THE RISE AND FALL OF DONALD TRUMP – HOW, WHY AND WITH WHAT EFFECT

As the fallout from the defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden in the US presidential election 2020 subsided, on Tuesday 23 March 20021, The Sydney Institute conducted a Zoom meeting for members with former ABC foreign correspondent Zoe Daniel to reflect on what she had found in research for her book, written with colleague Roscoe Whalan, Greetings From Trumpland. In a comprehensive talk, Zoe Daniel outlined the fundamental shifts in US voters that produced the phenomenon of the more than 74 million Trump voters – a phenomenon Daniel believes is still to be reckoned with.

THE RISE AND FALL OF DONALD TRUMP – HOW, WHY AND WITH WHAT EFFECT

ZOE DANIEL

Hasn’t it been a quiet couple of months since Donald Trump’s uncurated megaphone – his Twitter feed – was muted?

For me, as someone who has followed his every word and action since around mid-2015 it’s been strange… especially having spent several years as a journalist beholden to the chaos theory that Donald Trump successfully employed… in which he controlled the US, and in many ways global conversation, switched the narrative at will, and kept everyone – from the press to politicians and people across the world – chasing his agenda rather than setting their own.

The President’s Twitter notifications buzzed at all hours of the day and cable news blared endless breaking news straps. The words “historic” and “unprecedented” were tossed around. Every morning I woke up – along with every journalist in the US – and rolled over to check my phone, in a ritual that would continue for 4 years – to see what Donald Trump had tweeted overnight. It created a relentless news cycle that could easily become all consuming.

As my colleague Roscoe Whalan and I write in our book, Greetings from Trumpland:

While administrations past tried to walk the delicate tightrope between Republican and Democrat, consensus politics have been thrown out the window under Donald Trump. Instead, a bulldozer approach to policy is applied, seemingly tailor-made to satisfy the voters who delivered him the White House. Trump’s unpredictable tweeting with follow up cable TV, has also become daily fodder for the global media, sucking us into the vortex of minute-by-minute thought bubbles. I feel like we’re just trying to keep up, rather than getting ahead of or even just understanding the broader narrative. This seems a deliberate strategy on the president’s part: the chaos enables him to control the conversation at all times and shift it at will, and everyone else becomes beholden to him.

Yet, when we looked beyond the headlines, we found countless Americans hungry for change – and desperate for the political upheaval Donald Trump promised. It was hard to believe “Trumpland” existed in big liberal cities like New York or Washington. But head just 50 or so kilometres out of D.C. and Trump yard signs and MAGA hats were everywhere.

By the time election night 2016 rolled around, standing in the Javtiz Center in New York City, despite polling that suggested otherwise – and the intent of Hillary Clinton’s event being held beneath a glass ceiling that she and most of the world thought she would metaphorically shatter – I was not at all surprised at Trump’s victory. Four years later, I was even more bullish on the continuation of the Trump Train. And, had you asked me at the start of 2020 who would win the November presidential election, I would have said that Trump was walking into a second term.

He was stopped only by a once in a century global pandemic, which exposed the flaws in his inability (or refusal) to accept expert opinion. As the world struggled with the deadly COVID-19 virus, America struggled more. And the veneer of his tough talking, laissez faire, “America First” approach was peeled back.

COVID was a fight that couldn’t be eliminated with the bluster of a couple of tweets (as hard as he tried). Instead, it was a challenge that required a deft touch: navigating the emerging scientific facts, leadership, cultivating trust in government (at a state and federal level) and leaning on the good will of the American people. In other words, it required tools from a toolkit that the President – who had in many ways relied on the reverse tactics – had never carried.

In this Trump fell victim to the chaotic administration that he had built and the conspiracy theories that he had so expertly utilised to undermine trust and erode truth, creating an era where facts are now a matter of opinion. But COVID is not fake news, and nor is the fact that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. – although many of his supporters continue to believe the election was stolen.

