The branding of Donald Trump — and the choice ahead

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump’s words and actions divide Americans like no one else in politics. But how did it get to be this way, where the man many never expected to reach the White House became a president derided as “illegitimate” and then was twice impeached before leaving office, only to now face criminal charges in Manhattan?

Let’s look back at the branding of Trump from the moment he became a presidential candidate in 2015.

That year, Huffington Post announced it would cover Trump’s statements not as politics, but as entertainment. In the article, Arianna Huffington quoted a tweet by Jeffrey Goldberg, in response to Trump’s proposed “Muslim ban,” stating, “Donald Trump is now an actual threat to national security. He’s providing jihadists ammunition for their campaign to demonize the US.” This would set the tone that Trump would be an illegitimate president.

In 2016, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) made this assertion: “Throughout the 2016 presidential election, President Trump not only refused to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin but was even friendly and accommodating in his remarks.” He went on to argue, “President Trump has also surrounded himself with people [14 were identified] who did business with and are sympathetic to Russia.”

In a New York Times editorial in December 2016, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote, “Donald J. Trump’s election has raised a question that few Americans ever imagined asking: Is our democracy in danger? With the possible exception of the Civil War, American democracy has never collapsed; indeed, no democracy as rich or as established as America’s ever has. Yet past stability is no guarantee of democracy’s future survival.”

A study of news coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in the Oval Office found “80 percent of the media’s coverage of President Trump during the first 100 days of his administration was negative.” Retired Harvard professor Marvin Kalb would write about Trump’s attacks on the media: “Twentieth-century dictators — notably, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao — had all denounced their critics, especially the press, as ‘enemies of the people.’”

And so, a dangerous narrative developed around Trump. On one hand, his candidacy was a joke that should be relegated to the pages of a newspaper’s entertainment section; on the other hand, he might be as dangerous as Hitler, Mao and Stalin and must be stopped, and his supporters dispersed, by whatever means available. CNN noted that Joe Biden would define his 2020 campaign in these terms, “The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division.”

In a 2021 assessment of the Trump presidency, Pew Research pointed out that “Twitter permanently banned him from its platform [and] in his final days in office, Trump became the first president ever to be impeached twice.” The report went on to cite, “Trump’s overall approval rating never exceeded 50 percent and fell to a low of just 29 percent in his final weeks in office, shortly after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol.” Yet Trump still managed to record 74.2 million votes for reelection. Trump lost the election, but refused to go away. This has created a problem for those who want “business as usual” in our nation’s politics.

On Sept. 1, 2022, President Biden addressed the nation from the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, saying this about Trump and his “Make America Great Again” supporters: “It’s in our hands, yours and mine, to stop the assault on American democracy. I believe America is at an inflection point, one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come after.” Was he declaring war on MAGA Republicans?

Just days after Biden’s speech, a Reuters/Ipsos poll reported that “58 percent of respondents in the two-day poll — including one in four Republicans — said Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ movement is threatening America’s democratic foundations.” The poll also found that “60 percent of Republicans don’t think Trump’s MAGA movement represents the majority of the party.”

Last summer, Darnell West wrote for Brookings, “I argue there are several systemic threats to the future of democracy, such as copycat candidates, legal coups, a toxic information ecosystem, the decline of authoritative institutions, and the widespread prevalence of counter-majoritarianism in our political system. Trump represents an existential threat to our current system.” 

The result of all this? Trump has created a wide lane on which to expand government overreach. In 2019, FBI agents, clad in tactical gear, raided the home of Trump ally Roger Stone with little blowback. Then, on Aug. 8, 2022, FBI agents, also wearing tactical gear, raided Trump’s home, the Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida. Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol complex on Jan. 6, 2021, were labeled insurrectionists. Hundreds were rounded up and jailed; only two GOP members of Congress initially expressed concerns about due process. In September 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray released a statement noting that, “Since the spring of 2020 — so, the past 16, 18 months or so — we’ve more than doubled our domestic terrorism caseload, from about a thousand to around 2,700 investigations.”

When Trump’s indictment was announced, the New York Times reported, “[It] raises the prospect of an explosive backlash from Mr. Trump, who often uses his legal woes to stoke the rage of die-hard supporters.” The message of fear continues. An IPSOS poll, conducted in late March, found that “three in five Americans are concerned about political persecution against people in their community (61 percent), and 65 percent are concerned about acts of violence against people in their community because of their political beliefs.” Are Americans starting to see an uncomfortable pattern?

Trump is a unique figure in American politics — initially loathed by many because he disrupted the status quo. Politicians destroy each other as a matter of course, but this feels different. Anti-Trumpism has taken on almost a religious fervor that brands his supporters as heretics who need to be removed from the political discourse. This is a dangerous thing that will not be corrected by an election.

The choice in 2024 will not be “more Trump” or “more anti-Trump,” but instead, how do we preserve our system from the excesses of the past nine years on both sides of the political spectrum?

Dennis M. Powell, the founder and president of Massey Powell, is an issues and crisis management consultant and the author of the upcoming book, “Leading from the Top: Presidential Lessons in Issues Management.”