How did a billionaire and reality TV star with no political experience and a campaign in a seeming state of constant chaos defeat one of the most experienced, well-known, and well-funded political dynasties in America (two dynasties if you include his defeat of Jeb Bush in the GOP primary)? Though there is no shortage of theories, including racism, sexism, and Russian interference, it is worth considering the possibility that the outcome of the election was predictable. Though stunning, the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency was decades in the making.
Three trends since the 1960s created the conditions for his triumph. First, a growing popular discontent with government, long evident in public opinion surveys, created a widespread distrust of established leaders and institutions. Second, America underwent the rise of “professional government.” Governing professionals are an elite built on merit through occupational accomplishment. They now dominate interest groups, the bureaucracy, courts, institutional presidency, and Congress. Many government professionals perceive little need to mobilize the public in the way parties did in previous eras. This has furthered the sense of disconnect among the public and created a self-reinforcing chain. Third, political parties and governing institutions are now polarized around rival teams of ideological, partisan elites. Democrats are increasingly uniformly progressive and Republicans uniformly conservative. The intense battles between these polarized teams often result in government gridlock.
The three trends are mutually reinforcing. Distant government professionals help to fuel popular discontent. Polarized political warfare among political activists and governmental officials and the gridlock it produces spurs popular disgust with the squabbling and empowers professional governmental employees when elected officials create polarized paralysis.
Recent decades have witnessed a collapse in confidence, or trust, in government and the rise of negative partisanship driven not by loyalty to party but rather opposition to the other party. A driving force behind both is voter anger. That anger produces an environment ripe for populist candidates as well as recurrent populist uprisings among the electorate. As such, it’s important to establish what each means.
Since the 1960s, trust in government has declined and remained at low levels. Along with declining party identification, low trust is an indicator of greater public disaffection with the political system. A widely studied measure of trust comes from the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies (NES). Since 1964, the NES has computed a “Trust Index” of responses to four questions: (1) How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right—just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time? (2) Do you think that people in government waste a lot of the money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don’t waste very much of it? (3) Would you say that government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people? (4) Do you think that quite a few of the people running the government are crooked, not very many are, or do you think hardly any of them are crooked?
The Trust Index score ranges from 0–100. A low score indicates a lack of trust while a higher score is indicative of greater public trust in government. In 1966 the Trust Index score was 61, but within a decade it fell to 30. Though there were occasional upticks in the score, it hovered near 30 for most of the 1970s until 2008 before falling to 17 in 2016.
What caused the collapse of the Trust Index score? Researchers have identified many possible explanations: economic difficulties, crime rates, child poverty, citizens’ evaluations of incumbents and institutions, political scandals and negative media coverage of politics. The Trust Index fell during decades that witnessed a divisive Vietnam War, a civil rights revolution, the impeachment of two presidents, a presidential resignation and pardon, severe recessions and stagflation, periods of high unemployment, and the rise of polarized politics.
Additionally, the rise of more “professionalism” among governing elites has contributed to a dissatisfied and unhappy public. Those in various professional occupations now dominate American government due to the rise in education levels since the 1950s and the need for informed policy experts to carry out the ever-growing responsibilities of government. Even at the state level, there has been an increase in the number of professional legislatures since the 1960s. Governing professionals are an elite built on merit through occupational accomplishment. They now populate interest groups, the bureaucracy, courts, the institutional presidency, and Congress.
Many governing professionals perceive little need to mobilize the public broadly the way political parties did in previous eras. Three examples illustrate this. First, candidates now narrowly target their appeals to likely voters. Second, unelected judges increasingly engage in policymaking behavior previously the province of elected legislatures. Third, the great growth in professional interest group activity since 1970 has produced a proliferation of elite advocacy strategies. In an era of professional advocacy, policymaking need not involve the successful channeling of mass preferences.
Changing behavior in national institutions transformed governance as well. Congressional incumbents’ electoral security improved considerablyduring the 1960s and 1970s and that security contributed to legislative professionalism. In 1960, the total individual staff for Representatives was 2,444 or an average of nearly 6 staff members per legislator. Comparable increases occurred in staff for Senators. Committee and subcommittee staff increased as well. Total committee staff numbered 394 in 1960 and grew to over 1,200 by 2005. By 1974 the number of staff had more than doubled to 5,109 or 12 staff members per legislator. In the Senate, committee staff rose from 433 in 1960 to 883 in 2005.
