Whose Fault is Trump?

(It’s Probably Not Who You Think)

Photo by Christian Chomiak on Unsplash

My recent post about being wrong about Trump sparked exactly the kind of polarized reactions you’d expect in our binary political world. Some readers decided I must have voted for Trump and was confessing my error (and that Trump himself was emphatically my fault).

To clarify, I didn’t vote for him, nor did I vote for the Democratic candidate (either time). Though living in New York State meant my presidential vote was purely expressive anyway.

But the responses themselves revealed something more interesting than my voting record: two competing one-dimensional narratives about Trump’s rise, each confidently assigning blame to a single villain.

The left’s story: This is the fault of Trump voters. And maybe racism or white supremacy too.

The right’s counter-narrative: Actually, this is the fault of liberals and progressives who eroded critical institutions like rule of law long before Trump arrived. Trump is just payback, so goes this narrative. He’s just resetting the scales.

Both stories are seductively simple. Both are fundamentally wrong. And both keep us trapped in exactly the kind of one-dimensional thinking that created this mess in the first place.

The Reality Is Four-Dimensional

Understanding how we got Trump—and how we might move forward—requires thinking across all four dimensions of our political landscape: the breadth of interconnected systems, the depth of institutional complexity, the height of our aspirations and failures, and the dimension of time stretching backward through decades of choices and forward through their consequences.

So let me break down what actually happened, as systematically as I can.

Before we get started, I’ll admit that this post is not for (some) Trump supporters. I hope it’s for thoughtful citizens from a range of political perspectives, including those who voted for Trump for complex and thoughtful reasons. But if you are currently cheering on war crimes, open cruelty to legal residents, undermining rule of law, gaslighting Americnas on the economy or any number of other concerning activities you’re not going to agree with anything here and that’s totally fine. Not all posts will appeal to all readers. You don’t need my permission to scroll on by.

For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Party Failures: The Foundation Cracks

The story actually starts, maybe surprisingly, with weak parties (though weak parties themselves are caused by changes even further upstream). Political parties in the U.S. are complicated institutions and this isn’t my specialized area, but I do feel safe-ish making some general comments.

The power of parties in the U.S. has waxed and waned over time. Powerful parties control their messaging, platform, and candidates, at least to a degree.

A few critical changes over the past decades have hollowed out political parties, leaving them more vulnerable to the internal discord that up-ended American politics in 2016. While 2016 wasn’t the first time we saw cracks in the edifice, it was the first time we saw firsthand how a party losing control of its own candidates and narrative can have disastrous effects.

It’s sometimes hard to remember in 2025, but Trump wasn’t the Republican Party’s first - or even fifth - choice; this was a weird case of institutional Stockholm Syndrome. A former Democrat captured a party through a primary system that empowers the most extreme voters to choose candidates. The GOP knew he was dangerous but chose party survival over national interest. They could have intervened to support a more moderate or principled candidate. They didn’t.

Political primaries are often seen as more democratic than party machines, but they don’t actually give us more democratic outcomes. In fact, closed primaries fuel polarization by basically guaranteeing that the most partisan and most extreme candidates will be on the ballot because the voters who tend to vote in primaries skew to ideological extremes. Many of the failures of the GOP in 2016 stemmed from elites losing control of the party narrative and not quite knowing what to do about it.

The Democrats failed just as spectacularly too, for somewhat different (but related) reasons. The second Trump won in 2016, Democratic leadership should have been conducting intensive postmortems, rethinking their message, and cultivating their bench. Instead, they trotted out an ancient Biden with an “it’s his turn” argument—classic insider baseball that prioritizes rewarding party elites over serving the country.

Both parties put institutional self-interest above national welfare, but they did so in large part because the incentives of our current system encourage them to do so (more on this later).

The Republicans enabled someone they knew posed risks. The Democrats abdicated any coherent plan for opposing him.

Fast forward to 2024: Biden, very old, having promised to be a “bridge president,” insisted on running again. Internal evidence suggests Democratic leadership knew how frail he’d become. Nobody stepped in.

