I SHOULD have seen it coming!
Throughout the 2016 election — remember those crazy times? — I tried to draw a distinction between Donald Trump’s strategy and the man himself. In the primaries I thought that Trump’s pitch to working-class voters, his breaks with Republican orthodoxy on economic and foreign policy, were often politically brilliant … but that Trump himself was too much of a loose cannon to actually win the party’s nomination.
When that assumption was proved wrong, I thought that Trump’s general-election strategy of going hard after Rust Belt votes had the potential to split the Obama coalition … but that his obvious sexism and white-identity appeals would alienate women and drive minority turnout too high for him to win.
Well, that was wrong, too. Which left me with my assumptions about a Trump administration: that in theory an ideologically-flexible president promising a national-interest-first foreign policy could be remarkably popular, but that in practice Trump would give us economic weakness, global instability, and domestic upheaval.
Yet here we are four years later, watching Trump bask in the glow of an easy re-election over the Warren-Booker Democratic ticket. And given how successfully he defied expectations all through 2016, the path he’s taken to this point probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
