Abstract
This chapter addresses the question of how a man so psychologically flawed and unfit for high office as Donald Trump could be elected as President of the United States. The author points to three factors. The first was the transformation of the Republican Party from a centre-right party used to brokering policy solutions with the Democrats to a far-right insurgent outlier intent on imposing its will through manipulation and confrontation. The second involved the two-pronged revolution in communications since the 1980s as a result of the abandonment of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ in 1987 and the emergence of the Internet. Third, these developments occurred in the context of the quite startling demographic and cultural changes: the non-white population is at an all-time high and traditional mores in sexual and social relations are being challenged as never before. The concomitant ascendancy of identity politics has set the scene for the assertion of white, nativist nationalism by those who felt abandoned by the Democrats; Trump was able to exploit these changes to appeal to this rising nativist sentiment, capture the nomination and eventually the presidency.
At least the members of the Know Nothing Party knew they knew nothing.
– P. J. O’Rourke
How the Hell Did This Happen? London, Grove Press, 2017, 2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
This applies to almost all the indicators that make up the left-right dimension including views on the general the role of government, entitlements, taxation, healthcare, abortion, gun control, capital punishment, the status of women, immigrants and ethnic and sexual minorities.
- 2.
Presumably in their efforts to remain balanced, Real Clear Politics gives equal coverage to articles in right-wing sites such as Townhall, American Greatness and the The Washington Times as it does to liberal sites like the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post and the Guardian. Yet these are not true equivalents given that the former are much further to the right than the latter are to the left. This is a good illustration of the ideological asymmetry characteristic of media opinion in the United States.
References
Abramowitz, A.I. 2018. The Great Realignment: Race, Party Transformation and the Rise of Donald Trump. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Bartels, L.M. 2018. Partisanship in the Trump Era. Vanderbilt University, Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
Calmes, J. 2015. They Don’t Give a Damn About Governing: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party. Harvard Kennedy School, Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy.
Carnes, N., and N. Lupu. 2017. It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Most Voters were Not Working Class. Washington Post, 5 June.
Cox, M. 2018. Understanding the Global Rise of Populism. www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/research/updates/populism.
Da Costa, P.N. 2018. Drastic Income Inequality Is Putting a Strain on America’s Social Safety Net. Business Insider, 27 March.
Dionne, E.J., Jr., N.J. Ornstein, and T.E. Mann. 2017. One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Disillusioned, The Desperate, and the Not Yet Deported. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Drutman, L., L. Diamond, and J. Goldman. 2018. Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism. Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. https://www.voterstudygroup.org/.
Faris, R., H. Roberts, and E. Zuckerman. 2017. Bretibart Led Right-wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda. Columbia Journalism Review, 3 March.
Fiorina, M. 2017. Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
Frum, D. 2018. Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. New York: Harper.
Grossman, M., and D.A. Hopkins. 2014. The Ideological Right v. the Group Benefits Left: Asymmetric Politics in America. Paper presented at the 2014 Mid-West Political Science Association.
Hare, C., K.T. Poole, and H. Rosenthal. 2014. Polarization in Congress has Risen Sharply: Where Is it Going Next? Washington Post, 13 February.
Hopkins, D.A. 2017. Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize America. New York: Cambridge University Press.
King, A., ed. 1981. The American Election of 1980. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.
Levitsky, S., and D. Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. New York: Viking.
Malone, C. 2016. The End of a Republican Party: Racial and Cultural Resentment Have Replaced the Party’s Small Government Ethos. FiveThirtyEight, 18 July.
Mann, T.E., and N.J. Ornstein. 2008. The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2016. It’s Even Worse Than It Was: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. New York: Basic Books.
McDonald, T. 2017. Donald Trump Was Much Better at Social Media than Hillary Clinton. www.serplogic.com/all-things-marketing/donald-trump-social-media.
Mislinski, J. 2017. US Household Incomes: A 50-Year Perspective. Adviser Perspectives, 17 September.
New York Times. 2017. Median US Household Income up for the Second Straight Year. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/business/.../income-rebound-recession.html.
O’Rourke, P.J. 2017. How the Hell Did This Happen? A Cautionary Tale of American Democracy. London: Grove Press.
Pew Research Center. 2017. Many Unhappy with Current Political System. http://www.pewglobal.org/2-17/10/16/many unhappy-with-current-political-system/.
Poole, K., and H. Rosenthal. 2012. NPR, Its All Politics. https://www.npr.org/.../gops-rightward-shift-higher-polarization-fills-political-scientist.
Rauch, J., and R.J. La Raja. 2017. Re-Engineering Politicians: How Activist Groups Choose Our Politicians Long Before We Vote. Brookings Report, 7 December.
RealClearPolitics. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/.
Ruane, K.A. 2011. Fairness Doctrine: History and Constitutional Issues, 251–266. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.
Silver, N. 2016. Why Republican Voters Decided on Trump. FiveThirtyEight, 4 May.
Uslaner, E.M. 1993. The Decline of Comity in Congress. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Washington Post. 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../racism-motivated-trump-voters-more-than-authoritarianism, April 17.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McKay, D. (2020). Facilitating Donald Trump: Populism, the Republican Party and Media Manipulation. In: Crewe, I., Sanders, D. (eds) Authoritarian Populism and Liberal Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17996-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17997-7
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)