How We Got Donald Trump (And How We Might Have Avoided Him)

How We Got Donald Trump
(And How We Might Have Avoided Him)
By Andrew J. Bacevich
The present arrives out of a past that we are too quick to forget, misremember, or enshroud in myth.  Yet like it or not, the present is the product of past choices.  Different decisions back then might have yielded very different outcomes in the here-and-now.  Donald Trump ascended to the presidency as a consequence of myriad choices that Americans made (or had made for them) over the course of decades. Although few of those were made with Trump in mind, he is the result.
Where exactly did Trump come from?  How are we to account for his noxious presence as commander-in-chief and putative Leader of the Free World?  The explanations currently on offer are legion.  Some blame the nefarious Steve Bannon, others Hillary Clinton and her lackluster campaign.  Or perhaps the fault lies with the Bernie Sanders insurgency, which robbed Clinton of the momentum she needed to win, or with Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, and Low Energy Jeb, and the other pathetic Republicans whom Trump trampled underfoot en route to claiming the nomination.  Or perhaps the real villains are all those “deplorables” -- the angry and ignorant white males whose disdain for immigrants, feminists, gays, and people of color Trump stoked and manipulated to great effect.
All such explanations, however, suggest that the relevant story began somewhere around June 2015 when Donald Trump astonished the political world by announcing his intention to seek the presidency.  My aim here is to suggest that the origins of the real story are to be found much earlier.  The conditions that enabled Trump to capture the presidency stemmed from acts of commission and omission that occurred well before he rode down that escalator at Trump Tower to offer his services to the nation.
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176379/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_american_paths%2C_chosen_and_not_%281989-2018%29/#more