Trump's World: Challenges of a Changing America: An Anthology from the Cairo Review of Global Affairs

By The Cairo Review of Global Affairs

An anthology from the pages of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs brings together experts from the Middle East and around the world for a penetrating insight into how maverick tycoon Donald Trump captured the White House and a comprehensive survey of the new America president's domestic and international challenges. This is a must-read collection of serious writing for everyone concerned about superpower relations, Middle East peace, migration and immigration, climate change, and other hot-button issues in the Trump Era. Among the anthology's 32 essays: "The Meaning of Trump" by Donald T. Critchlow; "American Poverty" by Bernie Sanders, "Islamophobes" by Moustafa Bayoumi; "The United States and Palestine" by Rashid Khalidi; "Struggle of the Middle East Refugees" by António Guterres; "How ISIS Will End" by Mark Juergensmeyer; "Failings of Political Islam" by Tarek Osman," "Unraveling in the Kremlin" by Lilia Shevtsova, and "After the Paris Agreement" by Hoda Baraka and Payal Parekh. With an introduction by former Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781617978128

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs is the quarterly journal of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (GAPP) at the American University in Cairo (AUC). 

Book preview

Introduction

By Nabil Fahmy

Few predicted the Arab awakening that swept through the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. It served as a reminder for Arab leaders that their constituents, especially the youth, were tired of the perpetual political status quo that had created and enabled the repressive regimes to stay in power for over three decades. The youth demanded their right to join the liberal world order and reap the benefits that would come with it: democratic institutions, better governance, a more open society, and economic growth. They were in search of meaning, for their identity as young Arab members of liberal societies.

The year 2016 has demonstrated that the West, the liberal order the Arab World sought to become a part of, was going through an identity crisis of its own. In many liberal democracies those who feel left out, pushed aside, or forgotten by their establishment politicians spoke out for change, against the maintenance of the status quo. Few analysts predicted that Britain would leave the European Union, that Donald Trump would become the next president of the United States, or took seriously the rising tide of rightwing populist politics gaining ground in Europe and beyond. The rise of populism in the post-2008 financial crisis era has demonstrated that liberal democratic systems were neither perfect nor immune to an awakening in the age of globalization.

There are many reasons for this. The appeal of populism in the West grew when economies became sclerotic and establishment politicians seemed to favor the status quo. Wages stagnated, jobs for decades had moved from the rural areas to the urban centers, and low-paying jobs offshored to India and China. At the same time, education and living costs increased while political leaders assured their constituents that things were getting better. The richest 1 percent were getting richer, which to many indicated that globalization was benefitting mostly the wealthiest sectors of society, the elites, who had the resources to benefit from offshoring and the seemingly borderless flow of capital from London to New York to Hong Kong. The political and corporate elites appeared above the law while heavily regulating the lives of others.

For many the frustration that ensued is exacerbated by the liberal and internationalist norms that come with globalization and are espoused by many elites and cosmopolitans: more openness, be it in terms of free trade or the promotion of multiculturalism and diversity.

Especially after the start of the Syrian civil war and the subsequent refugee crisis overwhelming the European Union, immigration has become an increasingly contentious issue. Immigrants, coming from the global south, were seen not only as catalytic, stealing the jobs of the working class, but more importantly as changing the social fabric in many Western countries. Even though globalization had increased the flow of capital, goods, information, ideas, and people, it had not undermined attachment to national identity or enhanced the level of tolerance in our societies. Globalization and cosmopolitanism have failed to offer the same sense of belonging that adherence to national identity can foster. In fact, for many, globalization had resulted in the degradation of their nations. Populist slogans that tout the need to take back control and restore our country appeal to those feeling alienated by globalization and cosmopolitan norms that impinge upon national sovereignty.

People began to lose their faith in international and regional institutions whose job was to facilitate the process of globalization and economic integration while maintaining and promoting the liberal international order. The forces opposing globalization saw their countries being bound by transnational rules and international laws that reduce policy options available to domestic policymakers, thus impinging upon their national sovereignty. Russian President Vladimir Putin has argued that this liberal world order was politically motivated and directed by the West. Many governmental authorities in the Middle East and beyond share this belief. Thus, the politics of Putin and Trump are seen by many as a positive force in the global arena, steering the focus from promoting liberalism to a more realist approach to domestic affairs and international diplomacy.

