Abstract
The electoral victory of Donald J. Trump on November 8, 2016, very publicly evoked fundamental questions about American politics and society. How did a businessman and former reality television star, with no formal political experience, win the presidential nomination for the Republican Party? How did Trump defeat 16 other Republican candidates, including six current or former U.S. senators and eight current or former governors (several of whom had also held other elected offices, such as governor John Kasich, who had served as both an Ohio state senator and U.S. congressman)? Why did the Republican Party select Trump as its presidential candidate, despite vigorous opposition toward Trump personally (and not simply his proposed policies)? Why did a majority of evangelical voters support a twice-divorced and admitted adulterer? How did a formal political novice with few stated policy goals (and even fewer credible stated methods to achieve those goals) defeat a Democratic presidential candidate who had previously been a U.S. senator and a secretary of state? Peter Kivisto’s The Trump Phenomenon: How the Politics of Populism Won in 2016 grapples with these and related questions in a work that he presents as a “preliminary reconnaissance” of both the election of Trump and “some of the implications of what it might portend for the future” (p. 5).
Befitting this “preliminary reconnaissance,” The Trump Phenomenon is divided into three substantive chapters, “Democratic Culture and Civic Virtue”; “The Trump Voter: Labeling the Baskets”; and “Institutional Openings to Authoritarianism.” Kivisto considers cultural factors, institutional openings, social and political narratives within the election cycle, and the trajectory of social and economic factors that culminated in Trump’s election. Utilizing the narrative “scripts” of Jeffrey Alexander, Kivisto considers binary narratives around civil and uncivil leadership traits and observes that these illuminated three unfavorable narratives surrounding Trump’s character, business career, and political worldview—remarkable because two of these consider aspects of Trump the political candidate that appealed to his supporters. Kivisto suggests that many of Trump’s statements invoke a normatively binary “dichotomous worldview” that casts supporters and those he favors in glowing terms (“great,” “the best”) and opponents as unredeemable (“losers” or “disgusting”) and “may reflect Trump’s self-acknowledged germaphobia” (p. 18).
Similarly, Trump’s vast and cultivated media footprint—from the 1987 book The Art of the Deal (Trump and Schwartz 1987) to his long-standing presence in New York tabloids and appearances on Howard Stern’s radio show—encourages ambivalent and binary interpretations. For critics, these mediated roles (the most famous being Trump’s starring role on the reality television series The Apprentice, beginning in 2004) are emblematic of a fame-craving narcissist whose boasts about his business enterprises and successes overshadow his bankruptcies and murky finances. For supporters, the narratives around Trump’s businesses are part of a larger cultural transformation of what Margaret Somes terms “romancing the market,” in which business success is indicative of the qualities needed to benefit society. Such a perspective on the virtues of business (especially dominance in being “the boss”) account for some of Trump’s authoritarian proclivities that are coupled with concerns about victimhood, humiliation, and external threats that must be guarded against (pp. 24–26). What is remarkable is that these narratives, all of which were deployed by Trump’s opponents, failed to dissuade a plurality of Republican voters from voting for Trump and allowed him to win the Republican Party presidential nomination.
Another remarkable facet of Trump’s election that Kivisto observes is the evolving shape of the electorate that allowed Trump to win the Electoral College (while losing the popular vote by 2.9 million votes). After noting that Trump’s Electoral College victory was driven primarily by 110,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, Kivisto examines the factors that attracted some voters to Trump. Gender was a tepid predictor of voter behavior (42 percent of women voters supported Trump), while race was somewhat more pronounced (58 percent of white voters voted for Trump, while only 29 percent of Hispanics and Asians voted for Trump). Education provided a largely linear relationship: those voters with associate’s degrees and/or some college led nine points for Trump, while those with bachelor’s degrees voted 49 percent for Clinton, and 58 percent of those with postgraduate degrees voted for Clinton (p. 50). Income skewed toward Trump, with those earning less than $50,000 voting for Clinton, whereas “Trump won in every income category from $50,000 upwards” (p. 49). Overshadowing these variables was religion, whereby “conservative white Protestants voted overwhelmingly for Trump, by a margin of 81 percent to 16 percent” (p. 50). What about Trump appealed to these religious voters, when it was apparent that he had not been a remotely religious person during his adult life?
Kivisto draws on the recent work of Theda Skocpol, Vanessa Williamson, and Arlie Hochschild to understand how a billionaire New Yorker appealed to religiously informed voters living in the Midwest and South. Kivisto cites the recent scholarship of these scholars on the Tea Party and contends that a mixture of cultural values, a reactive sense of persecution (amplified by Fox News and conservative radio), and a lasting sense of polarization have all contributed to Trump’s appeal. Kivisto argues that a “right-wing paranoid style” has been fermenting for decades, famously identified in Richard Hofstadter’s (1964) article, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” whose recent manifestations include the Tea Party. Drawing on Skocpol and Williamson, Kivisto asserts that the Tea Party was generated through “the Great Recession of 2008 and the governmental efforts to forestall it, the Presidency of Barack Obama and Fox News” (p. 62). According to Kivisto, Hochschild makes a similar analysis regarding “the paradoxes of these members of the middle class who embrace a disdain for government, particularly the federal government, while being the beneficiaries of a range of government services” (p. 61). Welfare is especially anathema for these voters, because it is understood as excluding Social Security and Medicare, thereby emphasizing the binary vision of welfare as a further form of exploitation that deprives them of hard-earned and well-deserved income. This resentment is a key point, as it may explain how Trump’s persona of political outsider and the espoused “us-versus-them worldview” articulated by Trump found resonance with this audience (p. 55). This palpable sense of resentment is fueled both by an entrenched perception of victimhood and a belief that those (like them) who live in rural areas are ignored and derided by urbanites and elites. These perceptions of disenfranchisement in turn have allowed for some of Trump’s supporters from the alt-right (most notably, former chief strategist Steve Bannon) to appear alongside traditional conservatives and for what Kivisto terms a “politics of cruelty” to take hold, whereby even a visage of sympathy for the poor and refugees can be dispensed with.
