You can’t look at Trump and Trumpism in isolation.
‘Trumpism’ — whether cult or movement — is borne out of many frustrations with our large, and complex, democratic-republic — some legitimate grievances, some due to unrealistic expectations — but dissatisfaction nonetheless.
However, and it’s a big 'however’, folks need to understand: there’s a big, huuuuge difference between being dissatisfied with Government, and manufacturing the conditions that cause the most unqualified people possible to be elevated into positions of political power within that Government.
There’s nothing that says citizen dissatisfaction with the operation of government — a nominal democracy, no less! — of the world’s richest, most powerful country, MUST lead to kakistocracy!
Yet, here we are, in our time, facing this scourge of lowest common denominator mediocrity receiving the public trust.
Everyone’s heard of the ‘hidden hand’ of the Markets, right? That phrase refers to the conditions set up between buyers and sellers, between supply and demand, within a society that has an exchange system to reduce the ‘friction’ of providing goods and services to anyone who can afford them. But you don’t actually see ‘a hand’ moving around anywhere. Rather the phrase is a euphemism for the activity of millions of people engaged in a process that encourage behaviors we call functional ‘Markets’.
Some might use the word ‘incentivize’ instead of ‘encourage’.
You have something people want? You’re incentivized to create more of that thing to benefit from other’s need for that thing. Or you need something you know someone else has and is willing to trade for: you’re incentivized to find and make that trade, or travel to that store to buy.
Well, there’s a ‘hidden hand’ in our electoral system as well, that too few Americans understand, or consider consequential (like my Dad) in the operation of that system, that — in my view — has brought American democracy to it’s knees, due to it’s abuse in the hands of an unscrupulous few that understand the power of the mechanism in question.
The ‘mechanism’ here, like the exchange system that enables market Capitalism, is known as Apportionment. It’s what every nation on Earth has to do in some form, a process usually described in a nation’s constitution, to know where it’s people are, and how they’re going to be represented in whatever government they have. The US constitution has that as well, residing in Art I, Sec 2, Clause 3
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned (ed. there’s the word) among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Apportionment, as a mechanism, is critical for a consensus-based government like the American republic, which divides the geography of where people live, first into states, which have permanent boundaries, and the states into districts of various kinds, which are not permanent. Why are districts not permanent? Because people move around. They come and go over the years and decades. A district without people is meaningless for the purpose of taxation and governance. That’s why the Constitution mandates a national census every ten years, also contained in Art I, Sec 2, Clause 3, known as the Enumeration Clause:
"The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
[ed. Interesting historical note, the English Civil War (1642-51), was partly fueled by a failed apportionment system, that affected representation in the British parliament, which created an entrenched elite that refused to give up (monarchical) power. Those boroughs that no longer contained people, yet had representation in Parliament, were known as ‘rotten boroughs’. One hundred and thirty years later, the Founding Fathers, drafting the American constitution, understood very well why they wanted it to contain specific language that mandated a constant reassessment of electoral districts, through the employment of a decennial Census.]
Those districts, which the practice of apportionment determines, are mandated to elect representatives (ie ‘politicians’) to both state and federal legislative bodies. In the US, each district is granted one (1) federal representative, and (in most, but not all states) one (1) state representative.
If those are the only rules regarding apportionment, it doesn’t take long for an unscrupulous person to realize that the control of district boundaries can determine who, or what, has Power in the state and federal legislature, almost without regard for the actual votes by citizens! Pack all your opponents into a couple of large districts, with one representative each, and divide (sometimes referred to as ‘cracking’) all your ‘friends’ into many small districts, also with one representative each, and a small minority of the electorate can masquerade as a legislative majority!
Essentially, with some minor limitations that aren’t necessary for the discussion here, that’s what has happened in key places in the United States today, and is at the root of both the frustration of the American electorate generally, and the cause for the incentivization to place supremely unqualified people into public office specifically.
[Why this phenomenon can occur here and not in other democracies is a topic for another discussion. Suffice to say, those younger democracies recognized the apportionment loophole in the US constitution and didn’t adopt the same apportionment rules in their constitutions.]
But, you may be asking, how does that get us Trump, a person who is in office the second time around with both the EC (Electoral College) and the popular vote, a national office not directly bound by any misrepresentation in districts?
Answer: It didn’t have to be Trump. It could’ve been anybody unscrupulous enough to recognize the type of people — the quality of people — that, by 2015, were begging for a ‘champion’ to lead their anti-government, anti-democratic, cohort in Congress, by then known as the congressional Freedom Caucus. They weren’t going to get that from the entrenched elite, steeped in the traditions of matching an outward probity, with an inward unscrupulousness. They wanted someone like them, loud and proud, and ready to represent their extremism. Trump just happened to be the person best positioned, at the right time, to take advantage of a situation that was manufactured 5 years earlier by Republican mega-donors who recognized, during the mediocrity of the 2nd Bush, Jr term, that the nation’s demographics were working against their anti-tax, anti-government, anti-democracy, inclinations.
For them, the persuasion of voters to accept their libertarian, anti-government principles was no longer going to cut it. Democrats had, despite their best efforts to the contrary, managed to keep Government working well enough to convince a growing plurality of voters that Democrats had better answers to keep the modern, post-industrial, American ship-of-state moving forward, even with built-in obstacles that made that effort harder than it should’ve been. They needed something different, and in 2006 they quietly hired an apportionment-specialist, Thomas Hofeller, a veteran of the redistricting battles that raged in the South in the late 1980’s between a Democratic congress and a Republican-controlled DOJ (under Bush, Sr) that wasn’t enforcing the Voting Rights Act adequately, to figure out what that would be.
