This chapter begins the analysis of how American society prepared a space for someone like Trump to dominate public life. The major symptom was that citizens failed to not elect Trump and therefore twice elevated to be president a man who had no qualifications to administer the Executive Branch of a democratic government consisting of more than 4,000,000 employees and multiple responsibilities. He was, however, a “populist,” who promised to act on behalf of “the people” as if the people were entitled to throw off rule by “elites.” And together, he and his associates admired what scholars call “neoliberalism,” whereby many traditional, and democratic, political practices are overridden in favor of unleashing “private innovators” – such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – to acquire enormous wealth and influence. Assuming that Trump is a populist, we should observe that America’s crisis is not so much a failure of democratic “institutions” – agencies, procedures, etc. – as it is that “citizens” have failed to vote to support those institutions. Thus Defending Democracy is about how citizens must do their job – their “vocation” – more and better.