Every op-ed, post-mortem, and Sunday morning panel on the political shifts of the last decade converges on a single, comforting delusion. The narrative goes that Donald Trump was an anomaly, a political meteor that crashed into Washington, and that his rise was only possible because a cowardly cast of courtiers, donors, and party operatives chose ambition over country. We are treated to endless profiles of the enablers, the men and women who supposedly held the ladder while an outsider dismantled democratic norms.
It is a neat, tidy story. It places the blame on a convenient list of villains and lets everyone else off the hook.
It is also completely wrong.
The enablers did not create Trump. The bipartisan political establishment spent thirty years hollowing out American institutions, ignoring the collapse of the industrial working class, and treating governance as an exercise in technocratic management for a coastal elite. Trump did not subvert the system; he exposed its structural bankruptcy. Blaming the enablers is like blaming the scavengers for picking clean a carcass that was already dead. If you want to understand how a reality television host captured the executive office, stop looking at the people who bent the knee and start looking at the machine that made bending the knee the only rational survival strategy for career politicians.
The Myth of the Accidental Takeover
For decades, both major political parties operated under a bipartisan consensus that prioritized globalized trade agreements, financial deregulation, and endless foreign interventions over domestic economic security. The architects of this consensus treated wage stagnation and the evisceration of manufacturing towns as acceptable collateral damage in the grand march of progress.
When ordinary citizens in the Rust Belt or the rural interior pointed out that their communities were dying, Washington responded with patronizing lectures about retraining programs and the inevitable creative destruction of capitalism. Both parties promised prosperity and delivered decades of widening inequality, culminating in a 2008 financial crash where the architects of economic ruin were bailed out with public funds while millions lost their homes.
Into this vacuum stepped a candidate who said the quiet part out loud: the system is rigged, the experts are frauds, and the emperor has no clothes.
When establishment politicians fell in line behind him, it was not out of sheer moral cowardice. It was pure, unadulterated political calculus. They looked at their constituents, saw an electorate that despised the political class with white-hot intensity, and realized a simple truth. You could either join the movement or be crushed by it. To call these politicians enablers is to misunderstand politics entirely. Politicians do not exist to protect abstract norms; they exist to win elections and hold power. When the old coalition shattered, they ran to where the energy was.
The Institutional Rot That Made Resistance Irrelevant
The standard critique of enablers assumes that institutional guardrails were robust and functioning until bad actors came along and smashed them. This is historical revisionism of the highest order.
The guardrails were already rusted through. Congressional authority had been voluntarily surrendered to the executive branch across decades of successive presidencies, with both parties expanding executive overreach whenever their own team was in power. The intelligence community, the administrative state, and the media had long since drifted into insular echo chambers that viewed the public with quiet contempt.
When a populist outsider takes the reins of an already over-centralized state, you discover a terrifying reality. The machinery of authoritarian control does not need to be built from scratch. It is sitting right there in the basement, waiting for someone willing to turn the key.
The enablers did not hand over the keys; they merely stopped pretending that the locks worked. They watched as the checks and balances buckled under the weight of partisan polarization and realized that fighting back meant political suicide in a primary system driven by social media outrage and hyper-partisan tribalism.
The Comfort of Simple Villains
Why do we cling so desperately to the enabler narrative? Because the alternative requires looking in the mirror.
It is far easier to write a 5,000-word magazine feature about a spineless senator or a complicit cabinet member than it is to admit that the entire governing class failed to deliver basic economic stability and social cohesion to the majority of its citizens. The enabler narrative protects the professional managerial class. It allows journalists, consultants, policy wonks, and party bosses to maintain that their ideology was sound and that only bad execution and corrupt individuals led us astray.
This is a dangerous self-deception.
If you treat the political upheaval of our era as a moral failure of a few weak-willed individuals, you learn nothing. You assume that if you just elect better, more polite people who respect the norms, everything will snap back to 1995. It will not. The underlying pressures—economic dislocation, cultural alienation, institutional distrust, and the collapse of a shared factual reality—are accelerating.
What Actually Comes Next
The truth is that the old political order is never coming back. The illusion of permanent bipartisan consensus is dead.
Stop wasting energy condemning the enablers for failing to save a status quo that nobody believed in anymore. Stop pretending that institutional decorum is a substitute for material competence. If the system wants to survive the next shock, it has to deliver real economic growth for the working class, rebuild domestic supply chains, restore trust in public institutions through radical transparency, and accept that citizens care more about their grocery bills and community safety than procedural etiquette.
Until the governing class confronts its own failures, every new populist wave will wash away whatever remains of the old guard. The enablers were just the weather vanes. Blaming them for the wind is the ultimate exercise in political cowardice.