The current world order was established in 1945 after World War II. This order has resulted in the longest period of peace among states and spurred unprecedented economic growth, especially in the West. It has also brought Europe from the brink of destruction, lifted millions out of poverty throughout the world, and spread new freedoms to many countries. However, the liberal world order has failed to secure national and other in-group identities. The promise of secular democracy based on liberalism has not been able to offer citizens a strong enough sense of meaning and belonging. It is not only the Middle East where young people are losing faith in politics; in the West people are becoming tired of the technocrats in liberal democracies maintaining the status quo.

Despite its flaws, in liberal democracies the possibility of compromise exists. However, leaders must uphold the democratic institutions and traditions that guarantee equal rights for everyone. In the Arab awakening many had a very naive understanding of what it means to be a citizen: what the responsibilities and obligations are. It now seems that citizens in liberal democracies have forgotten what it means to be a citizen. Many of them have not engaged in politics and have let their representatives function on their own. Liberal Western democracies have to have frank discussions about the limits of liberalism and define what it means to be a citizen of a liberal democracy. Democracy, especially liberal democracies, will only satisfy aspirations if their citizens actively participate in defining and evaluating policies governing issues in the public domain.

Let’s not, however, draw the wrong conclusions. Recent events do not prove that the aspirations of the Arab awakening or the principles of Western liberalism are wrong. But the turmoil and call for change did underline that both required wise leaders and inclusive governance.

PART 1:

Challenges at Home

The Year of Living Dangerously

Trump’s Victory and the Brexit Vote in 2016 Highlight the Crisis of Democracy and the Need for Reform

By Stein Ringen

Brexit. Trump. In Britain, the country’s membership in the European Union is rejected in a referendum. In America, a maverick anti-establishment political outsider wins the presidency.

These results are monumental political upheavals in the two countries, with consequences that reach beyond their shores and throughout the world. Toward the end of 2016, the French president announced that he would not be seeking a second term, citing the pressure of extremist forces, and the Italian government was dispatched in a populist referendum. In Austria, the extreme anti-establishment attempt at the presidency failed, but the establishment candidates had already been dismissed before the final test. History will see 2016 as a watershed, the year of reaction.

Britain and America are the world’s core democracies. These countries have been bearers of a political–economic venture that has come to define the meaning of modern democracy. In 2016, to the surprise of winners and losers alike, the modern idea of modernity—the liberal inheritance that the philosopher John Gray described as the belief that the future is liberal and the arc of history, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., bends towards justice—has suffered a defeat from which it may not soon recover. What was lost in these tests was finally a set of ideas.

To be clear, firstly: The results in both countries were eminently democratic. In Britain, it was the verdict of a referendum mandated by Parliament. In America, it was the outcome of the regular vote. In both countries, no voters could be in doubt that they were given radically different options to choose between. In both countries, the choice was between establishment and anti-establishment positions, with huge constituencies of angry voters rallying behind the policies and candidates of discontent.

As often in democracies, the results were messy. The winning margins were tight, with about the same electoral strength behind losers and winners. In Britain, there is (probably) a majority in the population in favor of continued membership in the European Union (EU), but because of low voter participation among the young, that majority did not prevail in the referendum. In America, the losing candidate won the majority of the popular vote, but not in enough states to carry the election as constitutionally required. In both countries, the campaigns were distressingly ugly, the blame for which has to be shared between the perpetrators of ugliness and those unable to lift the battles above it.

But to be clear, secondly: The purpose of democracy is not to be democratic. Democracy is a method. The purpose is a social order of equality in which all citizens enjoy security and inclusion, and adequate governance to maintain and improve that order—in the American constitution: to form a more perfect Union. We subscribe to democracy because we believe that such a system, being under popular control, is likely to protect citizens against oppression and, being governance by consent, is likely to be effective in delivery. There has been a vision of liberty, inclusiveness, tolerance, and internationalism, and of trust in the democratic method for the advancement of these ideas. The tenability of this vision is now in question.

