How & why Donald Trump became the 45th US President

By Oliver Green

Caveat: Trump did not win the popular vote

First of all, I have to quality this article with the point that Donald Trump did not win the national popular vote in the 2016 US Presidential Election. In the popular vote overall, more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for any other defeated presidential candidate in American history, with Clinton gaining almost 3 million more votes at 48.2% of the national vote, compared with Trump’s 46.1% vote share. Clinton’s 2.1% margin is the third highest of defeated presidential candidates in US history. Andrew Jackson got more than a 10% margin in 1824 when they had a four way election in the final post primary run off, but the House of Representatives declared John Quincy Adams president after none of the final candidates won the then 131 Electoral College votes needed to win. In 1876, Samuel Tilden received 3% more votes than Rutherford B. Hayes, who clawed his way to the White House by one electoral vote. However, Trump’s 46.1% national vote share was much more efficient and condensed where it mattered, enabling him to win far in excess of the 270 Electoral College votes needed, winning in 30 of the 50 US States, with 304 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 227.

How & why Donald Trump became the 45th US President

Firstly, I agree with many Democrats that the relative and record unpopularity of the two main candidates in 2016 meant that the two third-party candidates did in large measure cost Clinton the election, as they both won a combined total of 4% of the popular vote. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate got 3% percent of the popular vote, taking more than four million votes, many of them in close swing states that could have won Clinton the election. Such as in New Hampshire, where Johnson secured around 25,000 votes, with Clinton losing by a mere 4000. In addition, the Green Party candidate Jill Stein got 1% of the popular vote, running to the political left of both Clinton and Bernie Sanders, winning 51,444 votes in Michigan with Clinton losing by 12,686. Stein also won 1% of the vote in Wisconsin, very likely tipping the balance there for Trump. This is in stark contrast to the previous two Presidential elections in 2012 and 2008 where the third-party candidates only managed to win a total of 1.7% and 1.4% of the popular vote respectively.

Nonetheless, from 9th November 2016 most of the American political and mainstream media establishment was asking itself, just how Donald Trump became the 45th US President, given just how divisive and polarising a figure he is. The first thing I noticed about Donald Trump’s campaigning style throughout the Republican primaries and the election itself, is that I would describe him as the world’s first proficient Strategic Political Capital Investor. What I mean by this is that he was totally adept at purposefully and shrewdly grabbing media prominence regardless of who was or was not supporting him, and in such a way that it didn’t matter. He acquired and sustained this prominence by intentionally taking a short term hit in his perceived consensual popularity, so as to appear more genuine, bold and authentic, so that once the initial flash in the pan shock was over and people had had time to think through what he is saying, many could identify where he was coming from and where they could agree with him in many crucial areas.

In addition, determining the short-term falls himself meant that the hostile media couldn’t do it for him, and when they tried to so, it was far less effective than it otherwise would be if he was perceived to be cagey and playing it safe, which is what most conventional politicians do when following the old tested rule-book of political law. The result is that he ended up becoming far more trusted and respected on any number of different levels by different people, precisely because he goes to bat by his rules and doesn’t buckle under pressure, which is an essential trait of a US President and world leader, and which he was well aware of, whilst understanding too that it is far more important to be secretly and overtly respected than liked, while his charismatic persona and star quality enabled him to present his arguments in a sufficiently entertaining and prominent way, so as to never lose public engagement and interest. He also showed that he knew not to fall into the trap of trying to be all things to all people and be constantly approved of by everyone on every little detail, which in the long term only serves to aggravate people who feel their intelligence being insulted and in a particularly disingenuous way, which is one of the main reasons why Hillary Clinton ended up generating more antipathy towards herself than support in the crucial swing states where it counted the most. Furthermore, Trump had a track record of running around 500 companies, involving projects, payrolls and budgets, and contrary to popular misconception had a record of hiring people of many different backgrounds based on merit, while Hillary was the typical career politician from a legal background.

