It was two years ago Friday when Donald Trump descended an escalator inside Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president. Did he drag the country’s political conduct with him? “Any debate about civility in politics begins with Trump,” New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush tweeted on Thursday. “No one has degraded discourse more, while embracing the fringe.”
There is ample, unique evidence to back the second half of Thrush’s claim. It would require a cumulonimbus word cloud to condense all the vulgar bluster Trump said on the campaign trail. He has legitimized the likes of InfoWars and Gateway Pundit: demonstrable peddlers of conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Trump’s Twitter feed, often mad as hell, could be ghostwritten by Paddy Chayefsky some days. Just look what he said Friday morning:
I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2017
But while these traits are unprecedented for a president, they did not spring from nothingness.
Any debate about civility in politics ought to begin with how civility fell out of favor—a development that predates Trump’s political ascendancy. The people’s bubbling hostility toward the status quo in Washington has a complex history in elections, government, and media. Ross Perot’s 1992 bid for the White House was a start. The Contract with America followed in ’94. Fox News hit the air in ’96. Two years later, the nation endured the Clinton impeachment proceedings. Two years after that: Bush v. Gore. Then America went to war. In 2003, Howard Dean became the first modern presidential hopeful to leverage populist anger into an Internet campaign. “Almost every innovation now commonplace in politics—search ads, social networking, online video hubs, do-it-yourself grass-roots tools—has traceable roots to a ragtag bunch of techies whose dream candidate was a loser,” Politico wrote about Dean’s run.
One of those social networks was 4chan, which began that same year. Facebook came in 2004. In 2005: Reddit. In 2006: Twitter.
That November, Democrats took control of Congress, their pent-up rebuke to George W. Bush. The Republican backlash of the aughts peaked in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama—and the elevation of the Web to the center of political discourse. The arrival of national flashpoints began to quicken: the stimulus and the Tea Party in 2009; Citizens United and Obamacare in 2010; the congressional debt ceiling crisis and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Even the Mayans were circling November 6 on their calendars in 2012. Total spending from outside groups that cycle exceeded $1 billion—more than tripling such expenditures from 2008. And super-PACs don’t exist to tell voters the world is going to be OK.
Mitt Romney lost, and conservative activists vowed never again. “What we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites,” said Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Express about the GOP nominee. Texas voters put Romney’s polar opposite, Ted Cruz, in the Senate. The “99 percent” found its voice in Elizabeth Warren, who defeated Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Together, they helped accelerate populist trends larger than either of them: The Republican lurch toward anti-establishmentarianism and the Democratic embrace of progressive economic policies. “Make D.C. listen,” Cruz beseeched the public during the “defund Obamacare” fight in Congress in 2013. “Make the rich pay their fair share,” Warren demanded constantly. Tens of millions would ask Trump and Bernie Sanders a few years later to do each, respectively.
Throughout this time, Americans’ trust in mass media dipped by almost half, according to Gallup. Fifty-five percent said in 1999 they had confidence in mainstream outlets to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” That dropped to 45 percent in 2009, then to 40 percent in 2012. Faith in the fourth estate was deteriorating long before the 2016 election—when trust dove to 32 percent—and alternative, partisan, and social media were flourishing. The primetime lineups for Fox News and MSNBC mostly featured ideological hosts. Those two channels and CNN helped coin the phrase, “Let’s bring in our panel”—panels, those argumentative roundtables on which straw men are frequent guests. Facebook and Twitter, with their “pages” and their cliques (“conservative Twitter,” “liberal Twitter,” “politics Twitter”), created echo chambers.
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” the French physician Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said. By the time Trump proclaimed “I am officially running for President of the United States,” voters were already consuming the country’s omnipresent politics and the accompanying outrage. Trump didn’t start anything. He filled a void and has exploited it for all it’s worth.
We would do well not to mistake a branch for the root of a problem. As long as the conditions remain in place for the political system to stoke and profit from the fear of men, that’s how you’ll get Trump, and whatever comes next.
