Trumpian Misconceptions

What Trump's Election Meant, What It Didn't, and Why Trumpism Doesn't Own the Future

Two moments define Donald Trump's rise to power.

March 2011: Trump initiated his long entanglement with birtherism, the false claim that President Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. In a March 17 interview on ABC's Good Morning America, he told Ashleigh Banfield: "If I ever got the nomination, if I ever decide to run, you may go back and interview people from my kindergarten, they'll remember me. Nobody ever comes forward. Nobody knows who he is until later in his life. It's very strange. The whole thing is very strange." Six days later, on The View, Trump asked Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters, "Why doesn't he show his birth certificate?" He added: "I wish he would because I think it's a terrible pall that's hanging over him. ... There's something on that birth certificate that he doesn't like."

The outbursts crystallized all that was wrong with Trump — and also how he would get to the White House. He was a shameless liar, and unapologetically demagogic. He would rally the angriest wing of the Republican Party by exploiting its racial and religious fears and prejudices.

June 10, 2014: In a Republican primary result almost no one expected, Eric Cantor, the House Republican majority leader, was ousted by a little-known college professor named Dave Brat. The routing of a thoroughly conservative Republican leader by the Tea Party, a movement Cantor himself had extolled, was a sign of how vulnerable traditional Republican politicians were to challenges from inside their party. No matter how much they tried to appease the GOP far right, more would be demanded of them. Brat's campaign was a prototype of what was to come.

He fiercely attacked Cantor as beholden to the party's moneyed interests and soft on immigration. "Eric is running on the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable principles," Brat told an audience of Tea Party supporters. "They want amnesty for illegal immigrants. They want them granted citizenship. And it's in the millions — 40 millions — coming in."

Brat, the prototype of a new nationalist, populist-sounding far right, explicitly denounced Cantor as a tool of Wall Street. "All the investment banks in the New York [sic] and D.C. — those guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, they went on Eric's Rolodex, and they are sending him big checks," Brat said. "They get cheap labor," he added of big business, "but everyone in the 7th district gets cheap wages."

John Judis, a journalist who closely followed the Tea Party and other populist movements, accurately noted at the time that Brat, a libertarian, would likely end up being far more business-friendly than he advertised himself in the campaign. But Judis added presciently that "in defeating Cantor, Brat echoed the age-old, darker, and more complicated themes of right-wing populism. These themes will continue to resonate, even if Brat abandons them."

They did, for Donald Trump. At the time, the front-running Republican presidential candidates did not make the connection. In 2016, this would prove to be politically fatal for Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and even Ted Cruz. In more moderate tones in the cases of Bush, Rubio, and, especially, Kasich, and with a harder edge in Cruz's, all would count on a mainstream conservative message to deliver them the party's nomination. Cantor might have warned them that a large contingent of the GOP rank and file was looking for something more incendiary.

* * *

Because Trump's rise to the presidency surprised nearly everyone (including the authors of this book and, it would appear from the evidence, Trump himself), he and his supporters have taken to scoffing at any and all analysts who, since his victory, have pointed to the underlying weakness of his position: his loss of the popular vote, his low favorability ratings throughout the campaign, and his record-low approval numbers on Inauguration Day. The idea seems to be that those who saw Trump as an unlikely president before Election Day are doomed to be wrong about everything they say now about the trouble he faces.

Humility is certainly a virtue, and it's fair to preach its benefits in the wake of the difficulties prognosticators confronted in 2016. But in fact, the predictions that Trump would never appeal to a majority of Americans were correct.

It is important to remember the basic facts of 2016. Trump's victory was a very close-run thing — a matter of 77,744 votes in three crucial states, almost certainly enabled by the intervention at the end of the campaign by then–FBI Director James Comey, who made Hillary Clinton's controversial use of email central to the dialogue in the final ten days before voting. Trump was also helped immensely by the interference of the Russian government and the heavy play throughout the fall of disclosures from hacked Democratic emails. There was also evidence that the two events overlapped — that Russian disinformation about the Obama Justice Department's handling of the email investigation may have prompted Comey's aggressively critical public comments about Clinton.

And it was no trivial matter that Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton by some 2.9 million ballots and ran nearly 11 million votes behind the combined Democratic, Libertarian, and Green totals. Trump received 62,984,824 votes, a gain of 2,051,167 over Mitt Romney's 2012 total. Nationwide, Clinton received 65,853,516 votes, just 62,419 fewer than Obama. A monumental shift in the nature of the nation's political leadership was enabled by relatively modest shifts in the electorate.

Trump's victory was less an endorsement of his program than a rejection of Clinton. Exit polling found that in the...