You Can’t “Move On” from Trump
Understanding our shared, comforting fantasy.
1. You Cannot Turn the Page
Last week Philip Bump wrote an exceptionally perceptive piece about Kamala Harris’s promise to end the last decade of acrimony and why that may not be possible.
The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.
Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.
This is correct. Now let me tell you a story about a time I was wrong.
Eight years ago I believed that Donald Trump was an aberration.
He had skated through the primaries by winning only a plurality of Republican votes. He underperformed his poll numbers in virtually every primary. Large swaths of Republican voters and Republican elites hated him. His convention featured an attempt to deny him the nomination followed by the primary runner-up telling Republicans to “vote their conscience” in November.
Trump had trailed Hillary Clinton in nearly every general election poll, often by 5 to 7 points.
Looking at this tableau I reached the following set of conclusions:
Trump would lose the general election.
In the Republican party there would be recriminations against anyone who had supported his doomed campaign.
The GOP would revert to being something like the party of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.
I was wrong. Utterly and completely. So I set about trying to understand why.