Getty Fourth Estate Trump and Sanders: The Political Parasites of 2016

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Think of the Republican Party as a host organism that has only now discovered the parasite it acquired eight months ago. The parasite, of course, is Donald J. Trump—no more a Republican than I—who has inserted himself into the party and appears to be on his way to winning its presidential nomination. Feeding on the Republican Party’s primary and caucus process, the Trump parasite has progressed from egg to larva and has now commandeered many of the Republican Party’s metabolic functions. But it’s been managed growth, as the smart-thinking parasite likes to keep its zombie host alive long enough to develop into the next stage and lay its own eggs and begin the process anew.

Trump isn’t the only political parasite on the hustings this season. Bernie Sanders, who never ran as a Democrat before this election, has likewise attempted to colonize the gastrointestinal tract of a major party in hopes that it will eventually deposit him at the White House. True to his parasitical nature, Sanders loves the idea of the party but has little interest in actually supporting it. He has raised only $1,000 for the Democratic Party’s fundraising alliance, while Hillary Clinton, who is many things but assuredly not a parasite, has raised $26.9 million.


Trump has similarly stiffed his party’s fundraising operations, canceling a scheduled appearance at a December Republican National Committee fundraising event, and Twitter-shouting his fury at the RNC for allegedly using his name in a fundraising solicitation without his consent. “Totally unauthorized, do not pay,” Trump tweeted. The true parasite never supports the host!

The life cycles of the Trump and Sanders parasites are nowhere near as gruesome as the life cycles of the Guinea worm and the parasitoid wasp, but they are as striking as anything we witness in nature. Viewing Trump and Sanders with an ideological microscope, it’s apparent that neither has much affinity for the parties they’ve joined. Their object and their genius has been to seize as much control as they can of the major parties from the various “establishments” and wage their outsider third-party candidacies from inside. Suitably camouflaged, neither Trump nor Sanders is seen by the average voter for political freeloaders they are.

The Democratic Party host seems to be slowly rejecting Sanders, but only at great cost—both financial and ideological. Presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton has been weakened by exposure to Sanders, and looks like a waffler and a “me-too” candidate compared with her consistent opponent. The exposure to Sanders has also increased the left-liberal tilt of the party, putting it at a distance from the flattened centrism that traditionally wins presidential elections.

How did Trump come to infest the Republican Party host? A surplus of candidates running as conservative ditto-heads helped, leaving its immune system too distracted to snuff Trump when he was still a campaign novelty. Also, as was written in the New York Times last September, the party made itself vulnerable when it compressed the campaign season and rewrote its nominating rules to “head off a prolonged and divisive nomination fight” à la Campaign 2012 “and to make certain the Republican standard-bearer is not pulled too far to the right before Election Day.”

Also, party fathers overestimated how effective the rivers of big money pumped in by rich donors would be in attracting voters to the usual Republicans (Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, et al.).

“Our theory was to dominate the establishment lane into the actual voting primaries,” a Jeb Bush strategist told the Washington Post. “The problem was there was a huge anti-establishment wave. The establishment lane was smaller than we thought it would be.”

But mostly, the party fathers (and mothers) underestimated Trump’s appeal to the populist and Tea Party elements of the party. Or as a parasitologist might put it, the Republican Party neglected to boil the water before it allowed its faithful to drink from the Trump stream.

The rise of Sanders is a little harder to explain. As many journalists have written, Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate. By failing to define her candidacy with exactitude, she made room for a competitor who would triple-down on the usual left-entitlement tendencies of the Democratic Party. “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive who likes to get things done,” as Clinton put it, is a lame slogan, all but announcing to any aspiring parasite the host’s availability.

Not all parasites are destructive. The medical literature is replete with examples of beneficial parasites that help hosts digest food, ward off disease and supercharge the immune system, to name a few. Even if the Trump candidacy fizzles, it will have demonstrated the weakness of both the Republican orthodoxy and the power of money, ultimately strengthening the party, as it builds political antibodies against Trumpism. On the Democratic side, you could argue that Bernie Sanders has helped alter his party’s guiding philosophies, making it more relevant to voters and demonstrating the power of grass-roots organization.

I have no crystal ball but offer Trump and Sanders a word to the wise should they continue their political careers. Even parasites have to be on the lookout for parasites. One slip, and you become the host.

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This marks the second time I called the Trump and Sanders candidacies third-party efforts mounted inside a major party. Sell every piece three times, states Strout’s Law. Send your legal wisdom to [email protected]. My email alerts are shot through with onchocerciasis, my Twitter feed has schistosomiasis, and my RSS feed almost died from trypanosomiasis.