The Trump Reality He may be the highest variable nominee in American history.
With his victory in the conservative heartland of Indiana, Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee for President. A plurality of GOP voters has rejected the strongest presidential field in memory to elevate a businessman of few fixed convictions and little policy knowledge who has the highest disapproval ratings in the history of presidential polling. Now what?
***Mr. Trump wasn’t our first choice, or even the 15th, but the reality is that more GOP voters preferred him to the alternatives. Dozens of miscalculations made his hostile takeover possible, not least decisions by other candidates in the early primary states to attack each other instead of Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz and his allies also prepared the ground by stoking rage against “the establishment” and immigrants, only to have Mr. Trump hijack their stage-managed rebellion as a more convincing restrictionist. (See nearby.)
Yet GOP voters made the ultimate decision, and that deserves some respect unless we’re going to give up on democracy. The GOP electorate had its chance to reconsider Mr. Trump after his Wisconsin defeat a month ago. Instead the voters rallied behind him for seven straight wins with a majority in each state.
The most hopeful way to look at this is that GOP voters see Mr. Trump as the vehicle for American revival. They are at heart nationalists who see the U.S. in retreat abroad and the economy failing to raise wages at home, and they are revolting against both. Unlike the Japanese or the French, they aren’t going to accept decline without a fight.
In that sense they hope Mr. Trump will be another Ronald Reagan, who can storm Washington and overturn the status quo. This may be one reason so many of Mr. Trump’s voters are older Americans who recall the failures of the 1970s and the Reagan revival that followed.
The problem is that Mr. Trump is no Gipper, who had spent 40 years developing a philosophy of limited government and the U.S. national interest. As his letters show, he had superb instincts about the major issues of his day and was a brilliant political strategist. Mr. Trump is a clever political tactician, but his policy and rhetorical jaunts don’t lead to anything coherent we can detect beyond his desire to “do great deals.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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