The model, of course, was Fox News, with several of its biggest stars defecting to Trump’s new network right after the election. Ann Coulter’s 8 p.m. show was popular right from the start, but it was Trump’s show with Sean Hannity, at 9 p.m. four nights a week, that formed the backbone of (and ratings juggernaut for) the new channel. It was a work of perverse genius. Trump had already shown that the media couldn’t resist covering his every incendiary pronouncement. Now he had a massive platform that he could promote all day long with provocative tweets, which led to an hour-long diatribe aimed directly at President Clinton and congressional Republicans. It was vulgar and rude and ill-informed … and utterly devastating to the new president.

Clinton was always going to have a tough time governing. Yes, the 2016 election gave her a narrow three-seat Democratic majority in the Senate, but the GOP held the House — and once Paul Ryan was deposed as speaker in a post-election coup and replaced by pro-Trump firebrand Dana Rohrabacher, there was no chance the incoming president would get anything done. Still, few predicted that people would look back at the inside-the-beltway dysfunction of the Obama years as a golden age of governing.

With three federal government shutdowns and a (failed) presidential impeachment trial in the last two and a half years, there has been no time to address the nation’s problems — above all the slow-motion collapse of the Affordable Care Act. With Trump and his on-air talent railing nightly against President Clinton and her Republican “lap dogs” for trying to fix HillaryCare (nee ObamaCare) rather than letting it die, Congress did nothing as hundreds of thousands and then millions were dropped from health insurance or faced a choice of devastating rate hikes or tax penalties for failing to maintain coverage.