Standoff, page 23
A lot of Americans shared his anger. Conservatives were infuriated that Barack Obama, the most liberal president we’ve ever had, got elected twice. Many working Americans were enraged that their jobs were disappearing in a globalized economy. A lot of white men felt that they had lost power with the rise of political correctness.
Even in bad times, Americans don’t usually elect angry candidates. They typically go for candidates who offer hope and optimism. Things were much worse in 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected. He promised better days ahead and a “New Deal” for the American people. In 1968 the country was gripped by an unpopular war, racial violence, and student protest. Richard Nixon said he would “bring us together.” In 1980, when we had an energy crisis, hyperinflation, and hostages in Iran, Ronald Reagan talked about “a shining city on a hill.” In 1992, when Americans were devastated by recession, Bill Clinton ran as “the man from Hope [Arkansas, his childhood home].” In 2008, when the country seemed to be teetering into another Great Depression, Barack Obama offered “hope” and “change”—not anger.
During the first presidential debate, Trump boasted, “I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament. I have a winning temperament.” What he really had was an angry temperament. Anger management is not something most voters want to be concerned about when they elect a president.
Trump’s signature attitude is defiance. In a country originally settled by runaways from authority, defiance of authority is a deeply ingrained tradition, even when the cause is hopeless. The movie Cool Hand Luke, released in 1967, celebrated that tradition. Defiance was the defining characteristic of the Trump campaign. Trump defied Washington insiders. He defied political correctness. He defied the media. He defied conventional wisdom. He defied common decency with his remarks about women. He defied George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney. He even defied the Pope!
But he still got elected.
The Un-Obama
In 2016, Donald Trump was the un-Obama. He was the first Republican candidate to try to disqualify Obama on the “birther” issue (charging, falsely, that Obama may not have been a native-born citizen). To Trump supporters, Obama was the ultimate educated snob; the candidate who was disdainful of hard-pressed small-town voters who “cling to guns and religion.”
President Obama insisted on facts. “We need to know all the facts,” he said after the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. Trump doesn’t deal in facts. The New York Times carried out a comprehensive analysis of every public statement made by Trump during one week in early December 2015. The conclusion? “Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media.”3 He continued to claim he’d seen “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering and celebrating after the 9/11 attacks, though there was no factual basis for the claim. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi reported that President Trump opened his first meeting with congressional leaders by saying, “You know, I won the popular vote.” (He lost by 2.9 million votes.)
Trump did nothing to hide his contempt for President Obama. “There is something going on with him that we don’t know about,” he said at a campaign rally.4 He insisted Obama wasn’t smart: “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” Unlike himself: “When you’re really, really smart like I am—” Trump said, adding, “it’s true, it’s true, it’s always been true.”5 What the two exhibit is different kinds of intelligence: book smarts versus money smarts. Guess which one Americans are more likely to value.
Obama is thoughtful, knowledgeable, and progressive—the ultimate NPR Democrat. The professor in chief. He’s always had trouble connecting with white working-class voters. He lost them to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries.
As the un-Obama candidate for president, Trump embodied change. It is hard to imagine anyone as different from Barack Obama as Donald Trump. Obama was cautious, deliberative, well informed, and politically correct. Trump is coarse, boastful, uninformed, and arrogant.
President Obama’s critics saw him as ineffectual. They looked at Washington and saw gridlock. Americans expect a leader to get things done. They don’t want to hear “Congress won’t give me what I want.” Tough leaders like Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan could get what they wanted out of Congress by twisting arms and turning on the charm.
Obama couldn’t stop ISIS from claiming a large swath of territory. He couldn’t do anything about Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and the Middle East. Most voters didn’t believe he could stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. He couldn’t bring well-paying jobs back to the United States. As for his signature achievement, health care reform, as of 2016, most Americans had never supported Obamacare.6 Even Democrats were frustrated, which helps explain Bernie Sanders. Obama couldn’t keep his pledge to shut down Guantanamo. He couldn’t deliver immigration reform or gun control.
There’s a reason Trump came across as someone who could get things done: he was not a politician. During the Indiana primary campaign, Ted Cruz was confronted by pro-Trump protesters. An angry young man pointed to Cruz and said, “You are the problem, politician. You are the problem.” With Trump, as with Ross Perot in 1992, supporters were looking for someone who could put politics aside.
After delivering a talk on politics, I was once asked by a member of the audience, “Why can’t we run government like a business? That way we could keep politics out of it.” I responded, “There is a reason why we can’t run government like a business. Business is not a democracy. If business were a democracy, it would look like government.” The questioner nodded thoughtfully and said, “I still think we should run government like a business.” I couldn’t change her mind. I could only offer the audience something to think about.
