Democrats enabled Donald Trump to become president twice because of repetition compulsions that still propel the party’s leaders – undermining the party’s potential to end the real-life nightmare of Maga control over the federal government. Scrutinizing how this century’s Democratic leaders set the stage for Trump’s electoral triumphs is crucial not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a vital focus on how such failures can be avoided in the future.
Elites did quite well after Barack Obama took back the presidency for Democrats in January 2009, amid the Great Recession. He bailed out big banks while a huge number of people lost their homes. By the time Obama was most of the way through his presidency, he had facilitated “the dispossession of at least 5.2 million US homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century”, the journalist David Dayen pointed out.
