The former president has fought the lefty media, a corrupt federal government and a politicized judicial system — and looks poised to win

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The renomination of Donald Trump makes him only the second president who could win nonconsecutive terms. This induces me to return to my annual attempt to explain to Canadian Trump-haters the sources of the present stark division in American politics. In 2015, Donald Trump was almost the only prominent American who detected the level of discontent in the lower half of American income earners. Donald Trump had been polling comprehensively across the United States for years. He saw the political implications of these figures and concluded that the bipartisan consensus in Washington was failing a steadily larger number of Americans.

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His public personality was of the Leo Durocher and Cassius Clay genre of tough and brash speaking and frequent exaggerations, in the manner of New York developers. To many, it was a caricature of the ugly American: boastful, bellicose and a braggart. This is at considerable variance with his charming and endlessly entertaining private personality, but it does appeal to a great many Americans who are aggressively annoyed about their condition. Americans were largely sympathetic to Trump’s critique of post-Reagan American politics: the federal government was composed entirely of Democrats in an entirely Democratic city where Democrats and Republicans who were almost indistinguishable from Democrats in policy terms politely exchanged incumbency as the country steadily drifted left, but with sweetheart arrangements for Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. So comfortable and complacent were the ruling elites, they had no........

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