By José R. Cabañas Rodríguez on May 7, 2025 from Havana
It is common to hear many people ask how it is possible that an individual like Donald Trump could be elected president of a country that, although it does not guarantee universal education, has research centers, universities, and institutions of advanced thought in various fields.
The first thing to note is that while 92% of the population has a high school education or higher, 43 million Americans are functionally illiterate (21%), meaning they cannot understand the content of a text written for an eighth-grade student.
Another factor to consider is the complexity of the US political system. It would be reasonable to assume that a political machine operating in 50 states, 435 electoral districts, and 30,000 incorporated cities could produce leaders who are able to form a clear idea of the country’s main problems and their potential solutions.
And again: how did the majority of people elect this individual?
To begin to answer these questions, it must be remembered that the majority of people eligible to vote in the United States do not, I repeat, do not participate in the electoral process. This responsibility therefore falls on less than 50% of the electorate every four years. If voting were mandatory in that country, the results would be different.
After the founding fathers designed a state and a constitution that guaranteed the rights of only a minority, years followed in which the ruling class was determined to design an electoral system that would respond even more to the interests of the few. It was not a task that could be accomplished in a day.
From the way the local caucuses or assemblies of each party were structured, the (working) day chosen for voting, the location of polling stations, the costs of advertising and other public resources needed to publicize candidates, access to the press and media in general, the need to travel physically across a vast geography—everything pointed from very early on that only those with sufficient resources could succeed.
Increasingly, the federal government became a pipe dream that was far removed from the interests of ordinary women and men. Increasingly, lower-income groups felt that the decisions made in Washington, D.C., had no bearing on their personal problems thousands of miles away. It was a state that had been established to preserve and mediate the interests of large economic groups, not to balance or adequately distribute the wealth created by all.
Although these trends had their ups and downs, with several governments pursuing populist agendas and even introducing budgets described as “social welfare,” the truth is that political and economic power became increasingly concentrated in a few hands, and party structures were dominated by groups and strongmen who were rarely willing to give up the privileges that come with the exercise of power.
And some will rightly say: but this is the same thing that has happened in most capitalist countries, and there are few cases as strident as that of Trump.
It should be remembered, however, that there have been many exceptions to this rule of supposed rationality. Whenever there have been systemic crises, fragmentation of local economies, and readjustments in the structures of domination, the structures of capital have propelled individuals such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and many others who were not exactly known for the brilliance of their ideas or the thoughtfulness of their decisions to the highest levels of executive power.
But returning to the US scenario, if we already know that more than 50% of voters are not interested in or attracted to the election of their leader, then we need to analyze how the remaining percentage behaves. Contrary to popular belief, the largest sector of those who exercise the vote are neither Democrats nor Republicans (ignoring the existence of other parties with a local presence), but rather the so-called independents.
The latter are not registered, nor do they attend activities (militant is not the term that can be used) organized by one electoral structure or another. This sector spends the four years between elections looking from one side to the other, with the same cadence as a table fan, waiting to see something here or there that will finally attract them to bet on one of the horses saddled for the occasion. According to historical surveys, these defining issues can range from the gestures made when delivering speeches to the clothing worn at each event. Rarely does the decision come down to a matter of substance. Many experts on the subject argue that the main thing to do before voting is to check your credit card balance or look in your wallet. If you have enough money, everything stays the same, regardless of the party’s color. If you have less purchasing power and more bills to pay, then bring on the change.
The reality, of course, is much more complex than that, if we remember that in every presidential election, voters have to cast their opinion on ballots containing several questions and not just answer who should be president. Something unique about the US system is that you can win the popular vote and still lose the election (Hillary Clinton in 2016), thanks to the existence of the Electoral College, an institution created during the era of slavery to ensure equitable representation of states based on their white voting population.
But if we start from the premise that most states have consistently voted for one party or the other over many years, then we come to the conclusion that presidential elections are decided by an even smaller sample of the electorate. The resources, attention, and energies of each party are concentrated in the so-called swing states, which register a swing in their preferences and are calculated as an average of between 12 and 6 of them in each election.
If we are willing to admit that the US president is NOT necessarily elected by the majority of voters, then it is useful to review who the candidates are, what their agendas are, and the most militant sectors that support them, until we can understand how a person with Donald Trump’s characteristics can be elected. But we should also take some time to look at the bigger picture: what is the United States today and what place does it occupy in the world?
