What Democrats can learn from Donald Trump

Let me start by being clear and unequivocal: Donald Trump was a bad president, set a bad precedent, and weakened the Democracy that we have spent hundreds of years attempting to make ever more perfect.

Now that I have that out of the way, I think we as a country need to begin our retrospective on what just took place. In the programming world, after every major milestone, we engage in a retrospective where we discuss what went well, what went wrong, and things we can do to make future iterations better. This system works best after the projects that frankly did not go terribly well or as expected. I think it’s time for America to do the same, and I’d like focus this piece on what Donald Trump did well. And to do that we need to go back to 2016.

I, like most people, was shocked when Donald Trump won against Hillary Clinton. People laughed at his candidacy, he stumbled about as often as one can do, and went up against an extremely qualified and well funded candidate. Mr. Trump did not even write an acceptance speech. Yet, he won.

Our retrospective after this election was that the polls were wrong, Hillary was not as likable as we tried to convince ourselves she was (the proof that this is a sexist label is that Donald Trump may be the most unlikable person to ever walk this earth but I have yet to hear anybody call him ‘unlikeable’), she ignored key swing states, Russia did their part to tip the scales, and James Comey should keep his mouth shut. What this added up to was a narrow path to victory for Trump that was only possible due to a confluence of all of these factors. In other words, it was a fluke. Once we accounted for these factors, there was no way a Trump-like figure could ever win.

Enter 2020. And while yes, Joe Biden won, Donald Trump received the second most votes of any political candidate ever. Taking into account that President-Elect Biden ran a near flawless campaign, might be the most qualified candidate of all time, we had no significant foreign influence, and Donald Trump suggested we drink bleach without a hint of satire and almost his whole team got COVID-19, the fact that Biden squeaked out a win in a very close race changes the retrospective for me; 2016 was not a fluke. 2020 was the fluke. So let’s go back and figure out what actually happened in 2016.

To set the stage, this thought came to me as I was watching an hour long NPR interview of Obama in 2016. He is pontificating at great length issues like racial equality, the effects of globalization on wages, and the need for patience when asking for change in a democracy. As Obama has admitted in his books, he is fascinated by these subjects and does not shy away from discussing these issues in great detail. I personally find these subjects fascinating and it is not lost on me that I have the privilege of engaging in this kind of intellectual pontification because I don’t have to worry about where I’m going to get my next meal, how I’m going to pay rent, or how to keep myself safe from unwarranted violence, a fortune that I cannot attribute to anything other than a roll of the dice.

Unlike myself, so many others don’t have the time or mental energy to hear somebody explain to them that their wages aren’t rising because the continued intertwining of global economies and technological innovation are driving the demand for their services down. Even less so are they willing to hear out how this could possibly be a good thing when all they see is less and less stability in their daily lives. They’ve got to focus on paying the bills, trying to find affordable day care, or learn new skills in an economy that is leaving them behind. It’s a catch-22; those that are willing to hear out the argument and understand it are not the ones in the subject of discussion.

That’s what Donald Trump got right. He simplified the problem and simplified the solution. He said that your wages will continue to stagnate unless we retreat from the world stage and stop letting people into our country. Your jobs are being stolen from you and you are right in your frustration. People who can sit and ideate on these issues and come up with an explanation for why globalization is good don’t get me. Donald Trump? He gets me.

Until Trump came along, the group that needed a Donald Trump figure to simplify the problem, tell them that their frustration is legitimate, and provided a simple answer for how to fix it simply didn’t engage in the political process. They looked at Obama v. Romney and saw two parties that were jousting on an intellectual basis, solving problems in their mansions that the average person simply did not have time to follow. Hillary continued this trend I believe would have fared quite well against another Romey-esque intellectual figure.

However, Donald Trump spoke in terms literally everybody could understand. He was able to do this because he could rely on fear and an us-versus-them argument. And when he couldn’t, he would outright lie. It’s hard to compete with that. But his voters finally had somebody that could tell them the hard facts, not beat around the bush, and tell them how he could fix it. I think he was wrong in every regard, but the people finally had somebody who could tell them how he was gonna fix it. When Hillary tried to win them back, her intellectual castle-building arguments fell flat.

So, how do we as Democrats, simplify our arguments in a way that could convince, for example, low-wage workers that globalization is a good thing and we should welcome immigrants when the opposing party can rely on fear and lies to swoon them. How do we compete with that? “We can’t” is not an acceptable answer. We have to, or else in the history books 2020 will be the fluke, with 2016 being the start of the new normal.