Even years later, as the same man, now convicted or indicted for a litany of crimes, still easily controls the base of the Republican Party, there is great care on the part of many mainstream liberals to focus on the destructive potential of Trump as a singular entity, a freak storm somehow returned to shore, rather than a symptom of an entirely different climate. This chasm between the thing one pretends to be and the thing one really is—it’s not an exclusively Republican phenomenon.