What is distressing in both Brexit and the Donald Trump victory is not that complacent establishments were rejected—nothing could be more pleasing to the democratic mind—but that it was done on terms that negate both the ideas of purpose that underpin the democratic enterprise and the huge advances that have been made in safeguarding democratic values after the defeat of fascism in the world, the fall of communism in Europe, and the end of legal racial and other segregation. In both countries, ugly campaigns embraced and encouraged sundry voices of xenophobia, fear of the other, racism, and divisiveness which we until the fateful year of 2016 had thought had been marginalized to the dark and dusty corners of the house of modernity. In both countries, the unexpected victories of reaction were followed by a new assertiveness of hate-speak and hate-crime.

There are lessons to be learned for those of us who are concerned for the standing of democracy in the world. We have for some time been used to thinking that the crisis of democracy is located in the democratic fringes where democracy has struggled to take hold and cope, such as in Russia and North Africa. There are clearly cases of democratic failure, but by and large democracy is doing well in the world. The proposition that democracy as such is in crisis has been tested empirically and rejected, for example by the German political scientist Wolfgang Merkel. Democratic weakness, it is now clear to see, is not confined to the fringe. We therefore need to give renewed and critical attention to the core democracies and how they are performing. If democracy falters in Europe and America, it falters generally. Democracy theorists have also been used to thinking—usually with reference to their rightly admired Tocqueville—that democracy is something it is difficult to become but easier to be. Another lesson of 2016 is that democracy, even in the old democracies, remains something that is persistently difficult to be. To understand the democratic predicament, the crisis if you will, we should pay renewed and critical attention to the social conditions of democracy.

Failure of Leadership

What happened in Britain and America? Briefly, the establishment projects were rejected. In Britain, the government side and in America the Democratic Party represented the alternatives of continuity. It turned out they were hapless, but they were right. They were on the side of progress but were unable to stand up to the challenge of reaction. They had the wind of history behind them but were defeated by assaults of anti-politics. What came under attack was not just this or that candidate or party but the very venture of modernity as it has come to be understood in the age of liberty.

However, thus describing what happened, even in stark terms, is not to explain it. Why establishments that had history and the logic of progress on their side were overthrown by foes that were all but impressive and attractive, if not atrocious, is something that evades easy explanation.

In both cases, what the establishment sides brought to the party failed to inspire. In Britain, the government and its many allies fought for a continuation of EU membership, but never articulated any vision or idea to give life to their line. With stunning strategic incompetence, they fell back on patronizing scaremongering, which could not fail to alienate voters they needed to attract. In America, Hillary Clinton failed, from the primaries and on, to present herself as an attractive candidate with a program of purpose. With equal strategic incompetence, her campaign took swaths of voters, whose votes they just felt entitled to, for granted.

Already at this elementary level of explanation, we meet a factor that is recurrent from whatever angle we look at it: the failure of leadership. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative government failed to present its case as believable. In America, Clinton and the other Democratic leaders failed to present themselves as worthy of taking over the mantle. These tests were lost more than they were won. The sides that should have won failed to rise to the occasion and were given short shrift.

In my book Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience, I argue that democratic order depends strongly on good leaders who are able to exercise good and persuasive leadership. In both the British and American campaigns there was an absence of good and an abundance of bad leadership. That goes to both sides. Not only did the establishment sides fail to make their case, the challenger sides disdained the responsibility of leadership. One would have hoped, in mature democracies, that those who aspire to leadership accept that with ambition comes responsibility. That includes to behave with civility, to argue honestly, to respect the truth, to refrain from extreme demagoguery, to not stimulate base motives. The reason they should accept such responsibility is that if they do not, short-term opportunism strikes back in the form of long-term damage to respect for public service and governance and to rational deliberation and decision-making.

In these two cases, that responsibility failed utterly. It failed in particular (but not only) on the side of the challengers. In the Brexit campaign, the leave side built their challenge around known untruths about the economic costs of membership in the European Union. In America, the Trump campaign was simply a parade of untruths, as uncovered by fact-checkers among campaign observers. That was in both cases shocking, but equally shocking was that the establishment sides proved themselves to be without the authority to discredit utterly disreputable politicking. In both countries, the campaigns exposed weaknesses of political culture and a debilitating absence of cohesion between leaders and people which have rendered their respective systems dysfunctional.

