“How did we put this man in the Oval Office?” Roger Cohen asked this last week after the Mueller report found President Trump innocent of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election. In the minds of many, he still has to be guilty of nearly everything else.
Trump was a minority candidate and a minority president, never winning half of the vote in the Republican primaries. He has never enjoyed the approval of half of the country.
Trump lost the popular vote by more than 2 million to Hillary Clinton, a woman as corrupt and dishonest as he is, who is also disliked and distrusted by millions. To call either the choice or the voice of the people is nuts.
Trump and Clinton both illustrate what happens when dynastic tradition runs amok and fails to provide the nation with what it wants and needs. As it turned out, neither Jeb Bush nor Hillary Clinton got to be president, but they both opened the door to the huckster and demagogue who clawed his way up to power after crawling from the wreck they created.
The GOP field was already too full in 2015 when Bush, a youthful phenomenon as Florida’s governor in 1998–2006, made himself the 16th wheel. His candidacy, in addition to its evident lack of pizzazz, derailed the plans of many contenders, disturbing the relative balance of various factions. Bush had always been the star of the family: the one his family always thought would grow up to be president. But in 1994, his cut-up and sometimes problem brother George was the one who won his race for governor in Texas. Jeb Bush lost and became Florida’s governor in 1999, too late to make the 2000 run for president.
Was Jeb Bush afraid he might be the only male in his family not to serve as president? No one asked questions like that of Hillary Clinton, who had made her wish to be president known sometime around the mid-1980s. If the Republican field of 2016 was too big and unwieldy, the Democratic field was too small — by the design and intention of President Bill Clinton, who made it his business in 2009 to purge from the party every last Democrat who deserted his wife for Barack Obama. With the purge, the party’s political skills left the building.
At the same time, the skills of Jeb Bush, which at one time were magical, seemed to have atrophied, as day after day he was shredded by Trump. As their airtime and money dried up, the rest of the field found it impossible get any traction.
“We” didn’t put Trump in office. Dynasties did. With their endless supplies of money and power, clunkers such as Hillary! and the latter-day Jeb! stayed up and running long after what should have been their political expiration dates. The more worthy candidates perished, and the predators gnawed on their bones.
