The Butterfly Effect encapsulates how small changes in variables lead to big changes in outcome. History is the Butterfly Effect written into human affairs, but it is even harder to untangle than math or physics. Who’d have believed a once and future President making an announcement after coming down a golden escalator would lead to the greatest, most improbable political story ever told?
If an assassin’s bullet landed less than an inch to the left on July 13, 2024, the future of the American experiment would be radically different in uncountable, unknowable ways. Whether you believe it was divine intervention, fate, or just old fashioned luck that caused once and future President Donald Trump to turn his head towards a graphic on a screen behind him, history itself hinges on that a moment. There was far less than a single second – barely a tenth of one to be precise – between the assassin pulling the trigger and the bullet traveling a mere four hundred or so feet, a time period far too short for anyone to have changed the outcome after events were set in motion. Moments like this crystalize the contingent nature of history, how a little more or a little less in an instant, can change all of our lives for better or worse, but the same sort of importance can be found in even those instants that might seem unimportant at first glance. This is history as a story we make together, a sequence of events leading from one point to another, driven by an impossible to imagine combination of personalities, relationships, external forces, both known unknowns and unknown unknowns, all combined into a single reality. History could’ve been forever altered on the stage that fateful day in Butler, Pennsylvania, irrevocably changing the story for all time, but the events both before and after are equally important. More than ten years earlier, President Donald Trump entered the national debate as an extremely unlikely politician to begin with, much less one who would go on to be the leader of a brand new movement that just ushered in a massive shift in American politics. To say that few predicted this of a brash, playboy billionaire and celebrity with a history of womanizing, known primarily as a publicity hound and for firing people on a reality TV show, who wasn’t even a reliable Republican until announcing his first bid for the presidency in June 2015, is such an understatement one needs a much stronger word to categorize it. Presidential politics, in general, isn’t kind to novices for obvious reasons, making it little surprise that Trump was almost immediately dismissed as an unserious candidate, looking primarily for media coverage, perhaps to sell me more books. After all, politicians, real ones, not celebrity pretenders, require constituencies, constituencies require an apparatus, an organization, a network both at the leadership and grassroots level. These aren’t the sort of things that spring up out of thin air or appear because you have a famous catchphrase. Successful politicians spend years, if not decades, cultivating relationships and building machines designed to propel them to higher office, from Congress to the Senate, or the Governor’s Mansion to the Presidency, sometimes generations.
Governor Jeb Bush, perceived as the leading candidate at the time Trump entered the race, was the son and brother of a president. His pedigree is the stuff of political legend, his very name synonymous with American politics. Even beyond Governor Bush’s own tenure as the well-liked and respected leader of Florida for two terms, the Bush “dynasty” dated back fifty years at the time of the 2016 primary, when George H. W. Bush first won a Congressional seat in 1966 during President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s time in office, ten years before your humble author was even born. Five decades later, the Bushes were considered among the most powerful families in the entire political world, backed by an unmatched fundraising network, countless allies in both Houses of Congress, and across the states. They had a ready army of supporters and volunteers, and a ready, receptive audience for Governor Bush’s message, or so the conventional wisdom had it. Trump’s other leading opponents, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, were not nearly as well equipped, but they were both already sitting Senators, plugged into Washington, and backed by experienced political teams that had proven themselves by winning actual elections in their respective states. Trump himself entered the race with none of this, nothing even resembling it, the equivalent of no political leg to stand on, leading to CNN proclaiming he had a 1% chance of prevailing around the time of his initial announcement. In political terms, he also had an unfortunate penchant, one that continues to this day, to run his mouth faster than he or most people can think, saying things at times that would be shocking for anyone in the public sphere, forget politicians who generally speak in an incredibly controlled, precise, and carefully focused group manner. In the summer of 2015 alone, Trump’s words alone prompted scandal after scandal as he mocked former Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, claiming he liked soldiers who didn’t get captured, and another contestant in the primary, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, insisting no one would elect a president with her face. Perhaps even worse, it appeared, at first, that he had no natural constituency to speak of, no one who was an obvious fit for his Make America Great Again message. As a womanizer and a recent convert to the anti-abortion cause, it seemed impossible to believe Evangelical Christians, who infamously refused to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012, would back him. As a fixture of elite New York social circles for decades, it was equally difficult to think he could connect with blue collar voters. Mainstream and establishment Republicans, meanwhile, were adamantly opposed to his strident anti-immigration stances and his repudiation of George W. Bush’s entire Presidency, particularly the failed military interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Key party leaders including Mitt Romney himself and one of his top advisers, Alex Castellanos, had begun moving against Trump before anyone had even voted in the primary, calling for a “negative ad blitz” targeted at a member of their own party. After he prevailed in New Hampshire and South Carolina, disaffected Republicans formed the “Never Trump” movement, which is said to have been supported by some 20% of Republicans in Congress. On March 28, 2016, the venerable conservative publication National Review published its “Never Trump” column, claiming “politics and principle alike provide reasons to oppose him.” This opposition lasted until the Republican National Convention itself, when some sought to deny the will of their own party’s voters, and onward through the general election.
