The Evening Standard in London reflects a general state of surprise that Donald Trump won the U.S. election. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
News Analysis
The morning after the election, journalists and talking heads were full of recrimination and wonder: How could they have gotten this election so wrong?
For weeks before, one expert after another reached the same conclusion, mutually reinforcing the conventional wisdom that while this would be a close election, Clinton was sure to triumph.
At 2:52 a.m., stat guru Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight website declared Donald Trump’s victory “the most shocking political development of [his] lifetime.”
By daybreak, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post blamed Trump’s rhetoric for causing journalists not to take him seriously: “[He] alienated us so much that we couldn’t see what was before our eyes.”
Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times acknowledged, “The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it.”
Rutenberg noted that CNN’s John King realized on election night that they had not been reading the electorate correctly: “We were not having a reality-based conversation” about what was showing up on the electoral map, he said.
On Fox News’ election night coverage, Tucker Carlson put his finger on what was happening: “It’s the entire world we live in. They [the elite] didn’t understand the country they presided over.”
Living in a Bubble
Indeed, Trump’s victory was such a surprise because the elites of this country have grown out of touch with the nation they live in.
In Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart,” he describes the rise in America over the past 50 years of a new upper class that increasingly lives in a bubble.
This upper class, less than 5 percent of the nation as a whole, holds the positions that allow them to make the decisions about how the rest of America lives. They are CEOs and top executives, heads of nonprofits, top lawyers and judges, executives and editors who determine how the news will be covered, heads of TV networks and movie studios, top academics and scholars, heads of federal bureaucracies, and politicians.
Murray found that this privileged group has become a homogenous class. They have the same tastes and culture. They exist at the top of the income distribution. They go to the same schools, live in the same select zip codes, and marry one another.
The typical journalist at the leading news outlet may not make the same high incomes as the members of this class, but they clearly identify with its attitudes.
This class lives separate geographically, socially, and culturally from the rest of the country. To an increasing degree, they may not in their daily lives interact with members of the lower class, except perhaps for the Uber driver who picks them up or the nanny who cares for their children.
Disconnect
For those who live in the expensive neighborhoods of northwest Washington, D.C., times have never been better, as their wealth has effortlessly skyrocketed on the back of a soaring stock market. It is not surprising, then, that on Sunday morning news shows, members of the upper class would speak in a bored way about how free trade in the long run is best for everyone.
While the economic theory of free trade might be true over time for people all over the world, for the individuals living in Youngstown, Ohio, who have seen the factories that guaranteed them a middle-class life pack up and move away, this theory is irrelevant.
Similarly, construction workers in Colorado priced out of work by illegal immigrants see a federal government that has failed to protect them by enforcing the law. Instead, they see sanctuary cities, elected officials, journalists, and business interests making the case for ever more immigration.
What they and the factory workers in Youngstown see is an elite that doesn’t recognize their suffering, and, even worse, condescends to it.
These are the middle-class and working-class voters who turned out to deliver Trump the White House and shake the political establishment.
Corruption
Trump has used the charge of corruption to explain the disconnect between the people of this country and its establishment.
Surely, there is corruption to point to. The revolving door between Congress and the lobbyists’ offices on K Street has never spun faster.
But the charge that “the system is rigged” goes beyond specific instances of malfeasance. It explains to ordinary people why the system is not working for them.
Journalists were shocked at the results of this election not because they are corrupt, but because they looked at events through the blinders of their class.
The journalists’ shock is an opportunity for the upper class to recognize they have such blinders and to look to heal the breach that has developed between them and the rest of the country. Murray is pessimistic about this. He sees a country with a culture that’s unraveling.
Shortly after his victory, Trump tweeted: “The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before.”
If Trump is right, perhaps this election will be the beginning of a better understanding among classes that seem to be alienated from each other.
Debbie Biro said it was difficult to talk to female friends about voting for Donald J. Trump.CreditMark Makela for The New York Times
NAZARETH, Pa. — Debbie Biro became a Republican to vote for Donald J. Trump.
