The Progressive apoplexy over Donald Trump—which is justified on myriad grounds, many of them other than those his critics are articulating—ought not obscure this decisive fact: Trumpism is a disease of Progressive constitutionalism. Its symptoms include an inflamed presidency and Supreme Court—and embrace of the former and a reaction against the latter.
Trumpism is inconceivable without the pairing of, on the one hand, a populist core driven by economic dislocation to the arms of a would-be savior and, on the other, an immovable bedrock of cultural conservatives who have embraced—out of a desperate desire to dislocate the status quo, but a desperation that seems to have morphed into an unaccountable enthusiasm—a candidate who obviously does not share their values personally and probably does not believe in them politically.
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