The total Congressional workforce, including support resources such as the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office, grew dramatically as well during this period. As a result of this growth, each Representative and Senator essentially runs a small business and relies on their staff to manage day-to-day responsibilities, analyze and draft legislation, help solve constituent problems, and work toward reelection.
For all the changes that took place in Congress there was a far greater transformation of the executive branch. The president sits atop an ever-thickening executive branch that reaches far beyond the president’s oval office operation to the Executive Office of the President (EOP), a series of presidential bureaucracies employing about four thousand people as well as roughly 2.5 million civilian employees who manage or staff the myriad federal agencies tasked with implementing federal laws and policies.
Closest to the president is the White House Office that includes top staff in charge of media relations, Congressional relations, policy planning and executive branch appointments. The president’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) employs about 529 people who perform crucial functions such as composing the annual budget proposal, improving management in the executive branch, recommending vetoes and “legislative clearance”—determining which policy ideas from the executive branch go to Congress as presidential proposals.
Another major EOP organization is the National Security Council that meets regularly to assess and manage security threats to the nation. Its statutory members include the president, vice president, and the secretaries of the departments of State, Defense, and Energy, along with other officials invited by the president. The head of the council’s staff, the National Security Adviser, is a top presidential aide who also attends all meetings of the council.
Beyond the EOP lie the fifteen departments of the president’s cabinet. The Department of Health and Human Services, with its administration of the massive Social Security (retirement income), Medicare (retiree health care), and Medicaid (health care for the poor), has the largest budget. The Department of Defense has the largest number of employees. The departments of Justice and Treasury deal with law enforcement and financial management respectively and are two of the oldest departments. The other departments have authority over areas of domestic policy: Veterans Affairs, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and Interior.
All told, the cabinet departments employ about two million civilian employees. Most do not work in Washington, DC, but in regional field offices spread throughout the United States. In the early and middle part of the twentieth century, many federal jobs were clerical and required few specialized skills. The federal government has retained some lower-skill jobs, but many positions now require high educational attainment and specialized training.
The changes that took place were not limited to those in government as demonstrated by the dramatic expansion in the number of Washington interest groups since 1960. The growth of interest groups since 1960 is recorded in the Encyclopedia of Associations. The number of interest groups, or associations grew from fewer than five thousand to slightly more than twenty-five thousand between 1955 and 2012.
One reason for their growing activities in Washington was the growth of government itself. In the 1960s, the “Great Society” programs of President Lyndon Johnson expanded government in a variety of ways. Medicare and Medicaid, passed in 1965, provided government health insurance for the elderly and poor. Congress increased Social Security benefits several times between 1960 and 1980. Under Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, new regulatory laws and new implementing agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration, further expanded the national government’s reach. New cabinet departments, like Housing and Urban Development, Education, and Energy arose to implement new domestic programs.
The number of annual pages in the Federal Register, the publication forum for new regulations, expanded from 14,479 in 1960 to 87,012 in 1980. Accompanying new laws, bureaucracies and regulations were groups seeking to shape the direction of governmental efforts. Professional associations—a diverse assemblage ranging from the National Science Teachers Association to the American Chiropractic Association—were at the forefront of this trend.
Today, a dizzying variety of advocacy organizations populates Washington, placing incessant demands upon government. Approximately six hundred American corporations pursue influence there, alongside two thousand trade associations engaged in similar activities. Trade associations—ranging from the Automobile Manufacturers Association to the National Association of Theatre Owners and Association for Dressings and Sauces (the condiment-making crowd)—are groups of businesses engaged in the same area of commerce who lobby for their common interests. Dozens of unions also have a permanent Washington presence, representing crafts (such as the United Brotherhood of Carpenters), industry (United Mine Workers), and in broad federations (American Federation of Labor—Congress of Industrial Organizations). In addition, hundreds of organizations pursue postmaterial agendas (such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Christian Coalition, and the Sierra Club).
