taibbi book

Introduction

A little over ten years ago, while writing a book and working as a correspondent for Rolling Stone, I thought I saw a new trend in American politics.
I was spending half my time in Washington watching Congress make some very unsavory sausage and the other half hanging around political extremist movements in various parts of the country. In retrospect, the setup probably predetermined the conclusion. Nonetheless, I ended up returning over and over to the same theme, which had a syllogistic formula:
The country’s leaders are corrupt and have become unresponsive to the needs of the population.
People all over are beginning to notice.

This being America, as ordinary people tune out their corrupt leaders, they will replace official propaganda with conspiratorial explanations even more ridiculous than the original lies.

This was the core idea behind a book that ended up being called The Great Derangement. Between first-person narratives about fringe political phenomena like the apocalyptic “Rapture” movement and 9/11 Truth, the book tried to warn about a loss of faith in national institutions, most notably in my own business, the political media.
I felt sure a collapse of belief in the efficacy of the news media, if it coincided with widespread (and justified) political discontent, could lead in some pretty weird directions. One possible future was one in which politics “stopped being about ideology and…instead turned into a problem of information.”
The 2016 presidential campaign, simultaneously the most thrilling and disgusting political event of our generation, proved to be a monstrous affirmation of the Derangement. The stunning rise of Donald Trump marked the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement.
Every mechanism our mighty oligarchy had devised to keep people like Trump out of power failed. This left the path to power wide open for anyone who understood, or sensed, the depth of the crippling weaknesses in our political infrastructure.
I didn’t see Donald Trump coming. But as a campaign reporter I’d surely seen trouble on the horizon. The most obvious problem was the total alienation of candidates and their attendant media from the population.
I’d struggled with this issue from the first time I was sent out by Rolling Stone to cover a campaign, in 2004. One of the first things that struck me was the way the candidates and the “traveling press” moved around the country in what was essentially a roving prison.
Your route was from a bus, to a charter plane, to another bus, to an event hall (where you were kept behind rope lines most or all of the time), back to the bus, back to a plane. Then the cycle would repeat until you got to a hotel in the next city, at night. You slept six hours and repeated the pattern, day after day, week after week.
This moving prison was so airtight that if you needed cigarettes, you had to ask campaign volunteers (the Kerry crew called them “Sherpas”) to smuggle them in.
This seemed like merely a strange detail when I first wrote about it more than a dozen years ago. But it spoke to a much more enormous problem. It was a perfect metaphor for the distancing of the ruling class from the population. Presidential campaigns were bubbles, and the people inside them became myopic codependents. The establishment pols and their lackeys bullied the press into becoming guardians of their orthodoxy. The press in turn savagely policed the agreed-upon lines of decorum.
To campaign professionals, real people became fodder for stylized visual backgrounds and nothing more. In a less self-deceiving future—perhaps under a leader like Donald Trump who better understands that presidential races are now really just big television shows—they will conduct campaigns from a single soundstage in a place like Burbank and just blue-screen in the different crowds and locations.
Campaigns needed “people” only as props. If a candidate wanted to show that he or she was with it on racial issues, that candidate would visit a predominantly black high school and be photographed clapping to a school band performance. If he wanted a worker-friendly image, he’d visit a robotics factory in Wisconsin and be photographed wearing a hard hat and goggles. And so on.
But neither politicians nor reporters were ever in one place for long enough to see or hear what was really going on with the public. In place of that one-on-one experience, politicians and the press increasingly relied upon polls, and each other, to gauge the temperature “out there.” This resulted in a bizarre mutual-admiration-society situation in which everyone inside the plane gradually became more and more removed from the outside world.
When fellow Rolling Stone scribe Tim Crouse wrote The Boys on the Bus nearly half a century ago, he was mostly describing how pack journalism led to faulty reporting. But his description of the culture on the Bus also accurately foretold the derangement of the whole campaign mechanism, which included the politicians with whom reporters traveled.
Stuck inside the campaign bubble for too long, politicians and journalists alike started to operate like high school Heathers, using abuse and shaming to enforce the myriad social rules inside the plane. If Candidate A fell outside either behavioral or policy lines, fifty reporters immediately cried foul and that candidate quickly retreated, or else.
A classic example was Howard Dean. Now a dependable party creature, Dean in 2004 initially garnered enthusiasm for his opposition to the Iraq War and his heretical reliance upon small online donations as a way around the Democratic leadership’s kingmaking corporate donors.
Dean spent much of his campaign’s first summer fending off questions from reporters about whether he was too “liberal” or “pointed,” not “nuanced” enough, etc. Many of my colleagues really didn’t even know what they meant by these harassing questions. They didn’t need to. The constant pestering questions were all code. The complaint about Dean was that he wasn’t enough of a company man, that he’d stepped outside the lines of the agreed-upon orthodoxy.
When the Vermont governor finally stumbled with that infamous scream in Iowa, the press piled on with what another reporter I know jokingly describes as the “Seal of Death.” This is a maelstrom of negative reports that is expected to inspire a plunge in the polls, followed by a series of humiliating rituals.
First comes the Abashed Public Apology, a scene reporters enjoy to the point of it being unseemly. Next comes the short Dead Man Walking period. Candidates, Dean included, usually try to soldier on after being excommunicated by the media, clutching at single-digit poll numbers and speaking in increasingly desperate or even angry tones to half-empty halls. This tragicomic narrative may last weeks, even months.
Finally there is the Anticlimactic Withdrawal, when the already-dead candidate quietly announces his or her exit and disappears for a while to “spend more time with my family” or go into literal or political rehab. Anthony Weiner’s recent exile to Tennessee for a stint of horse-riding therapy to treat his sexting addiction is a typical endgame for a Seal of Death victim.
Before 2016, nobody had ever survived the Seal of Death, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, who pathetically squirmed free from the Gennifer Flowers episode.
In the case of Dean, TV stations around the country played the “scream” tape a whopping 633 times in the first four days after Iowa, according to the AP. They were like piranhas skeletonizing a waterfowl. It was viral media before YouTube. As Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, later put it, “The establishment wanted to stop us and they did.”
Trippi’s comment implied that reporters were part of that establishment, which was a pretty damning criticism. But it was true. And people noticed.
—
It’s impossible to overemphasize the toxicity of this dynamic. Politicians and political journalists were volunteering to be trapped in an endless conversation with one another about which candidates, and by extension which ideas, were and were not suitable for consumption by the American people.
It wasn’t a substantive conversation, either. The big topic on the Bus was who was winning: the horse race. Policy ideas had no meaning except in terms of their efficacy in helping the candidate win the horse race. Of course, an idea that was too popular, like Dean’s anti-war gambit, could run up against that internal policing mechanism again and be dismissed as “populist,” which was something very bad in the campaign-trail lexicon.
Ultimately, most all of the talk on the Bus ended up being concerned with the narrow question of which party-approved candidate pushing acceptably non-populist ideas would edge out the other. We pretended this was a fascinating intellectual question. It even became fashionable to become a kind of PhD in these moronic dynamics.
Nobody thought it was odd when a baseball statistics guru, Nate Silver, became a godlike figure in the campaign bubble and America’s foremost expert on what was going on in the heartland.
I have nothing personal against Nate Silver—I was a big fan back in his Baseball Prospectus days—but elevating a bespectacled sabermetrics geek to the role of Nostradamus of middle American attitudes speaks volumes about where the country’s political elite was at, mentally, heading into this campaign season.
Even in baseball there’s value in looking beyond the numbers and seeing and talking to a player in person. But trying the Moneyball approach in politics is insanity. Reducing people to stats in politics is both a strategic and moral error of breathtaking proportions. Elections may be about winning and losing, but they are not a game—except, sadly, to the people who leading into this campaign season made electioneering their business.
If you want a graphic picture of the cluelessness of the people inside campaign bubbles, just watch Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous “Mannequin Challenge.”