Meanwhile, the Republican party had already handed over the keys of the party establishment to the equivalent of a drunk frat boy with a revenge complex.

Catastrophic party failures on both sides.

Institutional Erosion: Bipartisan Destruction

One common theme from conservative readers of my October post was that Trump’s excesses wouldn’t be necessary if Democrats hadn’t been undermining rule of law and other critical liberal democratic institutions for decades.

The conservative critique isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s certainly one-sided: both Democratic and Republican presidents have been eroding rule of law and checks and balances for decades. This isn’t a game one party plays while the other maintains integrity.

Executive power abuses, as just one example, are equal opportunity abuses across administrations. Obama used executive orders extensively to circumvent congressional gridlock just as Bush pushed the goalposts on foreign policy and war powers.

Both claimed they needed to do these things to solve critical problems, but the entire American constitution is set up on the foundation of if you can’t get stuff done through legitimate means, maybe you shouldn’t get that stuff done.

Or maybe you should take the time to build a coalition and get broad-based support.

Over time though it’s become easier and easier for politicians from both parties to jump over governance straight to power, ignoring messy limitations like checks and balances along the way.

Unfortunately, when political leaders mess with institutions to advance their short-term agendas, they’re wielding a double-edged sword. Because when the other side takes power—and they always do eventually—the very levers we’d need to constrain bad actors have been destroyed. The norms have broken down. Shame doesn’t work anymore. The guardrails are gone.

Electoral Failures: Systems That Breed Polarization

It was harder to control bad behavior too because the system was already breaking in fundamental ways.

Between gerrymandering, winner-take-all systems, and two-party primacy, changes in the very political infrastructure itself solidified partisanship and polarization even as parties themselves were becoming significantly weaker. This combination was disastrous: parties that no longer control their messages or their candidates alongside growing disaffection with broken democratic structures meant conditions were ripe for a populist demagogue to harness and amplify justifiable voter anger.

At the same time, the binary political structure itself, growing polarization and fragmented media landscape prevented real solutions to the issues Americans actually cared about: immigration, healthcare, affordability, strong economy, hope for our kids’ futures—the American dream, broadly construed.

It became easier to blame failures on the “other side,” whoever that other side happens to be.

Failures to address growing crises in everything from housing to criminal justice to immigration continued to undermine faith in democratic institutions. And this wasn’t one party consistently failing while the other tried valiantly to fix things. Ideological failures on both sides left larger and larger groups of Americans feeling voiceless and convinced nobody actually cares about governing.

If your district is heavily gerrymandered and your primaries look rigged and no one appears interested in doing any actual governing, why would you feel invested in defending democratic norms? Liberal democracy isn’t working that well for you anyway.

So when someone comes along promising to break things and get stuff done, it’s not irrational to be tempted—even if that person, like Trump, is indiscriminately destructive and weaponizing institutions for personal gain.

Why I Don’t Blame Trump Voters

And here’s where I take a lot of onus off Trump voters, and I do it deliberately.

I’m a political scientist. I’ve studied this stuff for 20 years. I teach about institutions and politics. For people like me—for people steeped in political life—the importance of separation of powers and checks and balances is obvious.

But you know what? The evidence on civic education is thin. It doesn’t seem to actually affect how people think about politics much. That’s because people react to incentives in the moment.

You can have all the institutional knowledge you want about separation of powers. But unless you see these structures actively working for you, protecting you in meaningful ways, you’re going to be influenced by your wallet. And when people are struggling—compounded by media’s deep negativity bias —those abstract institutional protections seem pretty irrelevant.

I can barely keep up with being a mother of three plus my full-time job plus this Substack. It doesn’t surprise me that a mom working two jobs to afford a house in a good school district isn’t making razor-sharp political decisions that align with the best practices of political theory. Especially when voting is one of those things where you rarely see direct results. Voters don’t know what their candidates actually do most of the time. They overestimate presidential effects on the economy and underestimate their impact on foreign policy.

