openpolitics.com

People I know were angry. They were tired of being told they were racist and bigoted as they went about the business of mowing their lawns, writing college tuition checks and working their jobs as cops, secretaries and teachers’ aides. They kept being told they needed to look inward, examine their sins and judge themselves guilty. They had not forgotten when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 and his wife, Michelle, said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country…”

So now we have President-Elect Donald Trump. I supported him because he promised to curb regulations, cut taxes and appoint constitutionalists to the Supreme Court. I supported him because Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have what it takes to turn around a stagnant economy or stand up to the special interests that block innovation.

 

.. The real danger Mr. Trump poses is the undermining of our politics — the norms that sustain our liberal democracies. His campaign was based on a divisive politics of identity. Ideals of equity, equal rights, diversity and inclusion were submerged under the weight of a rhetoric that raised racial and ethnic tensions and inflamed passions against imagined enemies — Mexican immigrants, Chinese exporters, Muslim refugees.

Illiberal democracy has been the bane of several nations around the world. Under Mr. Trump, the traditions in the United States of checks and balances and of rule of law will be tested seriously.

The political danger will be greatly magnified by Mr. Trump’s likely economic failure. He comes into office as the putative leader of middle and lower classes who feel they have been left behind. He has raised their expectations in ways that he cannot meet. There is little chance that incomes at the middle and lower end of income distribution will receive a large boost under his policies. The manufacturing jobs that have left will not return no matter how tough Mr. Trump’s trade policies get. These jobs have disappeared for good, largely thanks to technological changes, and not trade.

.. When the full scale of his economic disappointment sinks in sometime during his term, Mr. Trump may well react in the time-honored fashion of global populists like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. To keep his base mobilized and insulate himself from economic troubles, he may take shelter in an intensified form of the identity politics that worked so well for him during the presidential campaign. This would rip American society further apart along racial and ethnic cleavages.

The ugliness that characterized politics during the presidential campaign may be nothing compared with what may be yet to come.

.. Now it looks like a warning shot. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, Donald Trump was among the first to call for stonewalling President Obama’s choice to fill the seat.

.. Since 1900, had the Senate ever refused to confirm a nominee in a presidential election year as a result of the impending election? The answer was no (even if Mr. Cruz tried to argue, against the facts, that Justice Anthony Kennedy wasn’t confirmed in the election year of 1988.) The Republicans’ refusal to grant Judge Garland a hearing or schedule a vote was in fact unprecedented.

It was a new kind of hardball.

.. When they assumed Hillary Clinton would win, Republicans including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina talked about blocking Democratic Supreme Court picks indefinitely.

.. It’s hard to see how any Republican paid a price for radically altering the norms for Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Trump helped point the way, and the voters rewarded him and those who followed.

.. I believed, and still believe, that he is a man with a disordered personality and authoritarian tendencies. My job is to give him a chance to prove me wrong; his job is to prove me wrong.

.. The way he mistreats people will be normalized.

.. The Republican Party will fundamentally change, from a conservative party to one that champions European-style ethnic nationalism.

.. “Some say God moves in mysterious ways. I say, God grants humans the freedom to move in even more mysterious ways.”