Watch as the camera pans over the plane full of photogs, aides and pols, proudly clutching their tablets and pens and pizza boxes, all dressed in blazers and “smart glasses” and crisp gingham shirts and buzzed at being on the same plane as two Clintons and Jon Bon Jovi.
As a metaphor for an overconfident and incompetent ruling class that was ten miles up its own backside when it should have been listening to the anger percolating in the population, the “Mannequin Challenge” is probably unsurpassable. Here was a planeload of effete politicos making a goofball video when they should have been frantically bailing water to stave off maybe the most disastrous loss in the history of American presidential politics.
If those people had known the election was even going to be close, they would have outlawed smiling on that plane, let alone making nutty souvenir videos. But they had no clue what was coming.
Why would they worry? After all, there were fail-safe mechanisms built into the campaign infrastructure to prevent any of this foolishness from ever backing up on them.
Until 2016.
Yes, Donald Trump’s campaign was massively fueled by racism and xenophobia. But racism and hatred and fear of foreigners were not irreconcilable with hatred of the arrogant establishment that controlled major-party politics. Many voters out there hated both, and some hated those latter folks with the heat of a thousand suns.
Donald Trump was tuned in to this. Better than any candidate we’d ever seen, he ran against the Bus.
The media was the only group on his long list of cultural villains that was actually in the room for all of Trump’s enormous rage rallies. We were part of his act. And his triumph over us was a major factor in convincing ordinary people that he could deliver on his rebellious rhetoric.
A key moment in the race came in the days after July 19, 2015, when Trump made his infamous comments about former prisoner of war John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Earlier, Trump had made even more outrageous comments, calling Mexicans “rapists.” For some reason, that scandal was not seen as immediately disqualifying across the political spectrum.
But insulting veterans? That was a bridge too far, especially for other Republicans. Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer tweeted: “There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably.”
New Jersey’s Chris Christie added, “Senator John McCain is an American hero. Period. Stop.” Wisconsin’s Scott Walker said of Trump, “I unequivocally denounce him.” Lindsey Graham said, “At the heart of [Trump’s] statement is a lack of respect for those who have served—a disqualifying characteristic to be president.”
With universal statements affirming that Trump was now “disqualified” from running, reporters rolled out the Seal of Death script. There were a gazillion stories. The vid went viral. Twitter went nuts. We anticipated Trump assuming the position and commencing the Expected Rituals, beginning with the Abashed Public Apology.
It didn’t happen. Trump not only didn’t apologize, he even denied that he ever said McCain wasn’t a war hero.
“If somebody is a prisoner, I consider them a war hero,” he said.
Reporters freaked out. How could he deny he said it? It’s right there, on video! He said it!
But it worked. Trump not only didn’t sink after the McCain incident, he rose in the polls.
This happened again and again and again in Trump’s campaign. First, he would say something crazy, something that would have eliminated any previous candidate. Then reporters would try the WWE takedown maneuver, only to find themselves chair-whacked and tossed out of the ring.
For instance, after Trump’s comment about Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever” in the first primary debate, journalists and political analysts alike harrumphed: “Nobody can win after making a joke about women’s menstrual periods.” Women were 51 percent of the country. How could any candidate survive alienating more than half the voting population? It was impossible.
Once again, we tried to apply the Seal of Death. But Trump survived the Kelly episode. He similarly survived episodes in which he mocked disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski, threatened to kill the families of terror suspects, promised to ban all Muslim immigrants, offered to pay the legal fees of anyone who beat up people protesting him, insisted that women who had abortions should suffer some kind of “punishment,” and a hundred other things.
By the end of the campaign, even more serious accusations and scandals bounced harmlessly off that maddening false pompadour of his, seemingly having no impact at all.
America’s population of Otherwise Smart People was stunned. How could the electorate not care that a billionaire admitted to not paying taxes? Why was no one troubled by a child rape lawsuit? How was the “pussy” thing not fatal? What about the mountain of extant lawsuits—75 open cases, according to some reports—for offenses ranging from simple nonpayment for services to sex discrimination? Why did no one care?
Incredibly, the popular explanation floated inside the NY-Washington-LA corridor was that this was the media’s fault, that reporters were “not calling Trump out” while simultaneously overfocusing on issues like Hillary Clinton’s emails.
But this explanation itself was a continuation of the same original misread of the public. Here was this massive new revolutionary movement rising out of the population, and the first instinct of the establishment was to turn to other members of the establishment for an explanation of why this was being allowed to happen. As in, where’s the Seal of Death? Why haven’t you vaporized this guy yet?
But we not only couldn’t draw blood against Trump, we actually helped him every time we tried and failed to knock him out.
In his speeches, Trump would rip into the “crooked people in the press” for criticizing him and inevitably follow up with a tale of how well he was doing in the polls in spite of us.
Sometimes he’d call us “bloodsuckers” and “dishonest people” or even “highly paid,” a dig that seemingly makes no sense coming from a Richie Rich real estate scion like Trump, unless you’ve listened to a lot of his voters talk.
These are the voters who’ve never met a New York billionaire, but they’ve sure met a lot of corporate middle managers and divorce lawyers and professors and other such often-overcompensated members of the intellectual class.
Trump voters almost uniformly don’t begrudge someone for being an entrepreneurial success (“If the guy pulls his own weight, I don’t care how much he makes” was a typical comment I heard). But they can’t stand the book-smart college types who make cushy livings pushing words around in what these voters see as competition-averse professions that reward people who in real life need to call AAA to change a tire.
Trump tapped into all of this. His speeches were visual demonstrations of his power over us. We in the press, obediently clustered inside our protective rope line and/or standing mute on a riser in the middle of the hall, would sit looking guilty, like the pampered, narrow-shouldered, overgroomed hypocrites we are, while Trump blasted us as the embodiment of the class that had left regular America behind.
Then he’d point to our very presence following him in such huge numbers as proof of our defeat and moral lassitude. Even as we dismissed his campaign in print, we kept flocking to it in ever-bigger numbers. No matter how much we sneered, he insisted, we were slaves to his success. Just as everyone else would be. The Mexicans. The Chinese. ISIS. Everybody.
“See all those cameras back there?” he’d say. “They’ve never driven so far to a location.”
Very often this victory over us was the first thing I heard about when I went into crowds to talk to Trump supporters.
“What do I like about him? He’s got all you assholes jumping through hoops,” hissed an older Trump supporter in Wisconsin, before launching into an impressively obscene tirade about Rolling Stone and the UVA rape case.
“He’s gonna be his own man,” a Trump supporter named Jay Matthews told me in Plymouth, New Hampshire. “He’s proving that now with how he’s getting all the media. He’s paying nothing and getting all the coverage. He’s not paying one dime.”
This was part of the reason Trump’s supporters seemed so stubborn in their lack of interest in “the facts.” They were contemptuous of anything that came from us and our habit of trying to rub their noses in their mistake—well, it was just as off-putting as correcting their spelling, another thing educated liberal types tended to do a lot, especially on social media.
But the ineffectiveness of “facts” didn’t stop there. The election of Trump was not just a political choice, a vote against minorities and foreigners, against intellectuals, a cry for better jobs, etc. This was also a metaphysical choice.
Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts.
Blue-state America could not wrap its head around this during election season. Facts, they protested, are facts! But Trump voters did not agree. They believed facts were a choice. We had made ours, choosing to ignore certain things, and they would make theirs, doing the same. No amount of “calling Trump out” would change that.
—
Once upon a time, if the three major commercial networks said a thing was a fact, everyone agreed it was a fact. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because the three networks lied a lot, but still. Back in the day, when America argued with itself, it mostly argued over the same data.
News programs originally had little financial incentive to lie. They were designed to be loss leaders. Way back when, the Communications Act of 1934 set out the media business as a civic trade-off. The government would license out use of the public airwaves, but in exchange, private media companies would use those licenses for “public interest, convenience and necessity.”
