@Bigun
I'll concede your point that whomever the candidate was, the Dems and their establishment buddies would have gone after them like they did Trump. But would that candidate have given the Dems so much ammunition to work with? I would argue the answer to that is: no. Also, another area where I think another candidate would have been different is in the basic leadership skills: attracting, hiring, and retaining good staff being chief among them. Trump failed at this in spectacular fashion.
The "Trump Train" was supposed to sweep all before it because of Trump's visionary omnicompetence and because "he's not a politician." But when he failed to bend Congress to his will first-class ticket holders on the train told us he couldn't be blamed because "he's not a politician." First it was an argument that he would succeed, then it was an excuse for failure. All events had to be refracted through the prism of Trump's blamelessness.
The DC establishment definitely had it in for Trump because he threatened their sinecures; actually the Trump movement threatened their sinecures, Trump himself not so much (how much of The Swamp did he simply fire? Damn little). One can argue that had Trump been more effective in tearing down the bureaucracy's fortifications it would have counter-attacked more forcefully. But his administration was sabotaged from the get-go, he was already lied about systematically every night by the MSM, and he was impeached twice on ridiculous false charges; what more could they have done to him that they didn't do? He had much to gain and little to lose by systematically dismissing Executive Agency functionaries who stood in the way of his agenda *and* by vetoing spending bills that continued the bankruptcy of our children past the third generation. And I've read it
right here that Trump is the one with the
steel spine; steel Twitter thumbs seems more like it. Rather than making decisions and being accountable for them he played to the Social Media gallery.
Had he truly been the bulletproof master of flying, invisible, 9-dimensional stealth jedi chess that we were told about, he could have found the sweet spot of building an alliance larger than his own narcissism and using that alliance to drain the swamp. But he simply was not that bulletproof master. That failure doesn't make him a bad person, it just means that his sycophants raised expectations that were impossible to fulfill, just as Obama's sycophants had done eight years earlier.
What distinguishes Reagan from Trump is that Reagan persuaded the entire country to come along with him, to the tune of a 49 state re-election landslide, and he bequeathed a strong enough legacy that his successor could also be elected. There is no successor to Trump because there is nothing to which anyone can succeed; the "Trump Train" derailed and lies strewn in wreckage because the engineer couldn't keep it on the tracks. A lot of that wreckage I hope can be salvaged in the future, but right now, it's just wreckage.
I don't blame the engineer for being who he is, and I voted to keep him in place. I do blame the people who continue telling us the engineer is more than who he is and that we should continue following him.