Donald Trump represented a break from the political elite

The argument

This argument explains the 2016 result as a rejection rather than an endorsement, and locates the rejection in who Hillary Clinton was taken to represent. Its first claim concerns how voters understood the problems on offer. Americans believed that the problems politicians claim to have a solution for are problems created by the political elite — inequality, poverty, war, drugs, racism, and immigration. That belief changes the meaning of a policy platform: a candidate proposing solutions to those problems is not offering relief but asking to be trusted by people who hold their class responsible for the conditions in the first place. Experience and fluency in government then read as membership rather than as qualification. This kind of elitism is represented by politicians such as Hillary Clinton, whose long record in national politics placed her firmly within the group being blamed. Donald Trump represented the opposite of this group, and on this argument that opposition was the substance of his appeal. The voters' own accounts are offered as the decisive evidence. Many of Trump's voters claimed they were actually voting "against Hillary" rather than for him specifically, and they did not believe Trump was a qualified candidate — yet voted for him due to his anti-establishment outlook. A vote cast despite a judgement that the candidate was unqualified cannot be explained by his merits, so the explanation must lie in what he was not. Because Trump's value to those voters lay in standing outside the elite that Clinton embodied, this argument holds that Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because they didn't like Hillary Clinton.

Context

In political theory, the elite are the richest, most powerful, best-educated, or best-trained group in society.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Trump is not a break from the political elite, but rather a member of the elite himself. The combined wealth of the Trump family and administration cabinet members is extremely high. His "anti-establishment" cabinet actually owns more wealth than the annual GDP of 87 countries.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise reports what voters believed, which is evidence about perception rather than about any elite's role in the problems listed, and it does not distinguish this candidate from the party and institutions she had long belonged to — a description that would fit most of the field. [Rejecting P2] The reported 'voting against Hillary' motive is the argument's strongest material, but the anti-establishment framing pulls toward a different position: if voters chose him for what he stood against in general, that is the sibling claim that he spoke to their anxieties; if for his stated programme, it is the other sibling. The counter also disputes the premise on its own terms — a candidate of considerable wealth surrounded by an unusually wealthy cabinet belongs to an elite, so the break was one of style and affiliation rather than of class, a distinction the argument never draws.