. Indeed, they will probably get worse. But it takes a long time to ruin a country irretrievably, and there will be electoral opportunities to shorten the ordeal every two years.

What will be important after Trump is for the government to start rectifying the huge inequalities and the consequent disaffection of so many Americans that made his victory possible, and to do it very fast lest even worse befall the nation in another electoral cycle or two. This requires a clear understanding of how it all went wrong.

Is the neo-liberal order still the main problem, or is that already in decline? Is globalisation a real threat, or just a red herring? And how on Earth are we going to cope with automation when it really takes over?