In our book, we seek to explore how and why Donald Trump got elected, who his supporters are and why they’ve stuck with him in spite of, or perhaps because of, his unorthodox behaviour. They enabled a president who exploded norms, shifted boundaries, eroded civility, changed entrenched policies and protocols and in turn both undermined traditional democratic institutions and legitimised outliers.

What was the appeal of this renegade, anti-establishment candidate, this anti-politician, this arch populist? And what is Trump’s legacy? What are the ramifications of all that norm shattering and boundary shifting?

We write:

Donald Trump came to office with a clear platform.

In many respects, he delivered what he promised. He governed for his voters, not for the nation.

He tore up free trade deals. He stood up to China.

He picked coal over climate.  He delivered tax cuts to the wealthiest citizens.

He made slow progress on building a wall.

He enforced a “Muslim ban”. He made NATO allies increase their contributions to the alliance.

He reshaped the courts.

He also had disasters and failures – on healthcare reform, in manufacturing job creation, by separating migrant children from their parents, by fanning racial division, and by his catastrophic handling of the pandemic, with its associated economic crisis.

He renounced political correctness. He was blunt. He was brash. He was offensive and aggressive. He was himself, anti-politician, the disruptor. And although he did much of this with the diplomacy and deft touch of a bulldozer, he did try to fulfil his promises, to tick his boxes, in return for what he craves: legitimacy and approval.

Trump came to office with all the baggage of his life to that point: the dodgy business deals, the tax avoidance, the grotesque statements about women, the bullying, the name calling, the blurred lines between what is right and what is decent.

America elected him as president. And in 2020 more than 74 million Americans tried to keep him there. President-elect Joe Biden assumes office with a hefty clean-up ahead merely to restore the status quo.

“What is our mandate?” Biden asked during his victory speech to the nation. “I believe it is this: Americans have called on us to marshal the forces of decency and the forces of fairness. To marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.”

But is that enough for a nation of strivers? Is it enough for those left-wing Democrats seeking a more radical agenda? Is it enough for the independent voters of America who were fed up with Donald Trump and want a return to normalcy, but also progress?

Decency and humility will not repair the economy, nor will they bring jobs back to the working class, nor fill the hip pocket of the ordinary American. That’s why people turned Trumpward in the first place. For them, Joe Biden represents the establishment politics they rejected. Biden is the antithesis of Donald Trump in many ways: normal versus norm-shattering, selfless rather than self-centred, a lifelong politician replacing a political novice, stability over predictability.

Donald Trump turned politics into entertainment – channeling “appointment television” that made him famous as the boss in The Apprentice. He chose ratings over a rule-based order; combat over consensus. In Joe Biden, politics returns to something resembling the norm.

The nation has now chosen a centrist Mr Nice Guy who will attempt to bring Americans back to the middle so they can shake hands across the divide. But first, he will have to shift them out of their corners. And he inherits a country reeling from a once-in-a-century pandemic and an economy in tatters.

If he succeeds in pulling America out of its death spiral, President Biden, the oldest man to sit in the Oval Office, will have performed a mammoth task. And reform won’t be easy: a split Senate and a conservative Supreme Court wait in the wings to stall progress to the left.

Biden is a circuit breaker to four years of degradation and acrimony among Americans. For once, love has trumped hate. But America needs more than that to heal a divided nation. And if Biden fails, the forgotten men and women of Trumpland will rise again.”

With the cartoonish Trump with his famously quiffed hair and orange skin out of the spotlight – it’s the faces of those men and women whoM I met along the way that stand out to me most. While Hillary was attracting maybe a couple of hundred people to events in high school basketball courts, Trump was filling entire stadiums with people queueing for blocks often in rain and snow.

Each time I did a trip I would return to the office and discuss with Roscoe that it appeared that Trump had a very real chance of winning the election – and yet the polls continued to point in Hillary’s favour.

