Trump: how was the impossible possible?

To say that this victory was a surprise all over the world is an understatement. On November 9, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States with 46% of the vote against 48% for Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. It is astonishment. How could this victory have happened? How could this billionaire, misogynistic, undisciplined and openly racist businessman even have been chosen as a candidate? In the twelfth episode of the podcast Mister President by Europe 1 Studio, Olivier Duhamel helps us understand and learn from it for the future.

This podcast is produced in partnership with the Institut Montaigne

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Everyone knows who was elected president of the United States of America in 2016: Donald Trump. The question is not who, but how. How was it possible? How can a candidate be elected with 46% of the vote against 48% for his opponent, almost three million less? We know that. Because voting is two-tiered and losing a lot in large states, such as California and New York, but often winning very little in many others, such as Iowa, Ohio or Wisconsin, Trump has gotten more great voters. Is. But the question remains: how is this possible?

Gérard Araud, at the time of the presidential ambassador of France in Washington, then asked the right questions in the review Pouvoirs devoted to Trump and published in January 2020. I am inspired by them because these are the questions that we ask again:
- How can a given candidate beaten by almost all win anyway?
- How can a businessman, heir, having declared bankruptcy six times be chosen?
- How can a debater ignoring most of the files and accumulating untruths get out of it?
- How can a husband multiplying adultery, a man insulting women be elected?
- How, in a country with so many minorities, can a white man treating Mexicans as rapists win?
- How can a guy that everyone has seen on TV mimicking a disabled journalist to make fun of him can end up winning?
In short, how was the impossible possible?

A vote against Hillary Clinton

The first reason is that a presidential election is sometimes: not the choice of the preferred person but that of the least rejected. And Hillary Clinton was more rejected than Trump. Because she embodied the past, the old system, in the landscape for a quarter of a century, because she was the epitome of the elite, of the elites, the political elite, wife of President, senator from New York, then Secretary of State, Minister of Foreign Affairs, of Obama, the economic elite, she and her husband having become multimillionaires but not by the company, the cultural elite, that of the democrats of the East coast and Hollywood on the West Coast.

We Europeans, we French believe that the anti-Trump was necessarily more numerous than the anti-Clinton. It's quite the opposite. A Pew research center survey conducted in mid-August 2016 indicates on the one hand that, on both sides, the vote against was more important than the vote for. And, here is what you need to know: if 46% of the voters going to vote Clinton said they did it above all against Trump, they were 53% among those who went to vote Trump. The Trump vote is therefore above all a vote of rejection of Hillary Clinton.

No one knows what the presidential election of 2016 would have given if the popular Joe Biden had not given up running in October 2015 or if the socialist Bernie Sanders launched in the race in April 2015 had been chosen. He nearly won the Iowa caucus, crushed Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, lost in Nevada and South Carolina, won just three states against 7 for Hillary in the first Super Tuesday, caught up in the following primaries, and the yo-yo continued throughout the spring, until Hillary Clinton's decisive victory in the California primary on June 7. Sanders then loyally supported her, although some of her constituents did not follow.

The Republican Establishment Didn't Counter Trump

Second reason, going back in time: the inability of the republican establishment to counter Trump. There are two ways to interpret this fact, and the two are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the Republican party establishment, very hostile to Trump, has long believed that he would never win the nomination. Trump was not from the political world, from their world. His fortune was somewhat questionable. His somewhat vulgar notoriety. He could not win the primaries, thought the caciques of politics and political science. This ingrained belief that he would not go far has served Trump: no need to devise a strategy to stop him. On the other hand, voters no longer obey their leaders. 

Trump was therefore the man that no one saw coming. The presidential campaign for 2016 began the day after Obama's re-election in 2012. Or to be precise, the day after. On November 8, 2012, the New York magazine declared that the campaign for four years from now began. And the Politico site announces that the candidates will be Jeb Bush, son of his father HW and little brother of his brother W., governor of Florida, for the Republicans and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats.

At the start of the first campaign, that for the Republican nomination, fifteen candidates are in the running, nine governors or ex-governors, five senators, the president of the Hewlett Packard company, Carly Fiorina and the neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Trump is second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire. Most of the candidates fall, Jeb Bush gives up after his failure in South Carolina. There are only three left after the first Super Tuesday, March 1: Texas Senator Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ohio Governor John Kasich. If the last two got along, Trump would still be beatable. But they don't. The second Super Tuesday, March 15, is fatal to them. Nothing can stop Trump. At least for the nomination.