The result of leadership failure was that the establishment sides were unable to mobilize their voters. In Britain, the young, who are overwhelmingly in favor of EU membership and who are the beneficiaries of the lifestyles of internationalism that come with European integration and therefore had much at stake in the referendum, were not mobilized. In America, the Democrats failed to mobilize not only the young but also women and minority voters, again groups that had much at stake in the election and in the defeat of the challenger. Astonishingly, those whose interests the government in Britain and the Democrats in America were promoting failed to rally behind those they should have seen as their champions. The campaigns did spiral down into distortion, but something so counterintuitive as these results cannot be explained by campaign tactics alone. We need to dig deeper.

The 2016 clashes of progress and reaction took place in an environment of post-economic crisis and extremes of inequality and rising inequality. In 2008, America and Britain, and gradually the rest of the world, plunged into an economic crash of a ferocity comparable only to that of 1929.

The fallout was, firstly, a collapse in standards of living. Many workers and families experienced the loss of jobs, the loss of savings, the loss of homes, and degradation in other ways. In Britain, real wages and working age incomes have been stagnant since the crash, and for some groups of workers in decline, and are not expected to reach pre-crash levels again until at least 2021. Poverty rates have soared. It is not that people have felt abandoned, it is that they were abandoned. It was not that their anger was the result of simple-mindedness or lack of sophistication, or that those who were rising up in revolt were, in Hillary Clinton’s words, a basket of deplorables. They may not all have been articulate (by educated middle-class standards) but they were angry because they had good reasons to be angry.

Secondly, the economic crisis followed through not only to deprivation but also to a loss of confidence in prevailing models and custodianship of the political economy. During the pre-2008 years of steady economic growth, mainstream economic thinking had been infested by hubris to such a degree that ministers of finance, central bankers, and high-visibility economists were promising a steady march of growth into the heavens of prosperity. As late as June 2007, as world capitalism was about to implode, the British chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, in the formal setting of his annual Mansion House speech, heaped praise on the financial industry and congratulated the City of London on these remarkable achievements, and on an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age in which a new world order was created. Then came the crash. A year later, testifying before the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, the former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan described himself as in shock at having to face up to his free-market ideology, which he had been going by for forty years or more—the model that I perceived is a critical functioning structure that defines how the world works—being flawed. In the upheavals and the reaction to them, confidence in the experts died. This was to haunt the Brexit campaign in Britain. Near to unanimous warnings from official and independent economists that Brexit would come at a cost to the wallet had no traction, while the dismissal of these warnings for coming from the experts found an easy audience.

Long before the sudden economic crash, advanced economies, the American and British ones in particular, had entered into a period of ever-widening inequalities in income and wealth. In Britain, the turning point was around 1975, when a previous trend toward less inequality was broken for a new trend of rising inequality. In America, the share of pre-tax national income to the bottom half of earners had fallen to 12 percent in 2014, from 20 percent in 1980. Of children born in 1940, almost all would obtain a higher standard of living than their parents. Of children born in 1980, only a half can count on achieving that betterment.

Gradually, inequalities grew obscene, with most of the fruits of economic growth falling to a minority of the rich and super-rich, and with the majority of the population enjoying only moderate, if any, improvement in wages and real standards of living, except such improvements as were secured by more work through longer hours and two family incomes. (This has all been documented in great detail by, in particular, Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.)

Nevertheless, as long as there was steady economic growth, inequalities were in some way tolerable since there was, or seemed to be, at least some improvement, and a great deal of hope, also for many. The economic crisis caused that to change in two ways. The excesses of ever-widening inequality became intolerable when those in the lower- and middle-income ranks fell from comfort into neglect and deprivation. And the political response to economic crisis deepened inequality, and the perception of inequality, even further. Post-recession policies sheltered significant sections of the economy and population from the fallout of crisis, while others were left to suffer. Suddenly, societies that had been seen to be reasonably harmonious, or at least on a good path toward harmony, were exposed as deeply divided. The non-sheltered have-nots naturally resented the sheltered haves, but also found scapegoats elsewhere, such as among immigrants, or those who are different or seen as less British or less American, or more abstractly in globalization. Opportunistic leaders, rather than accepting leadership responsibility, stimulated and exploited the politics of scapegoating. Out of this again grew a tangible anger so that when the tests of 2016 presented themselves, the time had come for reckoning—with the rich, the toffs, the experts, the immigrants, with globalization, and in Britain with Europe.

