Robert W. Merry: “What went wrong? Trump went wrong. He built his constituency by exposing to America the fundamental political reality of 2016—namely, the widening chasm between Middle America and its bicoastal elites of big media, government officials, think tanks, big tech, burgeoning financial institutions, the federal deep state, and mavens of popular culture. He pulled his voters together into a tight knot of political support born of fear and intimidation and self-interest. But then he couldn’t build on it. He could never take his 43 percent support and find a way to add another 10 percent by devising policies designed to operate on the political margin.”

“Bill Clinton had a word for it—’triangulation,’ meaning the art of building coalitions of people and institutions that constitute majority sentiment on well-chosen issues. A well-crafted grand strategy on immigration probably could have served the purpose, had there been sufficient compromise involved. A success on the health care issue would have helped. A big factor could have been a foreign policy success fulfilling the president’s promise of reducing America’s military footprint overseas. A use of language and a comportment signifying a sense of national unity, at least to the point of creating a majority coalition, could have helped tremendously—and would have been easy to do. But Trump couldn’t do any of it. The result was that he couldn’t get beyond his core constituency and hence probably can’t be reelected. That likely will leave that core constituency in the lurch as the nation continues the politics of rancor, recrimination, and abuse under a new Democratic regime.”