The conviction that drove the Ross Perot movement in 1992 endures: politics is the enemy of problem solving. “For years,” former president Bill Clinton once wrote, “politicians have treated our most vexing problems here, like crime and welfare and the budget deficit, as issues to be exploited, not problems to be solved.”7
Trump defined himself as a tough guy. He would ignore politics and just get the job done. It was not at all clear how, but his supporters didn’t care. He would just do it. It’s the reason why voters have been attracted to political outsiders such as General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ross Perot—and Trump. They can put politics aside and just fix what’s wrong.
President Trump’s first decisive move in foreign policy, the air strike on Syria, was seen by many observers as a move to establish a sharp contrast with his predecessor. In 2013, after the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was found to be using chemical weapons against his own people, President Obama tried and failed to persuade Congress to support a military strike in Syria. In 2017, when the Assad government carried out a horrifying—and televised—chemical weapons attack, President Trump didn’t bother going to Congress for authorization. Within days, he launched a retaliatory missile attack on a Syrian air base.
As noted in chapter 8, the attack appeared to signal a sudden reversal of candidate Trump’s foreign-policy views. Of course, Trump takes pride in being unpredictable. By authorizing the missile attack a few days after the Assad government’s atrocity, Trump sent an indisputable message: he was completely different from Barack Obama. “Our administration would never have gotten this done in forty-eight hours,” a senior official of the Obama administration told Politico. “It’s a complete indictment of Obama.”8
For all the talk of ideological polarization, 2016 doesn’t seem to fit the trend. Trump was not the first choice of conservatives, and Hillary Clinton was not the first choice of liberals. What would true ideological polarization look like? Ted Cruz versus Bernie Sanders. Trump doesn’t really have an ideology. What he believes in most of all is himself. That’s why many conservatives don’t trust him. Conservatives such as House Speaker Paul Ryan tried to push Trump to the right. Trump’s response: “This is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.”
As we noted in chapter 1, in 2016 the Trump movement and the conservative movement used each other. Trump used conservatives to legitimize his rise to power. Conservatives needed Trump in the White House to sign whatever legislation the Republican Congress passed—and shut up.
But he won’t shut up. Conservatives were shocked when the president equated Vladimir Putin’s murderous record with US policies. When an interviewer called Putin a murderer, Trump replied, “What, you think our country’s so innocent?” Imagine the reaction if Barack Obama had said that.
The Education Gap
In 2016 education became a key political marker. It marks the line between the Old America (generally less well educated) and the New America (more voters with college degrees). The education gap has been growing for some time. In 2012 Republican Mitt Romney carried noncollege educated whites by 25 points and whites with a college degree by 14. In 2016 Trump’s margin among noncollege whites increased to 39 points, while the vote was a near tie among college-educated whites (48 percent for Trump, 45 percent for Hillary Clinton).9
Hillary Clinton’s biggest problem was that she is a charter member of the political establishment. Voters who wanted change were reluctant to support her. She embodied the status quo. She was part of both the Obama administration and her husband’s administration. Elect Clinton, most voters believed, and nothing would change.
Bill Clinton tried his best to redefine his wife as the candidate of change. Speaking at the Democratic convention in July, he called Hillary “the best darn change maker I have ever met in my entire life.” It was a nice try, but Trump always had a stronger claim on the change issue, and Clinton was never in a good position to compete for it.
Trump speaks the language of the disgruntled white working class. He gleefully says “notsupposedtas”: things his supporters may believe but mainstream politicians are “not supposed to” say. Like foreign trade is a rip-off, and immigration is a threat, and torture is okay. “We won with poorly educated,” Trump said after the 2016 Nevada caucuses. “I love the poorly educated.”10 Meanwhile, the drift of educated voters away from the Republican Party has been continuing.
It’s well established that Trump won because of a surge of support among white rural and working-class voters. What’s less recognized is his weakness among affluent white suburban voters who used to be the Republican Party’s base. The chairman of the Harris County, Texas (Houston), Republican Party called 2016 “an anomaly of an election” because “a lot of traditional Republicans would not vote for Trump.”11 They were appalled, not just by the fact that Trump was so uninformed but also by his coarseness and vulgarity. Trump may be rich, but he has no class.
President Trump continues to appall educated voters. They’re certainly not proud of the president. They find him embarrassing and shameful. The Speaker of the British House of Commons opposed inviting Trump to address Parliament when the president makes a state visit to London, saying, “I feel very strongly that our opposition to racism and sexism and our support for equality before the law and an independent judiciary are hugely important considerations in the House of Commons.”12
An April 2017 Quinnipiac University poll showed the president with just 36 percent approval among college-educated whites. Fifty-nine percent said they were embarrassed to have Donald Trump as president.13 Trump is doing everything he can to drive away well-educated Americans. His disdain for facts—like his claim, with no evidence, that as many as five million fraudulent votes were cast for Clinton and his assertion that the press covers up news of terrorist attacks—generated alarm among well-informed Americans. One critic writing in the Washington Post called Trump a “bullshit artist”—someone for whom facts are irrelevant.14
A pattern has been developing in American politics, at least among nonminority voters. The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be a Republican, while the better educated you are, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. What happens to people who are wealthy and well educated? Sociologists call them “cross-pressured.” If they vote their economic interests, they’ll vote Republican (like Mitt Romney). If they vote their cultural values, they’ll vote Democratic (like Barack Obama). Values often prevail over interests, which is why Trump has problems with upscale voters.
