As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system—a “black swan,” as his ludicrously unqualified son-in-law says—I can’t do it. I can’t keep lying to myself to ward off the depressing reality that I had been lying to myself for decades. There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration
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