The United States went from being the most important economic and military power since 1945 to being considered the winner of the socialism vs. capitalism confrontation in 1990. This gave it sufficient credentials, according to its rationale, to propose an agenda of bringing all markets to its feet and setting rules of competitiveness that hardly anyone could imitate (Washington Consensus and all the rest). On the political and military front, in the absence of a major rival to blame, it created the specter of terrorism as a banner to justify large military spending and involvement in a series of wars in the Middle East that destroyed nations and regional markets, generated millions of unwanted migrants, and diverted large amounts of money from domestic projects to the rear in favor of profits for the military-industrial complex.
The impressive challenge that the People’s Republic of China and other experiments taking place in the Asian region would pose in the medium and long term in economic and technological terms did not even appear on the radar of US observers at the time. No one calculated the trends that have been reversed in just 30 years.
The global economic crisis that ensued in 2008 highlighted a new reality for the United States: internally, there were many different levels of development, there were winners and losers in the free trade gamble, large areas of the nation’s social fabric were destroyed and beyond repair, political consensus was an endangered species and could rarely be used for creative solutions on a national scale. Two major trends coexisted in the political class at the time: improving the country’s image abroad and imagining supposedly inclusive projects at home (Obama 2008-2016), or changing the rules of the game, applying a “anything goes” approach, and making no apologies for representing a minority (Trump 2016-2020).
The next question that comes to mind is why Trump as an individual? If we review the names of the figures who aspired to party leadership before the 2016 election, we can see that personalities such as Sarah Palin, John McCain, and others did not offer an IQ very different from the case at hand. There were exceptions, of course, such as Jeb Bush, with his father’s and brother’s pedigree, and a more certain way of respecting the rules of the game.
But Trump rose above them for very specific reasons. First, he fought harder than the rest for a very particular reason: to gain access to the political arena in order to evade all the legal problems that were pursuing him and his close relatives. No one else had a similar incentive. The second would be his “ability” as a disruptive element, that is, his disregard for all rules, his anything goes attitude. His blackmailing track record of crushing his opponents in the construction industry in states as corruption-free as New York and New Jersey made his closest competitor pale in comparison.
Contrary to the entire political class that preceded him, Trump did not court every single social sector of the US electorate. He focused on the 27-30% represented by conservative whites (some evangelical, some not), who were concerned about the ethnic darkening of the country, frustrated by the collapse of the old economy, and reacted automatically to sins such as homosexuality and abortion.
And if this logic were not enough to win power in a system that increasingly disregards the so-called rules of the game, then we must consider the great effort made by his Democratic rivals to lose so badly in 2016 and 2024. They almost succeeded in 2020 as well.
In US election cycles, the big question is almost always who is going to win. But after what we have seen in recent years, perhaps we need to change who will do everything possible to lose. It is impossible to imagine that, especially in the last election, the Democrats were really working to achieve victory. The list is endless: an octogenarian candidate with no charisma, a replacement imposed by the bureaucracy, a closed convention that gave the grassroots no chance to express themselves, continuous mistakes in the handling of issues, low mobilization, investment of resources in geographical areas of dubious return, unrestricted support for international genocidal leaders, refusal to accept generational transition at different levels of leadership. They really made a great effort to lose, and their opponents thanked them for it.
The result is already known. During his first 100 days, Donald, who also has a passion for reality TV and empathy with fans of the genre, has been surprising those who never read or knew about his previous life. He cannot be accused of lying, acting, changing, or boasting. He has been the most consistent of all, the most faithful to his lack of principles and his previous experience as a contractor who was irreverent towards the competition. He has not been, nor will he be, a strategist, a philosophical visionary, or an articulator of social harmony. He did not come to power to benefit anyone other than himself and those who swear total loyalty, genuflection, and submission to him.
Why does his agenda every day include some action against established norms and shared truths? Very simple: the regulatory systems established to prevent monopolistic growth, damage to the environment, to allow the emergence of new economic actors, to allow science to drive innovation, are now suffocating for many internal sectors and for regaining lost ground to external competition.
Trump hopes that repeating this behavior indefinitely will make it normal or abnormal, reduce the ability of a public accustomed to the media message to react, and destroy the defenses of his Democratic friends, who are not coordinating a response and have not yet recovered from their defeat.
Mr. Trump has speculated about the possibility of re-election and generated thousands of comments from those who do not remember how old he will be in 2028. His ability to sway public opinion may soon fade because he will simply be unable to deliver results that live up to the expectations he has created. He may be able to destroy, crush, subjugate, and harm others, but in any case, the American dream will turn into a nightmare.
At this point, it is worth comparing this situation to similar moments experienced by civilizations that once held a certain preponderance in the history of humanity. The new question to be analyzed at another time would be: Do bankrupt societies generate this type of leadership in their terminal stage, or is this just a temporary phenomenon that will be partially or totally overcome in the future?
José R. Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English