A vision of greatness we didn’t know we needed.
Donald Trump had publicly toyed with the idea of running for president many times before 2015. In fact, he even entered the Reform Party’s presidential primaries for the 2000 election. But the timing was never quite right, until it finally was.
Of the many actions and twists of fate that created the opening for Trump’s presidential candidacy, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is an underappreciated one. Hailed by the conservative legal establishment as a win for free speech (on the merits I would agree), in practice it released a flood of money into the American political system that fundamentally reshaped the landscape of campaigns and how they were conducted. Suddenly the candidates themselves mattered much less, along with political parties. What mattered now were the new players who emerged from the wreckage of campaign finance law.
Super PACs could raise unlimited funds from corporations and billionaires. Dark money nonprofits kept their donors’ identities secret while spending hundreds of millions on attack ads. Labor unions could now spend unlimited treasury funds on elections. A new class of mega-donors wielded influence that dwarfed anything seen in American politics since the Gilded Age.
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman could pour millions into Democratic super PACs and dark money groups. The Service Employees International Union could spend tens of millions mobilizing voters and running ads. George Soros could funnel tens of millions through a network of liberal nonprofits to influence elections at every level of government. Candidates became supplicants in this new ecosystem, spending their days not connecting with voters but courting billionaires at private fundraisers, their policy positions increasingly shaped by the preferences of their financial benefactors rather than their constituents.
Voters noticed. They saw their television screens dominated by attack ads funded by shadowy groups with names like “American Bridge” and “Democracy for America”—names that were meant to sound generically patriotic and like they might belong to a real civic organization, but hearing them triggered something of an uncanny valley effect.
These changes to the political landscape occurred against the backdrop of a recession that continued to drag on and revelations that the NSA was engaged in widespread domestic surveillance. The combination was toxic: a political system that felt increasingly bought and paid for by wealthy interests, an economy that wasn’t working for ordinary people, and a government that was spying on its own citizens.
By early 2015, the presidential race looked like it would be the ultimate expression of this corrupted system. On the Republican side, 16 candidates were scrambling for the affections of megadonors, with Jeb Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC raising over $100 million before he even officially announced his candidacy. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was cementing her position as the Democratic frontrunner by giving $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs and collecting millions from Wall Street firms through the Clinton Foundation. She embodied everything that had gone wrong with American politics: a former public official who had leveraged her government positions into vast personal wealth, maintaining close ties to the very financial interests that Americans blamed for the 2008 crash. The prospect of a Clinton-Bush general election felt like the ultimate expression of a rigged system—two political dynasties, both thoroughly embedded in the donor class, offering voters a choice between different flavors of establishment corruption.
Beyond the obvious problems of corruption, the influx of cash and new types of political players was merging with another phenomenon that was reshaping American politics: the rise of social media and its democratization of political destruction. The 2006 “Macaca moment,” when Virginia Senator George Allen’s use of an obscure North African racial slur (his mother was raised in Tunisia) was captured on video and uploaded to YouTube, had served as an early warning of how a single unguarded moment could end a political career. By 2015, politicians had learned to navigate this new landscape with extreme caution, delivering focus-grouped soundbites and staying rigidly on message to avoid giving their opponents—or the online mob—ammunition.
This created a feedback loop with the post-Citizens United donor class: candidates became even more scripted and poll-tested because they couldn’t afford to alienate their financial backers with an off-the-cuff remark that might go viral. Corporate donors and wealthy superfunders demanded message discipline and political correctness from their chosen candidates, adding another layer of constraint to an already sanitized political discourse. The result was that American politics had become unbearably dull, with American politicians speaking an entirely different language than the American people.
Into that world stepped Donald Trump. His ride down the golden escalator began a journey that would shatter the suffocating facade of American politics. That escalator ride was itself emblematic, the first of a decade-long series of glittering images that has dazzled and dizzied the American public.
Trump’s political staff had tried to keep him from riding the escalator, arguing it would look “amateurish and not remotely presidential.” He overrode them, as he would continue to do at key junctures. Just as the political establishment fundamentally underestimated and misunderstood the man and his appeal, so did many of those who worked closely with him. Few have ever really understood Trump, as evidenced by the failure of so many Republicans who tried to imitate what they thought were his key points of appeal.
Within minutes of announcing his presidential run, he had violated every norm of politics, calling Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers while his rivals cowered behind carefully vetted talking points. Just weeks later, he attacked John McCain’s war record, declaring, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Any other candidate would have been finished before they started—their donors would have fled, their consultants would have resigned, and the media would have declared their campaign dead on arrival. But Trump had no donors to placate and no handlers to satisfy.
While his 16 Republican opponents were trapped in a system that demanded they speak in euphemisms and focus-grouped boilerplate, Trump could say exactly what millions of Americans felt but had been told was unspeakable in polite political society.
Though the media declared his campaign was toast, they couldn’t turn away from the spectacle. No one could. Trump did not just break the system—he made the system break itself. The more outrageous his statements, the more coverage he received. Cable news couldn’t resist the ratings bonanza. Every controversial tweet became breaking news, every rally a must-watch live event. The media, which had long served as enforcers of political correctness and donor-approved messaging, found themselves amplifying the very voice that was destroying their gatekeeping power.
Trump’s Republican opponents remained paralyzed, unable to adapt or even understand what was happening under their feet. So completely did Trump dominate every news cycle that even Jeb Bush’s $100 million super PAC couldn’t muster a fraction of the attention for its candidate that Trump could with a single tweet—and for free. Trump also had help from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which deliberately boosted him during the Republican primary because, in one of the biggest political misjudgments in American history, they thought he would be the easiest opponent to defeat in the general election.
The Comeback
Trump’s first term came and went. I saw him at an ebb, just ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. He was doing a rally in Mesa, Arizona, for the Republican ticket. Only the faithful were still showing up. He was characteristically running late. The desert sun was brutal, even in October. The only bottled water inside the security perimeter had been sitting in the sun all day and was boiling hot. During the wait I had helped with several incidents of heat exhaustion. Those of us who remained were in a practically hallucinatory state by the time Trump came onstage.
He was tired; it was plain to see. Not just in a physical sense, but a deeper kind of tired. It was just two months after the FBI had raided his home, the latest in a long series of serious attacks by his political enemies. But he went on through the full act. The setting sun had painted the desert horizon a crimson red.
As the speech wound into its finale, I was reminded of a poem, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” about an aging king gathering his faithful mariners for one more voyage, one more adventure into the unknown. “Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” the poet wrote. Trump may have seemed diminished, but he was not defeated. The man who had descended that golden escalator seven years earlier was still there, still fighting, still determined to strive and seek and find, and not to yield.
And so he did not yield. Two years later, Donald Trump would return to the presidency in what would be the most remarkable political comeback in American history. The faithful who endured the brutal heat that October day had witnessed not an ending, but an intermission. The assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, became the ultimate test of his political resilience. Rising with blood on his face and fist raised, shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” he transformed what could have been his final moment into his resurrection, emerging from that brush with mortality not diminished but reborn, rejuvenated, and more powerful than ever.
What Trump has given to America is not what we wanted—we didn’t even know what to want—but what we needed: a vision of greatness.
