WHY TRUMP? WHY HIM? WHY NOW? John Podhoretz posits that he’s the reckoning for 2008:

Further, imagine that serious proposals arose that the 8 percent of homeowners who had defaulted on their home loans be forgiven their debts—the very proposal in 2009 that led investor Peter Schiff to call for a new “tea party” uprising on the part of the 92 percent who paid their bills on time. Only this time Schiff’s comments had been spoken in 2007. Imagine all these things. And then imagine the presidential race that would have followed. Does the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders suddenly make all the sense in the world? Of course.

But of course the meltdown didn’t happen in 2006. It took place a mere seven weeks before an election. A presidential race that was a dead heat the week before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt turned into an 8-point rout. Barack Obama may have been a “change” candidate, but he had no idea the change would involve repairing the international finance system until that was thrust upon him by circumstance.

The Obama election had a distorting effect on the American response to the meltdown of 2008. The next seven years in American political life came to revolve around him. His actions in the wake of the crisis—a $1 trillion stimulus, the partial nationalization of the auto industry, and Obamacare—became the policy focus of American politics. Republicans opposed them and stopped him dead with the midterm shellacking of 2010. Democrats fought back and secured his reelection in 2012.

As the elections seesawed, Washington froze.

Read the whole thing, which is yet another reminder that Trump is the mirror universe version of an earlier reality show candidate, who similarly served “as a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” even as he goaded his supporters to “argue with neighbors, get in their faces,” “punch back twice as hard,” and bring guns to knife fights:

Update: Don’t Blame Trump for Divisiveness, When the Left Says Stuff Like This.