Ross Douthat: Underestimating Trump

I underestimated Donald Trump.

To really make a clean breast on this issue, I have to reach back earlier than 2015 (some forecasts take more than a year to be disproven), to a column I wrote in the far-off days of the 2012 campaign, when Mitt Romney flew to Vegas, baby, to accept an endorsement from the Donald.

This struck me, at the time, as a needless move by Mitt, because it left him sticky with the tar of Trump’s birther nonsense while delivering little in return. The idea that Romney needed the kind of voters excited by Trump’s flamethrower style, I wrote, confused “the existence of a fan base (which Trump certainly has) with the existence of a meaningful constituency (which he almost certainly does not).”

.. Second, that faction has turned out to include precisely the kind of voters Romney needed in 2012 and who stayed home instead: Blue-collar whites with moderate views on economics and a weak attachment to the institutional G.O.P.

.. I certainly overestimated poor Jeb Bush, whom I wrongly predicted would profit from Trump’s rise.