Of course, Trump and his supporters would bristle at the idea that he was just following in Obama’s footsteps. Much of the time Trump seems to be a living paraphrase of Karl Rove’s statement: “We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.”
But there are important facts too easily forgotten in the panic caused by the Trump reality distortion field. His base is unswayable, but it is far from the majority. Trump supporters represent at most 26% of America’s eligible voters.
He lost to Hillary Clinton – an unpopular candidate – by 3 million votes.Trump has had a galvanizing effect on the Democratic grassroots. A year ago, during the midterm elections, I spent a Saturday morning in suburban Atlanta with a bunch of Democratic party volunteers who were
canvassing the neighborhood. They were overwhelmingly women who had no prior political experience. Many had gone on the Million Women March the day after the Trump inauguration.
All over the US, people like them helped the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives. In Georgia, Lucy McBath, a woman of colour, ran as an anti-gun candidate in Newt Gingrich’s old district and won. Stacey Abrams, another black woman, came within a
whisker – and a bunch of suppressed ballots – of winning the governorship of that state. The trend continued into 2019’s off-year election. Democrats took over the legislature in Virginia. They kept hold of the governorship in Louisiana.
The Democrats’ surge in the old Confederacy included taking the governorship of Kentucky – despite the Republican tying himself tightly to Trump.
