This is a fascinating analysis of Trump’s success in reimagining America’s place in the world.
Blocked institutionally on so many fronts, Trump nonetheless scored his most extraordinary victory imaginatively—by inhabiting every crevice of his audience’s consciousness, pursuing them even in their nightmares, and eliciting from them their own share of norm-busting. The consequences were, in part, the obstacles and obstructions placed in the way of his haphazard and ineffectual policymaking. But it is hard to argue that every last bit of Trump’s occupation of the political imagination—an extraordinarily compliant act by those who feigned resistance to him—was required to incite the right response in the right amount. No president has ever combined so much institutional weakness with such imaginative romp.
In case after case, Trump’s mainstream opponents directed their ire more censoriously against policies in which Trump was simpler to forestall, while ignoring ones in which he was making substantial transformations. He controlled and owned them, luring them into drastic mistakes of principle and strategy, like their over-investment in the Mueller Report and the diversion of impeachment. But beyond any specific reaction, what was remarkable was how far Trump created a vast audience in the mainstream media and social media that made a life of hating him, while ignoring the causes of his reign in which they had participated, and the real alterations in American policy he was making, even as they were locked in embrace with him.
What has differed in real terms over four years is the shape of the debate about the American past and future. Closing the false “end of history” in 1989 and opening a new epoch, Trump oversaw a total renovation of our sense of where we stand and what Americans might do in response.