It was 1:47 a.m. ET when Fox News became the first major news outlet to call the 2024 Presidential Race for Donald J. Trump, the 45 ^th President of the United States. The early call was enabled by cutting-edge voter technology that prioritized real-time, on-the-ground data from each state over traditional exit polls. After the election had been “ on a knife edge” for months, American voters delivered a close, yet sweeping victory for Trump, as the former president secured all seven swing states and became the first Republican to win the nationwide popular vote since 2004.

This election result raises pressing questions – chief among them: How a man like Trump managed to galvanize a plurality of American voters behind him. Why did his openly racist campaign rhetoric – such as when he referred to undocumented migrants as “not humans” but “animals”, whose mass deportation would become “a bloody story” – not disqualify him as a candidate in the eyes of American voters? How did the self-proclaimed “party of law and order” reconcile its support for a convicted felon who had previously tried to retain power through an attempted coup? Throughout his campaign, Trump adopted an openly authoritarian stance, vowing to wield the Justice Department against his political opponents and to deploy the military against “radical left” U.S. citizens, who he labeled as the “enemy from within.” In an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump went so far as to call for the former GOP Representative Liz Cheney to be persecuted by a military tribunal. And yet, while a few Republicans put country over party, acknowledging that Trump poses a grave threat to U.S. democracy, much of the U.S. conservative sphere embraced their strongman Trump.

Yet, while this year’s Republican electoral campaign has undeniably reached levels of overtly violent rhetoric, authoritarian stances, and blatant racism that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago, a closer examination reveals that the GOP did not simply go rogue with Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. In fact, the groundwork for the 2024 Republican Party with all its abysses – the way its campaigns capitalize on racism, delegitimize political opponents and embrace authoritarian ideas – was laid over the course of decades. Concurrently, American conservatism has been indoctrinated and radicalized for years, paving the way for broad societal acceptance of a demagogue like Trump. Although this has been a gradual and rather elusive process, three men from the ranks of the Republican party have notably stood out in reshaping the GOP and steering U.S. conservatism down a path of radicalization. While the portraits of these three figures does certainly not provide an exhaustive account of all the actors relevant to making sense of the 2024 Republican Party, reflecting on their legacy does allow us to sketch a rough outline of the trajectory that brought us here.

The first man of our triumvirate, Kevin Phillips, was only 13 when he began researching the ethnic roots of American politics. Growing up in the Bronx, he observed that his polyglot borough, far from being a melting-pot where immigrants from different backgrounds fused into a shared American identity, was really a mosaic of mutually hostile nationalities. Phillips soon came to believe that most Americans voted based on deep-seated ethnic or cultural enmities – cleavages that, he theorized, could be graphed, predicted, and exploited for political gains.

Embracing this premise, Phillips joined the staff of Republican Congressman Paul Fino at just 20 years old. By 25, as administrative assistant, Phillips guided Fino’s electoral campaign to flip the 24 ^th Congressional district in the 1966 midterms. The race was won by tapping into the resentment that the working-class Catholic offspring of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants harbored against the Democrat’s Great Society programs – initiatives aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice – which predominantly benefited Black and Hispanic minorities, who these blue-collar Catholics feared would compete for their jobs.

Fino’s electoral triumph that year was emblematic of a larger shift in the 1966 midterms, where Republicans unseated Democratic governors, senators, and congressmen, particularly across the South. This affirmed Phillip’s premise that the long-standing North-South cleavage – which had culminated in the American Civil War and divided U.S. politics ever since – was disintegrating in the face of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs and his enforcement of the Civil Rights Act upon the segregationist South. Since the Republican Party’s founding in 1854 in the Northern states, white Southern conservatives had staunchly opposed the party for its abolitionist stance and had remained loyal to the Democratic party, even as it gradually moved leftward with the New Deal.

Sensing an opportunity to finally consolidate the conservative vote, Phillips began drafting his book, “ The Emerging Republican Majority,” which came to be widely regarded as a blueprint for how Republicans could employ the infamous “Southern Strategy”: an electoral strategy that capitalized on ethnic prejudices and racial resentments among white Southerners – while legitimizing and further stoking the scapegoating of minorities – to build a durable winning conservative coalition for Presidential elections to come. Even before its official publication, the book earned Phillips a place on Richard Nixon’s 1967-68 campaign staff as an ethnic expert and analyst of voting patterns. “ You could ask me about any Congressional district in the country,” Phillips recalls, “and I could tell you its ethnic composition, its voting history and the issues that would appeal to its electorate.” It was during the 1968 presidential campaign that Phillips famously told a journalist that “ the whole secret of politics is to know who hates who.” This remark encapsulated his conviction that political success would favor the party capable of consolidating the widest range of ethnic prejudices.

