Suppose, for a moment, that Donald Trump is elected president Tuesday evening. It seems unlikely, but is not impossible; and we’ve faced the apocalypse a couple of times in recent memory.
In 1992, for example, American voters dismissed from the presidency a heroic naval veteran of World War II who had served his country in a variety of high offices, as well as playing a leading role in ending the Cold War. We replaced him with a 46-year-old playboy governor of Arkansas who had been a draft dodger during the Vietnam war and admitted to having smoked marijuana, but hadn’t inhaled. For that matter, a dozen years earlier, we had elected a 69-year-old movie actor from Hollywood with no foreign policy experience, who was alleged to believe that trees caused more pollution than factories and, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills, was a product of the John Birch Society culture of Southern California and little more than the puppet of a handful of Los Angeles millionaires.
