But he is an anomaly

For the thousandth time: the problem is the Republican Party, stupid

Steve M.

[T]he Republican Party is the problem. 

The Republican Party has contempt for you if you're non-white or LGBT or if you're unemployed or need health care for a child with chronic illness or live downstream from a chemical plant. 

The key to changing America is not electing Republicans.

But what are we doing? 

We're fixating on Donald Trump and portraying him as an anomaly, not as the culmination of long-term trends in his party. 

To address just one untruth endorsed by Steve in these angry comments, there is this unhappy but critical fact.

Two different things can both be bad, though in different ways.

It is an error not to see Trump as a different kind of danger, a danger to the orderly processes of republican government absolutely not posed by the standard politicians of the Republican Party or the establishment figures of the conservative movement.

They want to use the normal and essential processes of our republican government to abolish as much as possible of everything ever done by progressives since McKinley.

Trump instinctively, impulsively, and viscerally despises the normal and essential processes of republican government, of which he is instinctively, impulsively, and viscerally, if not quite consciously, the devoted enemy.

That is his cloddish, authoritarian aspect.

Everything about Trump that involves brutality, bullying, wrecking-ball behavior is a natural feature of his personality, and we got a president with that sort of personality because we got somebody who is not a real, experienced, professional politician.

He is an ignorant, brutal, visceral outsider with regard to all things to do with the US government, and especially all things having to do with the separation of powers and the rule of law, and we will not know just how dangerous he is to our republic, and will not be able to say the danger is past, until he is gone.

And when he is finally gone, the chance of the presidential selection process putting another such demagogue in the White House would be much diminished if we can find a way to close it to people like him.

To do that I think we need a constitutional amendment both restricting eligibility and providing a lawful body with the task and the means to enforce the restrictions, early enough in the process to preclude a Bozo-like figure getting a huge and dangerous popular following before he is disqualified and forced off the field.

After four terms of FDR we got the 22nd Amendment, and it is good that we did.

How many terms of Trump would you like to see?

After Trump, we can get the sort of amendment that would spare us another of him.

But it won't happen if people won't see the special sort of threat he is and was, choosing instead to see him as a normal Republican or conservative leader.

PS.

It is true that since Johnson passed his Civil Rights Act most white racists of all degrees have become Republicans and most black racists of all degrees have joined the Democrats.

But not all.

Lots of people still prioritize their fundamental economic interests.

And it isn't all about just tribal or personal interests, which may lead in contrary directions, anyway.

Many perfectly sincere poor people are libertarians or fiscal conservatives, for example.

Lots of people at all social and income levels remain Christians sincerely wed to Christian sexual morals.

And lots of well-off and even flat out rich people are sincere progressives, even socialists.

Most Americans at all social and economic levels espouse capitalism and oppose socialism, or much socialism, thinking of it as a matter of dosage.

And so on.