Short Solo

The rise of Donald Trump is often explained as an accident of history, a fluke powered by anger, social media, or foreign interference. But that story leaves out a far more uncomfortable truth: Trump’s ascent was enabled by deliberate, documented political strategy inside the American establishment.

This is not speculation. It is written plainly in internal campaign documents and emails released through WikiLeaks during the 2016 election.

Elevate the Pied Pipers

In 2015, Hillary Clinton’s campaign identified a group of Republican candidates it viewed as strategically useful. Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson were described internally as “pied piper” candidates — figures whose extremism, the campaign believed, would make them easier to defeat in a general election.

The strategy was simple and cynical: encourage media attention toward the most polarizing Republican voices while more traditional candidates were sidelined. Corporate media obliged, providing Trump with billions of dollars in free coverage, often airing rallies live and treating spectacle as substance.

The assumption was that the American public would ultimately reject these candidates once faced with a binary choice. That assumption proved disastrously wrong.

Clinton’s campaign did not control Republican voters, but it did knowingly gamble that elevating an authoritarian-leaning figure posed no real risk. That gamble failed.

Neutralizing Bernie

At the same time, Clinton faced a different challenge — one from within her own party.

Bernie Sanders consistently polled better against Republican candidates, including Trump, than Clinton did throughout the primary season. His campaign energized younger voters, independents, and working-class Americans who had largely disengaged from Democratic politics.

Before a single primary vote was cast, Clinton signed a Joint Fundraising Agreement with the Democratic National Committee. This agreement gave her effective control over party finances, staffing decisions, and strategic planning.

Subsequent leaked emails revealed DNC officials openly favoring Clinton and discussing ways to undermine Sanders’ campaign. Former DNC chair Donna Brazile later acknowledged that the process was unfair and structurally tilted toward Clinton.

None of this was illegal. But it was profoundly undemocratic.

The Democratic Party did not simply back its preferred candidate — it intervened to ensure the outcome.

House of Mirrors

After Trump’s victory, attention quickly shifted to Russia-Gate. Russian interference in the election immediately helped in deflecting scrutiny away from the Democratic Party’s own email scandal.

The Mueller investigation did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russia. Yet the fixation on foreign interference allowed party leadership to avoid confronting an uncomfortable reality — that voter suppression within the party, media manipulation, and strategic arrogance played a decisive role in the loss.

Millions of voters who had been energized by Sanders were left disillusioned. Many stayed home. Some voted third party. Others disengaged entirely.

The result was not just an electoral defeat, but a deeper erosion of trust in democratic institutions.

The Democratic Party’s Continuous Loop of Anti-democratic Politics.

I’ve written recently about Zohran Mamdani True Colours . The party brass continue to ensure the wishes of party members and the American public are tightly controlled.

This was evident when party elite forced Biden out in favour of Kamala Harris. For the first time since 1968, the Democratic nominee won the nomination without winning a single primary vote.  In fact there were a dozen other candidates that had votes in previous primaries forcing Harris out of the race quite early.

After being anointed as the party’s presidential nominee, Harris attempted to walk a narrowing tightrope: reassuring the Democratic Party’s pro-war donors and power brokers while still needing the votes of millions of disillusioned young people deeply alarmed by her position on Palestine. To manage that contradiction, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was repeatedly deployed as a surrogate, assuring audiences that Harris and Biden were “working tirelessly, around the clock” to secure a ceasefire—language that functioned more as political insulation than as a reflection of meaningful leverage or results.

Months after her defeat – officials in Israel and the United States advised that real pressure for a ceasefire came from the new Trump Administration noting that Biden or Harris were silent behind the scenes. Millions of progressive voters have forever lost trust in the so called most progressive voices.

Taking Accountability

Trump did not emerge in a vacuum. He was not an inevitable force of nature. His rise was enabled by a political culture that prioritized control over participation and strategy over principle.

Elevating extremism for short-term advantage and suppressing popular movements for long-term dominance proved to be a catastrophic miscalculation.

The lesson of past years is that the American public wants change. MAGA was the more popular option for that change – largely due to the Democratic Party refusing to offer anything of value to voters.

That the Democrats keep rolling out the establishment (Clinton, Harris) demonstrates a Party out of touch with progressive populism. We’re left with a Republican-lite party that isn’t as offensive to our sensibilities- but offers little competition by way of policy or values.