Kivisto concludes by placing the singular election of Trump into a wider spectrum of a decline in democratic norms and institutions. Noting that the United States had been downgraded in the Democracy Index 2016 to “flawed” standing (from full democracy), Kivisto argues that a “trust deficit” and populist perception of “the people” (which includes business elites but excludes political and intellectual elites) encourages a neoliberal vision that both obscures the capacity of government to improve social life and harbors a suspicion of (most of) the press. This last point is critical because of the increasing reliance of information derived from very particular television sources (especially Fox News for Trump supporters). This dual trend of reliance on exclusionary news sources and incredulity toward experts may account for why there are wide gaps between Trump supporters and others (both Clinton voters and the wider public) about the realities of human-created climate change. This dual trend may also explain why Trump himself was able to cultivate attention prior to the 2016 election cycle through espousing and supporting “birtherism” (the false claim that Barack Obama was born in his father’s home country of Kenya and therefore was ineligible to be president), a claim that did not resonate outside of those already predisposed to distrust Obama. Kivisto suggests that these and other claims may find more reception in those from the ranks of the Tea Party and/or conservative evangelicals because of a 2011 Pew Research Center poll finding that these crossovers were much more likely to believe that corporate profits and influence were reasonable and that a literal reading of texts—Biblical and legal—facilitated these perceptions (p. 104).
The Trump Phenomenon is an excellent point of departure for coming to grips with how a reality television and tabloid-cultivating real estate businessman of uncertain wealth (as of this writing, Trump has still not released his tax returns, and therefore this measure of his actual wealth remains hidden) came to win an American presidential election. Ongoing reactions to the 2019 Mueller report and possible future state and federal investigations of Trump and the Trump campaign indicate that these questions are far from being settled. As such, The Trump Phenomenon will make an excellent text for courses like Political Sociology and Comparative-Historical Sociology and courses that consider contemporary American social and political conflict.
One of the attractive aspects of this text is the mixing of quantitative and qualitative data and the absence of one dominant theoretical paradigm to tether together the inherent complexity comprising the forces and events culminating in Trump’s election. A modified version of the TRAILS activity by Kordsmeier and Macdonald (2015), “Applying Theory to Current Events,” could be valuable when paired with the book (initially geared toward utilizing sociological theories to explain aspects of the 2012 U.S. presidential election).
Besides being highly relevant, Kivisto’s analysis should be useful in sorting through the cultural, institutional, and historic forces that are facilitating populism in the United States. It provides a very engaging synopsis of recent sociological scholarship regarding the Tea Party, conservative evangelicals, and political narratives and an easily digestible overview of the contours of Trump supporters. Subsequent events in the United States and internationally—such as Boris Johnson’s election as the incoming British prime minister (named the “British Trump” by Trump in the July 23 issue of the Guardian)—should be rich fodder for classroom discussions and exercises.
Using The Trump Phenomenon in a theoretically focused course could also be enhanced through a consideration of Trump’s successes with spectacle as a means to both generate popular support and evade the bureaucratic confines of the Republican Party. Guy Debord’s (1995) Society of the Spectacle articulated a recognition that mediated representations generated within a mass society were not necessarily merely reflecting the interests of those who owned the means of production, inevitably leading to hegemony. What Guy Debord (1995, 2002), Jean Baudrillard (1994), Murray Edelman (1988), Douglas Kellner (2003), and others recognized is that these mediated representations could assume a trajectory of at least a semiautonomous nature that could exercise significant influence over social life, even when these representations were not obviously authentic. In the case of Trump, David Cay Johnston (2016), a longtime observer of Trump, has documented how Trump has utilized the press to “spin” unfavorable legal and financial outcomes (such as losing a federal lawsuit against the Trumps over housing discrimination and several bankruptcies) to a degree that allowed him to continue his business dealings. Filmmaker Michael Moore (2016), in filming Michael Moore in Trumpland, observed during the election that Trump campaign “swag”—“Make America Great Again” hats and bumper stickers, signs, and shirts—were being consumed and displayed at a significantly higher rate than Clinton’s campaign materials, suggesting an enthusiasm among Trump’s supporters not measured by polling data. Similarly, his tenure as the focus of The Apprentice both garnered Trump with widespread name recognition and the persona of a highly successful businessman, despite the evidence that the outcomes of many of Trump’s businesses were problematic. While The Trump Phenomenon does consider Trump’s roles in reality television, it does not delve into Trump’s use of social media and his capacity to deploy mediated representations to eclipse primary opponents despite having few plausible proposed policy initiatives and some sustained press coverage of his misstatements and outright lies. Examining the synthesis of mediated representations and their impacts on forms of populism are clearly highly relevant for social science undergraduates. While The Trump Phenomenon suggests that these and other forms of Trump’s adroit use of media are not a central focus of a “preliminary reconnaissance” of the rise and election of Trump, understanding the roles of these and other mediated representations will be essential in future postmortems of this campaign and for what these might portend for the future.