AP Photo Fourth Estate Trump: The Black Swan Candidate By breaking the bounds of what we thought was possible, he's already changed politics. How far will it go?

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

When he announced his candidacy for the presidency in June, nobody in the press corps was predicting that Donald Trump would eventually become the Republican Party's front-runner. Trump has never held public office, after all, never run a campaign. He isn't a war hero like Eisenhower. He is on his third marriage. His business reputation has—let's put it daintily—been challenged in many corners. Braggart, insult artist and vulgarian, Trump by all measures would seem a sloppy, underqualified candidate. Like Herman Cain before him, Trump has occupied this campaign cycle's novelty slot.

As he climbed in the polls from a 3 percent starting point, nearly the entire pundit class seemed united in the belief that the next bodacious statement out of Trump's mouth would vaporize his candidacy. But, no. Immune to the standard laws of politics, Trump has continued to rise in the polls, replacing the manageable disorder of a presidential politics with his chaos. Today—before a single vote has been cast—the least promising presidential candidate in more than a century is the presumptive nominee of his party.


How the hell did that happen? What are we really looking at? The best way to understand it is to realize that the Trump phenomenon is a Black Swan moment in electoral politics.

The Black Swan theory—or metaphor—was devised by risk analyst and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb and fully realized in his best-selling 2007 book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, to describe unexpected, unprecedented, cataclysmic events that overturn established ways of thinking. As Taleb wrote, every swan observed in the West until the exploration of Australia was white, leading many to assume that all swans were white. But the single observation of a black swan invalidated the “general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans,” as Taleb put it.

To qualify for Black Swanhood, Taleb wrote, an event must be an “outlier,” that is, not expected; it must carry an “extreme impact”; and it must elicit from the population explanations after the fact that make it look as though it could have been predicted. Examples of Black Swan events: the 9/11 attacks; the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004; various market panics; AIDS; the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic; the fall of the Berlin Wall; and so on. It's not that any of these events was totally unimaginable, it's that all of them lurked outside our standard expectations and, when sprung, astonished us.

The Trump candidacy satisfies all three of Taleb's criteria: His success was not expected, it is having a huge impact on politics, and it is being subjected to massive post-hoc rationalizations that really don't explain anything. The scale of the Trump surprise can only be appreciated by fanning through the press clips that followed his campaign kickoff. He was a joke, and he was in on it. He was a rambling, simple-minded speaker. He was a dangerous loose cannon: After Trump attacked the war record of Sen. John McCain in late July, the best-informed sources (Dan Balz of the Washington Post; presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham; New York Times reporter Nate Cohn; and many others) were predicting Trump's demise. The Trump impact has been so universally acknowledged, I won't bother to link to confirming pieces. The “explanations” for his triumphs have become an instant cottage industry with some writers placing the credit (or should that be the blame?) for Trump on the donor class for underspending against him, Ted Cruz (who previously provided safe harbor for Trump), the Republican Party leadership for tolerating him, and the media (for covering his every utterance), and angry white men.

None of these rationalizations really come to grips with how and why Trump was able to take flight as a Black Swan. For instance, nobody has thought to examine how defying the usual good manners of politics actually seem to have enhanced his candidacy rather than damaged it. Likewise, wild lies and half-truths that Trump has told, which would have scuttled a lesser politician, have been detected and exposed by fact-checkers at no apparent damage to his candidacy. Jeb Bush almost figured out the Trump method in December when he called Trump the “Chaos Candidate.” Alas, Bush meant it as an insult and indicative of Trump’s weakness, when sowing chaos is really one of Trump's best political weapons, whether it arrives in the form of a sizzling one-liner or ultimatum delivered to a network broadcasting a debate. In the normal order, Trump's outré moves would alienate voters. Instead, voters seem to warm to them and the Republican powers seem to be warming to the inevitability of his nomination.

The world keeps going after black swan events. The United States of America will survive if Trump is nominated—and even if he is elected to the White House, not once but twice. After all, it has survived 9/11, AIDS and the financial collapse. But Black Swan events do more than unsettle civilizations, they emit shock waves, and change the culture's idea of what is possible and what can be endured, inspiring imitators and new Black Swan artists. The Black Swan event of 9/11 caused us to harden our transportation infrastructure and our most vital buildings. But it also prompted the growth of the surveillance state, caused an uptick in the number of students studying Arabic in our schools, placed another layer of security atop banking and encouraged Major League baseball teams to add the horrendous singalong of “God Bless America” to the 7th inning stretch.

The country survived, but it’s a different place because of what we realized was possible.

What will Trump's Black Swan transform? It has already diminished—temporarily, perhaps—the wisdom that money is all that matters in politics, as he has flattened better-financed campaigns like that of Jeb Bush. It’s also cheapened the value of ideology within the Republican Party, something that nobody would have predicted, given the endless internal fights over who and what a Republican is. The party's conservatives have traditionally battled the moderates who they called Republicans in Name Only, or RINOs. Now along comes Trump, who doesn’t even bother to pretend he's a Republican of any kind, and he easily outpolls the rest. Trump's ability to reshape the political environment to his own benefit is unmatched in modern politics. He has made zero political experience a campaign plus and the absence of policy savvy a way to differentiate himself from boring wonks like John Kasich.

We don’t yet know the limits of Trump’s impact, but it’s already safe to predict that his style will resonate in the future. What is Michael Bloomberg's long tease about his third-party run for the presidency but a variation of Trump's billionaire politics that state, “I'm rich, therefore I can run"? The boldest, blackest feather flapped by Trump so far must be his decision to run what is essentially a third-party candidacy from inside one of the two major parties. But maybe it's not that unique. Running a third-party campaign from inside a major party seems to be exactly what Bernie Sanders is doing, it's just that nobody has had the honesty to declare. Today, Trump and Sanders are political parasites. By November, one or both of these two members of the Black Swan Party could become the host.

As Taleb put it in Black Swan, “Isn't it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen?”

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