Donald Trump has put his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and now plans to shut it down for renovations later this year. That's one way to handle all the artist boycotts of the venue. And in a dumb and disturbing move last week, Trump tweeted photos of Barack and Michelle Obama doctored so they look like apes. Trump's presence in the White House prompts the frequent question, “How The Hell Did This Happen,” which is the title of P.J. O’Rourke's 2017 book about the presidential election of 2016. As I've often asked the same question in the Trump years, and because O’Rourke was for so long—he died in 2022 at 75—such a witty and insightful observer of politics, I picked up the book to see if he could add a few pieces to the puzzle of Trump's ascendance.
The book contains O’Rourke's most repeated observation on the 2016 election: “America is experiencing the most severe outbreak of mass psychosis since the Salem witch trials of 1692." It sounds more like a Rachel Maddow quote than one from someone who, up until Trump, was known as a diehard, libertarian-leaning Republican—a sharp and humorous conservative voice and long-time editor/writer at Rolling Stone who spent decades skewering liberal policies.
The mass psychosis was enough to turn the writer into the unlikeliest of Never Trumpers. Then he did the unthinkable by endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. O'Rourke called Hillary “the second-worst thing that could happen to America,” which will ring a bell for the many Americans who held their noses while marking the ballot next to “Clinton.”
How The Hell Did We Get Here? begins with a lengthy, withering analysis of the sprawling 2015 candidate field, describing that motley crew with his trademark colorful language: “Who are these jacklegs, highbinders, wire-pullers, mountebanks, swellheads, buncombe spigots, boodle artists, four-flushers and animated spittoons offering themselves as worthy of the nation’s highest office?”
Bernie Sanders is “Trump for people who live in their parents’ basements.” Elizabeth Warren turned left in order to appeal to the “vegan aroma therapist” Democratic primary voters. Hillary Clinton’s main accomplishment as Secretary of State was accumulating frequent flyer miles, and she had Julian Assange set up her e-mail server. The two-time failed presidential candidate has a “lunatic energy” and campaigns like a “gerbil in the wheel.” But Hillary has an “upside” to O'Rourke—she knows where the extra toilet paper is stored in the White House.
The author saves most of his firebombs for the woeful GOP hopefuls. Jeb Bush “had a problem,” in that the mass psychosis underway wasn't keen on a Phi Beta Kappa with the “Bush” name. Chris Christie (the butt of several “fat” jokes in the book) was the guy who thought telling people at a 2014 New Jersey town hall meeting to “sit down and shut up” was a strong political move leading up to his presidential campaign. Maybe Carly Fiorina would run the country like she ran Hewlett-Packard—”fabulous if you shorted the stock.”
As for Trump, he's a vulgarian who doesn't know how to tie his tie, but the author digs deeper, citing the famous Mencken quote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and they deserve to get it—good and hard.” In other words, the general public’s not that sharp, and democracy faithfully reflects the desires that spring from their dulled minds. When things go wrong, that's the system working as advertised. A cynical thought, but comprehending the rise of Trump calls for cynicism.
The author goes on to make the case that the dumbed-down American general public whom Mencken called the “booboisie” is exactly like Trump. “America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trump's,” he writes, while claiming we’re all greedy. But the only evidence he presents is that the Clinton Foundation accepted a $500,000 donation from the impoverished nation of Algeria.
Does anyone believe Clintons reflect the nation in any way? O'Rourke’s next point is that Americans admire themselves in the needy way Trump does. Admiration for the self, he writes, has become so fundamental to Americanism—with self-esteem now taught in our schools—that ”we can all match Trump's opinion of his own worth.” I'm not buying that.
O’Rourke spends more time dumping on Trump’s competition than necessary. There are entire chapters on Ben Carson, Rand Paul, and Joe Biden that are skippable. The chapter about how the primary system was one of the quiet enablers of Trump’s rise stressed the point that ideological and grievance-driven voters turn out in these low-participation contests, meaning that fringe types end up choosing the nominees in what resembles a talent show more than a job application process.
The next several chapters deal with peripheral issues, but the author finishes strong in the final one, “The Revolt Against the Elites.” O'Rourke, struggling to reconcile his libertarian ideals with a populist reality he clearly despised, wraps up his argument by describing what happened in 2016 as a rebellion rather than an election. The author refers to a “civil war,” a “war of incivility," and a “loser mutiny”—wars in which the weapons are “words.” The “losers”—who ended up winning—are the frightened ones who felt powerless over everything.
The hog-tied disenfranchised revolted against the “elites,” a class they defined so broadly, according to O'Rourke, that anyone reading a book was included. Trump became the “giant inflated balloon-face of the revolt” because, although wealthy, he wasn’t truly elite. He faced the apex of the elite, embodied by Hillary Clinton, who got there through education, institutional maneuvering, marriage to a president, and what O’Rourke calls a “better-in-the-tent-pissing-out cabinet post.”
O’Rourke concludes with a call for learning the value of individual freedom and responsibility from the “failure of the elites and their vast political power.” He says we're not learning about freedom because we're too scared about social transfigurations and economic instability. Fear, he writes, is a “bad schoolmarm… so we turn to the big, stupid bully at the back of the classroom.”
That breakdown of Trump's 2016 win is the best I've read. In one of the final books of a prolific career that produced 20 books, it feels like O’Rourke is thinking out loud rather than trying to produce a fully synthesized political analysis. More episodic than adhering to a structured satirical arc, it lends itself to skimming, as a collection of essays would. But even when this author had retreated to his armchair mode, the sharpness was still there, reminding readers that O’Rourke’s greatest skill wasn’t in offering tidy conclusions, but in showing us just how absurd, unpredictable, and foolish American politics can be.