We Bought a Baby Alligator
If the later years of the Twentieth Century began our political polarization and activated the growing disconnect between citizens and elites, the early aughts of the Twenty-First Century magnified our differences and intensified our partisanship. The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had a brief unifying effect (for which Lee Greenwood was especially grateful) but then our divisions returned and hardened like wet cement. The growth and success of Fox News during the Bush years encouraged this disharmony and set the stage for the “alternative facts” to come.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost the lives of more than 7,000 U.S. service members, 177,000 coalition partners serving in combat, and an additional 30,000 U.S. service members and veterans of the post 9/11 wars who have died by suicide. The human toll of these burdens was disproportionately borne by poor and working-class Americans, most from red states who joined an all-volunteer military in lieu of going to college. This had the compounding effect of impacting only one segment of the populace, leaving another segment completely unscathed, and exacerbating our educational divide in the process.
At the same time, to pay for these pricey conflicts (remember when we thought it would only cost $87 billion?) the Bush administration ran up its credit card debt and, in 2008, managed to send the economy into a tailspin. The global financial crisis of 2008 again disproportionately affected the middle and working class, while those who were better off were more easily able to fend off the blow.
George W. Bush, who had risen to historic heights as POTUS in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, left office as one of the least popular presidents in modern polling (fun fact: He left with a 34% approval rate, tying Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter! More fun facts: these three still beat Richard Nixon (at 24%, which seems obvious) and Harry Truman (at 32% which does not seem obvious AT ALL!) But I digress). Barack Hussein Obama became the first African American to win election to the White House in 2008, which had the two-pronged effect of animating African American identity groups AND white supremacists at the same time.
Apparently, on the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration, a group of GOP big-wigs met at a DC steakhouse to drown their sorrows in scotch and see if they could plot a course for the next four (maybe eight) years. Apparently, they figured it out pretty quickly: they would just try to block everything President Obama tried to do. Republicans would be the aggressive out-party and they had Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to help them deliver their anti-Obama message.
So, to recap: the growing distrust of those in charge grew larger when the foreign policy actions and economic destruction of the Republican Party ushered the first Black president into office.
Why am I mentioning race? Because after Romney’s 2012 presidential loss, the Republican Party famously produced a report of self-examination that was at one time thoughtful and still tone deaf. The so-called “autopsy” report warned that the GOP had to start reaching out to African Americans, Latinos, and women to avoid another electoral humiliation, and hot dog, did they pitch this to the wrong audience. The base of the GOP wasn’t angry that the Republican Party was too white. It was angry that the Party looked and sounded like Mitt Romney, who didn’t sound angry at all.
After years of hearing from Fox News and Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and Daily Caller that the American way of life was being stolen from them and that the country was on the brink of an existential crisis, the base voters of the GOP did not want to hug the very people who were being called out (not so subtly) as the villains of American destruction. These right-wing outlets had been hammering home the themes of massive, unruly, unlawful immigration, stoking fears of white delusion due to impending demographic changes, and hammering home the un-Americanness of the first Black president for so long, the base voters of the GOP were not inclined to enlarge their tent, no matter what a report by the bigwigs in DC said.
Instead, the base was mightily pissed that the elites had sold out their manufacturing jobs for corporate profits, that seemingly endless wars were suspiciously harming their communities, and that the rich seemed to get richer on their backs. Fox News told them to hate the Democrats, and they did. But they had started to hate the Republicans too, because all the elites in DC were cozy with the agreements that allowed the winners to keep on winning. The GOP base didn’t want nice: they wanted a wall. A big, beautiful wall that someone would build, and force Mexico to pay for.
Because, as it turns out, most of all the base wanted someone who said out loud the things they had been thinking for a while, the things that had been hinted at before but never spoken. And one day in 2015, a couple rode down a golden escalator in New York and announced that Mexicans were rapists, and the country was never the same after that. The media loved Donald Trump as a candidate because he was loud, garish, and unpredictable, which makes for good TV tape and clickable copy, and this meant Trump was covered constantly He was inescapable in the 2016 campaign, receiving $5.9 billion in free media coverage. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, received $2.8 billion, and most of that was responding to the crazy things Trump had said. That was why the media oved him. They made a bundle off of his crazy.
But the base loved him because he purposely tapped into their racial animus and penchant for conspiracies. Trump was a media guy and knew how that world worked. He phoned into Fox and Friends during a weekly segment called “Monday Mornings with Trump” starting in 2011, and during this time he not only circulated his name, but also heard the complaints of the most active GOP voters. He knew what excited them, what they gravitated to and (most importantly) what got them ferociously angry.
In this manner, Trump was a MAGA whisperer before there was MAGA. He saw that these far-right voters were angry about a number of things, and he fed on their fury. In the words of scholars Anders and Usenski, Trump benefitted from tapping into public sentiment that was a noxious blend of attitudes about racial groups, immigrants, and political correctness. When Clinton called them “deplorables,” it was a slam from an elite who couldn’t see the problems many Americans were facing, and the Trump supporters embraced it as it fed their rage. The base voters wrapped themselves in flags that literally said “Deplorable” and put bumper stickers on their cars that read “Trump 2016: Fuck Your Feelings.”
When Trump won, it was a victory for the voting block that came out to support him who also happened to be the faithful audience of the media that validated and amplified their fears and fury. This voting block was big and loud, and they were demanding: They knew what they wanted and if they were kept happy, they would provide the election wins for the GOP and the ratings for the media that kept the whole train running.
The only problem? The base was a baby alligator, and eventually babies get bigger, hungrier, and they don’t fit in your bathtub anymore. And yet… you have to feed them.
Next time: The Baby Alligator Grows Up