Republican politicians are blinded. They did not see that the base was escaping them. They did not understand that Trump, by his eccentricities, had a considerable advantage namely exceptional media coverage, positive or negative, whatever. A study by American Politics Research in November 2018 calculated that the free media coverage that Trump received in the primary campaign amounted to an expenditure of $ 2 billion. And Trump invested, it will continue.

Hillary Clinton is having a bad campaign ...

The third reason making the impossible election possible: Hillary Clinton's bad campaign. Bad because she didn't understand that the moment was populist. Bad because she thought that 75% of the press and only 5% support for Trump was an asset at a time when the media were criticized. Bad because she debuted her program while Trump debunked it. Bad because the voters didn't take much away from his painstaking presentations but captured Trump's poisoned arrows very well.

Bad because she made the big mistake of insulting Trump voters. On September 9, in a fundraising meeting with an LGBT association, she declared: "You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic , islamophobic. "You can put half of Trump's voters in what I call a lousy basket. Is not it ? They are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic ". True or false, whatever. We must never insult masses of voters.

... and neglects key states

Fourth reason: decisive states neglected by Clinton. In the United States, we call "swing states", states which, depending on the election, vote either democrat or republican. For example Ohio or Florida. In all countries, you have places that always vote in the same direction or almost. Neuilly on the right, Saint-Denis on the left. And others who pass from one camp to another according to the polls. It is therefore the latter which are decisive. Problem: the list is not immutable, a state long loyal to one side can switch to the other. And that, Hillary Clinton forgot. It neglected decisive states by thinking that they were acquired to it. Trump won thanks to Wisconsin, Democrat since 1984, 0.8% ahead, forgetting that if urban centers vote Democrat, the suburbs vote Republican and that they have developed. Trump won thanks to Pennsylvania, the same difference, forgetting that this state is a kind of northern Alabama, as James Carville, the advisor to Bill Clinton, described it very left in the cities, very right in the campaigns. Trump won thanks to Michigan, neglected by Hillary since this state had not voted Republican since 1988. The time of voters acquired in guaranteed states has passed.

These four reasons are enough to explain the defeat of Hillary Clinton, therefore the victory of Donald Trump. Others are often invoked which serve rather as a pretext. Russian interference, established. Thirty thousand Russian and pro-Russian accounts posted nearly 1.5 million messages on Twitter. Emails from the Democratic Party and Clinton's campaign manager have been hacked, fake news massively spread. Another explanation as an excuse, the FBI would have improperly interfered in the campaign. Eleven days before the election, James Comey, director of the FBI, announced that he would reopen the file known as Hillary Clinton's emails, messages that she should not have had and keep on her personal email. Admittedly, he announced that the investigation did not have to be extended a few days later, but was the damage not done? These elements could have played. They must not mask the essential. Trump's 2016 victory illustrates how far we have entered populist times of elite rejection. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton embodied excessively the rejected elites. On the other hand, neither she, nor her supporters, nor most of the commentators understood that we were changing epochs.

Lesson 25: Manipulations from abroad can intervene in the campaign and weigh on the election. Hillary Clinton was the victim of Russian interventions in 2016. No reason for France to be spared.

Lesson # 26: Never insult voters, even those of your worst opponent. Hillary Clinton forgot it. French politicians have learned this, who for a long time no longer cursed the voters of the National Rally.

Lesson # 27: Never believe that an election is won. So never neglect supposedly acquired strongholds. Hillary made this mistake, narrowly losing three previously long-standing Democrat states, which defeated him. Long before, in France, candidates persuaded to reach the second round were rejected from the first, Balladur in 1995, Jospin in 2002.

Lesson # 28: A given populist billionaire who loses by everyone can win. We have changed times. Lesson # 28 amplifies the first lesson, with Trump as a political outsider, elected in 2016. Our billionaires have not attempted it, at least to date. But this final lesson tells us more. That in our weakened and contested democracies, now everything is possible.

"Mister President by Europe 1 Studio" is a podcast imagined by Olivier Duhamel

Preparation: Capucine Patouillet
Production: Christophe Daviaud (with Matthieu Blaise)

Editorial project manager: Fannie Rascle
Distribution and editing: Clémence Olivier
Graphic design: Mikaël Reichardt
Archives: Europe 1 sound heritage with Xavier Yvon (July 19, 2016)

English voice-over: Julie Delazin