I was, no doubt, not alone in asking myself, in the days after the Brexit verdict in Britain and the Trump victory in America, How could they be so stupid? But now, in the cold light of analysis, what I see is not stupidity but reason. The establishments lost because they deserved to lose. They deserved to lose because they had lost confidence. They had lost confidence because they had presided over an enterprise in which values promised cohesion, but realities produced division. Democracy had done a job. In a democracy, once explained the great Max Weber, the people choose leaders in whom they trust. Then the chosen leaders say, ‘Now shut up and obey.’ Later the people can sit in judgement. If the leaders have made mistakes, to the gallows with them.

However, consigning the rascals to oblivion, although important, is not all we expect of democracy. In this case, it worked out perversely so that the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. The backlash hit not only failed leaders of the day but also the long-term venture to form a more perfect union.

Fix Our Politics

In the late part of the twentieth century, the world experienced an explosive spread of democracy. By century’s end, 140 of 189 countries had systems of multiparty elections (as counted in the 2002 United Nations Human Development Report). In the twenty-first century, the advance of democracy has now come to a halt and there have been setbacks. If that is a sign of democratic weakness, I believe the source of weakness lies more in the democratic core than in the fringe. Democracy as such does not fall into disrepute by not being embraced in, say, Saudi Arabia, or for stumbling in, say, Russia.

But if democracy does not perform reasonably up to expectations where it is long established, it is democracy itself that is in decline. That is now unfolding. Within the democracies, there is a lessening of popular trust in democratic rule while confidence in stronger and more autocratic forms of rule is rising. (These trends are now visible in European and World Values Survey data.) Internationally, soft power shifts to the dictators and dictatorships. After the American elections, for example, the leaders of China rushed into the vacuum to lecture the world that this is what you get when you are careless enough to let the people choose their leaders. At the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Lima, Peru in late November 2016, Xi Jinping was the one to reassure anxious nations that they could trust China to be their guarantor of economic openness and stability.

What is to be done? We must pray that political and economic elites in Europe and America take the rejection by their peoples—for that and no less is what it is—as a warning that the future cannot be business as usual, that they must shake themselves out of complacency, and that they need to bring themselves into a mindset of reform.

We need systemic economic reform. Societies that define themselves by security and inclusion cannot live by deprivation and division. Globalization and automation, the targets of the politics of discontent, come with enormous benefits in the form of affluence and quality of work and life. But we have not found a way of combining this progress with inclusiveness. To underwrite democracy under advanced capitalism, we need a new social contract. Post-economic crisis governments in Britain sold hardship and public finance austerity with a story that we are all in the same boat. We never were, but that’s where we now need to get. The shallow individualism and small-government gospel of Reaganism and Thatcherism has shipwrecked. Before inclusiveness in public policy must come inclusiveness in mindsets. It is a matter of nothing less than a reinvention of a democratic political culture. As always, it will depend on leadership.

In Europe, the mindset of reform needs to include the European Union. The project of European integration has received a potentially mortal blow. Britain exiting and the rest of the European Union continuing as before is a strategy of high risk and low imagination. British and European leaders should swallow their pride and sit down to devise a reformed union that can embrace all of Europe. The European Union is already a structure with many different forms of adhesion, from Swiss and Norwegian types of quasi-membership, via various combinations of inside and outside of the Schengen and the euro, to the comprehensive arrangements of the full-membership countries. Flexibility has proved to work and is now needed in respect to Britain and to preempt other possible exits. Brussels may have to sacrifice a battle to win the war, but better that than to lose the war.

In Britain, the time has come for constitutional reform. It is a misunderstanding that Britain does not have a written constitution just because constitutional provisions are not collected into a single document with constitution its heading. But the constitution is poorly protected and open to political manipulation. The Brexit referendum was called by Prime Minister Cameron ahead of the 2015 general election for opportunistic party-political reasons. The necessary legislation breezed through Parliament without serious reflection or debate. Whatever the outcome, the referendum would have represented notable constitutional change, at the very least to have made referenda a normal instrument of political decision-making. If they can, politicians of the day will manipulate the constitution for their own advantage. That should not be possible. Constitutional provisions should be changeable, but changing the constitution is a serious business that should not be done without serious work and deliberation. By coincidence, the week after the vote, the Chilcot report of the inquiry into Britain’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath was published, with deep criticism of a dysfunctional system of decision-making which resulted in colossal mistakes both on the entry into war and post-war management. Britain does not have a safe system of political decision-making.

