A long, unsettling contest has ended in yet more upset.
The next daunting challenge is charting a course of national reconciliation.
For all their parsing of policy, it was the personal message of Donald Trump, a candidate never before elected to public office who bulldozed his own party’s candidates and aggressively attacked Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state, senator and first lady — delivering the most divisive debate of the modern campaign era — that drove the 2016 vote for president.
For all the perceptions of recklessness that voters held of Trump, evidenced in surveys before the election and in exit polling on Election Day, the brash billionaire’s call for change — promising to upend a political regime that conspires against a downtrodden working class — carried him over Clinton’s message of experience.
“The people that like Trump like that he’s a change agent,” says Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who ran the super-PAC backing former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. “With Trump you get change, but also the same thing that makes him such a change agent makes him reckless and dangerous.” Trump, Murphy says, represented “a big-grievance candidate to blow up Washington.”
Trump based his “Make America Great Again” appeal on the anxieties of a class of disenfranchised white American men yearning to turn the historical dial back on an increasingly diverse nation. Eight in 10 Trump-backers surveyed by the Pew Research Center identified with this statement: “Life for people like you is worse than it was 50 years ago.”
Neither Trump nor Clinton measured well on the public’s scales of perceived honesty, polling showed. Seven in ten registered voters surveyed by Pew near the campaign’s close described Trump as reckless, and 65 percent said he has poor judgment. Clinton, too, was viewed as wanting in judgment by 56 percent. Most viewed both as dishonest. Still, asked ahead of the election who is “well-qualified” to be president, 62 percent said Clinton, 32 percent Trump.
Yet even an accretion of Trump fouls starting with insults against immigrants and minorities — including insulting parents of a Muslim American soldier killed at war in Iraq — and culminating with allegations of sexual aggression against women could not undermine his support in a contest with an opponent who warned that American presidents control the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal.
Clinton called Trump a “loose cannon.” Trump called her “crooked Hillary” — and in the closing days of the campaign, “the face of failure.” Opinion polling heading into Election Day portrayed a slight advantage for Clinton, yet a wave of white men rallying to Trump powered victories in key swing states, most notably Ohio and Florida.
“The biggest contributor will have been the anger and desire for change,” says John Geer, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and author of In Defense of Negativity. “When you think of all the things he’s tied himself to, attacking a Gold Star family, insulting Sen. John McCain… we could make a list of 20 things.”
“This has been an election, more than any in my lifetime, that has been fought on traits — personal characteristics,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Center for Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
This election “has asked what are the boundaries of appropriate behavior, and you have categories of behavior that are so egregious, if you encountered them in your ordinary life you wouldn’t associate with the person.”
Repairing the torn fabric of an already polarized American electorate divided even more deeply by this rancorous contest involves not only reconstruction of a riven Republican Party, whose leaders largely rejected the nominee who has reclaimed the White House for them, but also reconciling with constituencies who adamantly opposed Trump — a Democratic base of college-educated women, Hispanic and African American voters. The Democrats, too, may face their own internal battle of whether a turn more to the left would have produced a more welcome outcome.
“It’s so hard to find a path — it feels like we’re just in the dark,” says Barbara Perry, professor of ethics and institutions at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in the study of the presidency. “This (contest) has been so unprecedented. That’s why it seems so unprecedented in how we bring ourselves out of this darkness… I guess people have a sense that we are two nations. It doesn’t feel like we’re united.”
Traditionally, newly elected presidents enjoy a honeymoon with voters.
“People tend to give the benefit of the doubt to new presidents,” Perry says, noting that the newly elected traditionally gain public support early in their time in the White House. “That is a trend that I’m going to look for…The idea of Donald Trump sullying that sacred space makes for very interesting possibilities in him not going up in approval ratings. Then, that person is going to have even a harder time reconciling with the people.”
Both Republicans and Democrats emerge divided from a contest which pitted the GOP’s leadership against the upstart Trump, and supporters of socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders challenging Clinton for nomination.
“There is the making of two third parties, because the left is disaffected with Clinton and the Republican leadership is disaffected with Trump,” Jamieson says.
