Over and over, Trump was betrayed by his inability to hold in check his own ego needs for the good of the nation
Many years ago, my friend Dr. David Luchins, a Touro professor of political science and former aide to Senator Daniel Moynihan, pointed out to me that the Republican Party was consistently hampered in national elections by the fact that many of its “natural” voters had given up on the political process and no longer voted.
It was the genius of Donald Trump, argues historian Victor Davis Hanson in his incisive The Case for Trump, to bring those voters back into electoral politics. By doing so, Trump managed to swing Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania into his column in 2016. During the battle for the 2016 Republican nomination, I thought that Trump was the only Republican who could lose to Hillary. But Hanson argues persuasively that he was the only one who could have beaten her by engaging disillusioned voters. (He adds for good measure that Clinton’s high negatives made her the only Democrat who could have lost to Trump.)
Trump was an immensely consequential president. He reordered the electoral map by putting the Upper Midwest into play. He was also the first president in recent memory to actually hew faithfully to what he promised to do as a candidate.
And many of the signature issues he raised may well continue to dominate the political debate: illegal immigration of unskilled workers, the loss of American manufacturing jobs, China’s violation of trade agreements and industrial espionage, and endless foreign wars, in which young men of the working and lower middle class bear a disproportionate share of the burden. Or at least those issues would have continued to dominate had he not self-immolated, and cleared the way for long-term Democratic dominance.
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