For just a few weeks shy of eight years now, a certain class of Americans have been walking around in something close to a daze. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 blew to smithereens decades of conventional wisdom about the way many Americans view politics.
The ensuing years have seen even stranger things happen. In 2020, Trump came within a whisker of being re-elected — an astonishing result given the sheer chaos of his term in office.
Just two months after that, we saw the wrenching attack on the US Capitol — and then, even more unthinkably, the continuing viability, after that dark day, of Trump as the ideological leader of the Republican Party.
To this day, the outside world has a lingering question: How did this happen? Here are three key elements that have contributed.
1. Voluntary voting
There is an inherent volatility in the United States electoral system, given that voting is voluntary. Even in recent years, when voting has reached unusually high levels, only two-thirds, at most, of Americans vote in presidential elections.
Given the evenly matched support for the parties right now, a relatively tiny new voting cohort can significantly disrupt an election.
That is what Trump accomplished in 2016.
It is to his credit that he brought out an even bigger base four years later;, however, the Democrats cobbled together a backlash coalition in 2020, and Trump was narrowly defeated.
2. Democrats losing touch
Let's go back to 2016. Trump won the electoral votes in three key states by fewer than 100,000 votes.
He was considered by many as an unfit candidate with scandals swirling around him and still the Democrats lost.
That brings us to the haplessness of the Democratic Party. Over the years, the party has allowed itself to be branded as out of touch with what the Republicans call, rather drearily, "real America."
In the crude parlance of the right, these are people who live "between the coasts" and are said to be hard-working and God-fearing. Democrats, the Republicans say, have contempt for such folks, with their "New York values". Unmentioned in this is the inherent contempt of many on the right's part in labelling people on the coasts as not "real Americans".
Continuing in this vein, the Democrats are said to be overconcerned with African Americans, welfare recipients, gays and lesbians, socialists, and even Communists.
Democrats have perennially been said to be "free spenders". In recent years, as immigration politics has come to the fore, to this has been added a supposed Democratic support for "open borders".
Oddly, Democrats appear to have overcompensated in the face of these charges.
They are the party of reducing the annual budget deficit. (Republican presidents dating back to Reagan routinely explode the national debt.)
Barack Obama's policies on the southern border were quite strict; the American Civil Liberties Union labelled his record "monstrous". But that didn't stop Trump and the Republicans from declaring incessantly that Obama had let the border go out of control. Somehow, the Democrats have lost the messaging game on these issues and many others.
The result: it appears that large parts of the country are culturally Republican, based on a caricature of Democratic policies that the Democrats themselves have not effectively combated.
3. Fox in the henhouse
Finally, there is the right-wing media.
The United States has faced off with political advocacy cloaked as journalism before; the yellow journalism era at the end of the 19th century was even cruder than what we see today.
But the output of Fox News, the right-wing talk radio stations across the country, Elon Musk's X, and the little-known Sinclair Broadcast Group (which controls nearly 200 local TV stations) is rife with toxicity, dishonesty and ethical misconduct.
Fox's bias is well-documented. Musk has used his social-media platform in unprecedented ways to promote nativism, spread misinformation and support Republicans.
As for Sinclair, the company's right-wing owners routinely send out political screeds for their ostensible newscasters to read across their network. You can see a scary picture of the result here.
These outlets are too often referred to as "conservative", but this is a misnomer. They are partisan.
Fox News suppresses news that makes Democrats look good, and magnifies and spreads bad news about them.
Here's just one example: You can hear endless rants from the right about rising crime rates in America in general and New York City in particular. In truth, crime in America has trended downward for decades before a spike under Trump, which has since dissipated.
New York City, specifically, has become by far the safest big city in America.
One specific thing you will never hear on Fox News is that most of the most dangerous states in America are rural red states.
Conversely, it suppressed bad news about Republican politicians, particularly Trump, and of course, is a force multiplier for his myriad lies.
That's how it shelled out nearly a billion US dollars in a defamation settlement for its promotion of conspiracies about a voting machine company. (There are other suits in the works.)
Mainstream outlets such as The New York Times make mistakes as well; and when they do, they are often extravagantly disclosive as they explain to readers how it all happened. Fox News, by contrast, puts bad stories about itself and its favored politicians into a memory hole.
America's democracy appears to be under threat, and Fox is patently part of that threat. But neither the Democrats nor, sadly, the rest of the mainstream media has figured out how to deal with it.
Together, these elements allowed Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to grow in power. In just a few weeks, we will see if the resulting momentum can be halted.
(The author is a lecturer in Journalism in the Discipline of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. He is also the former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. This article was originally published under Creative Commons by 360info)
