WaPo: Mueller now investigating whether Trump obstructed justice

[The Self]

So the era inaugurated by Watergate may well be ushered out by Watergate's genuine successor. Fascinating.

[The Self]

There's no substantial difference between 'Trumpism' and 'Reaganism'. There could have been - Trump was uniquely positioned, among all Republican Presidential nominees, to endorse a Keynesian cornerstone like universal health care above the heads of his Party establishment - but this would have required the Trump movement to be a legitimately populist one, rather than a last madcap effort to staunch the self-destruction of the Reagan coalition.

For Trump to be a realigning figure would require that he, y'know, do some realigning on fundamental policy issues and their relationship to the established Parties. He hasn't.

[The Self]

There's no substantial difference between 'Trumpism' and 'Reaganism'. There could have been - Trump was uniquely positioned, among all Republican Presidential nominees, to endorse a Keynesian cornerstone like universal health care above the heads of his Party establishment - but this would have required the Trump movement to be a legitimately populist one, rather than a last madcap effort to staunch the self-destruction of the Reagan coalition.

I've recently made the argument that Trumpism, at least rhetorically, is the logical conclusion of Reaganism.

Which is extremely different from being something new on the political scene. And this is why 'Trumpism' is going to fail - it in itself isn't anything new, and what potential there is for something genuinely new (a kind of national collectivism, say) cannot be supported on the currently existing material premises of American society.

Trumpism is a limbo where the ideas that could power a genuine right-wing realignment go to die.

[The Self]

The use of the rhetoric of the 'witch hunt' by the Party of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell is very strange indeed, not the least given that a not-insignificant number of Republican voters believe that Harry Potter is an actual grimoire.