These thousands of organizations hire a wide variety of professionals to further their advocacy efforts. Among the professions that have thrived in DC’s interest group world are lawyers, public relations specialists, policy researchers and analysts, and lobbyists. All these occupations have professional associations with governing boards, announced professional standards, education and training sessions, and membership programs. In addition to hiring professionals, many interest groups contract the services of specialized firms of professionals. In DC, professional lobbying firms employ about 150 former Members of Congress to push clients’ agendas before government. Many Washington law firms employ lawyers as lobbyists for clients. Public and governmental relations firms conduct lobbying and media campaigns on behalf of their clients.
A big, entrenched world of influence grew in response to a larger national government. Its demands have further maintained and expanded the reach of that government. America’s vast interest group establishment feeds a perception of self-dealing, corruption, and a rampant pursuit of self-interest.
Increasingly professional government and interest advocacy have made federal policymaking a process with far more complex interactions than in 1960. This has sorely taxed the operation of a legislature, executive, and judiciary operating under our separation of powers system. Coordination and compromise are essential to the successful operation of separate institutions that must share powers. Thicker government in our national institutions, coupled with a densely populated, active, and professional interest group world escalates the coordination and information costs of governing. The scale and complexity of information now generated in the process of governing is vastly larger than a half decade ago. A big complicating element is the diversifying professional competencies among governmental players and the surrounding interest group advocates. Diverse competencies contribute to divergent agendas among a large group of individuals and organizations affected by government actions.
One outcome of all this diversity and complexity is policy stasis. A landmark study of interest groups in Washington found that their large and diverse presence leads to durable policy stability. Lobbying in Washington is geared not toward the creation of new programs, but rather the adjustment or maintenance of existing programs. As a result, it is the defenders of the status quo who usually prevail in DC.1
The sole exception to stasis is when the president actively pushes for policy change, but this does not happen often. Presidents have crowdeddomestic and foreign agendas, many distractions, and limited time in office. They are far more likely to prevail when they are popular and then only with a few issues to which they devote inordinate time and energy. That means stasis rules most of the time.
Polarization and partisanship are central features of contemporary politics and promote popular discontent and voter anger and are covered in greater detail in the following chapter but require a brief introduction here. As the Democratic and Republican parties diverged ideologically and became more internally cohesive after the late 1960s, Congressional rules and procedures were reformed to give greater power to the majority party and to make it easier to ignore or sideline the minority party.
In the Senate, where unlimited debate has long been a hallmark of the institution, the number of votes needed to end a filibuster was lowered from two-thirds (sixty-seven) to three-fifths (sixty) in 1975. During the same time, the Speaker of the House gained control of the House Rules Committee. This meant the Speaker gained control of the terms of debate for legislation on the House floor. Increasingly, rules were imposed that severely restricted or even eliminated any opportunity to amend or even debate legislation.
There was a tenfold increase in the share of major legislation subject to restrictive rules between the 89th Congress in 1966 and the 110th in 2008. During the same period, the number of days in session and the number of committee and subcommittee meetings fell dramatically. Legislation was increasingly subject to change by party leadership outside the committee process. All these changes worked to minimize the influence and input of minority party members.
Relegated to the sidelines, minority party members sought ways to obstruct the process. Minority Republicans took advantage of recorded votes and the presence of television cameras in the House and Senate chambers by forcing Democrats in competitive districts to cast votes against politically popular amendments. In the Senate, minority Republicans and then minority Democrats made increasing use of the filibuster to derail legislation.2
These tactics, coupled with an ongoing decline of the number of members who bridged the ideological divide between the two parties, served to bolster a sense of mistrust and even animosity between the parties. This tendency is enhanced as the positions of the two parties become more divergent.3 The cause of this comes down to the consequences of loss. If the parties hold deep ideological differences they are likely to pursue fundamentally different policies. As such, the price of losing a legislative battle would be quite high.