Eventually this morphed into a model where big media companies made money through sports and entertainment and satisfied the “public interest” portion of their mandate by creating news shows that had some degree of ethics and factual standards.
That worked relatively well, until the networks started to see that they could make very good money by altering the formula.
A key innovator was the new fourth major network, Fox, which along with conservative talk radio began cleaving media consumers into two groups in the Eighties and Nineties.
For decades, CBS, ABC and NBC mostly told America the same story. But when Fox and figures like Rush Limbaugh came along, they preached an alternative political gospel with starkly different interpretations of the news. This new consumer choice often offered very different “facts” as well.
In 1997, Fox fired a husband-and-wife duo of TV investigative reporters named Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. They’d refused to water down a documentary about the potential hazards of bovine growth hormone.
In a lawsuit, it ultimately came out that the Fox station manager in Tampa had told the pair, “We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.”
Looking back, we should probably have paid more attention to moments like this. There was clearly an underserved market of reality-agnostic media consumers, and it was hardly invisible. It had already identified itself in the vast audiences for tabloid television news shows, lurid daytime talk shows, absurd televangelists, infomercials, home-shopping networks, and, of course, reality TV. Fox News decided it wasn’t above picking its audience from this low branch of media consumers, and it became phenomenally successful.
The rise of CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network, was just an interesting business story to most when it first happened. Not many people really thought about the consequences of a news model in which TV stations were suddenly forced to fill oceans of airtime.
One immediate consequence was that live spectacles suddenly became crucially important to the commercial health of news programs. Something about being able to watch a “breaking” news story live was addictive for modern news audiences, even if the thing they were watching wasn’t terribly remarkable.
The presidential campaign fit like a glove into the new demands of the news business. For nearly two years out of every four, some kind of live campaign event was usually happening somewhere.
If there were no speeches in places like Iowa or New Hampshire, then there were candidate appearances on TV, “Jefferson-Jackson Dinners,” addresses to groups like AIPAC, straw polls, and 10,000 other ready-made news events. And you could fill the hours between those events with endless pre- and postelection analysis.
There are 8,760 hours in a year. During campaign season, you can fill nearly every one of them with campaign stuff if you really put your mind to it. But in the past, all those thousands of hours of coverage have always had to fit into the parameters of TV coverage generally, which like the campaign bubble is a world with very particular (and strictly policed) internal rules, mostly dictated by advertisers.
Donald Trump’s innovation was to recognize what a bad TV show the campaign was. Any program that tried to make stars out of human sedatives like Scott Walker and Lindsey Graham needed new producers and a new script.
So here came Trump, bloviating and farting his way through his early campaign stops, saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next, and gee, what a surprise, TV couldn’t take its eyes off him.
He dominated coverage and was more than happy to fill all 8,760 of those hours. Networks had long since abandoned their “public interest” mandate and now were financially dependent on anyone or anything that could revive their flagging ratings. They gave Trump as many hours as he could manage and he was narcissist enough to swallow all of them with a smile.
This part of Trump’s rise really was the media’s fault.
Trump was a legitimate news story. He had to be covered. He was leading a historic revolt against his own party, after all. But so was Bernie Sanders, who got nearly as many votes as Trump in the primaries. Yet Trump received something on the order of 23 times more television coverage than the Vermont senator.
Long segments of Trump’s speeches were broadcast uninterrupted, which seldom if ever happened with Sanders, even on traditionally left-leaning cable networks. If we in the media asked ourselves why that was the case, we came up with some damning answers.
It wasn’t just that Trump was outrageous and sensational and lurid, while Sanders dryly pushed substance over salesmanship. Nor was it just the car-wreck element to Trump’s performances that kept audiences glued to the screen, wondering what crazy thing he might say next.
It was also the content. Trump sold hate, violence, xenophobia, racism, and ignorance, which oddly enough had long been permissible zones of exploration for American television entertainment. And the news media was becoming more and more indistinguishable from entertainment media.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders talked about poverty and inequality, which are now and always have been taboo. On a level that is understood by news directors in their guts if not their minds, hate is sexy and sells, while the politics of Bernie Sanders were provocative in the wrong ways.
A news director who made the decision to run a Sanders speech in its entirety would worry about being accused of making a “political statement.” Meanwhile, running Trump all day long would be understood as just business, just giving viewers what they want. Editorially the press denounced him, but it never turned the cameras off.
By February 2016, when Trump was already steaming toward the nomination, I began to realize the extent to which he’d conned all of us. He first used the media’s financial desperation to secure free coverage, but when the attention became not just negative but condemnatory, he used that, too.
He converted the press’s indignation toward him into street cred with ordinary people, cred that otherwise might have been out of reach for a coddled billionaire like himself. Perversely, the alienation of the political press from its audiences helped solve Trump’s own accessibility problem.
The final insult to all of this is that when Trump secured the nomination, media companies looked down at their bottom lines and realized that, via the profits they made during his run—Trump is “good for business,” CBS president Les Moonves infamously confessed—they had been made accomplices to the whole affair.
—
Covering the presidential campaign trail has been a staple of Rolling Stone’s political coverage dating back to the Fear and Loathing days. It’s been my honor to uphold the tradition for the last four presidential races. Although some complicating factors kept me off the road this time more than I might perhaps have liked, I was still sent out regularly by the magazine to file reports during the 2015–16 campaign.
These long features from the trail, along with a selection of shorter dispatches and columns about the evolving catastrophe of this election season, form the basis of Insane Clown President. We didn’t travel together, but illustrator Victor Juhasz and I collaborated from a distance. Victor and I went through a lot of the same struggles.
In his case, given that his first drawing about the 2016 campaign had a giant Trump emerging in clown face from an elephant’s anus, the challenge was: where would he go for the next six pictures? We both ran up against the same problem of trying to find new ways to describe the worsening of a narrative that was pretty awful from day one.
The idea for his last illustration, done right after the “grab them by the pussy” scandal hit the news, came to him as he listened to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, which reminded him of a sculpture on that theme by a French artist named Hébert.
The substitution of the Statue of Liberty for the maiden, with Trump’s hand creeping just a bit higher than Death had ventured in the original sculpture, made for an iconic image that captured everything appalling and frightening about what, in retrospect, was just about to go down.
For most of the 2015–16 race, I felt as certain as a journalist can be that I understood what I was seeing. I think it comes through in these pages that nothing about Trump’s initial success came as a surprise to me, because I saw he was giving people a means to express their disgust at a campaign process that had long ago stopped working for voters.
Where I screwed up—and this is a glaring error in my coverage—was in dismissing Trump’s chances in the general election. I fell for a lot of the popular myths about the invincibility of the multicultural consensus Barack Obama twice rode to victory. I thought Trump’s legacy would be the destruction of the Republican Party. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
During the Republican convention, I’d had what I thought was a moment of clarity. I was in the stands of the Quicken Loans Arena, watching Trump muddle through a horrible, violent, and racially loaded acceptance speech that was a transparent knockoff of Richard Nixon’s infamous “law and order” address of 1968.
I remember looking around the stands at the thousands of faces staring in Trump’s direction. They were all anxious and hopeful, almost childlike, even the older faces. They were expecting this man to finally vanquish the liberal enemy and restore their lost paradise of pre–Civil Rights Act America, whatever their idea of that was.
God only knew what fantasies were playing out behind those faces. Maybe it was cattle cars of Mexicans, maybe mushroom clouds over Mesopotamia, or maybe it was just one-family households with dinner cooked by Mom ready on the table when they came home.
Maybe it was a big beautiful wall and a million cops rounding up and sending to gleaming new prisons all those dope-slinging black “thugs” with their underpants showing who for years have been spilling out of the affordable housing high-rises Hillary Clinton types had spent decades sticking in their towns, lowering their property values. If anyone understood property values, it was this guy, Donald Trump! Trump would fix it!