Beginning with Nixon’s victory, the Southern Strategy propelled Republicans to win five of the next six presidential elections and continues to serve as a major inspiration for Donald Trump’s electoral campaigns, which leverage racism and white fear of people of color. This was particularly evident in the 2024 Presidential campaign, where Trump claimed that immigrants crossing the southern border were “criminals from prisons and mental institutions” who would poison the blood of the country.

Notably, Phillips did not dismiss concerns about the potential for fascism within the new conservative coalition. “With its important component of military, apprehensive bourgeois and law-and-order-seeking individuals, there is a proclivity toward authoritarianism and overreaction to the liberal-engendered permissiveness and anarchy of the sixties. This is a danger the administration should watch carefully.” 

While the Southern Strategy succeeded in propelling Republicans into the White House, they were consistently faced with divided government, as Democrats held on to their majority in the House of Representatives for a whopping 40 years – in 34 of these, they controlled the Senate as well. Committed to seizing back both chambers of Congress, Newt Gingrich introduced tactics and rhetoric to the Republican party that would shatter longstanding norms and usher in a new era of fierce partisan warfare that persists up to this day.

In 1978, at the age of 35, while teaching history at West Georgia College, Gingrich made his third attempt to win Georgia’s 6 ^th Congressional District, following two unsuccessful bids against the Democratic incumbent. “ One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party,” he proclaimed in a campaign speech to College Republicans that year, “is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” For the GOP to succeed, the next generation of Republicans needed to abandon their “nice” demeanor – as he saw it, politics was a ruthless “war for power,” and it was about time that Republicans start acting accordingly and “raise hell.”

Starting at the fringes of the minority party in Congress, Gingrich made a name for himself through vitriols and unrelenting attacks – not only against Democrats but also against party colleagues who weren’t in line with him. He found a third target in the media, which he denunciated as partisan and untrustworthy whenever the opportunity arose. Ironically, despite his frequent and fervent attacks on the Washington press corps, it was media attention that made his rise to power even possible. Gingrich recognized earlier than most that the media would pick up every fight he brought about: Rule number one about the news media, as he once told supporters, was that “ they love fights.” Whether those fights would occur on an even playing field, however, appeared to matter little to him. When C-SPAN, a nonprofit network, was founded in 1979 to broadcast congressional sessions and hearings nationwide, Gingrich seized the opportunity to air his unfiltered diatribes onto the television screens of millions of Americans and into voters’ minds. What viewers couldn’t see, however, was that Gingrich often delivered these fiery tirades to an empty chamber, denying Democrats any chance to rebuttal.

Gingrich didn’t create the polarization of the American political sphere, but he exploited it like no other figure of his era. The ideological sorting of the two political parties on issues like race and civil rights – promoted by the electoral strategies of Kevin Phillips – provided fertile ground for Gingrich’s strategy of driving the two parties apart and sabotaging Congress. Gingrich was convinced that to save Western civilization, it was necessary to dismantle the old order in Congress and blow up long-standing bipartisan coalitions, which had been essential to legislating for decades. The goal was to make national politics into a constant fight of good against evil, which should ensure the Republicans a lasting majority in Congress after decades of being in the minority.

Gingrich redefined U.S. politics as a zero-sum contest, where a win for Democrats means an equivalent loss for Republicans, laying the groundwork for the modern Republican Party’s unwavering support for Donald Trump – even in the face of his attempted coup and criminal convictions. Central for establishing this ethos of negative partisanship and unconditional partisan loyalty – dynamics that would soon drive political polarization to unprecedented levels – was the introduction of a new rhetorical framework designed to delegitimize political opponents. This break with long-standing norms can be traced in an originally confident pamphlet which Gingrich, as general chairman of the Gopac organization, had compiled and distributed to Republican candidates running the 1990 midterm elections. The pamphlet offered Republican candidates a list of words to be used to frame Democrats, their records, and proposals. Pathetic, corrupt, radical, self-serving and sick are just some of the suggestions. Notably, most of these terms are deeply entrenched in the lexicon of contemporary U.S. politics, a lasting testament to Gingrich’s transformative – and polarizing – impact on the American political landscape.

Gingrich’s ascent to the height of his influence began in 1989 when one of his many smear campaigns, built on little more than rumors, targeted the Democratic Speaker of the House, Jim Wright. The effort gained traction, ultimately forcing Wright to resign. In the run-up to the midterm elections in 1994, Gingrich’s tactic of strategic obstructionism effectively paralyzed the House of Representatives by blocking as many laws as possible and refusing any bipartisan cooperation. While many fellow Republicans feared a backlash as they assumed voters would hold the GOP accountable for the gridlock, Gingrich’s gamble that voters would blame the Democrats proved correct. The Republican party seized control of the House for the first time in more than four decades – with Newt Gingrich as their new speaker.

