At an Amway Meeting in 1990, I met the Future of Trumpism
To begin to understand ‘how did we get a Trump,” historians should start with the DeVos and Van Andel MLM brainchild
Historians will be pondering for years, how did the phenomenon of Donald Trump happen in the United States. Many will look to the end of the actual years of Trump, and at the most extreme elements of his following, and say it was all based on racism. Others will look at the incongruity of the support evangelicals gave to a man who openly bragged about physically dominating women he wanted to be intimate with — whether they wanted it or not.
Trying to understand Trump cannot rely solely on the Trump years; rather, we need to understand what happened over the decades preceding Trump that so traumatized a nation that had formerly been the world’s moral policeman, albeit a flawed one.
A seismic shift cracked the American foundation and replaced a “love thy neighbor” ethos with a “suspect-thy-neighbor” one; middle-class values were replaced with a national aspiration that we all had to become millionaires. Words replaced deeds and the core stability that had kept America going for generations was whittled out and sold off to the highest bidder.