Even political scientists and economists disagree on the impacts of various political decisions. Some effects are clear. Most aren’t.

It’s Not Voter Failure, It’s Elite Failure

And many Trump voters voted for him not because they loved his brashness or misogyny but because the system seemed fundamentally broken and the options seemed pretty thin on the ground. And they’re not exactly wrong. While I disagree with them on the proposed solutions, the reality is that liberals and progressives I talk to do a really poor job of offering any kind of alternative. The Democratic Party certainly didn’t offer anything compelling.

And that’s the point and what irritates me the most about comments on my October post. Everyone is so busy pointing fingers at the average voter that they ignore the disastrous elite failures up and down the line, going back decades.

In general, political scientists and pundits and journalists should ditch the negative narrative directed not just at Trump voters, but at American voters in general. I was on a research call recently with political scientists who expressed frustration at the often-cited research that Americans don’t care about liberal democracy, they care about outcomes. Their wallets. Their safety. Their kids’ futures.

And I guess that’s concerning, but maybe not for the reasons the folks on the call thought. Having to choose between liberal democracy and decent outcomes indicates a much deeper problem than a lack of civic education. If what passes for liberal democracy in this country consistently gives you shitty outcomes—affordability crises, elite corruption, self-serving institutions—why would you defend it? We’ve created a system that isn’t really a liberal democracy in the first place, then act shocked when people don’t respect it.

I love the United States. I love our Constitution. The founders were geniuses. I’ve taught and defended our system for over twenty years. But the founders were the first to recognize that the system would decay over time. It would need reforms, amendments, and revision in light of new challenges.

And it’s very clear we need serious reform of the incentive structures themselves. We need a system where parties serve the broader population instead of their own self-interest.

Madison and Jefferson didn’t want political parties at all, for all the reasons I’ve laid out. Parties fragment populations. They trap us in polarized conversations without outcomes. They prioritize party over nation.

They got them almost immediately anyway.

The founders didn’t want what we have now. But parties are probably inevitable. Jefferson hated them, then joined one.

The key isn’t to throw the entire party system - or liberal democracy broadly - out the window, but instead to figure out how to realign incentives in a way that makes the parties work for Americans and not against them.

Moving Forward in Four Dimensions

So whose fault is Trump?

The answer refuses to fit on a bumper sticker: We’ve had party failures. Political failures. Institutional failures. Most stem from the incentive structure of American politics itself.

The failures occurred in four dimensions, across the length, breadth, and long time span of our country.

The one-dimensional narratives—blame Trump voters, blame progressives, blame the media, blame whoever—miss the entire landscape. They collapse a four-dimensional problem into a single line with a convenient villain.

Thinking in four dimensions means understanding:

• Breadth: The interconnected systems of parties, elections, media, and economics

• Depth and Height: Both the aspirations of American democracy and the depths of its current failures

• Time: Historical trajectories, generational change, decades of institutional erosion and norm-breaking, and the long game of reform.

This is radical moderation in action—refusing the false comfort of simple explanations, acknowledging the complexity without throwing up our hands, and focusing on the incentive structures that could actually create change. (My Coalition for America proposal could actually do this, I think).

Americans aren’t getting that now because parties only have incentive to protect themselves.

It’s not about finding the middle between “blame Trump voters” and “blame progressives.” I don’t know what the middle point on that line would look like, but it would suck too.

Instead, it’s about escaping that one-dimensional line entirely and mapping the actual terrain we’re trying to navigate together.

It’s about giving up our position on that binary line and the zero sum thinking and false narratives about “winning” and owning the “other side” that go with it and focusing on real 4D solutions.

Because the alternative—staying trapped in binary blame games—is how we got here in the first place.

Your Turn

What do you think? Where do you see the biggest opportunity for reforming political incentives? What role can civil society play? And how do we activate the power and money needed to make real change happen? Tell me in the comments!

Thanks for reading The Radical Moderate’s Guide to Life! If this resonated, please share it with someone trapped in one-dimensional thinking about our political moment.