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| Via Mother Jones |
I was somewhat annoyed when Time Magazine selected Trump for its award, because that had zero to do with motivating my decision; I was initially surprised because I thought Indian PM Modi had been selected (but it turned out he won the readers' poll, not surprising given a high number of Indian-Americans in Silicon Valley elsewhere). [Modi would not win the support of libertarians, although he ran as more of a free market guy back in 2014, because of his manipulation of currency, essentially cancelling certain higher currency notes except for limited nominal exchanges; this is presented as an anti-corruption measure, an attack on the black market. This is not the first time demonetization policy has been tried in India. Modi is trying to address the symptoms rather than the disease; you have a counterproductive top-heavy government bureaucracy which is supported by taxing more successful sectors of the economy, which is dysfunctional (the old law of supply and demand). Government tax and regulatory burden must be lower and more universal/consistent. If and when government abuses its money monopoly, the long-term response may well be exploring digital currency, e.g., Bitcoin, beyond the government's control.]
Why did I select him? Certainly not because of his nationalist policies and rhetoric, not because of his economically illiterate and disastrous policies of mercantilism/anti-trade, anti-immigration, his disregard of individual liberty (e.g., eminent domain, data privacy, etc.) I despise his manipulative, opportunist populism. Even his signature position against immigration was blatantly disingenuous; he had publicly attributed Romney's 2012 loss to the latter's self-deportation immigration stance: is a policy that implies use of force in deporting unauthorized immigrants any less cruel?
I found Trump's behavior obnoxious and unfit for the Presidency: launching unprovoked personal attacks against Rosie O'Donnell, Megyn Kelly, McCain, Carson, and others, inflammatory claims of the Mexican prisons being emptied across the border, etc. His obsession with Twitter is not a productive use of time. His knowledge of policy is paper-thin; he doesn't seem to understand the principle of federalism (the separate powers of state and federal government); he has no public policy track record. He openly admires strongman authoritarian rulers, like Putin, which troubles me: an imperial Presidency conflicts with the ideals of liberty.
Then why choose him? Well, his election is one of the biggest upsets in political history; even I didn't see this one coming. Clinton often had up to a 2-digit percentage lead consistently in head-to-heads over the prior year to the election; only a couple of national polls showed Trump leading and the "smart money" had Clinton with an almost 80% chance of victory. The black vote was less than under Obama, and Trump did better among black men (somewhere around 16%) than his predecessors. Even around 1/3 of Latino voters came out for Trump, which many had written off over his blunt immigration rhetoric.
His unorthodox path to the GOP nomination was unlikely: who would have thought that Republicans, after getting burned by class warfare attacks on multimillionaire Mitt Romney in 2012, would have turned to an ever richer nominee and even less public service experience? Trump's anti-trade and anti-immigrant policies departed from past GOP Presidential policies.
I still don't understand why GOP voters would turn to someone who just 10 years ago was a registered Democrat, who publicly attacked popular George W. Bush's policies and flip-flopped on past stands (abortion, immigration, etc.), even within the campaign (refugees), and who refused to address entitlement reform. Even worse, he had contributed to his coming highly unpopular opponent (Hillary Clinton)'s past campaigns.
Still, there was a time when the three insurgent candidates (Trump, Carson, and Fiorina, not one of whom spent a day in the public sector) amounted to 60-70% of early poll support, and you had 14 experienced governors and legislators, basically squabbling over who got the opportunity to face Trump. I had seen polls suggesting, like Dole v. Buchanan in 1996, the conservative survivor would consolidate the anti-Trump vote. But Cruz himself was almost as unpopular as Clinton, and Trump had survived the Southern primaries with a huge lead so he could win majority votes in the NE/mid-Atlantic primaries.
Trump expertly played conquer-and-divide, and voters were much more reluctant to support the perceived Establishment-supported candidates, like Jeb Bush. They bought into the notion that Trump's wealth made him "incorruptible" and his 6 bankruptcies were a feature, not a bug. But Trump also ran an unpredictable campaign and exploited his opponents' initial reluctance to attack him (because they hoped to attract his supporters if and when his campaign crashed and burned). He additionally ran a shoestring campaign, manipulating the national media into almost $2B of "free" coverage. His opponents were less successful and starving for press attention.
Trump was able to exploit a change election year, even with Obama's high approval ratings and his endorsement for Clinton, where two-thirds don't like the direction of the country. There was a sense that Clinton had "earned" and deserved her nomination, but voters no longer believe in the elitists' agenda works to their advantage. More importantly, the election ended the long Bush/Clinton era which has spanned decades. True, Clinton had found it difficult to dispatch socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders. But maybe the Democrats didn't get the message voters were sending with Jeb Bush's failed candidacy.
Trump brilliantly exploited the people's dislike for political correctness and sold himself as a successful businessman who knows what it takes to create jobs; he was also able to dismiss his more experienced opponents as part of the problem, not the solution. His opponents were unable to counter his attacks effectively.
