Trump is the wrong man for the right job

For his supporters, Trump’s candidacy represented a marked and necessary shift away from many things the Republican Party has long stood for both in the popular imagination and in Washington. Instead of boring audiences to death with summaries of his 60-point Heritage Foundation-approved plans for unleashing the dynamic genius of entrepreneurship upon the nation’s unemployed and drug addicted and otherwise immiserated, he promised infrastructure spending and an end to multilateral trade deals. Rather than empty gestures about health-savings accounts he insisted that he would replace the Affordable Care Act with something better. In lieu of the usual verbal acrobatics that ultimately amount to a brief for cutting taxes for the wealthy, he straightforwardly suggested that it might be a good idea to raise them. He demanded the shoring up of entitlement programs rather than a scaling back of benefits or a rise in the minimum retirement age. On social issues he suggested compromise rather than pretend, as so many of his blue-blazered predecessors have done, that he is a pious family man. He gave the impression, in other words, that he was going to govern as a very different kind of Republican.

All of this existed only at the level of a fantasy.