If you read only one thing about Donald Trump today, make it what Matt Yglesias has written about him. It's the most convincing analysis I've seen as to why Trump won and it has to do with too many Americans figuring Hillary had it in the bag so they could simply not vote or vote for someone else. They could even vote for a guy like Trump they didn't want. Yglesia drops a couple of intriguing (if true) statistics like…
[Trump] got 17 percent of the vote of people who said he wasn't qualified to serve as president, 19 percent of the vote of people who said he lacked the temperament to be president, and 23 percent of the vote of people who wanted the next president to be more liberal than Obama.
Yglesias also says Trump won the electoral votes of seven states in which he failed to capture a majority of the vote. Something's sure wrong there.
What intrigued me especially was when Yglesias noted that "[His] antics have taken Trump much further than anyone predicted they possibly could, and so he evidently has no intention of abandoning them." I've been thinking that Trump reminds me in many ways of a certain TV producer I worked for, once upon a time. This guy had built a very successful career — unlike Trump, out of nothing — by a string of petty, borderline illegal tricks. Some were not so borderline. They were ways of delaying payments to people, defaulting on some bills altogether, etc.
He conned and swindled people until he had a few hits of such awesome success that he became very, very rich. When I was working for him, he was probably making $100,000 a week. That's right: I said "a week." But he was still doing all the old tricks to cheat a messenger service out of $20 or to set up dummy companies to run up bills and then disappear. You'd think that once he owned three homes, he would stop doing that kind of penny-ante con job but no.
One of his business associates and I discussed it one time and the associate said, "He's afraid to give up the two-bit swindles because he's convinced they're what made him successful. When I tell him to knock it off with the petty larceny, he says 'Hey, that petty larceny got me where I am today.' Last week in a 7-Eleven store, I saw him shoplift a Hershey bar apparently because he's done that all his life."
The analogy of that guy to Trump only goes so far but our new prez does seem to me like a guy who can't believe his act has succeeded and he's afraid to change anything about it. Which explains why his inauguration speech sounded just like one of his campaign speeches. I was surprised he didn't take a moment during it to call Rosie O'Donnell a fat pig.
Anyway, I think Yglesias is right. Most presidents seem to come into office and be surprised at how much they can't do. Trump seems more surprised than most. He thought he was elected Absolute Monarch…and with the marches against him and the press reporting that which he thinks should not be mentioned, he's finding out otherwise.