Explaining Trump, Explaining Us

Bookshelf — Wildland, The Making of America’s Fury, Evan Osnos

Immediately after Donald Trump got elected in 2016, friends from other countries like Mexico, Venezuela, or Spain asked me: How did this happen? How could Americans vote for such a thuggish clown?

I never developed a succinct answer from the many factors that put Trump in the White House:

· working-class white backlash to Obama and the related fear in White America to the browning of the nation;

· flaccid economies in former factory towns the created American’s first modern generation that wasn’t going to live better than its parents;

· the mendacity of conservative media (led by Murdoch and Fox), the death spiral of local news reporting, and the viral compression of the public attention span by social media;

· the greed of wealthier Republicans who saw Trump for what he was but bet (correctly) on his willingness to enrich them further;

· and the cowardly moderate GOP pols who once they sniffed the direction of their base’s wind abandoned what few principles they had in favor of self-preservation.

In other words, the short answer to Why Trump? was this: Race, fear, resentment, greed, media, and raw politics.