Also, Jamieson suggests, “the economy runs in cycles. We should be at this point running to the end of an economic cycle. If we run the natural economic cycle and come into a recession, then we have a scenario where things are even worse for those people (who rallied behind Trump). “We come into a recession, and you’re going to increase the intensity of a constituency who went for Trump.”
Any healing is complicated by differences which run deep and personal. In some ways, each nominee was the other’s greatest asset in the most volatile race since the Vietnam War era: Trump benefited from a deep-seated distrust that most voters have of Clinton. And Clinton drew on the disdain that many — and even leaders of Trump’s own party — held for the Republican nominee.
Probing leading reasons for voting, Pew found one in three Trump supporters explaining: “He is not Clinton.” The same share of Clinton-backers said: “She is not Trump.” The Washington Post’s polling found more than half of Trump voters calling their choice a vote against Clinton.
In a contest intensifying divisions along ethnic and gender fault lines, Clinton appealed to the party’s longstanding appeal to women and minorities. Weighing multiple, late-breaking allegations of sexual abuse by Trump, six in 10 women said Trump has no respect for women. Fewer than half of all voters viewed him as having respect for blacks (42 percent), Hispanics (35 percent) and immigrants (30 percent), Pew found.
Clinton, in addition to staking a historical claim in a nation that denied women the vote until 1920, campaigned with images of children and talk of the future. Seven in 10 Clinton supporters, a coalition of women, college-educated men and racial and ethnic minorities in a nation becoming majority-minority by mid-century, viewed this statement favorably: “Increasing number of people of different races, ethnicities make U.S. a better place to live.”
Since descending the gilded atrium escalator of his gold-plated Trump Tower to announce his candidacy, Trump amassed one self-inflicted liability after another, starting with depiction of undocumented Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume are good people.”
He initially proposed a ban against Muslims entering the U.S. He went on to insult the federal judge handling a lawsuit alleging fraud at Trump University as “a Mexican,” insult the parents of the Muslim-American soldier question McCain’s status as war hero, mock a reporter’s physical disability and famously vow, at a January rally in Iowa: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
READ: [Trump, Clinton and 27 of the Strangest, Most Memorable 2016 Presidential Election Moments]
Then a tape emerged in early October of a 2005 conversation with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush in which the star of TV’s “Celebrity Apprentice” bragged of groping women at will — “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump explained. “You can do anything.” And this unloosed a string of women publicly testifying to Trump’s unwanted advances, which he denied.
Yet the albatross hanging over Clinton’s campaign from start to finish carried one name: Email.
Revelations that the former secretary of state, operating a private email server, had exchanged sensitive information spurred a Justice Department probe. FBI Director James Comey, reporting that Clinton had handled a limited amount of confidential information — 110 classified, eight top secret — found no grounds for prosecution. Yet he delivered a striking public rebuke, calling Clinton “extremely careless.”
The hacked emails of Clinton adviser John Podesta revealed a fundraising enterprise centered around the Clinton Foundation that personally enriched the Clintons.. An associate called it “Bill Clinton Inc.” The Clinton campaign dismissed the stream of purloined emails released by Wikileaks as the “weaponized” work of the Russians.
Then, in the closing weeks of the campaign, Comey announced the FBI would be examining yet more Clinton emails discovered on an associate’s computers — without any details revealed. Finally, two days before the election, he announced nothing new was found.
Trump sought to capitalize on this, starting at an Oct. 28 rally in New Hampshire: “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”
In a campaign which at times had the feel of a marketing pitch, Trump repeatedly dragged a trailing press corps through his own properties — ranging from golf courses in South Florida and Scotland to his historic Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach. Two weeks before Election Day, he cut the ribbon on the renovated Old Post Office in Washington, the newest Trump luxury hotel just blocks from the White House.
“This is the most coveted piece of real estate in Washington, D.C.,” Trump said of his newest property — “with the notable exception of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”
In the end, he claimed that address as well.
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Donald Trump’s Call for Change Answered originally appeared on usnews.com
