Trump's Populist Uprising Takes Him All the Way to White House

Two engines propelled Donald Trump’s rise from longshot to next president of the United States: an angry message of nativist populism, directed at the very elites among whom he’d spent his adult life, and his loquacious, volcanic, uncontrollable, made-for-television personality. They pushed him further than anyone had believed possible, and made fools of many a pundit who held to his underdog status until the final hours of election night.

Most journalists, along with the people with whom they live their lives in America’s cities and college towns, had a hard time believing that Trump was more than a novelty act gone much too far. That turned out to be a stunning instance of epistemic closure. For tens of millions of Americans across the red states and in many of the battleground states held by Barack Obama in the past two elections, Trump became the embodiment of their acute frustration with elites who brokered trade deals that bled the nation of jobs and allowed too many foreigners to enter the country, legally and illegally, and who insisted that things were getting better when they seemed to be getting worse.