It’s also perhaps forgotten now, just how much resistance there was towards Trump even winning the nomination from within the GOP in those early days of 2016. “History is written by the victors” is true of Trump’s political success – and those who after were desperate to hitch their wagon to it – including many that tried to stop it before momentum grew too great.

An entire movement of moderate Republicans known as Never Trumpers mobiliSed against him. Even those who are now firm allies – Senator Lindsey Graham comes to mind – spoke out against him over xenophobic positions on immigration to his language about women. Mostly, they eventually fell into line. Even Ted Cruz, who refused to endorse him after his wife and father were deeply insulted by Trump and was booed off the stage at the RNC, eventually did back him.

As he dominated the news, especially via wall-to-wall cable TV coverage, they realised he was their ticket to the White House. And a possible model for political success, leveraging outrage and outcry for political gain.

In Trump, the Republican Party bent to the cult of personality. They realised he could win. And while Trump needed the GOP for legitimacy; they in turn needed him to govern. It’s a mutual dependency – and an unlikely arrangement – that played out initially with a great deal of tension, but with an alarming ease as the years of his administration played out. A reminder of how easily generations of normalcy and status quo can be steamrolled.

The question now is who needs the other more?

In part, the book is an exploration of our travels around America – I went to about 44 states in my time as US bureau chief – but it’s also an exploration of the hearts and minds of Americans, especially those who call themselves the ‘forgotten people’, who put Donald Trump in the White House – and tried to keep him there.

Donald Trump knew well how to shore up both his voting base and his international allies bestowing that legitimacy transactionally to get and keep support, at times leaving the left and moderate republicans aghast amid applause from his backers. And yet, most of Donald Trump’s heartland supporters are not the neo-Nazis and the alt-Right or the horned man who stormed the US Capitol on the 6 January 2021.

They are ordinary Americans disappointed with years of establishment politics, of being talked down to, talked over or not talked to at all. Some voted for Obama with a sense of hope and ended up with a sense of disappointment (after he too positioned himself as an outsider to shake up politics as usual when he successfully ran for President in 2008). Some were Republicans frustrated with their own party and the dug in politicians in DC. Others perhaps wouldn’t usually be motivated to vote at all.

In many ways, pitting Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton created the perfect storm – the anti-politician against the establishment candidate, and a woman to boot.

It’s contradictory in that Trump voters came together to back a brash New Yorker who got his start from his father, was several times bankrupt, has flip flopped politically, became a household name via reality TV, lived in a New York penthouse and yet became the “man of the people” who was going to change Washington.

Some would say that with the boundaries that he shifted and the norms that he exploded, the political trends that he fanned, the leadership behaviour that he modeled – that he changed the world. And many say, “enough” at the very mention of his name now – preferring to see the past four years as an aberration.

But to be relieved at his departure and to assume the Trump era is done is naïve. It ignores the long shadow Donald Trump will cast over America and politics at large for years to come, and it ignores the motivations of those who voted him in and their continuing sense of disconnection.

Joe Biden won the presidency with more votes than any president before him – but so too did Donald Trump. In 2020, Trump expanded his support by millions since 2016. Even after everything more people said, “sign me up for four more years of that” than before. And those 74 plus million people are not just going away.

Donald Trump succeeded, in part, because he co-opted America’s Republican Party and used a complicit media ecosystem to manipulate information, which was readily consumed by a legion of diehard followers. Some deride those followers as crazy but that is an easy out.

Three times the population of Australia cast their vote for Donald Trump last November. This critical mass cannot and should not be ignored.

I met many of them while crisscrossing America: real estate agents, bartenders, farmers and factory workers. College kids, elderly folk, Black Americans, Latinos and everything in between. To shrug off them as racists, sexists or stupid is to ignore the complexity of Trump’s base. It ignores the fact that he carried the flag of a political revolution: a rejection of establishment politics that appealed to many – and continues to do so – both in the United States and elsewhere, including Australia.