A lifelong Democrat, Ms. Biro, 57, is a churchgoing single mother who practices yoga and does not eat meat. She works in the office at the Crayola Crayons factory near here, and she can pinpoint her “turning point” — the moment she became convinced that Mr. Trump was “a strong leader, and he’ll get things done.”
It came in January, when he skipped a debate in Iowa to host a fund-raiser for veterans — an event that later garnered questions of how much money he had given. Ms. Biro’s father served in the Korean War, and she said she admired Mr. Trump’s business skills, “and I thought it was nice that he was taking care of the vets.”
In well-to-do Naples, Fla., Sue Gauta, 47, a small-business owner married to a doctor, also embraced Mr. Trump. So did Wanda Lincoln, 67, a retired college administrator still working to make ends meet in a threadbare mill city in Maine. And Kyleigh Ostendorf, 26, who lives in Los Angeles and produces graphics for ESPN.
As America dissects the results of Tuesday’s election, one trend stands out: Tens of thousands of women — 53 percent of all white female voters, according to exit polls — chose Mr. Trump, playing a crucial role in his victory.
In interviews here in the Lehigh Valley — a bellwether region in a swing state that helped elect Mr. Trump — and around the country, female supporters said theirs was a vote for Mr. Trump and not against Hillary Clinton. America was on the wrong track, the women said, and Mr. Trump alone could fix it.
They are women who want their daughters to grow up and run businesses — and who run businesses themselves. Many said they were eager for a woman as president. Were they offended by Mr. Trump’s vile comments about women, captured on tape? Absolutely. Did they believe the women who came forward and said Mr. Trump had groped them? Not necessarily. Did any of it stop them from voting for him? No.
Where female opponents took to Twitter with #NotOkay, branding Mr. Trump a misogynist and worse, his female supporters saw “a good man and a good father,” said Mary Barket, the head of the Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women, who knows Ms. Biro from church and helped her get involved in the Trump campaign.
Ms. Biro, who said she was “a quiet, reserved person,” had never knocked on doors or worked in politics before. But she spent one day each weekend since August canvassing for Mr. Trump.
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Mary Barket, president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Republican Women, in Easton, Pa.CreditMark Makela for The New York Times
Where those who voted against Mr. Trump saw someone who bankrupted businesses and ducked paying taxes, these women said they saw a man who built a real estate empire and simply followed the law. They saw a man who had raised and promoted a beautiful and successful daughter, Ivanka, and who let a smart and accomplished Washington strategist, Kellyanne Conway, manage his presidential campaign.
In short, they embraced Mr. Trump’s sales pitch for himself.
“I think that women see the big picture — women are smart,” Mrs. Gauta said. “The fact that he said something crude,” she said “is not going to change my mind about the good he can do for our country.
“Did I like that, no,” she went on. “But do I think he can do a better job than Hillary? Absolutely. I think he has got the best interests of this country at heart. He’s got a beautiful family; he wants to leave a nice country — the great country he was raised in — for his kids. And I think he said the only way I’m going to get that done is by being president myself.”
She took her sons, 14 and 16, to a Trump rally, and said she “was even more impressed by him in person than on TV.” But as to his sometimes foul mouth, “If my boys ever said anything like that, I’d put them over my knee and spank them.’’
In Chicago, Nicole Been, 22, a Roman Catholic who attends DePaul University, is deeply opposed to abortion and the “hookup culture.” She complained that other students branded her a racist and a bigot for supporting Mr. Trump.
In Philadelphia, Daphne Goggins, 53, an African-American community activist and ardent Republican, always knew she would vote for Mr. Trump. She said she believed decades of Democratic efforts had done little for black people. When Mr. Trump invited her to a minority outreach meeting, she told him tearfully that “for the first time in my life, I feel like my vote is going to count.” (Only 4 percent of black women, exit polls show, supported Mr. Trump, while 26 percent of Latinas did.)
