Hurricane Trump

Thomas B. Edsall, NYT
SEPT. 23, 2015

“A political storm is not coming. It is already here,” Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster, wrote last week on the website of his firm, Public Opinion Strategies.

The anger voters feel at corporations and the political class has reached heights not seen since the Great Depression.

However long Donald Trump lasts, the forces that prompted his ascent may be more politically consequential than a mere outburst of discontent from Americans in the early stage of a presidential election would suggest. Trump’s improbable success so far may have the potential to shift politics and the policy agenda.

In Trump, Republican primary voters have picked an unexpected standard-bearer for a protest against money in politics. Counterintuitively, the billionaire provocateur boasts of using campaign contributions to buy politicians: “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”

In the first Republican debate, on Aug. 6, Trump elaborated:

I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.

(More here.)