Take Dan Moore, a boilermaker from Ohio, who twice voted for Obama but even now staunchly supports Trump. He’s seen his town decimated by free trade deals, automation and a changing workforce. The Global Financial Crisis crippled regions like his and never recovered.

I first spoke to Dan in late 2016 before Trump was elected. He was like many Trump supporters I had met as we tried to unravel this political phenomenon: earnest, generous with his time and desperate to be understood. In Trump, he found a voice. “There’s a really rising sense of anger, frustration and disenfranchisement that nobody in Washington DC is listening,” he said at the time. We trudged through the site of a mothballed steel mill together. In his eyes, the reasons for rejecting more of the same were piled as high as the rubble.

By the time the 2020 election loomed, Dan Moore hadn’t picked up a pay cheque for two months. He’d been picketing the factory where he works in Western Pennsylvania with his workmates, seeking better pay and conditions. It allowed him a lot of time to think – and instead of being filled with regret and his political choices – his support for Trump had only hardened. “(Trump) resonated with a lot of blue-collar workers,” he said. “Finally, we have a president in the White House who’s listening and who’s willing to take action.

Those who swung the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favour, weighed down by disappointment and lacking optimism for the future, bought both his red “Make America Great Again” caps and his anti-politician persona. Putting America First he promised to bring back their jobs and their prosperity, by rolling back free trade and immigration.

Whether or not Trump fully succeeded, he tapped into the deep malaise among America’s working classes, where the future looks bleak not bright, and where the blame is laid on cheap central American labour, cheap goods from China and the “elites” in Washington. For the “forgotten people” who voted for Donald Trump America First became Me First.

Through the so-called “flyover states” like Western Pennsylvania and Ohio, Trump fanned anger for political gain, and delivered tax cuts that enabled business to employ more staff, crunched the entry of refugees and economic migrants and took it up to China on trade. Yet even before COVID-19 upended the world, and the election campaign, American manufacturing was still contracting.

With automation then accelerated due to the virus, many jobs will never return. His trade war made Chinese imports more expensive due to tariffs and American exports less competitive due to retaliatory action from overseas. The country, it appears, is more divided than ever.

There have been riots over race. White supremacists were validated by the President’s use of xenophobia as a political tool. Muslim Bans and walls were built to keep out foreigners. Anti-Semitic attacks rose during the Trump era. In 2021, truth is a nebulous term. Trust in the press has been eroded by the label “fake news”, not helped by the media taking sides with inflammatory and partisan commentary.

While Trump oversaw a period of great upheaval at home; his style of politics provided significant cover for populists abroad. Hard-right leaders like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungary have been enabled – and continued to dismantle the pillars of their own democracies under the cover of a compromised US President – while North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was validated by meetings with Donald Trump.

It’s irrelevant to his supporters – who cheer his rejection of international order. They see multilateralism as weakness – and another example of Americans propping the rest of the world up while they are left behind. Donald Trump knew it – and he’s rewarded with unwavering fealty from his supporters.

Back in 2016 and again in 2018 I met with farmers in Ohio, among them Tom Yuhasz, who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and peas. Back then, he told me that while TV reporters on the cable networks were talking the President down, his support ran deep. “He ain’t gonna be P.C.,” he observed. “I don’t care what he says. It’s what he does.”

Trump’s unorthodox manner is excused because his supporters see him as a man of action; it’s refreshing after years of the slow drip of incrementalism. Four years later, Tom’s support for the President had only deepened, despite the economic recession, the mismanagement of the pandemic and the dire death toll. He benefited from a Trump administration scheme that paid out billions of dollars in aid to farmers affected by tariffs. “The Chinese have stepped up and we’re starting to see some dividends from it,” he said from his farm in Ohio. “The prices of beans have gone up,” in many respects, that’s all that matters. “It’s really been good for farmers. There are a few out there disgruntled but they’re not as patriotic as they should be”.