In his new role, Gingrich rearranged the schedule of Congress to allow the representatives to spend more time collecting campaign donations; it would be the advent of a new period of money in politics. His second attainment during the four-year speakership was the weaponization of the debt ceiling, where the GOP-led Congress refused to raise the borrowing limit. As President Clinton refused to give in to Republican budget demands, this resulted in a government shutdown for several weeks. While this tactic backfired in the short term, as the public blamed the GOP for the shutdown, it established the government shutdown as a weapon in the partisan wars, always hanging over U.S. politics like the sword of Damocles.

After four years as the Speaker of the House, Gingrich had to step down after the worst midterm elections in 64 years for the Republicans, personal scandals around an unpopular book deal, as well as a sex scandal – a misdemeanor for which he had previously attempted to impeach President Bill Clinton. Yet, during his time in Congress and particularly as the speaker of the House, Gingrich had managed to permanently transform U.S. politics. The long-held tradition of cooperation between the two parties had been superseded by tribal competitiveness, in which conservatives portray Democrats as the incarnation of evil that must be fought down for good to prevail.

After his fall from grace, Newt Gingrich was one of several Republicans who sought to restart his career in the early 2000s. The best place to regain public appearance was on the TV shows of the Fox empire. It was run by Roger Ailes, who completes our triumvirate of the three men who broke U.S. politics. Like the other two men, Roger Ailes was born in the early nineteen-forties, growing up in a small town in eastern Ohio with an authoritative and abusive father whom he nevertheless admired. After starting his career in television as a producer on The Mike Douglas Show, Ailes was hired as a media adviser for Richard Nixon’s second presidential bid after Nixon had appeared on the show, coming across as tense, uncomfortable, and awkward.

After the show, Ailes, only 27 by then, told Richard Nixon that, if he wouldn’t improve his TV performance, he would lose the campaign for the White House again, as he did eight years prior against John F. Kennedy. After the Nixon campaign had hired Roger Ailes, he staged every of Nixon’s TV appearances to the last detail, including the make-up, the positioning of the cameras, and even how they should be cut in the editing process. He organized town hall meetings in which Nixon was asked simple questions, and after producing good advertisements, he sent the finished films to local TV broadcast stations across the country to avoid the editorial oversight of national TV channels, which he perceived as too left leaning.

The successful Nixon electoral campaign encouraged Ailes to continue his work as a media consultant for Republican candidates; most notably for the second campaign of Ronald Reagan, for Mitch McConnell – the former Republican leader in the Senate, for Rudy Giuliani – the former mayor of New York City, and for George H. W. Bush.

While advising Bush, Ailes was involved in the creation of the “Willie Horton” commercial, which sought to depict the Democratic candidate Dukakis as weak on crime. The commercial focused on the convicted murderer Willie Horton, a black man, who had raped a woman and assaulted her husband while on furlough from prison. The advertisement was widely condemned as racist but helped George H. W. Bush in his bid for the White House. At first, Ailes had denied his involvement in the production, but he soon told Time magazine that the only question was whether they should depict Willie Horton with or without a knife in his hand. He later stated that this was a joke.

George H. W. Bush acknowledged the importance of Ailes’s consultancy in a tweet in 2017, shortly after Ailes had died at age 77. But after having advised three presidents on their campaign trail and multiple Republican candidates for high public offices, Ailes’ period of great influence was yet to come. In 1996, after a brief intermezzo at NBC, which would then become MSNBC, he was hired by Rupert Murdoch as the CEO of Fox News.

Ailes was given a carte blanche to build a cable news channel that would cater to the politically right-leaning market that he had long wanted to serve. What he created over the next two decades would gradually morph into the loudspeaker of right-wing conservatives and conspiracy theories, spreading baseless claims like that Barack Obama was an America-hating Muslim who wasn’t born in the U.S. and thus could not become the U.S. president. Fox News also fueled what came to be known as the War on Christmas – America’s newest forever war. Here, Fox News sought to induce the fear into their viewers that traditional Christian holidays were under attack by dark forces of secular pluralism.

It would have been impossible to create a partisan news channel like Fox News only about a decade before the launch of the network. Until 1987, the Fairness Doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission had required holders of broadcast licenses to cover controversial issues of public importance fairly by devoting equal airtime to competing perspectives on these matters. For nearly 40 years, the doctrine had ensured that the media landscape in the U.S. wouldn’t become too partisan, but the Reagan administration – which Ailes had helped to get elected – deemed this policy obsolete, declaring that there was sufficient diversity in the media business to revoke the Fairness Doctrine.