For the women interviewed, as for male Trump backers, the economy was of utmost concern. Mrs. Gauta and her husband are tired of paying $1,800 a month in health care premiums, with a $12,000 annual deductible. Ms. Lincoln, the retired college administrator, now works at her husband’s auto body shop in Old Town, Me., to help pay the bills.
Ms. Ostendorf, the graphics producer in Los Angeles, watched her father’s million-dollar business implode in the economic crash of 2008. He picked up work doing maintenance for the Y.M.C.A.
“I’ve seen America fall down,” she said, “and a big part of Trump that appealed to me was his business plan.”
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Trump’s supporters in Reno, Nev., cheered as it became clear the real estate mogul was going to become the president-elect.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times
And they said they are troubled, as well, by an America that seems to have embraced multiculturalism and political correctness without question. They said they did not understand the Black Lives Matter movement, wondered why Democrats seemed so fixated on transgender access to bathrooms and tended to be enraged at the way veterans are treated and violence directed at the police.
They are concerned about immigration and the threat of terrorism.
Bobbye Horton, 67, of Grand Junction, Colo., who is Hispanic, approved of Mr. Trump’s plan to build a wall with Mexico. On Wednesday she wore a “Viva Trump” T-shirt. Immigrants, she said, needed to use legal channels or stay out. “He got at the heart of America.”
Research suggests Americans in both parties long ago became open to a female president. By 1999, the Gallup poll found that 92 percent of Americans said they would vote for a woman. When Gallup first asked that question, in 1937, the figure was 33 percent.
“People no longer hear, ‘Do you want a woman to be president?’” Ms. Conway said in an interview in February, before she became Mr. Trump’s campaign manager. “They hear, ‘Do you want that woman?’”
This held true in many conversations with Mr. Trump’s female supporters. Many said they simply avoided talking about voting for him with Democratic female friends, for fear it would damage their sisterly bonds. (Ms. Biro never speaks of politics at yoga or at work.)
“When I told them that I was supporting Trump, they were, like, shocked, oh my gosh, ‘there is no way I could support him,’” Ms. Biro said of her friends. “But I was like, ‘Everybody has their thing.’”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said the party had expected “a surge of women” to support Mrs. Clinton, but that did not happen. While Mrs. Clinton did better with women in almost every demographic group, Ms. Lake said, “Trump won very solidly the white women’s vote, and we know that was fed by white, blue-collar women.”
Ms. Biro comes close to fitting that mold; although she considers herself middle class, she did not go to college. And Nazareth, a middle-class community in Northampton County, is the kind of community where Mr. Trump did well.
Yet sitting in the kitchen of her tidy Cape Cod-style home here, with the Trump-Pence signs still stuck in the front yard and a poster that speaks of peace as a path to enlightenment on the living room wall, Ms. Biro expressed the same hopes and fears for the country that many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters now have.
“Hopefully he’s going to try to unite people,” she said of the president-elect. “We have to try to help people heal, so people can learn to trust, and have faith that things are going to be O.K.”
Friday, November 11, 2016
How Letting Bankers Off the Hook May Have Tipped the Election
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Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., right, speaking with Lanny Breuer, an assistant attorney general, ahead of their testimony in 2010 before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which investigated the causes of the 2008 financial crisis.CreditJim Lo Scalzo for The New York Times
There are many facets to the populist, anti-establishment anger that swept Donald J. Trump into the White House in Tuesday’s election. A crucial element fueling the rage, in my view, was this: Not one high-ranking executive at a major financial firm was held to account for the crisis of 2008.
As millions of foreclosures and job losses followed, the failure to go after fraudsters confirmed the suspicion that the powerful got protection while those on Main Street were kicked to the curb. When Mr. Trump asserted that the system was rigged, he tapped directly into such misgivings.
Many readers of The New York Times, particularly if you live in Manhattan, San Francisco or another affluent enclave, may not see how an accountability failure of years ago could still resonate. But the failure to prosecute even one or two high-profile bankers — or force them simply to pay fines and penalties out of their own pockets — left millions of Americans believing that our justice system was unjust.
