Why Did Trump Win the First Time?

In December 2019, just weeks before the pandemic lockdown, I participated in a conference on the role of media in the rising threat of authoritarianism. For the people in the room—journalists, aca­demics, and researchers who worked at the intersection of media, tech, and politics—the prior five years had been particularly fraught, stressful, and challenging. The 2020 Presidential Election loomed, and anxiety over risks of violence and disruption cast a worried pall on the room.

The event kicked off with a panel of experts describing global trends in the rise of authoritarian attitudes. One of the panelists said that authoritarian-minded leaders were coming to power with virtu­ally no resistance from either the public or media. He claimed that journalists and political editors hadn’t perceived the risks posed by Donald Trump in 2016. Citizens in the United States and around the world seemed complacent, and media hadn’t sufficiently raised the alarm.

From my perspective this claim was gobsmacking. Even though a majority of white voters supported Trump, millions of people from every demographic, especially women, well understood the political and social threats he represented. For decades, reproductive-justice advocates pressed media to understand erosions of women’s rights in state legislatures. In the years leading up to the elections in 2016 and 2020, women organized and led resistance movements to fight for immigration rights, Black lives, abortion access, environmental safety, ending gun violence, voting rights, disability rights, prison abolition, and more. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, millions of people—again, mainly women—peacefully participated in the largest global pro­test in recorded history. Today, women activists, community leaders, and legal advocates are at the vanguard of democracy movements.

This hardly constitutes “no one.”

The panelist was referring to an elite class of, as studies have shown, white journalists and editors, the majority of whom were men, who underestimated the risks of white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and xeno­phobia. Journalists, writers, and activists marginalized by a homogenous mainstream political class were acutely alert to the risks of tyranny and often frustrated by its whitewashing, false equivalences, and peevish dismissals of concerns about misogynistic ethno-violence. The problem the panelist identified wasn’t that “no one” was resisting or framing the risk, but that because of a lack of power sharing and diversity in newsrooms and political coverage, risk perception was dangerously distorted. As editors and writers, women and journalists from marginalized communities are more likely to cover issues that are otherwise ignored or minimized. The imbalances put us, as a society, in a precarious political state that we are revisiting today with the possibility of Donald Trump’s reelection. 

Studies reveal that the possibility of Trump’s election to the presidency is causing the electorate stress, anxiety, and fear. Across the political spectrum, women in particular report high levels of frustration, distress, and anger. Constantly adapting to political tumult and chaos requires energy and time, it means, for women especially, even more emotional labor as people around us report the same feelings. 

How resilient are we? How resilient will have to be? These two questions aren’t only about our psychology but about how we think of risk and politics. 

We’re schooled to think of resilience in highly individualized ways, but the degree to which we can and have to be resilient depends on people we empower to make risk decisions for us. We give others the authority to impose their risk perceptions and resilience understand­ings on the rest of us.  Business leaders, economists, politicians, technologists, and scien­tists have the power to determine the quality and safety of our food, the nature of our communications, the energy we rely on, and the shape, look, and feel of the many technologies that impact our lives. While we can each do our best to prepare ourselves, our families, and maybe even our neighborhoods from possible dangers, most of us have little ability to prepare in a meaningful way—by assessing risks and acting to reduce their likelihood at scale.

We choose leaders who confirm our values and beliefs and share our visions of what makes a good society. What are the parameters of “good”? Whose communities will be sacrificed? Who will get sick? Whose homes will be destroyed by accidents or disasters? Whose families will suffer? Who will have to be the most resilient? It’s rare that “learning to be resilient” includes civics and the influence of voting on our lives, but elections are risk calculations tied to resilience ex­pectations.

Today, our resilience, both personal and political, is constantly being tested because our institutional threat assessment is concentrated in the hands of people whose risk perceptions and social values are woefully out of sync with the needs of a diverse and pluralistic soci­ety. Across all major institutions, a lack of diversity in our decision-making bodies is a danger that we can’t afford any longer. No amount of personal resilience skills building or dedicated individual good intentions will generate the adaptability and resolve that we need collectively.

Excerpted from THE RESILIENCE MYTH: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma by Soraya Chemaly. Copyright 2024, Soraya Chemaly. Published by One Signal Publishers/Atria Books.