Why Did Trump Win? Because It Was Written.

How the Iron Rules of Storytelling Predicted Trump's Win

Bad stories are bad in their own ways.

But all good stories are alike.

With apologies to Tolstoy, what I mean is that good stories all have in common the rigid, iron laws of storytelling; this is what in fact makes them great.

I am not talking about prose or character or setting or adjectives. I’m talking about the beats.

You know about the law of the three-act story arc, or the hero’s journey, or you’ve read
Joseph Campbell and you know the basics of narrative storytelling. Set ups must be paid off. A gun shown in the first act must be fired in the third. The fate of the world is at stake and only one man knows how to save it. Tales as old as time.

The Trump saga contains all those mythic storytelling elements, but it also somehow fits absolutely perfectly into the master cinematic storytelling beat sheet. It’s almost supernatural. It fits so well that if you had applied the beat sheet to the story weeks ago, you would have immediately realized that there was only one way for this story to end: it could only have a hero redeemed, a terrible villain vanquished, stolen honor restored, and the world saved. The set up was just that good. It demanded a happy ending. The universe would not allow anything else.

Happy for the hero, that is; it was a terrible and fitting end for the antagonist. Here he is realizing he’s going to lose to the man he hates most in all the world:

Blake Snyder’s Master Beat Sheet

Many, many years ago I took a screenwriting class at UCLA. On day one the instructor handed out a photocopied numbered list. This was his friend Blake Snyder’s beat sheet. Snyder was an L.A. screenwriter who reverse engineered all great stories into this numbered list of story elements.

I still have it. I’ve used it many times. Years later I became friends with some of the people behind the “Save the Cat” book series. This is the series that took Blake’s list and turned his magical blueprint into helpful instructional books for writers; so called because of the essential beat where the hero does something kind for a more vulnerable character (he “saves the cat.”)

When you set out to write a saga spanning ten, even twenty years, you are probably writing an epic story of good vs. evil in which an underdog must defeat overwhelming foes, overcome insurmountable odds, and emerge victorious at the end—and for good measure save the world at the same time.

This the the universal story arc of all great epics, from The Odyssey to Beowulf to the Lord of the Rings to Star Wars.

After 2020, I realized that the Donald Trump Story might be the perfect beat sheet, and on July 13, 2024, I was sure. That was the moment that convinced me the story just had to have a big, splashy, satisfying happy ending.

We the audience needed it. It was the ache that had to be filled, the itch that had to be scratched. The laws of the universe, physics, chemistry, everything demanded that this hero be able to ride off into the sunset (aboard Air Force One) victorious.

To prove my theory, I applied the story to the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. Here’s what it looks like: