By
Robert
Reich
Even
if he loses (and I believe he will), Donald Trump has done incalculable damage
to America – eroding the trust and social cohesion the nation depends on.
But
he couldn’t have accomplished this without three sets of enablers. They must he
held accountable, too.
The first is the
Republican Party.
For
years the GOP has nurtured the xenophobia, racism, fact-free allegations, and
wanton disregard for democratic institutions that Trump has fed on.
Republican
fear-mongering over immigrants predated Trump. It forced Marco Rubio to abandon
his immigration legislation, and, in 2012, pushed Mitt Romney to ludicrously
recommend “self-deportation.”
During
this year’s Republican primaries, Ben Carson opined that no Muslim should
be president of the United States, and Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz suggested Syrian
refugees be divided into Christians and Muslims, with only the former allowed
entry.
Trump’s
racism is nothing new, either. Republicans have long played the race card
– charging Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens” and being soft on
black crime (remember “Willie Horton”).
Trump’s
disdain of facts is also preceded by a long Republican tradition – denying, for
example, that carbon emissions cause climate change, and tax cuts increase
budget deficits.
And
Trump’s threats not to be bound by the outcome of the election are consistent
with the GOP’s persistent threats to shut down the government over policy
disagreements, and oft-repeated calls for nullification of Supreme Court
decisions.
The second set
of Trump enablers is the media.
“Trump
is arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee,” concluded
a study by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public
Policy.
By
mid-March, 2016, the New York Times reported that Trump had received almost $1.9
billion of free attention from media of all types – more than twice what
Hillary Clinton received and six times that of Ted Cruz, Trump’s nearest
Republican rival.
The
explanation for this is easy. Trump was already a media personality, and his
outrageousness generated an audience – which, in turn, created big profits for
the media.
Media
columnist Jim Rutenberg reported CNN president Jeff Zucker gushing over
the Trump-induced ratings. “These numbers are crazy — crazy.”
CBS
president and CEO Leslie Moonves said, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn
good for CBS. The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”
Not
only did the media fawn over Trump but it also failed to subject his
assertions, policy proposals, and biography to the scrutiny normal candidates
receive.
Fox
News, in particular, became Trump’s amplifier – and Fox host Sean Hannity,
Trump’s daily on-air surrogate.
Trump
also used his own unceasing tweets as a direct, unfiltered, unchecked route
into the minds of millions of voters. The term “media” comes from “mediate”
between the news and the public. Trump removed the mediators.
The third set of
Trump enablers is at the helm of the Democratic Party.
Democrats
once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party
has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and
pollsters who have focused instead on raising big money from corporate and Wall
Street executives, and getting votes from upper middle-class households in
“swing” suburbs.
While
Republicans played the race card to get the working class to abandon the
Democratic Party, the Democrats simultaneously abandoned the working class –
clearing the way for Trump.
Democrats
have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and
for four of those years had control of both houses of congress. But in that
time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and jobs.
Both
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without
providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of
getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They
stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white
working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on
companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with a simple
up-or-down votes.
Partly
as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was
elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost
bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.
Both
Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the
result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.
The
unsurprising result has been to shift political and economic power to big
corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. That created an
opening for demagoguery, in the form of Trump.
Donald
Trump has poisoned America, but he didn’t do it alone. He had help from
opportunists in the GOP, the media, and the Democratic Party.
The
pertinent question now is: What, if anything, have these enablers learned?
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also
a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause,
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the
award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
