We Must Not Forget that Trump and Reagan Both Became President by Accident
I should state up front that this column can be added to the "failing to remember history, doomed to repeat it" file. There is nothing new, of course, to the admonition that it is important to understand history. Although that is indeed an old point, it nonetheless needs to be repeated again and again, because too many people forget. And because history inescapably gets longer, while attempts to rewrite it -- especially in this era of pathological lying from the Oval Office -- are part of an ongoing disinformation campaign, the specifics matter. As I will argue below, there is an alarming kind of retroactive triumphalism about Trump's 2016 and 2024 electoral outcomes that is disconnected from reality, a triumphalism that we can also see in contemporary commentary about Ronald Reagan. Those two accidental presidents are now treated as all but inevitable by people who have simply decided to impute their own spin on what "the American People" said with their vo...