What else were they were dreaming about? Maybe for some it was just a better job and lower taxes, with minorities and foreigners taking a bit of collateral damage (but that was OK because after all they’d had their eight years in the White House). Maybe others were secretly tired of having to watch what they said all day at work and were just living vicariously through this ribald, lecherous go-getter who defied the unwritten rules on the biggest stage and got away with it.
Who knew, but uniformly in the Q seats there was a look of breathless anticipation. Trump had promised a lot during campaign season. He said restoring America’s greatness would be easy, no problem, that his America was going to be so great, you couldn’t even imagine it.
“You’re going to say, Mr. President, please, we can’t take it anymore, we can’t win anymore like this, Mr. President, you’re driving us crazy, you’re winning too much,” he’d said, in the weeks before the convention. “And I’m going to say I’m sorry, we’re going to keep winning!”
Wow. That sounded amazing! What would all that winning feel like? You could see in the crowd, they almost couldn’t wait to start finding out.
But then I looked down at Donald Trump and I was sure I saw a con man who was just barely holding it together. His convention had been kind of a fiasco (Scott Baio as an opening-day speaker?), and his own speech now had none of his usual breezy bluster. He sounded like a politician. Instead of shooting from the hip, his every word was off a teleprompter.
“It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation,” he said, in painfully clean syntax that sounded like anyone in the world but Donald Trump.
The address he went on to deliver was a pathetic pastiche ripped off from the very Republican establishment he claimed to hate—five decades of dog-whistle clichés stolen from Nixon, Bush I, Jesse Helms, and countless others. He was going through the motions, trying to deliver a traditional boilerplate political scare speech about crime and terrorism. But Trump is an awful actor when not not playing himself. He looked terrified, as if he was about to be found out.
In that moment I suddenly remembered the Archibald MacLeish poem “The End of the World.” The poem is about a traveling circus. The audience is enthralled by the acrobats and lion tamers and freaks, until suddenly the top of the tent blows off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

To me this was a perfect metaphor for Trump. He had promised the world, but when we finally pulled the lid off him, there was not a Hitler or a Trujillo or even a Boss Tweed underneath, but just blackness, a void—nothing, nothing, nothing at all.
Trump was a cipher, a cheap fraud and TV showman who had gotten in way over his head and was now just gamely trying to play out the string. He seemed destined to be buried under a mountain of his outlandish promises, in the process leading these thousands of hoodwinked followers of his off the cliff of history.
I still believe this is true. For all the investigative energy focused on Trump, there was never much depth to discover underneath. A few scams maybe (well, more than a few), and possibly even some very serious crimes, philandering, sexual assault—a crook with money. But the only thing profound about the man was his level of self-absorption. The story might ultimately be that this preening idiot was brilliantly appropriated by forces that did harbor far-reaching revolutionary ideas, like Steve Bannon and the “alt-right” movement. But if Trump himself turns out to be a man of ideas, it will mean it’s something he came to late in life— the same way George W. Bush didn’t really get a job until he was around forty.
Who knows why he got in the race, or if he ever intended or even hoped to win. But the narrative in which this discombobulated bundle of urges was swept toward the presidency in spite of himself was an awesome and terrible black comedy.
Here was a figure of almost supernatural shallowness, who had almost certainly run for the presidency on some level out of boredom, who somehow became the vehicle for a collision of great and powerful historical trends in the world’s last superpower.
There was the rise of a racist revanchist movement in the heartland on one side (merging with a distinctly upper-class, college-bred “alt-right” racist movement), and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus on the Democratic side. All of these movements took place against the backdrop of a splintering and collapsing of the media landscape that, entering the 2016 race, left us without any real forum for a national conversation, without a dependable way to communicate with one another.
America was so divided, so alienated from itself, so vulnerable, that even a zero like Trump could penetrate our political system without breaking a sweat. To put it in terms the casino-owning candidate would understand, he won the presidency without so much as a pair of twos in hand.
It’s impossible to say what kind of president Donald Trump might be. The early returns are not good. His attorney general choice is Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who lost a judgeship because he apparently said the KKK was “OK” and called the NAACP “communist inspired.” Steve Bannon, a conniving monster who looks a lot like the late Chris Hitchens, only unhealthier and with a worse case of neck bloat, ran a Breitbart site that is a sewer of the foulest racist memes. He is set to be Trump’s chief strategist, playing the David Axelrod role.
Who knows what will come next, but that’s not really what this story is about. Insane Clown President instead describes how we got here.
It’s an Alice in Wonderland story, in which a billionaire hedonist jumps down the rabbit hole of American politics and discovers a surreal world where each successive barrier to power collapses before him like magic. From a literary standpoint it makes perfect sense that Trump would be the grotesque and charmless protagonist that he is. His bellicose pussy-grabbing vulgarity and defiant lack of self-awareness make him, unfortunately, the perfect foil for reflecting the rot and neglect of the corrupted political system he conquers. A system unable to stop this must be very sick indeed.
To return again to MacLeish’s poem, we are all staring up at the same nothingness now. Who knows how it will be filled, but the real shock this past year was finding out how frail has been our illusion of stability all along. We were a shallow country, held together by stale rituals and muscle memory. And now it is a shallow man who will take us wherever he pleases.

The Great Derangement Redux
Ten years before Donald Trump, I wrote a book about Middle America’s growing mistrust of government, the media and other mainstream forces. The thesis of the book was that we were moving toward a future in which facts would be increasingly irrelevant and people would gravitate more and more toward conspiratorial politics. This situation was fueled by the repeated failures of once-trusted institutions to respond to the frustrations of ordinary people.
I didn’t exactly see Donald Trump coming. But there were a lot of signs that the conditions were set long ago for the rise of a truly postfactual candidate.

From the introduction to The Great Derangement:

We were living through*1 the last stage of the American empire. Historians consistently describe similar phenomena in past centuries. Great societies often collapse in the same way.
When the Bolsheviks finally broke through the gates of the Winter Palace,*2 they discovered tsarists inside obsessed with tarot cards. When the barbarians finally stormed Rome in its last days, they found the upper class paralyzed*3 by lethargy and inaction and addicted to the ramblings of fortune-tellers.*4
This, too, seemed to be the fate of America, viciously attacked by a serious enemy on 9/11 but unable to grasp the significance of this attack. Most of the country instead fled for consolation to the various corners of our vast media landscape, in particular seeking solace in the Internet,*5 an escapist paradise for the informationally overwhelmed.*6
Trained for decades to be little more than good consumers, we had become a nation of reality shoppers, mixing and matching news items to fit our own self-created identities. We rejoiced in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves. We are Christians, therefore all world events have a Christian explanation. We hate George Bush, therefore Bush is the cause of it all.
And directly feeding into this madness was the actual, real failure of our own governmental system, reflected in a chilling new electoral trend. After two consecutive bitterly negative presidential elections and many years of what was turning into a highly deflating military adventure in Iraq, the American public had reached new levels of disgust with the very concept of elections.
People no longer voted for candidates they liked or were excited by. They voted against candidates they hated.*7 At protests and marches, the ruling emotions were disgust and rage. The lack of idealism, and especially the lack of any sense of brotherhood or common purpose with the other side (i.e., liberals and conservatives unable to imagine a productive future with each other, or even to see themselves as citizens of the same country*8), was striking.
Politicians, with their automated speeches and canned blather about “hope” and “change”*9 and “taking the country back,” were now not only not believed by most ordinary people, but actively despised.*10
A parallel phenomenon was a growing lack of faith in the mainstream media on both sides of the spectrum. Conservatives*11 and liberals*12 alike accepted unquestioningly the proposition that the stories put out by network news broadcasts and major daily newspapers amounted to little more than a stream of untrammeled, insidious deceptions.