The increasingly competitive nature of politics worked to diminish the opportunity for compromise. Why does increased competition decrease the likelihood of compromise? Consider the motivations of the minority party under a system where the majority party dominates and there is little chance of the minority party gaining control of the levers of government. Under such a system, the minority party gains little from obstruction and instead risks being shut out by the majority party. If, however, the minority party works to find common ground and acts as a constructive partner then there is at least the chance that some of their priorities may be given voice. Under a competitive system where the minority knows that it may regain control as early as the next election there is less motivation to seek common ground.
Instead, the minority seeks to delay and obstruct the majority party. In return, the majority party works to sideline the minority party. Why the lack of compromise? Neither side wants voters to view the other side as effective or legitimate. The result is often policy stasis. Our present system is defined by ever rising levels of professionalization, polarization, and electoral competition. Individually these features tend to result in policy stasis. Collectively they frustrate the voters as much as they frustrate the system and the level of voter frustration has become more obvious in our elections.
The size and complexity of national government and the multiplicity of demands brought before it require both liberals and conservatives to harness it for their ends rather than dramatically restructure or downsize it. The dream of the early professionalizers, the progressives—that national government becomes a continuing exercise in policy progress through innovation—is America’s twenty-first century reality.
So why doesn’t the public trust it? Why the popular discontent? Professional national government has brought us complexity, diversity, and stasis. Complexity makes it difficult for many in the public to understand just what national government is up to. Diversity ensures endless dispute about every public issue as groups ceaselessly jostle for advantage. Stasis signals that usually nothing much changes, that government is unresponsive in the face of many citizens’ individual needs, and the public dislikes the pointless political conflict they believe to be rampant in American politics today.4 The central irony here is that national politics is highly organized in a way to represent more interests than ever before. Its huge scale, however, makes it all seem a confusing blur to many citizens.
Many in the public are afraid of the self-dealing involved in the arcane negotiations among governing professionals. Policy talk, after all, is not normal discourse for most citizens. Combine this with a series of governmental failures and scandals since the 1960s and you have enduring public resistance to professional government. Whenever national difficulties mount, popular anger focuses on professional governing elites. Contrary to accepted opinion with regard to the current era, these popu-list uprisings are in fact an established aspect of the current American political system. We have a system not marked by unpredictability, but rather by an era in which the elections of 1974, 1980, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2016, and 2018—in which popular discontent led to significant electoral shifts—are recurrent features of a larger electoral pattern. Governmental failures spur popular uprisings.
In 1974 it was Nixon’s impeachment and a deepening recession; in 1980 it was stagflation and American hostages in Iran; 1994 witnessed hostility to fiscal deficits, expanding government, and scandals in Congress; in 2006 concerns over the Iraq war, a botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and Congressional corruption drove voters to the polls; in 2010 reaction to an expansive federal healthcare law and record federal spending, debt and deficits sparked the Tea Party Movement; in 2016 economic uncertainty and record low levels of trust in government elected a political outsider with no governing experience; and, in 2018 an unpopular tax reform bill and the rollback of environmental regulations bolstered a sense of a government working more for the wealthy and corporate interests. It remains to be seen how the public will react to impeachment proceedings in response to President Trump’s July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Zelensky to work with the US Attorney General as well as Trump’s personal attorney to investigate unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing by a potential political rival.
In 1974, 2006, and 2018 it was the Democrats who benefited from populist anger and in 1980, 1994, 2010, and 2016 it was the Republicans. It is important to understand the populism is not relegated to a single end of the ideological spectrum but rather appears at both ends. Populism can best be understood as a movement that views ordinary people as a noble group organized against self-serving and undemocratic elite opponents. Populism seeks to rally working- and middle-class voters against those elite interests. Unlike other political philosophies, populism is less about offering a pro-active agenda of policies and is instead focused on mobilizing the public in reaction against the status quo and politics as usual.
