February 14, 2018--Hence, Donald Trump

In case anyone is still wondering why Donald Trump was elected, in a few words, in her Sunday New York Times column, Maureen Dowd, who has recently turned more attention to interviewing celebrities (Uma Thurman last week) than writing about our depressing politics, returned to biting form and supplied as good an answer as I have seen. 

Here are the first few paragraphs--

Donald Trump slipped into the Oval Office through a wormhole of confusion about American identity.  

We weren’t winning wars anymore. They just went on and on and on, with inexplicable and deceptive aims and so many lives and limbs and trillions lost.  

We couldn’t believe in our institutions, with breaches of trust and displays of ineptitude.  

We were moving from a white-majority, male-dominated country and manufacturing base to a multicultural, multilateral, globalized, P.C., new energy, new technology world, without taking account of the confusion and anger of older Americans who felt like strangers in a strange land.  

Among many, the allure of Barack Obama’s brainy nuance had given way to a longing for a more muscular certainty.  

With the Russians sowing confusion, Trump surfed those free-floating anxieties, that fear of not knowing who we are, straight to Pennsylvania Avenue.