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America is a “democracy” governed by antidemocratic institutions, a country where a growing progressive diverse majority is being governed by a shrinking conservative white minority.
The best summary of Trumpism is “billionaire-funded racial grievance politics.” It’s plutocracy in populist clothing.
It taught the politicians that shame was weakness, truth was unnecessary, and democracy was the enemy. Trump also got the Republican base hooked on a particularly high dosage of racial resentment.
Standing with Trump amid his racism, incompetence, and corruption became a requirement for membership in the Republican Party.
On one side, you have a Republican establishment that exists to serve the corporate titans and Wall Street barons that fund the party that opposed the debt ceiling confrontation. On the other side, you have a rabid base raised on right-wing red meat and fueled by racial paranoia.
The reckoning between the billionaire-loving elites and the racist base never happened, because America elected a racist billionaire.
In this union lies the core of Trumpism—billionaire-funded racial grievance politics. Trump united the billionaires and the bigots. That union will continue after he is gone because they need each other to maintain their political power.
ideological spectrum from Democratic Socialist37 to Republican lite.
Democrats and Republicans are not opposite sides of the same coin. The great asymmetry in American politics is that Democrats view political power as a means to an end, and Republicans view political power as an end in and of itself. In other words, Democrats want to do the right thing and Republicans want to win. Modern politics is a contest between two different philosophies. It’s “Yes We Can” versus “Because We Can.”
McConnell had a choice: work with the new president to try to save the American economy or exploit the crisis for partisan gain. He chose the latter. As Alec MacGillis reported in The Cynic,43 his biography of McConnell, the then Senate minority leader told his fellow Republicans, “We begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that.”
The Republican Party transitioned from an organization united by a conservative ideology into an incoherent coalition of conflicting interests bound together by an opposition to a changing America.
Trump’s election didn’t turn the Republican Party into a nihilistic, win-at-all-costs, political-racketeering scheme. The fact that the Republican Party is a nihilistic, win-at-all-costs, political-racketeering scheme is what led to the election of Trump.
We have to adapt to a new type of politics that fuses the hopeful idealism of Barack Obama with the realism that comes from the knowledge that someone like Trump can become president of the United States.
People desperately want to believe that Trump is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to twenty-first-century Republicanism.
In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House by appealing to the “silent majority” and executing a Southern strategy that courted white voters angry about desegregation.
The history is clear. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. He fits right into the trajectory of the Republican Party, especially when you consider the backlash and radicalization along racial lines that resulted from the election of a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. An openly racist Republican president isn’t an accident of history; it’s a product of that history.
Republican political success depends on making white people scared that nonwhite people will take their jobs, waste their taxpayer dollars, and commit crimes and terrorism in their community.
They clearly made a decision that being seen as racist was better politics than condemning racism.
While Democrats spend our time passing the best policy regardless of politics, the Republicans have spent years rigging the game to hold on to political power.
My advice would be to hit Trump where he is strong. Instead of trying to exploit Trump’s many and very manifest weaknesses, erode his strengths. Immigration and trade are Trump’s two best issues—they fire up his base and persuade just enough swing voters. They were key to his victory in 2016, but he is also vulnerable on those issues, if your campaign makes a strong, sustained argument.
Tell people why Trump is trying to scare them. Something like this may work:
President Trump is lying to you about immigration. He is trying to scare you, and he is trying to distract you. He doesn’t want you to know that he pays for his tax cut for the wealthy and Wall Street by cutting Medicare and making your health care more expensive. He doesn’t want you to know that he is letting corporations pollute your air and water and make your food and your kids’ toys less safe. And he is doing all of this while using his office to help his friends, punish his enemies, and enrich himself.
Trump talks tough on China, but much of the Trump-branded products including his hideous ties are made there. President Trump launched an incompetent trade war with China that cost American farmers and consumers billions. When he started losing, he tried to help farmers. But he screwed that up, too. Most of the money went to big corporations instead of family farms. The money for Trump’s corporate farm bailout was borrowed from—yes, you guessed it—China.
unifying message can seem naive in the polarized dystopia that is politics in the Trump age, but it’s actually your best path to victory.
All the data shows that Trump is taking credit for all the work that Obama did to put the economy back on track. Trump’s only real accomplishment was a tax cut that did nothing to help the economy but did make the rich a lot richer and add a trillion to the deficit.
A plan to give massive tax cuts to billionaires, companies that ship jobs overseas, and Wall Street banks and pay for it by cutting Medicare and jacking up health insurance premiums is an A+ answer to the question, How would a candidate commit political suicide most efficiently?
