Who gave us President Trump? Largely the people who complain most about him and seem most disturbed by his rise.
President Barack Obama helped give us Trump when he failed to tend to and build up his party. Sworn in with healthy majorities in both houses of Congress, he sacrificed them over four successive elections to his policy obsessions, especially healthcare, which played a massive role in both 2010 and 2014. The rout two years later, when he was not on the ballot, completed the damage. No, Obama never lost an election, but he did so much damage to his own party that he left it at its lowest ebb in a great many years.
Gone with the wind was a generation of rising young Democrats, House members, and members of state legislators who never got to be senators or sit in state houses, senators and governors who some years later might have run against Trump and won.
Though he always retained his own personal following, Obama never quite put his own stamp on his party. He never named or tried to build up a successor. He never offered resistance to the Clintons, who stepped with great gusto and determination into the void he had created. How many Democrats who might have stopped Trump fell in the healthcare-fueled losses of all those elections? It’s something we’ll never know now.
And let’s not forget our good friends the Clintons, who from their twenties had planned his-and-hers presidencies, and who, after their first attempt fizzled because of Obama, were ready to try it again. They spent the years in between clearing the field of potential opponents with their money and power, so that no one dared run except the eccentric Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who still gave her a real fight.
Would any of those whom former President Bill Clinton had scared off have managed to win the 77,000 plus votes in the Midwest, which turned out to make the difference? It took talent to scare off more people than Trump, but she managed to do it. It was her race to lose, and she did.
Others who made Trump include the Bushes, who decided two presidents just wasn’t enough for their favorite family. They went for the trifecta in Jeb Bush. But the third time wasn’t the charm for this loyal contingent, which found out the hard way and at just the wrong moment that its talent and luck had run out. Whatever Bush had in his two terms as governor, when he was rightly described as the best in the country, was already long gone by the time he entered the race in 2015 and was running on empty, the perfect foil for Trump to mock and beat up on, part of the case that he made that the establishment forces were depleted and past their prime.
Bush hung in just long enough to draw votes away from many more viable candidates and left only after the damage he’d done had become irreparable.
Who gave us Trump? The Obamas, the Clintons, and the Bushes. They put their own forms of self-interest over the good of the country and still may not realize what they did.