Recall that more than 800 bankers went to jail after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. And that mess wreaked nowhere near the devastation that the housing debacle did on the overall United States economy.
Embarrassed, perhaps, by their passivity, Justice Department officials recently pledged to take a more aggressive approach to white-collar crime. But the memo issued last September by Sally Quillian Yates, deputy attorney general, outlining new ways the department would hold individuals to account, has not translated into results.
These kinds of cases, of course, take time to mount. Still, data supplied by the Justice Department and compiled by Syracuse University shows that white-collar crime prosecutions are actually down significantly in 2016 from previous years. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse indicates that through August — the first 11 months of the government’s most recent fiscal year — prosecutions of all types were down almost 18 percent from five years ago.
I delved further into the figures and found that precious few of these were white-collar crime cases. According to the database, the largest number of cases pursued by prosecutors — representing almost 53 percent of the total — involved immigration. White-collar crime, by contrast, accounted for about 6,000 cases, or just 4.6 percent of the total so far this year.
That tally is far fewer than in previous periods. Compared with five years ago, for example, the number of cases is down 39 percent; going back a decade, near the height of the mortgage mania, cases have fallen by 19 percent.
“Criminal enforcement is required to deter criminal behavior, and the current Justice Department has more and more abandoned such activities,” said David Burnham, co-director of the records clearinghouse, who compiles the data.
A lighter form of punishment — termination — was also rare. “After the crisis, nobody on Wall Street lost their job in a Trump way — ‘You’re fired!’” said Dennis Kelleher, president at Better Markets, a nonpartisan organization that promotes the public’s interest in financial markets. “In addition, there has been this bipartisan interest in understating the deep economic damage from the financial crash. If you don’t have a compelling message that resonates with people in economic pain then you’re going to pay an electoral price.”
While the Fed concluded that more Americans than in previous studies were comfortable or “O.K.” with their financial positions, the researchers made a disturbing finding. If faced with emergency expenses of $400, almost half of the 5,600 respondents said they either would not be able to cover the costs or they would have to sell something or borrow to do so.
Another troubling statistic from the study: 22 percent of workers in the survey said they were holding down two or more jobs.
“It’s important to identify the reasons why so many families face continued financial struggles and to find ways to help them overcome them,” said Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor, at the time the study was published.
I’d call that an understatement.
Marcus Stanley, policy director at the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform, agreed that outrage over the accountability gap played a role in the election’s outcome.
The degree to which these voters favored Mr. Trump is something of a paradox, given his persona of the wealthy real estate mogul. Jailing bankers wasn’t one of his campaign’s main themes.
Still, Mr. Trump did call for bringing back Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial banking from investment banking. And he threatened to revoke the special tax treatment known as carried interest that enriches private equity executives and hedge fund managers.
On the other hand, he also promised to dismantle aspects of the Dodd-Frank legislation, Congress’s response to the 2008 mayhem.
“Trump’s personal background does not necessarily strike a populist chord,” Mr. Stanley said. “But his campaign rhetoric portrayed a situation where the economy was being rigged by powerful insiders. We’re going to be holding him accountable to deliver on some of that rhetoric.”
That points to one of the risks to Mr. Trump of riding a populist wave. If voters come to believe that he is actually more interested in protecting his friends or dispensing favors to the powerful, they will turn on him.
The first inkling of whether Mr. Trump is truly on the side of Main Street may emerge when his administration sets out to change Dodd-Frank.
There is much to dislike in the legislation — its rules are maddeningly complex and were weakened by Wall Street lobbyists. Changes to the law could help protect the system, Mr. Stanley said, or leave it vulnerable to another collapse.
“Are you going to return to the situation under Bush and Clinton where Wall Street wrote its own rules in the back room?” Mr. Stanley asked. “Or are you going to put forward something that constitutes a genuine alternative and that will prevent Wall Street from rigging the economy?”
It seems pretty clear that’s what voters are looking for. Will they get it? Stay tuned.
