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Since the election of 2016, I’ve seen variations of statements of this sort: that Trump won because of mistakes by Obama, or that If Obama had done things differently, Trumpism wouldn’t have emerged. I respectfully disagree. /1
The first thing to remember is that Trump didn’t “win” the popular vote. He lost by 3 million to a flawed candidate who was treated incredibly unfairly by the media—and, yes, I’m looking at you, @nytimes. /2
Moreover, if not for voter suppression in many states, Clinton would have won the popular vote by significantly more and almost certainly would have won the electoral college as well. /3
But,more fundamentally, this assumes that the groundswell of support for Trump’s racist, anti-feminist,anti-immigrant, Islamophibic message didn’t have a large pre-existing audience./4
It also assumes, against everything we know about party polarization in our era, that significant numbers of Republicans were likely to vote against Trump, even though most of his message—tax cuts for the rich, anti abortion, anti climate change, anti ACA—are GOP boilerplate./5
I remember Republican eminence gris, James Baker, tell Morning Joe in June 2017 that he had voted for Trump because he was “a Republican and a conservative.” Most other establishment GOPers made the same calculation./6
According to many political science models, we should have expected a GOP victory in 2016. /7
More importantly, these claims don’t take full account of the conservative media landscape and the nature of the modern Republican Party, which put Obama on the defensive from the beginning of his presidency. /8
I remember walking by a large protest at the South Carolina state house about Obama just a few months after he took office. All the language was already in place on their placards: Obama was a socialist, a dangerous radical, unAmerican. /9
There is a sizable minority in this country that, aided by antidemocratic institutions and practices, has a lot of electoral power. Many of these people, abetted by right wing media and social media, feared the direction of the country and actively supported Trump’s worldview./10
Personally, I doubt whether different policy by the Fed, as much as that would’ve been a good thing, led most of these people to support Trump. They were driven by what we might call the politics of preemptive backlash./11
