Donald Trump has managed to retain his stranglehold over the Republican field of presidential candidates far longer than most pundits had assumed he would. When Trump declared his candidacy, most experts assumed that Trump would follow in the footsteps of Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain before him: a rapid ascent followed by an equally rapid fall from the stage. Yet Trump shows no signs of fizzling out as the first round of voting — Feb. 1 in Iowa — rapidly approaches; he still leads in national polls with a 37.4 percent plurality, according to Huffington Post Pollster, and there is no reason to believe that he will fade from the scene in the foreseeable future. Therefore, it is important to examine the conditions that have allowed him to rise to prominence and the ways that America could hopefully reverse this trend. 

Trump is not your run-of-the-mill Republican. In fact, that is a large part of his branding: He angles himself as an “outsider candidate” who is not beholden to corporate interests — as long as you don’t count himself as a “corporate interest.” As such, he has tapped into a vein of frustration that other anti-establishment candidates such as Herman Cain have used in previous elections. In response, the establishment has tried to derail Trump as early as the first Republican debate, where the very first thing the moderators asked the candidates to do was to pledge to not run a third-party campaign should they lose the nomination — something that Trump alone had threatened. Trump, predictably, refused, after which the moderators reminded him that it would likely result in Hillary Clinton winning the presidency. When Trump remained resolute, the audience started booing — and yet, Trump still leads the polls. 

A large part of the reason that Trump is more successful than past anti-establishment candidates has a lot to do with the era in which we live. More so than ever, the populace is fed up with the Washington establishment because they feel that Congress and other politicians are aligned with the interests of large donors more so than their own views. The success of anti-establishment candidates in both parties — Bernie Sanders and Trump — evinces the widespread extent of these feelings. Further, as Yuval Levin points out in his Jan. 12 National Review article, most of the Republican candidates have sourced a dissatisfaction with current political elites and have consistently fired off at the establishment in their stump speeches. 

Another key reason for Trump’s success has been the changing economic fortunes of rural white people. As a Jan. 18 New York Times article points out, in recent years, the level of poverty among working class people living in rural areas has skyrocketed, and people in their prime earning years are the most affected. This relatively bleak economic outlook is part of what explains the eruption of anger currently manifesting in the armed takeover in Oregon. 

On Jan. 2, an armed militia led by Ammon Bundy took a wildlife refuge in Harney County, Ore. after protesting the jail sentencing of two men, Dwight and Steve Hammond, for arson on federal territory. Weeks later, the occupation continues. Called “terrorists” or “protesters” depending on the source, the occupiers have not made an official statement endorsing Trump, but they echo his anti-establishment cries. 

Despite admitting that the occupiers must vacate the refuge, Trump told the New York Times editorial board on Jan. 5 that he would invite the occupiers to the White House to listen to their requests: “I think what I’d do, as president, is I would make a phone call to whoever, to the group I’d talk to the leader. I would talk to him and I would say, ‘You gotta get out — come see me, but you gotta get out.’” The shared anti-establishment sentiment of the occupiers and Trump, as well as the latter’s relatively sympathetic response to acts that many — including CNN National Security Analyst Juliette Kayyem — have deemed terrorism, suggests that the occupiers and Trump may originate from the same political vein.

In many ways, the occupiers and Trump supporters have acted in reaction to a federal government that they feel no longer listens to them, as well as a bleak economic outlook. To make matters worse, population in rural areas is falling as more people move to western cities that are rapidly developing into metropolitan social centers like Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City and Denver. This has led to a condensing of financial resources in the urban centers. As the Times reported, “half the jobs in Oregon, for example, are now clustered in just three counties in and around Portland, according to a study by Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group in Bozeman, Mont.” As the economic insecurity of these groups increases, they often look for someone to blame. For the occupiers, the entity at fault is the federal government; for Trump and his supporters, it’s Muslims and immigrants — but in both cases, the source of the rage is the same. 

The desire to “Make America Great Again” speaks to these people from rural areas and other working-class white people because they have seen a noticeable increase in both poverty and unemployment, and they feel that inefficiencies in Washington have prevented them from receiving the help that they need, according to a Jan. 18 New York Times article . Trump has been able to channel this anger and hyper-nationalist zeal to propel himself to the top of the polls and prolong his stay there. The only way to quell this movement of right-wing populism — manifested in the Oregon takeover and Trump’s success — is to address the economic needs of these groups. Progressives need to do a better job of reaching out to people of poverty, and Americans need to start asking themselves what they can do to alleviate the economic suffering these groups experience. They have, like countless other groups — including the people in Flint, Mich. — been failed by their government. The only way to eradicate Trumpism is to eradicate its source: worsening poverty in rural areas and excessive disenchantment with the U.S. government. Solving this will not be easy, and it will be a long process that will have to include significant campaign finance reform, but it is necessary.