One of the great puzzlements of modern presidential politics will forever be that, in the historically bizarre 2016 campaign, it took the Republican Party’s establishment elites three-quarters of a year to wise up to the fact that multibillionaire mogul and reality-TV entertainer Donald Trump was stealing their party right out from under their upturned noses.
Beginning on June 16, 2015, the day Trump announced he was running for president, Republican elites and designated talkers were dismissing Trump’s candidacy as an ego-driven, gaffe-o-rama sideshow. They assured each other and all the eagerly flapping media ears that Trump’s candidacy would inevitably self-destruct — and soon. The multibillionaire tycoon and political neophyte would either bow out or flame out — and the celebrity-fawning news media would finally focus on the genuinely famous Republican officeholders and ex-officios who were clogging the campaign trails. After all, no candidate could possibly survive so many goofs, gaffes, false statements and flat-out lies as Trump was committing day and night.
There was, of course, another way of analyzing all of that. But it existed way below the Republican establishment’s radar. There was something about the things Trump was saying, how he was saying them — and mainly, how his huge crowds were reacting to them — that had reminded me of something I’d covered as a rookie campaign journalist.
So, on July 21, 2015, I wrote a column drawing a parallel between Trump’s appeal and the way I’d seen ordinary folks in the industrialized North be won over in the 1968 presidential campaign by Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace.