And then, in 2008, came the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.
For the GOP mega-donors, their worst fears were realized. Not only had the Democrats won the presidency and Congress, they had managed to create a ‘movement coalition’ that threatened 30 years of work trying to denigrate and delegitimize the ‘regulatory state’ into oblivion. On top of that, by this point, the GOP party chairman, Michael Steele, was a Black man which, for the latent racism still present in the minds of too many powerful Americans, made him part of the ‘problem’ the GOP was facing.
Lucky for them, Thomas Hofeller had delivered on his promise to ‘change the game’, as they saw it. Modern data technology had met intention, fueled by an unscrupulous arrogance, that transcended any quaint notions of a ‘spirit of fairness’, Constitutional or otherwise. Hofeller’s plan was going to replace the persuasion of voters with the cheating of voters out of their proper representation. And it was going to do that before any voting had taken place!
What he gave them was REDMAP.
REDMAP, first introduced to the American public in the pages of the WSJ on March 4, 2010 (paywalled, sorry) with the subtitle “He who controls redistricting, controls Congress”, is the strategic, and weaponized, apportionment abuse (aka ‘gerrymandering’) of as many states as possible, designed to misrepresent American voters generally, and disenfranchise Democrats in particular. Currently, it has done so in approximately half the states in the Union, but most importantly in many of the so-called ‘battleground states’.
Something like 30% of the congressional Republican caucus are card-carrying Freedom Caucus members. Who knows what percentage they hold in state legislatures? What does that mean? That for most of the past 15 years, in Republican-controlled states, significant numbers of representatives could not win district elections in districts that were not designed for them to ‘win’. In a very real sense, that makes them all illegitimate representatives! Why? Because they weren’t chosen by voters before the voters were chosen to populate districts that their representatives couldn’t lose.
That’s ‘marking’ voters in the same manner a crooked casino marks cards in a crooked poker contest, to obtain an advantage that abuses the trust the players have that the contest is fair and not rigged. The house can’t lose if it doesn’t want to, for the sake of appearances. If you don’t know the cards are marked, you don’t know you’re being cheated out of your money.
If you don’t know you live in a gerrymandered state, you don’t understand why your representative can never win a primary, much less an election. Or, how your party, despite casting more votes in an election, never seems to be able to win a legislative majority.
The answer is: it’s rigged. Just like Republicans love to claim the Democrats are guilty of doing, with their typical projection onto others of what they’re already doing behind the scenes.
And with that rigging of districts, based on the apportionment abuse that is the national election strategy called REDMAP, the extremists that were kept away from public power, were handed the gift of entering the halls of public power, by the same people financing the entire American electoral system with private dollars, some of whom - by 2009 - decided the time had come when ‘their money’ gave them the right to write their own rules. Just like a crooked casino decides it likes making money more than it likes being perceived as operating a fair contest of games of chance. The GOP political elite went along with the donors, because they decided they liked ‘winning’ elections more than they cared about how they were winning elections, or the damage they would cause to America’s public institutions when vandals and extremists recognized no political boundary they wouldn’t cross to maintain their ill-gotten power.
Even going so far as to support — from the inside of government — the candidacy of the most unqualified candidate for President the nation has ever seen. Yes, there’s more that could be added about the nature of the media environment, that leverages and monetizes the rhetoric of extremist voices and opinion, and regurgitates that as propaganda, but that would make an already long essay even longer.
Suffice to say, without REDMAP, adopted in 2010 as the GOP national strategy to win back Congress from the Democrats after the Obama Wave, there would be no Freedom Caucus kamikaze’s in the state legislatures and Congress.
Without an extremist Freedom Caucus in congress and the states, to rally and bully the party leadership into submission with threats and violence, there would be no institutional support for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican convention.
Without the Republican nomination, there is no President Trump in 2016.
Without a president Trump in 2016, there’s no Stop The Steal, or Jan-6 insurrection, or 2024’s FightFightFight.
The question isn’t: How did America elect Donald Trump. But how are we not seeing that his institutional support, which fueled his rise, and continues in allowing the dismantling of American government, is MANUFACTURED?Trump gets away with breaking every rule and every norm, and suffering no consequences, because he can count on the political support of a manufactured constituency in Congress that we ignore at our peril. And that norm-breaking is boomeranging back on a society that’s looking around and saying “How did we get here?”
The msm isn’t going to give you any answers. I’ve been watching and waiting since March 4, 2010, the Day REDMAP was introduced. When the DNC was asked about REDMAP, about a week after the strategy was published in the WSJ, a spokesperson uttered these infamous words “Well, we don’t think it will amount to much.”.
Almost 15 years later, to the day, the FBI is literally being dismantled as an independent agency tasked with protecting the American people from “enemies of the Constitution, both foreign and domestic”, and a lawless American president is publicly talking about going to war to seize territory to the South (Panama) and to the East (Greenland).
That’s not bad luck. That’s a dereliction of our duty as citizens to protect our nation and our constitution, by mandating an understanding of how American democracy actually works, and the quality of representation necessary to keep it functioning as a legitimate expression of the Will of the People.