He is just the figurehead of his party at the time. The same as was with Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.
He has reshaped the Republican agenda as even Ronald Reagan couldn't, and he has done so faster and more completely. Reagan was slightly to the right of the Republican mainstream and was willing to take many verbal risks only to back off is those risks went bad. Trump doubles down and casts aspersions on anyone who fails to recognize how wonderful he is.
Donald Trump is already developing a totalitarian-style personality cult. What he has not done is a purge of law enforcement (which is almost entirely state and local, anyway) and the Armed Forces (inertia). He sees America having no excuse for failing to coalesce around His Glorious Leadership.
Bill Clinton was a 'tough law-and-order' man. Obama is a stickler for legal niceties, but on the whole, his attitude is that it is best to not do the crime.
Like most fascists, Trump is willing to take some left-wing appeals to convince those on the other side. Tariffs for jobs! But never forget that the objective of Donald Trump is a social order in which 95% suffer for 2%. He is for low wages, high profits (especially from monopolization and privatization), lax regulation so long as the benefits are 'economic' for an elite that backs him. He wants government to represent economic interests above all else, and the bigger the economic interest the more righteous is the share in government. That is Mussolini's Corporate State. Of course, we Americans already have the questionable innovation of government by lobbyist.
Barack Obama could not understand the tribal shift in politics that focused upon ethnic identity as opposed to class interest. He could not understand why rural white people had been going to the political Right, as he was brought up believing (and Obama is now older than the national average as he approaches his 57th birthday) that Democrats are for working people and small farmers while Republicans are for the fat-cats. Yes, it really is about guns and religion; the National Rifle Association has scared people who own a hunting rifle that the liberals for gun control want to take away the deer rifle that is part of the annual excursion to hunt down a deer for venison, and the Religious Right has been successful in scaring people that abortion means that females can get away with sexual immodesty and amorality.
America was definitely
not winning in economics and foreign policy in 2008. Paradoxically, President Obama got conservative results on economics and foreign policy, the latter by going back to what works.
But Trump stands to get bad results. At that, he reminds people of the harsh owner or manager who bullies his subordinates with such a pitch as "Why aren't you suffering more to make me even more filthy-rich?" Donald Trump is normal, all right, if you want someone to serve as a Marxist stereotype of capitalism being led by plutocrats and executives who know restraints on neither indulgence, power, or gain of themselves and suffering for everyone else. For Donald Trump the plutocratic order that he cherishes is a Marxist stereotype of capitalism; the difference is that he endorses what most people consider brutal and inexcusable excess.
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