But what seemed to have baffled the Democratic Party in particular is just how “the Donald” managed to obtain well over the 270 Electoral College votes needed for the White House, when all of the perceived advantages were with them, such as Clinton having the full weight of the Obama campaign machine behind her. According to Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton’s funding efforts dwarfed that of her Republican rival, totaling $171.6 Million, compared with Trump’s $83.9 Million, of which he was the biggest contributor. To add to this, I certainly noticed throughout the campaign that the mainstream US media were certainly far more sympathetic and forgiving of Hillary Clinton, especially in their reporting of the Presidential Debates and were much more critical and hostile towards Trump in spite of Clinton having many shortcomings of her own. But this of course may have helped him gain the greater publicity to get his messages across to the public (despite the negative media angle on them), whist not having to spend a cent on advertising, which I think Trump was well aware of in both the Republican primaries and the election campaign itself. Furthermore, the Democratic Party was at least nominally united behind their nominee, with her main rival and outsider Bernie Sanders endorsing and campaigning for her, whilst much of the Republican establishment failing to endorse Trump and publicly announcing their refusal to even vote for him out of fear for their own electoral prospects.

In addition, the Republican Party was seen to be at a grave mismatch with the evolving demographic makeup of the US electorate. The party was widely thought to be becoming increasingly out of touch, due to its aging membership and was thought to be too ethnocentric to be able to properly connect and resonate with enough Latinos and younger voters, a problem that appeared to have been compounded by Trump himself, who appeared to have no interest in the perceived sensitivities of sizable minority voters and who much more crucially appeared not to be able to connect and appeal to enough women voters, a perception that the Wall Street Journal managed to magnify with its release of the infamous 2005 “locker room talk” video recording, which many at the time could not see how even the Teflon Donald was going to bounce back from.

So why did this bombshell have no lasting and meaningful impact on “the Donald’s” ascendancy to the White House in the final month of the election?

Like every other world changing event or set of developments throughout history, it is never down to any one factor, but rather a combination of them all coming together at the right time to make a particular outcome or course of outcomes more or less inevitable. The main factors which aided him in the closing stages of the election campaign included a terribly unpopular, hapless and disingenuous opponent, who believed she had a given entitlement to the highest office on earth, followed by FBI Director James Comey’s decision to re-open the investigation of Clinton’s use of emails during her time as Secretary of State, only concluding the re-investigation a couple of days prior to the election, which even managed to wipe out her lead on the deceptively favourable polls, which since the Wall Street Journal’s release of the Trump and Billy Johnson recording had given her leads of 6-11 percentage points, which was in large part due to many traditional Republican voters re-instating their support for Trump, once the email scandal had come back to the fore and overshadowed their own candidate’s scandal of the previous couple of weeks.

One overriding factor as far as I’m concerned that enabled “the Donald” to “seal the deal”, was his ability to recognise the well of anger, resentment and sense of disenfranchisement that has been building for the past couple of decades among (although certainly not exclusively) white working class and middle America, who resented the encouraging of globalisation at any price, which can be argued as going a long way to creating the ever widening chasm between rich and poor, along with a shrinking middle class, where the interests of Wall Street and major corporations have to a large extent hijacked and suppressed those of many ordinary Americans, who have seen their living standards stagnate since 2000, along with life chances being significantly curtailed with the outsourcing of work to emerging markets, alienating many traditional Democrat Voters in the crucial swing states of Hillary’s supposed “blue wall”, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which Trump took, totaling 46 electoral college votes. In addition, many of these voters had been natural Bernie Sanders Supporters in the primaries and been as anti-establishment as many Trump supporters, being none too pleased at seeing their socialist hero supplanted by the Wall Street bank rolled Hillary Clinton, who epitomised the very establishment they’d been campaigning against. Trump on the other hand was a fellow outsider with no political baggage or significant ideology to divide them from him, resonating with them a lot more.

What really struck me as I watched the election outcome unfold throughout the night, was how it exactly mirrored the night of Britain’s EU Referendum just a few months before on 23rd June, both in initial expectation and exit polling and also the pattern of voter turnout. Just after the Brexit vote, the exit polls had predicted a narrow remain win and the markets priced it in accordingly, with Nigel Farage ready to concede. Then as the results trickled in it became more and more apparent that the voters (on a record high turnout of 72% in some parts of the country) had turned out in numbers far higher than expected to vote Leave, but that nothing like the numbers had turned out for the Remain side. Then, the exact same phenomenon occurred on the night of November 8th in America. The exit polls and the markets called it narrowly for Hillary Clinton, but the voters had other ideas and turned out in much higher numbers for Trump than for her across both gender and social divides, completely contrary to mainstream media and polling expectations. (I would say in parenthesis, political polling as an industry was utterly discredited in 2016 as a means of prediction, due to the limited sampling capacity reducing the representative nature of the snap shots of electorates being taken. Polls could no longer accurately take into account who was most likely to vote. The positional bias of the organisations and people carrying out the sampling also fed into the results, as well as over surveying in general, which by then had increased the reluctance of many to respond to the polling in the first place. The only way to really gain a likely picture of election outcomes is to examine the long history of all past elections and cycles, identifying all the relevant factors involved in those outcomes and then applying them to the present.)

