Source: Persuasion
by Damon Linker
“As others have noted, Trump’s win in 2016 could be dismissed as a fluke or aberration caused by our highly idiosyncratic way of electing presidents via the state-based Electoral College. This enabled Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans to console themselves with the thought that he didn’t really win. His presidency was at bottom illegitimate. The American people didn’t sign up for this. The repudiation of him in 2020 therefore seemed foreordained. And after the horrors of January 6, 2021 and all the criminal indictments that followed, the idea that the voters would return him to the White House seemed unthinkable to many. And yet here we are. The outcome leaves us to make sense of what it means—and what it means, I think, is that Donald Trump has consolidated the fluke of 2016.” (11/07/24)