Donald Trump’s Great Bait and Switch

In her gracious concession speech last Wednesday, Hillary Clinton said of her victorious opponent, Donald Trump, “We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.” That’s an admirable sentiment, but it doesn’t mean we can ignore how the President-elect puts together a government. Trump isn’t just another politician, and we shouldn’t pretend he is. Moreover, in 2008, we saw how the decisions taken immediately after the election proved immensely consequential. When President Obama brought in the Robert Rubin crew to run economic policy, he effectively committed himself to a bank bailout that stabilized the financial crisis and put the economy back on the road to growth, but also produced a huge populist backlash, which, as we saw last Tuesday, is still reverberating.