Trump Sees the United States as a Country Like Any Other

Crispin Rovere

Politics,

The Republican front-runner is no fascist. He's not even particularly extreme.

I am one of the few who early on predicted Donald Trump's ascendancy to the GOP nomination. Last year I also outlined in clear terms how this outcome would be achieved. 

This gives me a good vantage point from which to evaluate other pundits, many of whom are facing harsh realities in the wake of Arizona and Florida, in particular. Some have acknowledged they made mistakes and openly canvassed where they went wrong. Yet many more can be divided into three categories: charlatans; denialists; and messiahs. 

Charlatans are those who made a career out of (mis)perceptions of their predictive abilities. They claim to have tools and algorithms that enable them to reduce elections to high confidence probabilities. Now that their pseudo experiments have proved worthless, they're scrambling to re-write history and preserve non-existent credibility.

Denialists are those conservative GOP journalists and commentators who simply refuse to believe that Trump could be their nominee. Even now they monstrously advocate stealing the election and overturning the democratic process. For denialists, this whole election is an exercise in complicated grief.