It was the firm conviction of the Establishment and Democratic Party that Trump’s rhetoric, remarks, tape scandal and campaign strategy would produce an anti-trump surge of high turnout among women and Hispanics, who would vote by a landslide for Clinton, not because of any great love for her but by their inescapable revulsion at the prospect of a Trump presidency. However, what they failed to realise was that Trump’s campaign strategy and message worked by resonating with far more voters than it alienated, energising more people to vote for a candidate who was actually airing their concerns regarding the economy, living standards, security and immigration, as opposed to a Wall Street funded mouthpiece who offered nothing more than to preserve and press further ahead with the status quo, as well as on the platform of just not being Trump. In addition, Hillary Clinton was in close competition with Trump over the lowest approval ratings of any Presidential candidate in US political history, but without the promise of change that Trump was offering. So consequently, just as in the Brexit vote in Britain, Trump’s political base drastically over-performed on expectation, while Hillary Clinton’s significantly under-performed, which the vote breakdown of the election illustrates, clearly showing how the 2016 voting patterns among all major demographics contrasted with those of the 2012 election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

How the demographic and socio-economic make-up of the voters worked for Trump in 2016

First of all let’s take the demographics that were supposed to turn out overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, Women, Hispanics and Latinos. It turned out that 8% more Hispanics voted for Donald Trump than for the previous Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, with only an extra 1% of women voting for Hillary than for Barack Obama in 2012, whilst there was no percentage change whatsoever in the numbers of Latino men or women voting Republican or Democrat compared with 2012. Secondly, there was the other assumption on the part of the mainstream media and liberal establishment regarding the bulk of Trump supporters being poorly educated, but the vote breakdown demolished that myth as well. 10% more college educated Americans voted Republican than in 2012, taking the total to 52% of college educated Americans voting Republican, along with 45% of full college graduates and 37% of University Graduates, who would probably have been a bit more insulated from some of the Socio-Economic effects of de-industrialisation and globalisation. Even more significant was that 62% of non-college educated white women voted for Trump.

But perhaps the biggest miscalculation of the Democratic Party was the belief that income disparities would limit Trump’s appeal among higher income earners and white collar workers. In fact those on the lowest band incomes of under $30,000 per annum provided the lowest relative but still significant Republican support at 41%, followed closely behind by those on incomes ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 per annum on 42%. But it was the support of the middle incomers on $50,000 to $100,000 per annum that provided the highest Trump vote of 50%, with a notably lower 46% share voting for Clinton, hence Trump’s message and campaign resonating with vast swaths of “Middle America”. Furthermore, the second highest level of Trump support came from the two highest income bands of $100,000 to $200,000 and over $200,000 per annum, which both voted more for Trump at 48%, compared with them voting 47 and 46% respectively for Hillary Clinton.

The point reached in the American political cycle was on Trump’s side

But by far the biggest factors in Trump’s favour were nothing to do with him, his opponents or the campaign at all. The main causal factors are undoubtedly cyclically historical in nature, both in the short and long terms. Trump’s ambition for the highest office on Earth would have come to nothing were it not for the short and long term trends of disaffection of US voters, which Trump was well aware of. As a real estate developer and multiple businessman, Trump knew first-hand the importance of timing in any business proposal or decision and knew that it applied every bit as much to the political climate as any business venture, which is why he would never have run in 2012, regardless of being too committed at the time with “Celebrity Apprentice”. Like in most democracies, the outcome of US national elections is decided every bit as much by the position of the “political cycle”, which determines how the party in power is favoured by the electorate regardless of who is running for office, which became much more significant after the World War II when the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution was passed by Congress in 1947 and then ratified by the states on February 27th 1951. The 22nd Amendment limited an elected president to two terms in office, a total of eight years, which after two terms removes any personal incumbency advantage there might be of the party in power.