Such mobilization is more readily accomplished if trust in government is low. On the left, populist ire tends to focus on powerful and entrenched interests at the top such as corporations and governmental entities that support them. On the right, populist anger focuses on those at the top, but also those at the bottom, often viewing the middle and working class as being forgotten by a system that favors those at the top as well as many “undeserving” groups at the bottom such as the poor, racial or ethnic minorities, and immigrants.5
Recent years have witnessed multiple examples of populist uprisings in the United States and around the world. In nearly all cases, the populist surges were built upon the mobilization of disenchanted and angry voters, pushing back against the political establishment. Two movements demonstrate rather well the overlaps as well as distinctions between left-wing and right-wing populism. The Tea Party movement of 2009 began in response to the expansive spending and regulatory policies of the Obama administration. Surveys showed that Tea Party members tended to be white, older, and angry and usually voted Republican. Tea Party members were motivated by opposition to President Obama’s healthcare reform bill, what they viewed as excessive spending by a government that did not represent the people, and economic anxiety.6 Most members viewed a reduction in the size and influence of the federal government as their primary goal. The Tea Party movement helped deliver the House of Representatives to Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections and there is considerable overlap between those who supported the Tea Party movement and those who supported Trump in 2016.
The Occupy Wall Street movement emerged in late 2011 and quickly spread to major cities throughout the United States. Though more difficult to survey, interviews with Occupy Wall Street protesters revealed that most viewed the wealthy and corporate interests as serious threats to American prosperity. Protesters believed in a more expansive role for government in the taxation of wealth and the regulation of business. The vast majority supported the idea of free health care and forgiveness of all student debt.7 Though the Occupy Wall Street movement and protests faded away by the end of 2012, Bernie Sanders embraced much of the movement’s agenda in his 2016 and 2020 quests for the Democratic nomination for president.
Collectively, a decade that featured periods of high unemployment, low economic growth, rising levels of personal debt, and stagnant wage growth contributed to low public esteem of government, banks, and industry and greater popular distrust, discontent, and anger. This combination made the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump candidacies viable. On the left there was a growing sense that large corporations and monied interests were able to use their influence to manipulate government and on the right there was a belief that big government cared more about special interest than it did average citizens. It was an environment tailored for the populist messaging of Sanders and Trump.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were hardly the first politicians to harness and ride a wave of populism. Alabama Governor George Wallace, a well-known segregationist, sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1964, 1972, and 1976. In 1964 Wallace packaged his anti–civil rights message with attacks on a liberal press and distant Washington establishment. Wallace delivered fiery speeches at his rallies and it connected with and motivated the audience. Wallace often held rallies in areas where he knew he would attract protesters and demonstrators. These demonstrators often clashed with police and Wallace used the image of unruly protestors to convey to his supporters that such people were dangerous.
In 1972 Wallace repackaged his anti–civil rights rhetoric of prior campaigns with messaging targeting elites and “big government.” At rallies Wallace would tell the crowd that the government was run by elite liberals who had lost touch with the “little people.” Though Wallace had publicly disavowed his segregationist past, his rallies often played out much the same as they did in 1964. Crowds often sang “Dixie” and the Confederate Battle Flag was ubiquitous. Wallace would use the presence of protestors to convince his supporters of the importance of his fight. Wallace secured significant early primary wins only to have his candidacy cut short by an assassination attempt.
In 1992, billionaire Ross Perot campaigned for the presidency by railing against the Washington, DC, establishment. He described the nation’s capital as a “town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don’t ever accomplish anything.” Despite an erratic campaign in which Perot withdrew, all but endorsed the Democrat, reentered the race, and claimed that Republicans had tried to sabotage his daughter’s wedding, Perot went on to win 19 percent of the popular vote. Perot’s vote total is clear evidence of a significant group of disaffected voters ready to shake up the system.8 Though Perot hit upon many of the populist themes raised by Wallace, Perot did not tap into or exploit racial resentment as Wallace had. As an interesting side note, in the months prior to Perot’s death in the summer of 2019, his son wrote two checks of the maximum legal limit to Trump’s 2020 reelection.
Two years after the Perot insurgency, Republicans nationalized the 1994 midterm elections as a referendum on a corrupt Congress marred by scandal. Democrats made effective use of populist rhetoric in 2006 when they ran on a promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington—the same promise made by Donald Trump in 2016. Donald Trump’s victory (and the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary) were just the most recent manifestation of these populist uprisings driven by rising levels of voter anger with the political system. An Associated Press poll released in April 2016 found that nearly 80 percent of American adults were dissatisfied or angry with the federal government. Though few predicted that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency, the signs of a victory like his were there for years.
