We Designed Donald Trump's Election

Abstract The postmortems of the 2024 election need to start before Election Day, with the institutional developments that loaded the dice for Donald Trump's nomination despite the opposition of senior Republican Party officials who declared him a threat to America’s national interest and security. Primary contests—and not general elections—were the decisive decision points in accepting a candidate who had been indicted, convicted, and impeached for high crimes. This article examines two seminal historical junctures during the Progressive Era and after the Democratic Party's riotous 1968 Chicago Convention to account for the institutional changes that stripped away the filters on demagogues and authoritarians that James Madison insisted upon and cleared the way for Trump's rise.