Since Donald Trump descended from Trump Tower’s gilded, golden escalators to announce his 2016 presidential campaign, the United States hasn’t been the same. 

Initially considered one of the more casual candidates, Trump went on to win his party’s nomination and galvanized nearly half of the American electorate to vote, not one, not two, but three times over the course of nine years. 

Capitalizing on celebrity status from his “Apprentice” days, Trump molded himself into a candidate rarely seen in American politics—tough, masculine, and stubborn. This led to his supporters being mesmerized by his “America First” ethos and his rallying cries at campaign events. 

So, how did someone initially written off as an outcast in American politics win back the trust of the American public?

In 2016, Trump was the new kid on the block amid veteran candidates who widely criticized him; like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called the president a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” and former La. Gov. Bobby Jindal, referring to Trump as an unstable narcissist. But as the primaries progressed and Trump became the clear frontrunner, his critics began to fall in line. 

In the general election phase of the campaign, the candidate who wins the independent vote typically wins the presidency. In 2016, Trump riled up rally crowds with chants of “Lock Her Up” directed at Hillary Clinton over her email scandal and handling of the 2012 Benghazi attack while she was secretary of state. While Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, he made substantial gains in every state in 2024. 

During all three of his campaigns, Trump framed his talking points around the economy, which has consistently polled as the top political issue in the minds of American voters for decades. While the 2020 campaign was a referendum against Trump, in the words of Democratic strategist James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.” 

Trump has sought to bring American toughness to the international stage, a stark departure from the Biden administration’s diplomatic approach. Embracing figures like billionaire Elon Musk, podcaster Joe Rogan, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump has broken from the modern political norm of inclusion to espousing hypermasculinity in U.S. politics. 

“Trump offered a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright,” according to Elizabeth Spiers of The New York Times.

She says this entitlement lies at the intersection of most men in power—like the idea that “white people are superior to other races, and that any success that women and minorities have has been unfairly conferred to them by DEI programs, affirmative action, and government set-asides.”

Trump’s grip on the Republican party did not happen overnight. After his second inauguration in January, droves of Trump supporters sported red hats while chanting the Reaganesque slogan “Make America Great Again.”

To understand Trump, one must look at the people he surrounds himself with. Though Trump began his career as a real estate mogul, it wasn’t far into this career that he met a New York attorney and prosecutor who would make him into the boisterous and prolific public figure he is today—Roy Cohn, a man who lived by the mantra, “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.” 

Trump met Cohn in a dingy, smoky Manhattan bar in 1973. Soon after this meeting, Trump hired Cohn to represent the Trump Organization in a $100 million defamation lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ alleged in a separate suit that the Trump Organization engaged in housing discrimination by not renting properties to Black Americans. The defamation suit was quickly dropped, but Trump, to this day, maintains his innocence. 

Cohn served as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s chief legal counsel during the Second Red Scare of the 1940s and ‘50s, when McCarthy sought to persecute suspected communists working in the U.S. government. While the accusations brought by the House Committee on Un-American Activities were baseless, Cohn made a career of making baseless accusations against his opponents, which ultimately led to him being disbarred in 1986. 

Closeted his whole life, Cohn worked with McCarthy to fire countless LGBTQ+ government officials during what became known as the Lavender Scare. McCarthy often described members of the queer community as “unsafe” national security risks, which resulted in the termination of more than 7,500 federal employees due to their sexuality. 

Cohn was disbarred in 1986 in New York for unethical practices. Later that same year, he passed away from complications of AIDS—although Cohn asserted he had liver cancer until the day he died. In a world where most LGBTQ+ Americans remained in the closet out of fear of ridicule and threats, Cohn likely did the same to maintain his public image as a prominent lawyer. 

While practicing law, Cohn advised clients to “fight all charges, counter-sue when sued, and never concede defeat,” according to NPR. Seeing how successful this advice made Cohn, a spry young Trump took it to heart for the rest of his life.

After repeatedly claiming that the 2020 election was “stolen” and beginning his second term as a convicted felon, Trump has put this advice into practice. 

Even after Trump clinched the Republican nomination in 2016, he repeatedly claimed the election was rigged against him. “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary” Trump said in an Oct. 16, 2016, tweet. Even after he won in 2016, Trump claimed that millions voted “illegally” and created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by then-Vice President Mike Pence. 

The clearest example of Trump employing Cohn’s advice was after the 2020 election when he repeatedly claimed there was evidence of widespread voter fraud. Trump brought local and state election officials to court 60 times due to supposed irregularities and lost all but one case. 

On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Trump gave a speech on the White House Ellipse ahead of Congress certifying then-President Joe Biden’s election victory. He implored his supporters to “fight like hell,” and asserted they were not “going to have a country anymore.”

Nearly 2,500 Trump supporters forcefully entered the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, delaying Biden’s certification. Five people lost their lives in the aftermath of Jan. 6, 175 police officers were injured, and the Capitol was vandalized for the first time since the Civil War. One supporter was pictured waving the Confederate flag, and a large crowd gathered around a makeshift chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” After spending hours at an undisclosed location, Pence, acting as president of the Senate, certified Biden’s election victory early into the hours of Jan. 7. 

Since the beginning of his political career, Trump and his allies have dreamed of achieving a Reagan-esque landslide. This dream, however, has not come to fruition. In 1980, Reagan received 489 electoral votes in 1980 and 525 in 1984. The now two-term Trump received 304 electoral votes in 2016, 232 in 2020, and 312 in 2024.  Fast forward forty years, and Trump’s electoral numbers barely constitute the mandate or “Red Wave” he has repeatedly claimed.

Trump’s vocabulary—dominated by words such as “rigged,” “huge,” and “fired”—appealed to his largely blue-collar and non-college-educated base that had felt cast out in our political precedent. While these statements were often exaggerated, Trump’s buzzwords moved the American public to vote for him in hopes of self-improvement. 

To this day, Trump has yet to concede the 2020 presidential election to Biden—and he likely never will—following the advice his longtime mentor Cohn taught him: “Never concede defeat.”