In the 2006 senatorial primary contest between the would-be Jimmy Stewart–esque do-gooder millionaire Ned Lamont and the archetypal Washington whore Joe Lieberman,*13 the fault lines were outlined with crystal clarity.*14
The “People” boosted Lamont with blogs and YouTube broadcasts, while the entrenched political mainstream circled the wagons around Lieberman.*15 The major news mags and dailies blasted the blogger phenomenon, and the likes of sanctimonious New York Times columnist David Brooks ascribed the antimedia bias to “moral manias” and a “Liberal Inquisition.”*16
On the right, similar fault lines were appearing. Whereas before conservative anger toward the “liberal media” had been usefully directed against the Democratic Party by Republican strategists, the failure of the Iraq war and also growing disillusionment on the part of Christians who had supported George W. Bush led more and more of those voters to seek out their own enthusiasms.*17
For the first time I started to see and hear people at Republican events who sounded very much like the dissidents on the fringes of American liberalism.*18 The Ron Paul supporters*19 who began to collect around the rallies of assembly-line establishment-blowhard candidates like Mitt Romney were almost indistinguishable from the followers of liberal candidates like Dennis Kucinich.*20
They were similarly against the war, similarly against the conspiracy of business interests that dominated Washington, similarly fed up with standard-issue campaign stumpery.
At these events I heard some of the same theories about “peak oil” and the nefarious influence of institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission that dominated 9/11 Truth rallies.*21
But they weren’t liberals. They were ex-Dittoheads*22 and dropouts from the Republican revolution. The Ron Paul candidacy was an extreme example of outsider politics on the left and right merging.
I spent time down in Texas with a group of churchgoers who were loyal to an apocalyptic theory of world events, one in which 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were part of an ongoing march toward a final battle between the forces of Satan and an army of God.
At the same time, I found myself involved, at times involuntarily, with the 9/11 Truth Movement.
The similarities between both of these groups is striking and should be clear to anyone who reads this book. Both groups were and are defined primarily by an unshakable belief in the inhumanity of their enemies on the other side.
The Christians seldom distinguished between Islamic terrorism and, say, Al Gore–style environmentalism. The Truthers easily believed that reporters for the Washington Post, the president, and the front-line operators of NORAD were equally capable of murdering masses of ordinary New York financial-sector employees.
Abandoned by the political center, both groups ascribed unblinkingly to a militant, us-against-them worldview, where only their own could be trusted.
What made them distinctly American was that, while actually the victims of an obvious, unhidden conspiracy of corrupt political power, they chose to battle bugbears that were completely idiotic, fanciful, and imaginary.
At a time when the country desperately needed its citizens to man up and seize control of their common destiny, they instead crawled into alleys and feverishly jacked themselves off*23 in frenzies of panicked narcissism.
Time and again during the research for this book, I encountered people who acted not like engaged citizens looking for solutions to real problems, but like frightened adolescents, unaccustomed to the burdens of political power. People saw in the vacuum of governmental competence an opportunity not to take control of their lives, but to step in and replace the buffoons above with buffoon*24 acts of their own.
They made elaborate speeches to no one in particular, as though cameras were on them, they dressed in Washington and Jefferson costumes, they primped and preened like they were revolutionaries, modern-day Patrick Henrys and Thomas Paines. And they got nothing done.
I was struck particularly by a meeting of 9/11 Truthers*25 in Austin, Texas, in which a “discussion” of what to do about the conspiracy in Washington devolved into a speech-making session. A group of twenty-five to thirty Truthers filed into a little church on the outskirts of town and, led by a breezy, EST-counselorish moderator who enforced tolerance for the viewpoints of all, each participant got up and offered his or her own individual angry theory about the nature of The Conspiracy.
Some blamed the royals, others the bankers,*26 others the Trilateral Commission, all blamed decades of Bush family iniquity, and one woman even talked about a conspiracy to hide the discovery of alien technologies at Area 51.*27
Everyone made his or her speech, and then the meeting was over with nothing accomplished except a decision to have another meeting.
Having seen all this, what I ended up trying to do in this book was describe the whole outline of the problem. Much of the book focuses on the insider game in Washington, from the corrupt response to Hurricane Katrina to both parties’ absurdly transparent attempts to deflect popular opposition to the Iraq war.*28 At the same time I tried to describe the response to this nonfunctioning government across the country, on both the right and the left.
What I hope comes through is that the corruption of the system certainly has had consequences in the population, inspiring popular disgust and rage, with voters keenly understanding on some level anyway the depth of their betrayal.
But the form of the public response turns out to be a grotesquerie. It turns out that we’ve been split up and atomized for so long that real grassroots politics isn’t really possible.
We don’t respond to problems as communities, but as demographics. In the same way that we shop for cars and choose television programs, we pick our means of political protest. We scan the media landscape for the thing that appeals to us and we buy into it.
That it’s the same media landscape these new dissidents often reject as a false and misleading tableau dominated by corrupt interests turns out not to be problematic for many.
In some cases, like that of those Christians I spent time with in San Antonio, the trusted new figure, a preacher named John Hagee,*29 turns out to be every bit the establishment Washington insider these would-be religious revolutionaries think they’re fleeing from.
In other cases, like that of the 9/11 Truthers, the radical canonical revolutionary tracts end up including thoroughly commercial mainstream entertainments like V for Vendetta*30 and The Matrix*31 (at different times I would hear both radical conservatives and liberals describe their political awakenings using the phrase “taking the red pill”).*32
In short, what sounds on the surface like radical politics turns out to be just another fracturing of the media picture, one that ultimately will result in new groups of captive audiences that, if experience is any guide, will ultimately be assimilated*33 and electorally coddled by a political mainstream in reality bent on ignoring both sides.
For now, however, the situation going into the 2008 election looks grim. We have a population more disgusted than ever with our political system, one inclined to distrust the result no matter*34 who wins*35 the White House—and should the national election end up being a contest between a pair of full-of-shit establishment conservatives like Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, it will only confirm the worst fears of both sides and result in an even further bonkerization of the population.
Gone will be the good old days of neat blue-state/red-state hatred—a nicely symmetrical storyline that has always appealed to the Crossfire/American Gladiators sports-coverage mentality of the commercial media.
In its place, at least temporarily, will be a chaos of lunatic enthusiasms and dead-end political movements, with calls for invasions of Babylon and, on the other side, congressional investigations*36 into nonexistent conspiracies…*37
When a people can no longer agree even on the basic objective facts of their political existence, the equation changes. Real decisions, even in the approximate direction of righteousness, eventually become impossible.
The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology, and has instead turned into a problem of information.
Are the right messages reaching our collective brain? Are the halves of that brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? It’s a hell of a problem for a nuclear power.
From Chapter One:

Out There, in states both blue and red, the People were boarding the mothership, preparing to leave this planet for good.
The media had long ignored the implications of polls that showed that half the country believed in angels and the inerrancy of the Bible, or of the fact that the Left Behind series of books had sold in the tens of millions.
But on the ground the political consequences of magical thinking were becoming clearer.
The religious right increasingly saw satanic influences and signs of the upcoming apocalypse. Meanwhile, on the left, a different sort of fantasy was gaining traction, as an increasing number—up to a third of the country according to some polls—saw the “Bush crime family” in league with Al-Qaeda, masterminding 9/11.
Media outlets largely ignored poll results that they felt could not possibly be true. For instance, there was a CBS News survey that showed that only 16 percent believed that the Bush administration was telling the truth about 9/11, with 53 percent believing the government was “hiding something,” and another 28 percent believing that it was “mostly lying.”
Then there was a stunning Zogby poll taken just in advance of the 2004 Republican convention that showed that nearly half of New York City residents—49.3 percent—believed that the government knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks were coming and purposely failed to act.
Voters didn’t just distrust the government’s words and actions. By 2007 they also had very serious doubts about their government’s legitimacy.
Successive election cycles foundering on voting-machine scandals had left both sides deeply suspicious of election results. A poll in Florida taken in 2004 suggested that some 25 percent of voters worried that their votes were not being counted—a 20 percent jump from the pre-2000 numbers.*38
Even more damning was a Zogby poll conducted in 2006 that showed only 45 percent of Americans were “very confident” that George Bush won the 2004 election “fair and square.”