In America, what burst through the surface in 2016 was the pent-up pressure from a long, relentless, step-by-step erosion of political culture in which big business has fortified itself as the power behind the throne. Already President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw this coming and warned, in his farewell address in 1961, against the military-industrial complex, the influence of which, he said, was economic, political, even spiritual and felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. He was not heeded and the build-up of corporate backstage power has continued to now constitute a more general politico-corporate complex.

The rejection of the establishment in 2016 was in part a reaction against corruption and gridlock in Washington. The reason there is gridlock is that the holders of office, in Congress in particular, are not free to make policies for the public good. Since Eisenhower’s warning, corporate America has added organizational power to its already formidable arsenal of economic power. Through a vast network of partisan Political Action Committees, think tanks, media organizations, and lobbying groups, it has won control over the setting of political agendas. Furthermore, in the age of mega-expensive politics, candidates depend on sponsors to fund permanent campaigns. When big money is allowed to transgress into politics, those who control it gain power to decide who the successful candidates will be—those they wish to fund—and what they can decide once in office—that which is acceptable to those who hold the purse-strings. The representatives, or most of them, may not be personally corrupt, but the system in which they work is one of deep collusion between big politics and big money (the collusion, incidentally, of which Hillary Clinton was seen as the embodiment).

In his final State of the Union Address in early 2016, Barack Obama called on his fellow Americans to fix our politics to prevent democracy from grinding to a halt. This, he said, is the most important thing I want to say tonight. That was a shocking message from the president of the United States of America, speaking in Congress, to the nation. And in hindsight now, a message loaded with foreboding. He was repeating Eisenhower’s warning, but with the radicalism of substance disguised by the elegance of rhetoric.

Washington is dysfunctional, said the president, because elected representatives are trapped by imperatives which they dislike but cannot get out of, notably that of raising money—dark money he had called it in his State of the Union address a year earlier. When Washington is unable to act, the next bastion to fall is trust. A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything, but it does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. The reason trust breaks down is that those with money and power gain greater control over the decisions, and then, as frustration grows, there will be voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes. Democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest. Too many Americans feel that way right now. And further, since the representatives in Washington are trapped, it’s not enough just to change a congressman or change a senator or even change a president. We have to change the system. We have to reduce the influence of money in our politics, so that a handful of families or hidden interests can’t bankroll our elections.

It ought to be possible for Congress to extricate itself from the trap it has fallen into. The members of Congress hate it: the never-ending campaigning, the constant raising of money, the kowtowing to richness, the looking over their shoulders to the moneymen when they vote. And the people despise it. Democracy is a public good, it should be paid for publicly. It does not need mega-expensive campaigning. It is a misunderstanding that politicians chase money; it is money that chases politicians.

Reform Matters

Democracy in the world needs protection, good examples, and leadership. That must come from the core democracies, notably America and Britain. That they are able to reform matters for democracy in these countries. But it matters equally for the peoples of countries and areas that are dictatorial or where democracy is in its infancy. For my own part, I have recently been preoccupied with the political system of China. I have found it (as reported in my book The Perfect Dictatorship) to be a sophisticated totalitarian state. I have also seen that in the shadows of that mighty state, heroic activists risk life and livelihoods in a struggle for rule of law, freedom, and security. As a result of events in America and Europe, and through no fault of their own, their cause, and that of their fellows in other areas of oppression, has suffered a heavy setback.

—Cairo Review Winter 2017

The Meaning of Trump

What the Billionaire Businessman’s Anti-Establishment Challenge Heralds for America’s Future

By Donald T. Critchlow

Donald Trump’s nomination to head the Republican Party ticket in 2016 stunned and confounded the Grand Old Party establishment, foreign policy experts, conservative pundits, and most of the news media. Trump is a unique phenomenon in American political history. No other presidential candidate, with the possible exceptions of Andrew Jackson in 1824 and Woodrow Wilson in 1912, has experienced such a meteoric political rise. At least Jackson had served as a congressman and U.S. senator from Tennessee, and Wilson came to the White House after two years as governor of New Jersey.

