How could they? It’s the question being asked by all the world’s press and much of our own. How could the American people, after all they have learned about Donald Trump’s private vulgarity, his boasting and confabulation, his wild and tacky business career—how could they vote to place him in the highest and most venerable elective office in the world? The explanations generally given—that Trump’s voters were either too stupid to see the evidence in front of them or too bigoted to admit what they saw—are wrong.
Americans voted for Donald Trump with their eyes open. Only a third considered Trump honest and trustworthy, according to NBC exit polls. Naturally those people all voted for Trump, just as the bare third who trusted Hillary Clinton voted for her. The election was decided by the unusually large group (31 percent) who didn’t consider either candidate honest or trustworthy. Such voters had the option of “voting” for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Evan McMullin—if one wants to apply that verb to an ambulatory form of sitting out the election. But it is striking how few took it: Of the people holding their noses at the prospect of a Clinton or Trump presidency, 85 percent nonetheless voted for one of the two. And in the aggregate, these people made Trump president. They chose him over Hillary Clinton 45 to 40 percent—and if one doesn’t count the ambulatory nonvoters, the nose-holders chose Trump by 53 to 47.
Other measures illustrate this phenomenon even more starkly. A little less than a fifth of voters expressed an “unfavorable opinion” of both candidates. Trump got 49 percent of these voters, Clinton 29. Again, cut out Stein voters, Johnson voters, and others who mistook what they were doing on Election Day for a school art project, and we find Trump beating Clinton by 63 to 37 percent.
One in seven voters said neither candidate had the requisite qualifications to be president. (They were, strictly speaking, wrong: The qualifications consist of having been born here no less than 35 years ago—but we tally their views as a service to psephology.) Leaving aside the non-voters, Trump got 82 percent of these people’s vote, Clinton 18 percent.
Or consider the seventh of voters who believed both candidates were temperamentally unsuited for the office. Out of those among them who nonetheless picked one of the two major candidates, Trump took 86 percent of the vote.
These are extraordinary numbers. We have long known that people who profess neutrality often lean one way or another. Most “independents” in the United States vote Republican. Most who call themselves “moderates” vote Democrat. But here is an overwhelming preference for Trump among people who condemn him in the strongest possible terms. The specter of Hillary Clinton must be in some way more alarming still.
Whether Americans were right to choose Trump is not yet ours to know. But the fear that led them to do so is undeniable. For years now, Americans have been behaving like a captive nation, afraid in the way that people are afraid in repressive societies. Although people of all political persuasions are jittery about the future—36 percent of Clinton voters and 29 percent of Trump voters said they were “scared” of what would happen if the other side won—the Trump side was probably more motivated by fears about the country as it exists and does business now.
Although Trump won the popular vote in 30 states, he was endorsed by only two major newspapers (the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Florida Times-Union). The political philosophers who last summer published the short-lived but widely read Journal of American Greatness were not unanimously Trump supporters. But because they were open to figuring out what Trump stood for, they felt they could do so only under Latin pseudonyms. Few prominent political figures allied themselves with Trump during the campaign. You can almost count them on one hand: Giuliani, Christie, Gingrich, Pence.
In staffing his administration Trump may have to choose between allying with the bureaucratic establishment he was elected to oust, or joining with nonestablishment forces (the way Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK party did in 2002 when it was shocked to find itself taking power in Turkey), or winging it with his nonexpert followers and allowing them to learn embarrassingly on the job (the way Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement did when it took dozens of seats in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in 2013).
The reluctance of the public openly to embrace the candidate it intended to vote for is spooky. He lacks public support not because he is unpopular but because a modern sort of ecclesiastical anathema has been pronounced upon him, and in the public’s experience, one offends the clerisy at one’s peril. In the past eight years, government has gone to great lengths to punish those who oppose or ignore it: suing nuns over Obamacare, prosecuting bakers over gay marriage, and trying to wreck the economy of North Carolina over transgender bathrooms.
None of this was talked about openly on the campaign trail. In retrospect, one can’t have expected it to be. Americans have been behaving like the citizens of a totalitarian country. If you believe they had good reason to, you voted for Trump. If you believe this was sheer paranoia, you voted for Clinton. If you believe the election was about something else, you missed it.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
