Political Memes

Trump didn’t create the grift. The system that enabled it was built long before he arrived.

Starting with Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” the Republican Party began reshaping political identity around grievance. After the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, partisan media like talk radio and Fox News grew without the obligation to present balanced perspectives. The Citizens United ruling in 2010 then opened the door to unlimited political spending, allowing well-funded groups to amplify fear-based messaging at scale. The Tea Party movement reinforced the idea that the threat came from within, not just from ideological opponents.

Over time, this narrative produced an ever-shifting villain: sometimes “liberals,” sometimes “socialists,” often just “them.” Orwell captured the mechanism in Animal Farm: “Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball.”

Trump didn’t invent that scapegoat. He inherited it, and then he turned the volume up.

To us, the grift is obvious. But for many, decades of messaging eroded trust in institutions and made the fear feel real. The lie works not because it persuades, but because it offers comfort.

Understanding that history doesn’t excuse it. It reminds us the machinery was built before Trump and will remain if we only confront the man instead of the system that produced him.