Trump's Conventional Logic

James Allan has an interesting piece in Quadrant on the appeal of Donald Trump.

Let me start by laying my cards on the table. Back in 2016 I predicted both the Brexit vote and the Trump win before they happened. Clearly this was in part luck. Partly it was also wish-fulfillment – I wanted both those outcomes, and humans being what they are it was easier to believe what I wanted to believe. But also it was in part due to my then conviction that much of the mainstream media and much of the Establishment had become massively disconnected from the concerns and worldview of the ordinary voter. Candidate Trump ran not just against the Democrats. He also ran against the dominant wing of the Republican Party (many making up today’s ‘Never Trumpers’) and against the outlook and biases of most of the press.

The whole piece is well worth reading, but this paragraph is particularly telling when it comes to the core of the Democrat and Republican approaches.

On top of that the Republican Convention trotted out war veterans, football coaches, Indian chiefs, small business owners, but not the great and good of Hollywood and the Davos caste that populated the Democrat Convention. Basically, the Republicans were big on optimism, big on individual personal choice, big on America as a great country. They left it to the Democrats to try to walk the difficult tightrope of calling half the country racists and then proclaiming ‘but hey, let’s unite’.