What Made Trump

What Made Trump May 5, 2016

Andrew Sullivan’s Trumpacalyptic essay in New York doesn’t persuade. The Constitutional system that Sullivan describes so well is more resilient than he thinks, and Trump more moderate, pragmatic, and changeable than he credits.

But Sullivan’s explanation of Trump’s rise is spot on. On the one hand, there are the ongoing political effects of the media revolution, which has left us all less dependent on elites for our view of the world. As Sullivan says, “Those who didn’t see him coming – or kept treating him as a joke – had not yet absorbed the precedents of Obama and Palin or the power of the new wide-open system to change the rules of the political game. Trump was as underrated for all of 2015 as Obama was in 2007 – and for the same reasons. He intuitively grasped the vanishing authority of American political and media elites.”

And Trump has spent a couple of decades in this new world, as a reality TV star: “Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, ‘You’re fired’” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.”

On the other hand, there is the anger of the white working class. Sullivan has played his own role in shaping what he describes as a “more diverse mainstream culture” but he recognizes that this has been met by “a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded.” As Sullivan says, “Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. . . . These working-class communities, already alienated, hear – how can they not? – the glib and easy dismissals of ‘white straight men’ as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them – all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities – and see themselves, in [Eric] Hoffer’s words, ‘disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.’” The Tea Party wasn’t reacting only to “the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women”; it was defending itself against “the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life.”

Put these together and you have a volatile mix. Our emotive hyperdemocratic polity has little power to restrain the anger of the marginalized and demonized. It’s no shock when “white straight men” gravitate toward a celebrity of the new media as their mouthpiece. And it’s no surprise that the “mainstream” elites (Sullivan self-confessedly among them) find this prospect so frightening and appalling.


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