Donald Trump had publicly toyed with the idea of running for president many times before 2015. In fact, he even entered the Reform Party’s presidential primaries for the 2000 election. But the timing was never quite right, until it finally was.
Of the many actions and twists of fate that created the opening for Trump’s presidential candidacy, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is an underappreciated one. Hailed by the conservative legal establishment as a win for free speech (on the merits I would agree), in practice it released a flood of money into the American political system that fundamentally reshaped the landscape of campaigns and how they were conducted. Suddenly the candidates themselves mattered much less, along with political parties. What mattered now were the new players who emerged from the wreckage of campaign finance law.
Super PACs could raise unlimited funds from corporations and billionaires. Dark money nonprofits kept their donors’ identities secret while spending hundreds of millions on attack ads. Labor unions could now spend unlimited treasury funds on elections. A new class of mega-donors wielded influence that dwarfed anything seen in American politics since the Gilded Age.
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman could pour millions into Democratic super PACs and dark money groups. The Service Employees International Union could spend tens of millions mobilizing voters and running ads. George Soros could funnel tens of millions through a network of liberal nonprofits to influence elections at every level of government. Candidates became supplicants in this new ecosystem, spending their days not connecting with voters but courting billionaires at private fundraisers, their policy positions increasingly shaped by the preferences of their financial benefactors rather than their constituents.
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