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Be careful what you ask for

Vox co-founder Ezra Klein’s interview Wednesday night on “The Last Word” encapsulated the self-destructive decision Trump voters made in choosing a true Washington outsider with no experience in governing.

“Drain the swamp” was one of Trump’s staple applause lines during his 2016 campaign. Maybe No. 2 behind “Lock her up.” (You can hear the chants inside your head.) Trump’s white grievance campaign was not rooted in anger at Washington so much as at the looming fact that the election of Barack Obama brought home. Shifting national demographics conservative pundits had long warned about suddenly became real. White people, especially white men, were losing their grip on power. They would have to share.

The horror.

It is not even that the moment the white share of the population falls below 50 percent a dark bell will toll across the land. (The white population stands now at roughly 60 percent.) Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by 2 percent. Not all white people are in the angry faction that backed Trump. White people terrified of losing “their” country do not control a 50-percent share of it even now except on political maps in which Republican red predominates based on acreage not population. But Obama’s 2008 win was a kind of political 9/11, a shock to the system that set off a backlash that gave the Oval Office to Trump.

A black president was bad enough, but Hillary Clinton? Racial prejudice is powerful, but so is misogyny.

By electing a white-grievance huckster with no experience in government to lead a party with no interest in governing, Trump voters handed the government to a man whose conception of how to be president he learned from television. Instead of draining the swamp, like his Manhattan apartment Trump gilded it. It seemed to work at first.

“There is simply no better politics than governing well,” Klein began.

But Trump did not know how. Nor did he care to learn.

“He ran in politics as a pure, political entertainment character,” Klein continued. He still does not understand that he cannot run a re-election campaign as an outsider as he did in 2016. But that is his shtick. It is the only act he has.

Trump took credit for economic up-trends he inherited from Obama’s eight years. That worked for Trump until it didn’t. As did xenophobia-based domestic and foreign … policy is too kind a word. He got by for three years on phoning in his presidency to “Fox & Friends” or “Hannity,” by tweeting his way through his morngings, and by appointing cronies who would not call him on it except behind his back or in tell-all books. The White House, meanwhile, was in perpetual chaos.

The appearance of the coronavirus, 120,000-plus American dead, and an economy in crisis stripped away the proscenium arch to reveal an empty backstage.

“He functionally was not acting as president at all,” Klein continued. “He was acting as president on TV, but he was not running a White House, not running an administration, not setting an agenda.”

The Republican Party has collapsed as a governing institution, Mitt Romney’s 2012 chief strategist tells Klein. It is not just Donald Trump. Republicans not fully absorbed into the cult cannot step in to fill the void.

The party is now only devoted to maintaining power. That makes it a reflection of Trump’s unsettled base. But don’t expect his most devoted followers to accept responsibility for what their choice has wrought. The least Trumpish, however, are beginning to shake off the spell. Trump is crashing in national polls against former Vice President Joe Biden.

“People can actually see what it looks like when the president isn’t doing his job during a crisis,” says Klein. “And it is terrifying.”

More terrifying even than a black man or a woman president? How about none at all?

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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

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