By David K. Shipler
Mark Twain is
said to have once advised, “If you don’t like the weather in New England now,
just wait a few minutes.” So it might be said of Donald Trump. If you don’t
like his policy on this or that, just wait a few minutes. It was true during
the campaign and has been the case since the election.
His shifts have stoked the wishful
thinking that some on the left have embraced since his candidacy. First, his cruelly
personal, bigoted assaults were supposedly so off-putting that voters would surely
flee from him in droves. On the contrary, he did better and better as the
primaries proceeded.
Then, conventional wisdom in the
press and political establishment held that a) he would moderate his tone
during the general election campaign to appeal to a broader electorate, or b)
his repeated misogyny, crude ignorance of the world, and narcissistic rants
would propel him into the dustbin of history. He did not moderate, and he made
history instead of being buried by it.
All assumptions about the power of
good manners, truth-telling, and common decency fell by the wayside. Whenever
Trump said something obnoxious, and especially after the recording surfaced of
his boasts about his predatory sexual preferences, The New York Times and other mainstream news organizations rushed
to hear from the distraught and fractured Republican leadership about the party’s
imminent disintegration and how it might put itself back together again after the
expected devastating loss.
Most of the chattering class, including
conservative Republicans, couldn’t believe that voters would tolerate his rude
attacks on sacred cows—the parents of a U.S. soldier who had died in combat, a
former P.O.W. named John McCain, a Miss Universe, a handicapped reporter—or his
flirtation with Vladimir Putin or his nonchalance about NATO commitments and
the spread of nuclear weapons. But even when his poll numbers dipped after an
egregious remark, the support then steadied and never signaled the collapse
that some political coverage predicted.
