Those nerves still tingle. Nine months into the presidency, the support of Trump’s base remains fervid. I am often asked whether I believe that Trump will be impeached. I’ve taken to responding that it’s more likely he’ll be a two-term president. I’d put the chances of impeachment at under 10 percent and of his re-election at about 25 percent.
That’s partly because the Democratic Party has not yet begun a serious reckoning with its defeat last year. It hasn’t grasped the degree to which it lives, still, in a coastal echo chamber of identity politics and Trump-bashing. Just being anti-Trump won’t cut it. As Chuck Coughlin, a Republican political consultant who once worked for Senator John McCain, put it to me, “Somebody who speaks to common-sense American values — that is what the Democrats need.” I’m not sure who that person is, but I am pretty sure she or he does not reside in New York, Massachusetts or California.
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