Whether Trump has a political future or not depends entirely upon him. If he wishes to leave the arena now, he can do so honorably and confident of a comparatively generous historic treatment. The presumptive president-elect clearly is not an individual of the stature or stamina necessary for such a demanding position, and almost nobody claims he is. Democrats are an uneasy and opportunistic agglomeration of corrupt city machines, urban guerrillas, the subversive wasteland of academia, the Luddite teachers unions and the detritus of the old Democratic Party of Joe Biden’s Scranton youth.
Trump has cracked open the Democrats’ African American and Hispanic American fiefdoms, and if he acquires more presidential dignity — and an enhanced judgment of when and what to tweet, of when and when not to be back in the people’s faces as he has been, exhaustively, for four years, and can sometimes be discreet and patient — he could still have a brilliant political future. There is no rival to him as Republican leader and, after four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Democrats will be sitting ducks. Even as his enemies celebrate, Donald Trump, by calculation or inadvertence, will be the chief architect of America’s next political decade.