With the Fairness Doctrine gone, nothing was holding back broadcasters from using all the tools at their disposal to increase their audience, even if that meant disregarding journalist ethics. Roger Ailes was ruthless in exploiting this opportunity to build the Fox News empire: everything that would increase the number of viewers was permissible. Ailes ushered in a post-fact society in the U.S., where facts and the truth are losing ground in debates while hostile rhetoric and fear are taking over. Like Gingrich, Ailes understood that fear and drama would keep people watching. He emphasized confrontation and polarization, framing issues in stark, emotionally charged terms. This encouraged viewers to see politics as a cutthroat zero-sum contest between two hostile camps where compromise is regarded as inferior to unwavering party loyalty.

Ailes’ career ended in 2016 in a sexual harassment scandal in which dozens of women came forward about being harassed by him over the span of his career. The scandal also turned a focus on the sexualization of female media presenters on the Fox network, where Ailes demanded women to wear short skirts while sitting behind see-through tables to cater to the target audience.

His legacy is an America where citizens, liberal or conservative, are angrier and in which even simple facts have lost their value. Roger Ailes might be gone, but his legacy, which has turned into the nation’s biggest cable news network, continues to polarize and divide Americans.

Kevin Phillips, Newt Gingrich, and Roger Ailes – three names that many people might have never heard of, but whose legacy weighs heavily upon U.S. politics.

Kevin Phillips’s research on ethnic or cultural enmities and the resultant Southern Strategy laid the groundwork for a new conservative coalition, prone to fascism and galvanized by racism and fear of people of color – sentiments that were not only legitimized but actively stoked for political gain. Phillips’s tactics of mining racism, fear, resentment, grievance, and prejudice to consolidate the conservative vote are deeply embedded in Trump’s electoral playbook today and will likely guide the policies under his upcoming administration as well.

While Phillips crafted a winning strategy for Presidential elections, Gingrich upended Democratic hegemony in Congress by introducing rhetoric and tactics that shattered long-standing norms and unwritten rules of legislating. Gingrich viewed politics not as a marketplace of ideas but as a cutthroat struggle for power, a war of good versus evil. He ushered in an era of partisan warfare that continues to polarize the nation to levels posing an existential threat to a democratic system reliant on bipartisan dialogue and compromise. Gingrich’s divisive style of politics keeps driving families apart while ideologically sorting them into different neighborhoods and pushing the nation ever closer to the brink of civil war, which one-in-four U.S. voters thought was at least “somewhat likely” to erupt following the 2024 Presidential elections.

Roger Ailes created a network that makes or breaks careers in the Republican Party and serves as the platform for public expression of unwavering loyalty and allegiance to the Party strongman. Ailes’ legacy is a broadcaster that supports the favored political candidate to the bitter end, such as by disseminating Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud despite being fully aware that he lost free and fair elections. In fear of the demise of Western Civilization, Ailes decided to forgo journalistic ethics and factual truth and invoke angst and hate in the people for them to flock to conservative values. A society in which trust in institutions, the media, and fellow citizens have eroded would create the space for a strong leader who could bring back a presumed glorious past – one who could Make America Great Again.

Trump is not a singular phenomenon that appeared out of the blue to overtake the Republican Party, but rather the culmination of decades-long shifts within U.S. conservatism, shaped by the legacies of Kevin Phillips, Newt Gingrich, and Roger Ailes. Phillips’s Southern Strategy reimagined the Republican Party’s electoral approach by exploiting racial and cultural resentments, laying the groundwork for a conservative coalition galvanized by scapegoating and the dehumanization of minorities. Gingrich transformed U.S. politics into a zero-sum contest, setting the stage for today’s hyperpartisan landscape where compromise is viewed as weakness and partisan warfare has become the norm. Ailes revolutionized media consumption through Fox News, amplifying partisan narratives and fostering a post-factual environment where truth became secondary to ideology. Together, these three men played pivotal roles in paving the way for Donald J. Trump’s rise to power in 2016 and his dominance of U.S. politics ever since. While Trump’s ascent is often seen as a sudden political earthquake plunging the U.S. into chaos, it is crucial to appreciate that the core features of Trumpism are but the final stage of a tectonic shift decades in the making. This also means that the legacies of Phillips, Gingrich, and Ailes will likely outlive Trump and his MAGA movement. It remains to be seen whether the U.S political system and democracy can eventually overcome the toxic legacy of this triumvirate, or whether they have broken U.S. politics beyond repair.

Leander Zillich is a second-year PPE student at Utrecht University and chairing the Spotlight Committee for the academic year 2024-25. In his PPE studies, he devotes most of his academic writings to U.S. politics and sociopolitical developments.

Felix Sender is a first-year PPE studentat Utrecht University and chairing the Debate Committee of Metis. His main interests are in foreign politics and European politics.