If you have not yet read Part 1: The Power Struggle Unfolding Before Our Eyes available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we reviewed six narratives that seek to “explain” Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election. We then distilled these narratives down into three categories: moral claims, elite machinations and structural economic/social issues.

I propose that the most comprehensive explanatory narrative of Trump’s improbable victory is The People Staged a Coup D’Etat.

Threats to Democracy

To understand this narrative, we must first examine the structure of the American system of governance and the previous “quiet coups” that consolidated power in new elites.

In broad brush, the U.S. Republic was designed to be run by elites—hence the Electoral College and the bicameral legislature with a senate overseeing the rabble of the House of Representatives.

The founders—particularly James Monroe and his allies—were acutely aware that the greatest threats to an enduring democracy were a tyranny of the majority, a majority that undermined the civil liberties for all, or an elite whose powers could not be constrained.  This is the purpose of the balance of powers between the Executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government.

But these structural efforts to restrain a tyranny of the majority or an above-the-law ruling elite, the U.S. has experienced both a tyranny of the majority—the Jim Crow racial discrimination that was institutionalized in the Southern states until the mid-1960s—and a ruling elite that is above the law.

I would argue that the current ruling elite (neocon, neoliberal) personified by Hillary Clinton, is effectively a force unto itself, i.e. above the law.

The roots of this ruling elite’s expansive power can be traced to the 1940s rise of the National Security State, the catch-all term for the institutions (CIA, Department of Defense) established by…