Since the amendment had been introduced, HW Bush had been the only US President to succeed someone from his own party after 8 years in office, succeeding Ronald Reagan in 1989 as a result of the exceptional circumstances of the late eighties. The Republican administration at that time had been running high, having overseen massive structural economic reforms at home in the form of Reaganomics, coupled with the massive foreign policy coup of facing down the Soviet Union. But neither of those sorts of advantages applied to the Democrats in the 2016 election, as they’d had no major foreign policy successes, such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Obamas first term and no significant breakthroughs in domestic policy, such as Obamacare in Obama’s first term, which by their second term had become a liability for the Democrats, along with the Iran deal and Foreign policy decisions in general. Consequently, the Democrat administration had reached the end of its political shelf life, hence why the Republicans also won both houses of Congress which had nothing to do with Donald Trump, reinforced all the more by the fact that so many Senate and House Republicans had refused to support him in the Presidential campaign.

The point reached in the global economic cycle also favoured Trump

But just as significant was the position of America on the much longer term “Economic Cycle”, which determines how the performance of the political class as a whole over the previous 20 to 25 years or so is favoured by the electorate, which not surprisingly did not favour any western political class by 2016. Like the Democrats at the end of their second term in office, there had been no significant domestic or foreign policy shifts since the 1980’s, resulting in the relative stagnation of incomes, living standards and life chances, particularly of “Middle Americans”. The political class had also shown a prolonged distain for properly transparent, balanced and fully representative political discourse and debate. The establishment as a whole had become more concerned with political correctness than discussing the issues that affected everyday people, which Trump exploited to great effect. There had also been a relative decline of the United States in the 21st Century, both in terms of the relative growth in living standards and social mobility among many Americans themselves.

Consequently, Trump wasted no time in exploiting this with his regular references to China as a “currency manipulator” and making it one of his promises during the campaign to wage a trade war with Beijing and to put tariffs on them, which resonated and tied in with how negative and resentful many of the US electorate had become over the free trade deals of recent times, which they attributed as a major contributing factor of American jobs and corporate investment going overseas to places like China, as well as the stagnation of wages, living standards and life chances. So when Trump promised to tear up the Trans Pacific Partnership, pull out of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, this was music to their ears. In addition, Trump had been voicing for many years of the need to stand up to Chinese trade practices and currency manipulation and pledged in the campaign to bring jobs and corporate investment back to America by the withdrawing of the Tax incentives that made American firms invest and outsource overseas, while financially dis-incentivising them if they continued to do so. So it was policy positions like these that really tapped into the core issues of what swathes of “Middle America” were truly passionate about, enabling Trump to present himself as the only candidate willing to discuss and tackle them. Not to mention his stance on immigration and open boarders to America’s illegal immigrants, which had brought with it security concerns for many Americans and served as an additional contributing factor of the falling job rate and stagnating living standards, for which the Liberal Elite and establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton could not provide satisfactory responses or resonating policy positions on. Instead, they preferred to take the “everything’s hunky dory” approach, which people knew wasn’t the case, instead yearning for change no matter how non PC or untactful it may be.

The internet and democratisation of the mass media has completely eroded the monopoly of the establishment mainstream media.

Even more significant, is how the internet and democratisation of mass media has completely eroded the monopoly of the mainstream media. Voters no longer have to rely solely on the “Liberal World View” of the major news corporations to get information. The Western public can now turn to a wide variety of smaller independent sources, which are not owned and controlled by the wealthy powerful interests, thanks to the incredibly liberating and egalitarian phenomenon of the internet, which is effectively a global communication network. By 2016, any small independent media outlet could already gain the same scale of following and consumption as the major news networks and practically free of charge. Social media is one undeniable aspect of this technological revolution, as it has allowed millions of people of all backgrounds and cultures to come together and formulate their own policy positions and popular movements beyond the control of the powerful, who traditionally had the exclusive rights to distribute and control the information people were given. None of this was lost on Donald Trump who knew that he had to embrace these media and social networks, so as to outflank the inevitable opposition he would face from the wealthy mainstream media when taking on the establishment, leading to his exhaustive use of social media and doing interviews with independent broadcasters. The same was true in the Brexit campaign, when it was found that the amount of activity and engagement on social media from the Leave side significantly outperformed that of Remain.

So like him or loath him; I would say that Donald Trump was the only candidate willing to stick to his guns, to stand and fight the election on the very issues which much of “Middle America” cared about, whilst being financially and politically independent enough not to appear to be owned by Wall Street and the powerful special interests. Consequently, Trump’s message really resonated with a significant swath of “Middle America” who’d been left behind and betrayed by an arguably outdated and increasingly dysfunctional form of Globalisation.