If you just subscribed after reading this week's Thomas Edsall column in the New York Times that quoted me at length, welcome! Happy to have you here. I hope you stick around. To ensure you do for at least a little while, I'm releasing today's post without a paywall. It will be back next week, so at that point you'll need to become a paying subscriber to finish reading what I have to say. But for today, don't worry about it. Most of my archived posts have paywalls in them, but those from the first six months or so, from June 1, 2022 until around the end of that year should be free and clear. So please read whatever you want from back then without charge. Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement'in George Wallace's populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan's potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush's bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of...
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