Like Wallace, Trump used his rallies to fire up his supporters. Trump often attracted protestors and Trump would call them out and even encourage his supporters in the audience to throw the protesters out. At one point Trump promised to pay the legal fees should one of his supporters punch a protester. Trump railed against liberals, the Washington establishment, and the press. And Trump painted a distorted picture of an America riven by crime and overrun by illegal immigrants. Trump made frequent references linking illegal immigration to the violent international criminal gang MS-13. Multiple studies conducted before and following the election found that racial resentment played a key role in Trump’s victory. In one study, racism was a greater predictor of support for Trump than was economic anxiety, ideology, or partisanship. This had not been the case for prior Republican nominees.9
Exit polling data support the populist uprising explanation for Mr. Trump’s victory. On Election Day 2016, fully 69 percent of voters were either dissatisfied with or angry at government; Mr. Trump won 58 percent of them. A plurality of voters, 48 percent, wanted the next president to be more conservative than Barack Obama; Mr. Trump won 83 percent of them. A clear plurality, 39 percent, said the quality that mattered most to them in a new president was that he/she can bring change; Mr. Trump won 83 percent of those voters. Fully half of all voters said government already does too much as opposed to too little, and Donald Trump won 73 percent of them.
Given her resume, Hillary Clinton had little choice but to be the establishment candidate. In the midst of that populist ire, she ran as the candidate of Mr. Obama’s third term. She wrapped herself in the cloak of the Obama agenda. She did all this in a year when most voters did not want the establishment to win. Unfortunately for Clinton, she struggled to tap into the left-wing populist anger that had propelled Sanders.
Among other issues from her past, revelations surfaced that Clinton had collected nearly $700,000 as compensation for three speeches delivered to Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is one of the largest investment banks in the world and was at the center of the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and received a $10 billion investment from the federal government as part of the 2008 economic bailout initiative, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. When transcripts of the speeches were leaked late in the 2016 campaign, selective excerpts portrayed Clinton as being too cozy with the very folks that many Sanders supporters opposed.
Neither candidate was viewed as honest or likable, and most voters were not happy with the choice presented them in 2016. In a rather telling finding, fully 60 percent of voters said Mr. Trump was not qualified to be president. Yet he still managed to win 20 percent of those folks; 2016 was an election based on discontent and frustration, not qualifications and temperament.
Though Ms. Clinton and her supporters have offered myriad explanations for her defeat—from Russian interference, Wikileaks, James Comey’s decision to reopen the investigation into Ms. Clinton’s email server, and misogyny—exit poll data suggests that Ms. Clinton lost for many of the same reasons that prior candidates have lost. On Election Day, over two-thirds of the electorate were either dissatisfied with or angry at the federal government. Nearly two-thirds of the electorate said that the American economy was in poor shape and that the country was headed in the wrong direction. Mr. Trump carried those voters by wide margins.
The size and scope of what happened in November 2016 points not necessarily to a realignment in American politics, or to a result influenced by nefarious forces, but to a systemic and recurring reaction by an upset and frustrated electorate. It was the manifestation of years, in fact decades, of rising levels of discontent by a growing number of disaffected voters. And into the midst of that discontent entered two immensely unpopular candidates for president.
One, a former senator, a former secretary of state, a former candidate for president, the spouse of a former president, and the heir apparent to an outgoing two-term president was the embodiment of the very political establishment that populist uprisings rail against. The other candidate channeled that voter anger and offered those angry voters a conduit through which to express their frustration—and won.
As stated in the opening pages of this work, we argue that the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency was decades in the making and three trends since the 1960s created the conditions for his triumph: (1) a growing popular discontent with government that produced widespread distrust of established leaders and institutions; (2) the rise of “professional government” that has furthered a sense of disconnect among the public; and (3) the rise of polarized political parties and governing institutions that often results in government gridlock. These trends reinforce each other as distant government professionals help to fuel popular discontent while polarized politics promotes gridlock and spurs popular discontent and a lack of trust. This opens the door for populist uprisings that seek “outsider” candidates who promise to end politics as usual. However, most of these candidates fail. Candidates like George Wallace, John Anderson, H. Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader fell far short of electoral success.
