The ominous fact is that Trump is undeniably one of the greatest intuitive political geniuses in history. Think about it: A wealthy businessman with no political experience at all takes on more than a dozen experienced politicians and manages to prevail, winning the presidential nomination of a major party. He then runs what an army of experts and analysts consider to be a train wreck of a general-election campaign and nonetheless manages to prevail to become the president-elect of the most powerful nation on Earth. It’s an astonishing accomplishment.
This doesn’t mean that Trump had it all planned out ahead of time, like some Machiavelli from Manhattan. On the contrary, I suspect he’s as surprised as anyone that the quixotic campaign he launched in June of 2015 has delivered him to the front door of the White House. As I said, he’s an intuitive genius. Radicalizing certain recent tendencies of the Republican Party and diverging from it in others, Trump tried something new and it worked. The most discontented voters in the party listened to his message and responded to it, probably without realizing that this is what they wanted until they heard it. In that sense, Trump conjured into existence the very populist movement that has now catapulted him to the presidency. In the process, he managed to rejigger the GOP electoral coalition and wrest control of the party away from its leadership.
The revolution was about policy — immigration, trade, and the economic and cultural decline of the white working class — but it was at least as much about attitude. Trump was (and continues to be) George Wallace with a Twitter account — a demagogue spewing venomous anger and disgust about the multiple “disasters” confronting the country directly to like-minded voters with no intermediary at all, circumventing the heads of his party, mainstream media outlets, and even the retinue of advisers who ran his campaign.
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