As for why he does well with white working-class voters, a study by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Atlantic magazine found that “it was cultural anxiety that drove white working-class voters to Trump,” indicated by “feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment.” White working-class voters who were facing economic hardship were more likely to support Hillary Clinton.15
A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that views of higher education have taken on a strongly partisan cast. Among Democrats, 72 percent said that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country. Only half as many Republicans felt that way. The share of Republicans who believe colleges and universities are bad for the country jumped from 37 percent in 2015 to 58 percent in 2017.16
A conference of polling professionals in 2017 found that the education effect had a lot to do with polling problems in 2016. “The education issue . . . helps explain why the state polls fared so much worse than national polls,” the New York Times reported. “Most national polls were weighted by education, even as most state polls were not.” Why not? Most state polls interview only registered voters, and state-level data on the educational composition of registered voters are hard to come by. “In the past, it hardly mattered whether a political poll was weighted by education.” What was new in 2016 was “the importance of education to presidential vote choice.”17
Resentment of education has always been stronger than resentment of wealth in the United States. Especially since the educated elite has come to embrace liberal cultural values—values that conservatives denounce as political correctness. No one in government is less politically correct than Donald Trump. He claimed that some people failed to report suspicions about the San Bernardino terrorists because of concerns about racial profiling. “We have become so politically correct that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” Trump said. “We don’t know what we’re doing.”18
Trump is a whole lot wealthier than Mitt Romney, but his wealth never seemed to be an issue to his supporters. “He spends his own money,” one said. “He’s not going to have any lobbyist or any high zillionaires that he has to do favors for.”19 If he has made all that money and wants to use it to run for president, a lot of people think that means he’s committed to the public good.
Since the 1960s, educated white liberals have become a dominant force in the Democratic Party. After Trump took office, they exploded in rage. They have a deep commitment to diversity and inclusion. Trump has no respect for that commitment.
Younger, better-educated Americans tend to live in major metropolitan areas that are increasingly diverse. White working-class Americans have been fleeing those areas. Some because they can’t afford to live there, others because they want a different lifestyle. In 2014 Andrew Levison wrote in the New Republic, “Today two-thirds of white workers live in small towns, the urban fringes around metropolitan areas or rural areas; only a third remain in central cities or suburbs.”20
While Trump won the electoral college, Hillary Clinton carried the national popular vote by nearly three million. Her problem was where she got those votes. The Cook Political Report, an online newsletter, separated thirteen battleground states from states that were not competitive. Clinton won the noncompetitive states by more than 3.7 million votes.21 She piled up huge majorities in states where she didn’t need the extra votes. For example, Clinton carried California by 4.3 million votes.
The Trump campaign focused on the battleground states, and it paid off. He carried the thirteen swing states narrowly (by about 816,000 votes out of 46 million). The closeness of the vote didn’t matter as long as Trump got the electoral votes. When I gave a talk to a California audience after the 2016 election, a voter asked me what she and other California Democrats could do about that problem. My advice: “Have you considered moving to Michigan?”
Polarization Persists
In 2016 Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. There are two Republican establishments, and Trump beat both of them. One was the old Washington and Wall Street establishment. The other was the conservative counterestablishment. The story of the GOP since 1980 has been the increasing power of conservative activists. It started with the election of Ronald Reagan and culminated in the Tea Party revolt.
In 2016 the establishment candidate, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, was humiliated and driven out of the race by Trump. The Tea Party favorite, Ted Cruz, lasted longer than Bush. But Trump ended up stealing the Tea Party base of the GOP. The mainstream Republican establishment has always regarded the Tea Party with deep suspicion. After all, outlandish Tea Party candidates kept the GOP from winning a Senate majority in 2010: Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (“I’m not a witch”), Sharron Angle in Nevada (unemployed Americans are “spoiled”), Ken Buck in Colorado (ban all abortions, including those for victims of rape and incest).
The Tea Party was at war not just with Barack Obama and the Democrats but also with the mainstream Republican Party establishment, which it claims betrayed the conservative cause for the sake of governing. (Imagine that.) Antiestablishment conservatives have always nurtured a keen sense of betrayal. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy took on the Republican Party establishment for betraying the conservative cause. He saw Communist infiltration in Washington. Trump just sees stupidity (“Our leaders are stupid; they are stupid people”), as opposed to himself (“I’m, like, a really smart person”).