Dan shares the sentiment. After voting for Obama, he again voted for Donald Trump. “I’m praying that he does [win]. He’s been the best president I’ve ever voted for,” Dan Moore said before voting for Trump a second time. “Looking back, I felt a connection with President Trump. I tend to get emotional at times over that,” he says.

In the Democrats, people like Dan Moore saw generations of political inertia. A working-class growing poorer. A job market growing smaller. And sneering elitism. For him, Joe Biden represented both years of establishment failures – but also fears of a lurch to the left especially on environmental policy.

The violent January insurrection at the US Capitol allowed Donald Trump’s supporters to be dismissed as crazies from the fringes of society. It was the ultimate “I told you so” for Never Trumpers. But regular people, like Dan, who weren’t there that day and don’t condone the actions of those that were, remain ever loyal to Trump. “I’m sorry that it turned out this way,” he told me on the penultimate day of Trump’s presidency, “I wanted four more years … I don’t feel like, myself, that I need to be deprogrammed, re-educated or that I’m a member of a cult,” he said. “You can’t look at every member who supported President Trump and say, ‘Well, this man is an extremist. He’s on the far right. He wants to overthrow the government. That’s nonsense”.

However, what happened at the Capitol was the result of Donald Trump’s deliberate seeding of the lie that the election process was corrupt. In many ways it was the culmination of his deliberate undermining of the truth over years. His subsequent refusal to concede has seeped into the psyche of many Americans and his messy departure has turbocharged the next iteration of a world that increasingly trades on disputed facts and fake news.

His supporters admit that had Trump conceded, they would’ve accepted the results too. But he didn’t. And so often it was what Donald Trump didn’t do – when faced with a choice to speak out, to lower the temperature of his supporters, to condemn white supremacy or to denounce violence – that mattered most.

He alone, through his position and his unique power over his supporters, had the capacity to stop the corrosion of society and the American institutions of democracy that upheld it. Instead, he strung them out, for personal gain and – with a crippling impact. His rise and subsequent fall are a warning that even the staunchest political machinery and democratic institutions are susceptible to decay. And binging on his brand of empty calorie TV, entertainment and politics can have a degenerative impact on society at large. His supporters remain active on social media – peddling in conspiracy theories about the election, and getting their information from more fringe, hyper partisan news sources such as One America News Network and Newsmax.

That’s part of Trump’s legacy that won’t be easy to reverse. The likes of NewsMax have found the post-Trump era difficult to navigate – and ratings have slipped since the manic days in the aftermath of the election.

However, it proved that the “Big Lie” around the election sells. Much like much of the Trump Administration did too. If anything, it has been a signal to Fox News and other partisan broadcasters that to continue to push outrage, opinion driven content over the truth is what’s profitable.

And 74 million Americans cannot be pushed aside.

Ignoring their gripes is politically fraught too. Leaders must understand why voters are increasingly looking to the margins for candidates to represent them. “We need a lot more outsiders,” Dan Moore told me. “Trump came in as an outsider and a disrupter and we see what happened.”

So how do you reunite a divided nation, how do you tone down the division, repair the partisanship and return to productive debate? Donald Trump’s supporters would argue that Democrats never accepted his victory and spent his entire presidency via the Russia probe, impeachment and other means trying to de-legitimise their votes.

Why – they say – are our votes as Trump supporters, any less valid than yours?

Many Democrats, now victorious over Trumpland would say that Trump supporters are “bad people” that they’re not worth talking to or dealing with because they paused their scruples for the sake of what they thought Trump could provide for them in terms of prosperity. This refusal to engage is dangerous.

Australia is not immune to Trump-style politics. We too have an increasingly outrage-driven, partisan media landscape, growing communities of conspiracy theorists on social media, and cheap point scoring politics that take a leaf out of the Trump Playbook.

For politics to move past Donald Trump, it first requires an acknowledgement that he is not a glitch and his supporters won’t return to regular political programming. Without this, Joe Biden’s victory may in fact be the aberration.