The most surprising thing about that last poll was the degree to which the distrust was spread wide across the demographic spectrum. That 71 percent of African Americans distrusted the 2004 results was perhaps not a surprise, given that black voters in America have been victims of organized disenfranchisement throughout this country’s history.
But 28 percent of NASCAR fans? Twenty-five percent of born-again Christians? Thirty-two percent of currently serving members of the armed forces?
These are astonishing numbers for a country that even in its lowest times—after Watergate, say, or during Reconstruction—never doubted the legitimacy of their leaders to such a degree.
And if distrust of the government was at an all-time high, that was still nothing compared to what the public thought of the national media. Both the left and the right had developed parallel theories about the co-opting of the corporate press, imagining it to be controlled by powerful unseen enemies, and increasingly turned to grassroots Internet sources for news and information.
In the BBC/Reuters/Media Center’s annual Trust in the Media survey in 2006, the United States was one of just two countries surveyed—Britain being the other—where respondents trusted their government (67 percent) more than they trusted national news reporters (59 percent). A Harris poll that same year showed that some 68 percent of Americans now felt that the news media were “too powerful.”*39
The country, in other words, was losing it. Our national politics was doomed because voters were no longer debating one another using a commonly accepted set of facts. There was no common narrative, except in the imagination of a daft political and media elite that had long ago lost touch with the general public.
What we had instead was a nation of reality shoppers, all shutting the blinds on the loathsome old common landscape to tinker with their own self-tailored and in some cases highly paranoid recipes for salvation and/or revolution.
They voted in huge numbers, but they were voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody. The elections had basically become a forum for organizing the hatreds of the population.
And the worst thing was that the political parties at some level were complicit in this and understood what was going on perfectly. That’s why they collectively spent $160 million on negative advertising in this cycle, as opposed to just $17 million on positive ads.*40
There were no longer any viable principles in play. Just hate. And distrust.
The system had nothing left to offer the People, so the People were leaving the reservation. But where were they going?


Epilogue

Just after dawn, November 9, 2016. I’m in shock. Right up until the end, I didn’t believe America would actually do it.
What just happened? What I saw all year was a bumbling train wreck of a candidate who belched and preened his way past a historically weak field of Republicans, then seemed to spend all summer staggering toward the nearest exit.
Trump was an accidental candidate, a goof playing out a whim, like the guy who walked across America backward. Assuming great effort on his part, you could see him making it to the finish line alive. But winning? What did we all miss?
Only upon reflection does it make an awful kind of sense.
Trump’s election marks the end of an era. In particular, the one that began back on August 28, 1963, with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, establishing—no matter how incomplete, how unfulfilled—the template for 50 years of race relations.
Of course we don’t remember today that white residents in 1963 fled the capital before the March on Washington, suffering from what Life magazine called “the worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run.”
Nor do we remember that John F. Kennedy’s head of domestic intelligence at the time, William Sullivan, reacted to the speech by declaring that King was “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”
King turned out to be anything but a dangerous man. His rise didn’t precipitate a communist takeover. His legacy instead was nonviolence, reconciliation and a generation of young people of all races who grew up after his death believing that acceptance of others is a primary duty of citizenship.
King told us we were people before we were anything else: white or black, young or old, male or female, rich or poor, born here or born elsewhere. Even if we never came close to realizing it, the notion that we all had to find a way to live together was the organizing principle of our society for 50 years. Many of the people voting in this election never knew anything else.
Then Trump came along.
Presidential elections, no matter what else they’re about, are ultimately all referenda on race. Conventional wisdom heading into this election said the Republican Party needed to adjust even more in the direction of racial universalism.
Republican big-dollar donors and party chiefs after 2012 went through the same exercise in willful blindness that Democrats will undoubtedly go through for the next four years, searching out every explanation for a crushing loss except for the ones that inculpated them.
Republicans didn’t blame their plan to reduce Medicare benefits for people under 55, or their anemic job proposals, or their proud dedication to free trade policies.
No, it couldn’t have been any of those things. As former speechwriter to George W. Bush David Frum explained in the Atlantic in January 2016, the Republican donor class believed the path to victory for Republicans involved voters accepting a softening on the immigration issue. So they set about raising money for “crossover” Republicans pushing path-to-citizenship ideas, like Jeb Bush.
As Frum pointed out, the impact of immigration for this brand of Republican donor was limited enough (“more interesting food!”) that they were really agnostic on the issue. They expected their voters out there to feel the same.
They didn’t. Instead, they flocked to Trump, who specifically ran against those “establishment” Republicans and their uninspiring aristocrat candidate, Bush. Trump’s run promised voters something the Republican leadership never even considered as a strategy—i.e., a radical overthrow of that 50-year consensus on race, during which time even most Republicans paid lip service to King’s vision.
As Trump’s run progressed, the ideology behind it came into focus. In the summer he named a new campaign “CEO,” Steve Bannon. Bannon was best known as the head of the noxious Breitbart site but for some time had also been perhaps the leading figure in a revolutionary anti-universalist movement that explicitly rejected the King doctrine.
The so-called alt-right movement, like all movements dreamed up by intellectual revolutionaries, is obsessively concerned with defining itself. As such it has left behind a voluble literature detailing its history and priorities.
Earlier in 2016, Bannon’s Breitbart site even published an exultant “Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” written by Allum Bokhari and barnstorming campus villain Milo Yiannopoulos, for the benefit of the soon-to-be-vanquished class of David Brooks/George Will Republicans.
This tract outlined the main principles of the new movement, the first apparently being that the thing distinguishing them from skinheads is that they all went to college:
Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred. The alternative right are a much smarter group of people—which perhaps suggests why the Left hates them so much. They’re dangerously bright.

The Breitbart manifesto was unpleasantly familiar stylistically, and would be to anyone who’s had the misfortune (as I have, having studied in the Soviet Union) to read a lot of Marxist/Leninist writing.
These alt-righters are clearly influenced by Lenin, not in his leveling instincts, of course, but in his tactics. Just like the Bolsheviks, the alt-righters see themselves as the elite vanguard of a much larger population of proles, whom they deign to call “low-information” voters.
“Although the alt-right consists mostly of college-educated men,” the piece declares, “it sympathises with the white working classes and, based on our interviews, feels a sense of noblesse oblige.”
Or, as Trump would put it: “I love the poorly educated!”
Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were internationalists and globalists, the alt-righters are proudly provincial. Their goals are “a new identity politics that prioritises the interests of their own demographic,” is how Allum/Milo verbalized the idea.
Culture over economics is another theme. They dislike modern “establishment” conservatives because, like Clinton Democrats, they embrace a globalist politics that de-emphasizes national identity. They talk a lot about the “preservation of their own tribe.”
They believe that if ethnic groups spill over the border in big enough numbers, they will eventually “come to blows” with other groups, like for instance white Americans. This is one of the cardinal beliefs of the alt-right, and it’s an outgrowth of early twentieth-century white supremacist Ben Klassen’s “Racial Holy War” concept.
You can go on any alt-right message board, for instance 4chan or Stormfront, and see people speculating about when “RaHoWa” is coming. This is the new right’s version of “pure communism,” or the Rapture—the beautiful paradisical thing to be dreamed of in the future. It’s not terribly indistinguishable from Charlie Manson’s homicidal “Helter Skelter” theology.
As Breitbart puts it, integration “won’t be successful in the ‘kumbaya’ sense.” This is a profoundly pessimistic movement, angry, disappointed, born of frustration and insecurity and failure.
Early in the race, Trump seemed more like a consumer of alt-right ideas than a progenitor of them. He came off like a guy who read some stuff on the Internet that got him so worked up, he ran for president. This helped him connect with ordinary voters, because they read the same material. Trump was just like them!
The question of whether or not Trump was a conscious purveyor of these revolutionary concepts is hard to decipher, since Trump is a man who embraces and discards ideas at light speed. On the stump he seems unstable, easily distracted, and as likely driven by gas as ideology. His dominant idea is usually the one that most recently entered his head.
