From the very start, Donald Trump was running as if he wanted to lose this election. Then he did.
Most politicians start with a base of natural and/or loyal supporters and try to build and expand it, but Trump behaved from the very beginning as if he thought that his base had been all he ever needed or wanted.
“We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans,” Thomas Jefferson said at his first inaugural in 1801 after what was then, and still is, the most bitterly contested election in history. When he left the White House after two terms in office, he left a one-party state behind him.
In contrast, Trump found a country that was already divided and did everything anyone could ever have thought of to make these divisions still worse. Even Richard Nixon said after he won in 1968 that he intended to “bring us together.” He didn’t mean it, of course, but felt that he had to say it, as did Al Gore after the closest and most painful loss in presidential history. Trump was the first in recent times not to have said it, and he was as bad as his word.
Trump should have known from the start that he won because he was running against Hillary Clinton — perhaps the worst politician in all of our history. She won her first race for the Senate from the state of New York (in which she had never lived) because she had been the great Woman Scorned in the great intern scandal. The people, in their intuitive kindness, thought she needed a new start in life. Her husband supported her in return for the pain he had caused, and in exchange for all of the cover-ups she had helped him with. That started with their 1992 joint interview on 60 Minutes, in which she falsely stated that he had never strayed with a chanteuse named Gennifer. His entire machine, left over from his eight runs for office, got behind her with its incredible access to cash.
Her lack of talent was shown, not in her safe New York seat, but in her first run for president. She ran head-on into the force called Barack Obama, a born politician, potent campaigner, and star. After her first failure, Bill vowed that next time would be different. Indeed, it was.
Democrats’ consecutive midterm failures of 2010 and 2014 wiped out the generation of Democrats that had been swept in with Obama. Hillary’s rivals were gone, along with all the governors and senators who had better skills and fewer drawbacks than she did and might have been capable of beating Trump.
In the great blame game of “What Gave Us Trump?” soon to emerge in large parts of this country, there’s really no need to look beyond Bill and Hillary Clinton, who gave us so much not to be grateful for. Among them, this last gift of all.