Of course, the general election saw President Trump facing off against yet another legendary political machine. Hillary Clinton had been First Lady, a two term Senator from New York, and a former Secretary of State when she became the Democrat standard bearer. She combined the backing of a proven political operation, considered one of the best ever assembled, and perhaps rightly so considering the Clintons had parlayed Bill Clinton’s Presidency into a political career for his wife and over $2 billion in donations to the Clinton Foundation, complete with every kind of fundraising, messaging, and policy expert imaginable. This made her both much better backed, especially considering the continuation of the Never Trump movement, and much more experienced at the ceremony, pomp, and circumstances surrounding an election. Donald Trump, for example, had never participated in a debate, much less at the presidential level. He’d never managed a campaign, a political advertising budget, a get out the vote effort, or anything of the sort outside a primary. He’d never won a general election, receiving votes only from the Republican Party. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the vast majority of prognosticators rapidly concluded that President Trump’s chances of victory were close to zero. Data cruncher Nate Silver was considered generous when he claimed Hillary Clinton had a 71.4% chance of winning compared to Trump’s 28.6% on election day 2016. Pew Research put it this way shortly after his stunning upset, “The results of Tuesday’s presidential election came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling, which consistently projected Hillary Clinton as defeating Donald Trump. Relying largely on opinion polls, election forecasters put Clinton’s chance of winning at anywhere from 70% to as high as 99%, and pegged her as the heavy favorite to win a number of states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that in the end were taken by Trump.” The Harvard Gazette noted that “Democrats and Republicans in recent years haven’t seemed able to agree on the time of day, but there is one assertion on which they’ve found common ground: Polling and data analytics took a spectacular face-plant in the 2016 election. On Election Day, nearly every public polling firm predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. The only real debate was by how large a margin.” Elsevier’s Fred A. Wright and Alec A. Wright published a study in August 2018, “How surprising was Trump’s victory? Evaluations of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and a new poll aggregation model.” As they saw it, “The U.S. presidential election results of 2016 surprised many poll-watchers, suggesting possible biases in estimated support for the major party candidates and posing a challenge for poll aggregation as a prediction tool.”
Regardless of how you choose to interpret the outcome, it’s clear that next to no one believed he was going to win – and yet he did, creating history and adding to this incredible story as he did so. While 2020 proved a challenging year for President Trump when a once in a generation pandemic led to his first and only loss, even so, he received an unexpectedly larger number of votes than his previous effort, the most for a sitting President in US history, outperformed expectations by between four and five points, and came within less than a hundred thousand votes of prevailing. If President Trump’s story had ended there, it would have remained remarkable as the only non-politician or non-member of the military to win the presidency, with total odds between the primary and the general election of around a thousandth of percent if you take one percent for each, but few could have known at the time that it was only the beginning. He and perhaps he alone wasn’t ready to go quietly into history’s goodnight, battling back from a second impeachment effort, multiple indictments at the state and federal level, 34 convictions, and a number of civil suits to earn his party’s nomination for the third consecutive time and then ultimately the Presidency again, making him only the second president in history to serve two non-consecutive terms along with Grover Cleveland, once again surmounting almost impossible odds. This time, not only did he overcome the weight of nine years as a controversial, polarizing politician, but he also bested the remnants of both the Obama and Biden political machines, meaning he has vanquished all of the major Republican and Democrat apparatuses in the modern era. If Trump were a boxer, this would be the most remarkable Cinderella Story in the history of the sport. Comeback wins after devastating losses are uncommon in and of themselves, but they’re almost unheard of when no one thinks you can win in the first place and the period in between is mired in injury to use the sports metaphor or scandal in the political world. In politics in particular, only two candidates in history have won after being branded a loser in a general election, Grover Cleveland and Richard Nixon. Even the incomparable Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t able to succeed in his quest for a third term after leaving the Presidency. He, a towering political talent if ever there was one, didn’t even win his own primary. Simply put, there is no historical analog to what Trump has accomplished, making it undoubtedly the greatest political story ever told based on the odds alone.
There is, however, a lesson about history itself. The future is unwritten and unknowable. If you were to have told someone in 2015, that Trump would win in 2016, lose in 2020, and win again in 2024, they would likely have laughed in your face, but each day, each hour, each minute, and each second opens up new possibilities while closing old ones. Some of these, like the bullet that narrowly missed blowing President Trump’s head off, are beyond our control, either destiny or blind-luck, but others are within our sphere of influence, either directly or indirectly, either boldly or timidly, greatly or just a little. President Trump’s initial decision to run was bold to say the least, but at the time no one knew it would change the world, most thought it would be a punchline or minor footnote in politics, an example of what not to do that experts snickered at occasionally. President Trump’s will to prevail and the American electorate’s craving for someone new and dynamic changed history the first time, opening up the opportunity to do it again in an even more dramatic and remarkable fashion. History, however, didn’t end there. The loss in 2020 and the challenges he faced afterwards, while devastating to his supporters at the time, make the story even more amazing and improbable in hindsight, far, far more. If the pandemic, another outside force beyond our control, didn’t happen, President Trump probably would’ve cruised to victory that year and closed his political career as one among many controversial two term presidents, but an unwritten future doesn’t work that way. He lost, and had to make yet another bold decision to run again while in political exile, mired in scandal and legal entanglements. Once again, his will and the strength of his support among the people propelled him to that field in Butler, PA, facing down death itself and revealing his desire to fight, and events both within and beyond his control propelled him the Presidency for an incredible second time. Even forgetting the events leading up to his initial decision to run in 2015, there are an uncountable number of moments between then and now, the great majority not nearly as remarkable as the bullet whizzing by his head, that could’ve gone slightly differently and fundamentally altered the future. The Butterfly Effect is a household term to encapsulate how small changes in the variables governing a system lead to big changes in the outcome. History is the Butterfly Effect written into human affairs, but it is even harder to untangle than math or physics. There are moments that we know are important, but the vast, vast majority only seem that way in retrospect. Who’d have believed a once and future President making his announcement after coming down a golden escalator would lead to the greatest, most improbable political story ever told? Most of us will not change history as Presidents, but the same applies to our own lives, our own stories, of which we do not know the end, but neither are we without influence if we have the will to fight.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 