Still, Trump was the perfect vehicle for the movement. A lot of Trump’s policy ideas spoke directly to its cherished themes. Alt-righters love walls. They believe other “tribes,” like Muslims for instance, inherently look out for their own, and therefore limiting their entry into the country “until we figure out what’s going on” is not racist but merely self-preserving.
Moreover Trump’s constant mocking violations of modern cultural taboos, his jokes about Megyn Kelly’s “wherever” and impersonations of disabled Serge Kovaleski and his rants about Carly Fiorina’s face and Hillary Clinton’s “massive” hair, all line up with the ethos of the alt-righters.
These “dangerously bright” people think their Internet trolling is hilarious and ideologically justified. They actually think about this, consciously, as a strategy, which is another reason to think they just got incredibly lucky when the Republican nominee turned out to be Trump, a man whose trolling is reflexive and pathological, anything but thought out.
The alt-righters see themselves as the twenty-first-century version of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s who were forever “swearing on TV, mocking Christianity, and preaching the virtues of drugs and free love.” Only their thing is idiotic caricatures of Jews, Muslims, women, etc.
The alt-right positions Dr. King’s “dream” as false medicine forced upon us by our parents, a thing to be lampooned as cruelly as possible, the way we picked on Reefer Madness or Jerry Falwell’s “first time.”
I didn’t see or understand the power of the alt-right message until late in the campaign. Trump himself doesn’t seem like the kind of guy you’d imagine hanging out with an effete wimp like Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s easier to picture him with Mike Tyson and Kid Rock. Moreover, when I went out on the trail and talked to Trump voters, these snide campus-troll types were nowhere to be found.
My idea of a Trump voter, almost until the end, was one endless crowd of mostly older white people in mesh hats, carrying little American flags, standing with their hands clasped in a barn (in Iowa) or an agricultural fairgrounds (Wisconsin), begging for a return to a lost America that never existed.
Not one of these people had the education to be offended, as alt-righters were, that there had been calls to tear down statues of Cecil Rhodes or Queen Victoria in England. A lot of them were veterans and longtime blue-collar workers who had been shuttled from bad idea to bad idea over the years, as Republican snake-oil salesmen had descended into the heartland pointing fingers at cultural villains to the east and west. Trump seemed like just the latest.
But with Bannon’s help, Trump’s rhetoric unleashed a monstrous energy in these crowds. It turned out it took just a little push to move the traditional doddering Republican voter from tepid free-market internationalism to furious “tribal preservation.” In retrospect no one should have been surprised that voters were so unimpressed by the Republican Party establishment’s repeated cries that Trump was “not a conservative.”
Not a conservative? So what? Neither were most of these people. True, they didn’t love government regulations and taxes, but that wasn’t as central to their identity as, well, their identity.
The old Bush/Reagan Republicans used identity as a mere palate cleanser for their real political mission, energetic programs of laissez-faire capitalism.
Trump made identity the main course. He unleashed something dark and violent in the American psyche. He gave voters permission to disbelieve in a common future with the rest of America and offered the option of confrontation instead.
Pull a lever for me, he promised, and you’ll horrify them all. And they did it. Sixty million of them chose it. They wanted us to feel the way we feel this morning. They wanted to watch our faces as the dream went up in smoke.
In retrospect, the campaign really turned when Bannon came aboard. In classic Leninist fashion, he won the political battle with a strategic surrender, by having Trump publicly denounce almost all of the alt-right’s principles.
Trump crisscrossed the country on an “African-American outreach” tour. He went to Mexico and supplicated before President Enrique Peña Nieto, who got to tell Trump to his face he wouldn’t be paying for any wall. And the Trump campaign signaled over and over again that it was open to a “softening” on immigration, a seemingly heretical concept and a betrayal of everything he said during primary season.
Asked about Trump’s change of heart, campaign spokesclown Katrina Pierson quipped, “He hasn’t changed his position on immigration. He has changed the words that he is saying.”
I was with Trump’s press corps on a bus in New York, waiting to be shepherded to a flight to New Hampshire, when that comment came out. All of the reporters, myself included, burst out laughing. The general consensus was that Pierson was a dolt and that whatever they were doing with the immigration issue, it was suicide.
It wasn’t. It was brilliant. They were sticking the alt-right revolution back in the Trojan Horse in order to move it forward. Someone had finally wedded Trump’s crazy energy to a strategy. The beauty of the plan is that it didn’t require that Trump himself have a conversion. He squirmed and pouted through the whole “outreach” exercise, like Huck Finn fighting a bath. His core voters never stopped believing he was the uncouth madman with whom they’d fallen in love. Millions of other Republicans thought he’d tiptoed back to respectability. Bannon was doing the exact thing the choleric Trump by himself could not. He was building a coalition.
—
A few days after the election, postmortems began to trickle out of Washington. Right on cue, the Democrats began pointing fingers at everyone but themselves.
A Politico report describes the good-bye address between top Clinton aides and campaign staff:
Sexism. The media. James Comey.
On a call with surrogates Thursday afternoon, top advisers John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri pinned blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss on a host of uncontrollable headwinds that ultimately felled a well-run campaign….
They offered no apology for the unexpected loss.

The piece quoted surrogates who seethed as they listened to the Clinton brain trust deflect responsibility: “She got this gift of this complete idiot who says bizarre things and hates women and she still lost,” a Clinton fund-raiser told Politico. “They lost in a race they obviously should have won. They need to take some blame.”
Like Steve Bannon, Bill and Hillary Clinton were revolutionaries. The original Clinton revolution was also an intellectual revolt, born not of popular frustration but the intramural angst of Washington politicos frustrated by repeated Republican electoral successes.
Stung by Walter Mondale’s landslide loss in 1984, the new Democratic Leadership Council pushed a “third way” strategy. Founding documents like the DLC’s 1990 New Orleans Declaration—written when Bill Clinton was DLC chair—described a simple pragmatic trade: less bleeding-heart politics, more Democratic presidents.
The only “ideas” at the core of the DLC strategy were that Democrats were better than Republicans, and that winning was better than losing. To make Democrats more competitive, they made two important changes. One was the embrace of “market-based” solutions, which opened the door for the party to compete with Republicans for donations from Wall Street and heavy industry.
The other big trade-off was on race. The Clinton revolution was designed as a response to Dick Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which was based on dominating among whites from the South who nurtured resentments about the post–civil rights consensus.
To win those white voters back, the Clintons “triangulated” against liberal orthodoxies, pledging to end “welfare as we know it” and to punish criminals instead of “explaining away their behavior.” Liberal dog-whistling, if you will. Candidate Bill Clinton even went out of his way to attend the execution of a mentally deficient black man named Ricky Ray Rector during the 1992 campaign to signal his seriousness.
The original DLC positions on policing sound almost identical to current Trumpian rhetoric. “The U.S. has unwittingly allowed itself to unilaterally disarm in the domestic war against violent crime,” the group wrote, as part of its argument for a bigger federal role in law enforcement and the expanded use of “community policing.”
These moves worked in large part because of the personal magnetism of the Clintons. Bill and Hillary both seemed energetic and optimistic. Much of the world was enthralled by them, this power couple of intellectual equals. They were something modern, with their can-do positive attitude, which was marketed almost like a political version of Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign.
Moreover, Bill Clinton was nobody’s idea of a plutocrat back then. He was a self-made success story from a hardscrabble background, raised by a single mom in a rural Arkansas town literally called Hope. He was thought of both as an overgrown hillbilly and “the first black president.”
Clinton looked like a man of the people. He had to be torn away from campaign stops and chatted up everyone from truckers to waitresses to toll operators. He even had a bad junk-food habit, a quality then-Bill shares with today’s Donald Trump.