Trump won the nomination with no experience in elected office, defeating sixteen other Republican contenders. At every step, his GOP primary campaign rivals underestimated him. His understanding of policy was nearly absent, he lacked a ground game for campaigning, and his rhetoric was vitriolic, divisive, and demagogic. True to his swashbuckling style in business, Trump’s campaign soared on the strength of idiosyncratic antics such as the constant stream of name-calling tweets that ensured viral exposure in twenty-four-hour news cycles and delighted anti-establishment voters looking for a populist hero. But from start to finish the Trump phenomenon left the Republican Party in total disarray, with even former Republican presidents refusing to endorse the GOP’s 2016 standard bearer. With less than a month before general election day, news reports about Trump’s serial lewd behavior prompted other Republican leaders to retract endorsements and had some GOP leaders desperately exploring ways to dump Trump from the ticket.

The form and content of Trump’s bid for the presidency was set in his June 16, 2015 announcement speech, in which he declared, When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And, some, I assume are good people. His tone was in sharp contrast to that of Jeb Bush, the leading candidate at the outset, who had described illegal immigration as an act of love by people striving to give their families a better life, and to that of Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American senator from Florida, who had supported providing undocumented immigrants with opportunities to remain in the country.

After a series of primaries that saw his rivals drop out one after the other, Trump received the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July 2016. Trump had failed to win a majority of primary voters in any state until it had become clear he was headed to ultimate victory. The crowded Republican field had split the vote. Yet Trump tapped into a deep undercurrent of anxiety in America about a tepid economy, the loss of manufacturing jobs, demographic changes, race relations, and the breakdown of families and social order. Playing on popular resentment is not new to American politics, but never was a leading presidential candidate so unvarnished, so unrestrained, and so blunt in his language. His appeal turned off most higher-income and suburban voters, but attracted other vital voting blocs.

Trump energized a constituency that had not gone Republican since Ronald Reagan twenty-five years earlier: blue-collar workers. A key to his success was attracting working-class independents and Democrats who cast ballots in Republican contests in states with open primaries. Trump received a higher percentage of blue-collar voters than any other Republican candidate, ranging from 40 percent to 60 percent of voters making $50,000 or less, according to the exit polling in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. The only state where another candidate did better among these lower-income voters was in Wisconsin, where Ted Cruz beat Trump by one percentage point, 42 percent to 41 percent.

Surprisingly, Trump also captured much of the evangelical Christian vote that can be critical to Republican electoral success, even though he displayed little religiosity himself, unlike some of his rivals, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, or Cruz, who wore their religion on their sleeves.

From Trump Tower to the White House

Trump has been a well-known celebrity in American popular culture for decades, thanks to his flamboyant activities as a businessman (building iconic skyscrapers and casinos bearing his name), his self-promotion of a billionaire’s lifestyle (of his three glamorous wives, two were fashion models and the other an actress), and his fame as a reality TV host (on NBC’s The Apprentice for eleven seasons). Though it seemed to many observers that Trump came out of nowhere, his political ambitions in fact date back decades. His 2016 bid for the presidency was initially dismissed by most serious observers as another scheme to enhance the Trump brand for merchandizing eponymous products that include, besides his skyscrapers and casinos, wine, apparel, golf resorts, hotels, and a university. However, Trump had considered running for president in 1988, 2000, and 2012, and governor of New York in 2006 and 2014.

Trump contemplated challenging President Reagan’s vice president and heir apparent, George H. W. Bush, for the Republican presidential nomination in 1987. He launched a national advertising campaign chastising Reagan for his negotiations with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and with Japan. Trump ads proclaiming, There’s nothing wrong with American’s foreign defense policy that a little backbone can’t cure, appeared in newspapers across the country. He created a press frenzy by flying into the early-primary state of New Hampshire and declaring, Whatever Japan wants, do the opposite. Typically touting his own savvy as a negotiator, he added, The Japanese, when they negotiate with us, they have long faces. But when the negotiations are over it is my belief—and I have seen this—they laugh like hell. He pushed for a protectionist policy, appearing on the popular Oprah Winfrey television show in April 1988, telling the audience, I’d make our allies pay their fair share. We’re a debtor nation.

In 1999, Trump temporarily left the Republican Party, complaining that conservatives are just too crazy right. He formed an exploratory committee to run for president under the