Part II: The System That Built Trump

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink"

The Last American President: Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Part II: The System That Built Trump

The Beginning: The Machine That Eats Democracy

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the
growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger
than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism:
ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any
controlling private power. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 message to Congress

As Louise and I watched Trump descend that golden escalator in 2015, we felt what millions of Americans did: disbelief, followed by dismissal. Surely this reality TV showman, this serial bankrupt, this carnival barker would quickly fade. Yet as the years passed and my radio listeners increasingly reflected his worldview back to me, I confronted a haunting truth: Donald Trump didn’t happen by accident.

He wasn’t, as so many have suggested (particularly Democrats) just some political anomaly or a weird, media-driven glitch in American democracy. He was, instead, the inevitable product of political structures meticulously constructed by morbidly rich ideologues and the fossil fuel industry over decades; all systems designed to concentrate power in the executive branch, weaponize the historic grievances that have haunted American politics for three centuries, and systematically dismantle the democratic guardrails that, up until now, have kept us a free nation.

In Part I, we examined the making of the man: his father’s cruelty, Roy Cohn’s tutelage, and his carefully constructed façade of success. Now we must confront something far more disturbing: the billionaire- and corporate-funded “machinery” that made him possible.

The chapters ahead expose this anti-democratic infrastructure, built brick by brick, dollar by dollar, lie by lie over more than a half-century. We’ll trace how the Republican Party transformed from Lincoln’s vision of an egalitarian, democratic nation into a grievance-fueled vehicle for authoritarianism. We’ll confront the dark money trail of billionaires who bought and paid for policy while helping encourage (particularly those who run media and social media outfits) populist rage.

We’ll document how seizing control of our political systems by exploiting Citizens United and other corrupt Supreme Court decisions became a profit and power center for the unscrupulous, damaging large parts of the American middle class as they produced outsized dividends for shareholders. And we’ll map the industrialization of lying, where truth itself became optional in service to power.

These aren’t isolated phenomena. They form an interconnected system that not only enabled Trump but will outlast him. That’s what makes this story so urgent. When we focus exclusively on the man, we miss the machinery that elevated him—a system still operating in communities across America—where legitimate economic suffering is weaponized to serve interests directly opposed to those experiencing the pain.

I’ve spent decades talking with Americans from all walks of life, from factory workers in Michigan (where Louise and I grew up) to farmers in Iowa to seniors in Florida. What strikes me is how many good people have been systematically lied to about the true causes of their hardship. The blueprint for American autocracy was refined over decades by those who found democracy too constraining for their ambitions. Understanding this blueprint is the first step toward dismantling it.

Because Republicans starting with the Reagan administration embraced the corrupt Buckley, Bellotti, and Citizens United decisions so aggressively, embracing and soliciting money from the morbidly rich, the path ahead has the potential to be far darker than most Americans realize. But illuminating the machinery of democratic destruction is the necessary precondition to rebuilding what’s been destroyed or weakened by these greedy individuals. Because this isn’t just about stopping Trump: it’s about exposing and then building public support for dismantling the system that made him inevitable.

Next Sunday: Chapter 4: The Party That Sold Itself Out