It helped that Bill Clinton’s first presidential opponent, George H. W. Bush, was a calcified Connecticut aristocrat who had been pampered in power for so long, he didn’t know how checkout lanes worked when he visited a supermarket.
They won, and kept winning, their success papering over fault lines building in the party.
—
In the sixteen years after Bill left office, a lot changed. For one thing, the Clintons personally emerged from the experience of the presidency deeply embittered by press criticism. They became fatalistic rather than optimistic about the burdens of power.
In that Politico piece after the election, an unnamed “longtime confidant” explained that Hillary and Bill decided to embark on a moneymaking campaign after Bill left office because they figured they would get criticized either way.
“Her outlook is, ‘I get whacked no matter what, so screw it,’ ” the person explained. “I’ve been out here killing myself for years and years and if I want to give the same speech everyone else does, I will.”
So the Clintons went from being plausibly accessible to ordinary people to living in a world where it was nobody’s business if they wanted to make $153 million in speaking fees.
Soon they were the politicians who’d been on Olympus so long, they couldn’t navigate the metaphorical supermarket line. Shortly before she announced her 2016 run, Hillary gave a speech to Goldman Sachs executives admitting that she was “kind of far removed because [of] the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy.”
There was another change.
The original Clinton strategy of the Nineties had stressed a rejection of liberal mantras about identity politics, and even the 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign had aggressively run against the “fairy tale” of Barack Obama.
That Hillary Clinton generated quite a lot of heat among white voters on the campaign trail. The emotional high point of her campaign came during the Pennsylvania primary, after Barack Obama had made his infamous “they cling to guns and religion” speech.
Hillary Clinton wasted no time in calling Obama “elitist and out of touch,” hammering him for his “demeaning remarks…about people in small-town America.”
I was at some of her Pennsylvania rallies that year, when she railed against her eggheaded opponent and riffed on her background as the “granddaughter of a factory worker” who was raised “outside” of a big city. Her mostly white and middle-class audiences whooped and hollered.
Hillary may have been very wealthy already by then. But the former “Goldwater Girl” clearly enjoyed playing the role of the champion of the silent majority. Her stump speech in that race was an almost exact replica of Nixon’s “forgotten Americans” theme from 1968: Hillary’s version was a call to the “invisible Americans” of the betrayed middle class.
But she lost that race, and the size and breadth of the Obama victory against McCain inspired the change to what her aides described to reporters as the “far narrower” Obama mobilize-the-base strategy in 2016.
But decades of those triangulating politics made her an unconvincing vehicle for that plan, and unforeseen developments like the Bernie Sanders campaign forced her to spend an enormous amount of time trying to hold the Democratic coalition together.
Meanwhile, on the other side, she was now pushing a strategy that couldn’t possibly have been less appealing to the so-called white working-class voter. Always an economic globalist, Hillary Clinton was now an enthusiastic convert to multiculturalism as well, the worst conceivable combination.
In the end, the Clinton revolution went the way of a lot of revolutions. The longer any group of intellectuals sits at or near power, the more they tend to drift away from their founding ideas and resort more and more to appeals to authority.
Trump’s rise massively accelerated this process. By late summer 2016, the Clinton campaign spent virtually all its time either raising explorations of Trump’s evil up the media flagpole or denouncing anyone who didn’t salute fast enough.
The Clinton campaign dismissed flyover Republicans as a “basket of deplorables” and then developed their own Leninist mania for describing factional enemies and skeptics within their own tent. In place of parasites, cosmopolitanites and wreckers, the campaign railed against “Bernie Bros,” “neo-Naderites,” “purity-testers” and a long list of other deviants.
In 2014, before the start of his wife’s presidential run, Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The biggest threat to the future of our children and grandchildren is the poison of identity politics that preaches that our differences are far more important than our common humanity.”
But by the last months of the general election race, the Clinton camp had done a complete 180 on identity politics, deploying it as a whip in an increasingly desperate effort to keep their coalition in place. They used language against other Democrats they would previously never have used against Republicans. Even ex-hippies and New Dealers were denounced as bigots whose discomfort with Clinton was an expression of privilege and an attack against women, people of color and the LGBT community.
Meanwhile members of the press who wrote anything negative about Clinton, made jokes, or even structured their ledes in the wrong way could be guilty of anything from “both-sidesism” (Lenin would have loved this tongue-mangling term) to “false equivalency” to the use of “weaponized” information, to say nothing of actual treason.
“You are a criminal agent of Putin conspiracy. And a profound enemy of progressive politics,” raged Democratic strategist Bob Shrum to journalist Glenn Greenwald, after the latter made a sarcastic comment about the campaign’s outrage toward previously lauded FBI director James Comey.
There are a lot of people who will probably say that all of these tirades against Clinton’s critics were on the mark. But it’s surely also true that once you reach the stage of being angry with people for wanting a reason to vote for you, you’ve been in this game too long.
The Clintons probably should have left politics the moment they decided they didn’t care what the public thought about how they made their money. Their original genius was in feeling where the votes were on the map and knowing how to get them. But that homing mechanism starts to falter once you make a conscious decision to tune out public criticism as irrational and inevitable.
It was a huge gamble to push forward toward the White House after they crossed this mental line. Moreover to run for president at a time when you’re admitting in private that you’re out of touch with regular people is wildly irresponsible, a violation of every idea even they once had about how to win elections.
All of these things played a role in the still-stunning loss to Trump. They spent virtually all their time attending corporate fund-raisers—more than 400 of them, according to one source I spoke to in Washington the day after the election—and relatively little on traditional canvassing. And they relied upon a preposterous computerized fortune-telling machine called “Ada” to gauge the feelings of voters, instead of sounding them out in person.
After the loss to Trump, the inclusive, upbeat Fleetwood Mac vibe of the original Clinton revolution vanished forever, replaced by anger, recrimination and willful myopia. A movement begun by future-embracing intellectuals ended on notes like, “I don’t want to hear it,” which became a ubiquitous phrase in Democratic circles.
“Samantha Bee Doesn’t ‘Want to Hear a Goddamn Word’ About Black Turnout” was HuffPo’s headline, after the comic’s postelection tirade against any explanations for Trump’s rise other than “white people.”
“I don’t want to hear it” became an expression of solidarity. It felt like a real-world extension of a social media response, where publicly blocking people during this season became a virtue even among upper-class white guys (Vox’s Matt Yglesias boasting in the summer of 2016 about having blocked 941 people on Twitter is one bizarre example).
The “hear no evil” campaign was surely in part messaging from the Clinton campaign, which went from pooh-poohing any poll numbers that showed a tight race (the media was often blamed for pushing poll numbers “without context” in search of a better horse race) to describing Trump’s victory as the inevitable triumph of an irrepressible white nationalist movement.
We somehow went from “suggesting it’s close is a vicious lie” to “we never had a chance” overnight.
The Clintons throughout their history had been survivors. They made it through controversy after controversy by unfailingly finding the lee shore in a storm. Their talent at spinning was legendary.
Any journalist who ever tried to call a Clinton aide for a comment on a negative story was inevitably treated to a master class in double-talk. The bad thing didn’t happen, or they didn’t do the bad thing if it was done, or even if they did do it you shouldn’t report it, because it helped worse people, and so on. They were like junkies: They always had a story. Their confidence was unshakeable and exhausting, their will to persevere a thing to behold.
But in the end, they ran out of stories, except one last one: They lost because there was no hope. They went from optimism, to fatalism, to absolute pessimism, all in the space of 25 years.
The pessimism of the Democratic leadership is like that of a person in a catatonic crisis. Once they were heroes for finding a way to win by selling out just enough on race and economics. But now that that strategy has been closed, they seem stunned to the point of paralysis by the seemingly incurable divisions of our society, as if they’re seeing them for the first time.
Meanwhile the pessimism of Trump’s revolution is intentional, impassioned, ascendant. They placed a huge bet on America’s worst instincts, and won. And the first order of business will be to wipe out a national idea in which they never believed.
Welcome to the end of the dream.