How did Donald Trump happen to leverage his outsider status into a 2016 electoral victory? Four factors propelled him into the White House. First, Trump’s long career as a public celebrity gave him an identity and “brand” widely known to the public and which generated massive free media coverage as a candidate. Second, Trump and his campaign ably used social media to further amplify his message. Third, decades of polarized political elites, governmental professionalism, and mounting popular discontent made an “outsider” message attractive to millions of angry and discontented voters in 2016. Fourth, Trump was blessed with a political opponent, Hillary Clinton, who represented the polarized and professional governing class, the establishment, that Trump rightly saw as a target ripe for his outsider message and demeanor. We tell this story in the following chapters.
Effective political parties are essential for a sound democracy but, as detailed in chapter 2, American parties have suffered important decline since the 1960s. Party deterioration is a major contributor to the polarization, professionalism, and popular discontent chronicled in chapter 1. We reveal the lengthy trend of party unpopularity in public opinion and the growing ideological polarization of the small group of citizens who are party activists. Parties now act as fundraisers for their candidates, but that important campaign finance role contributes to their unpopularity.
“Negative partisanship” and “affective polarization” by party identifiers motivated by distaste of rival partisans are now mighty contributors to polarization. This polarization has led to a substantial perception gap among the electorate with Democrats and Republicans holding fundamentally misleading and wrong impressions of each other. Collectively, negative partisanship, affective polarization, and the perception gap create a political environment ripe for our angry politics. Trump routinely taps into each to keep Republican ire focused on Democrats at times when he has suffered setbacks or is mired in controversy.
Trump’s career and exploits as a celebrity, covered in chapter 3, represent a broader trend of increasing celebrity power in national politics. We will present striking evidence of the ability of celebrities to influence contemporary opinion and draw examples from Trump’s rise to illustrate his clout with many in the public. Trump’s candidate and presidential communications strategies, including his effective use of “hero and villain” narratives in his speeches and tweets, reveal a new method for marshalling the resources of celebrity into a successful campaign for political office. However, his career as a celebrity with a manufactured persona did little to prepare him for the many legal and technical aspects of governing.
Trump’s 2016 breakthroughs are many: (1) his unconventional campaign organization and tactics, (2) his early popularity among Republicans in opinion polls, (3) his successful nomination campaign, and (4) his general election victory. In chapter 4 we explain the broader context for these breakthroughs by noting how popular discontent, professional government, “negative partisanship,” polarization and celebrity all contributed to these breakthroughs. Trump’s use of money, media, and messaging, including his potent policy narratives and hero and villain themes, in tandem with those broader systemic trends, produced the shock of his election. The impeachment inquiry begun in late 2019 may represent the ultimate test of the limits of Trump’s breakthrough.
Modern presidents have had many problems of “political capital”—amassing and retaining support from the public, Congress, and professional government. Trump has proven unconventional in governing as he wishes without great concern about his own political capital. His communication strategies garner him constant attention but have failed to increase his poll support despite a growing economy. Trump’s Congressional relations remain unpredictable and variable, often producing tempestuous conflict with the Democratically controlled House of Representatives. There is perhaps no greater example of this than the opening of an impeachment inquiry against Trump. Chapter 5 includes a presidential narrative that illustrates his idiosyncratic decision-making style. It’s idiosyncratic in that it’s impetuous, often unpredictable, at war with professional government, and often demonstrates limited attention to his problems of political capital. Trump’s agenda as well as a discussion of his policy successes and setbacks, at home and abroad, are presented in chapter 6.
How has Trump’s presidency reshaped polarization, professional government, popular discontent, and the role of celebrities in national politics? He has reinforced polarization, assaulted professional government, failed to abate popular discontent and may well have ushered in a new era of celebrity politics. Chapter 7 explores each of these impacts with an eye toward Trump’s own future. Will he emerge triumphant in a second term, leave office in disrepute or follow a middling course for the remainder of his presidency? The consequences for each of these three possible outcomes for the country’s political system receive concluding analysis.