What Trump Is Running Against

Mark Leibovich: “Other than undocumented immigrants, who represent a go-to boogeyman for the right, Trump’s targets consisted of a bipartisan assembly of the ‘’permanent political class’ that Joan Didion described in her book Political Fictions: that incestuous band of TV talkers, campaign strategists and candidates that had ‘rigged the game’ and perpetuated the scripted awfulness of our politics.”

“Resentment of this class has built over several years. It has been expressed on both sides, by the rise of insurgent movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street… As a reporter in Washington, I, too, have grown exceedingly weary of this world — the familiar faces, recycled tropes and politics as usual — and here was none other than Donald J. Trump, the billionaire blowhard whom I had resisted as a cartoonish demagogue, defiling it with resonance. He tacked not to the left or to the right, but against the ‘’losers’ and ‘scumbags’ in the various chapters of the club: the pundits who ‘wear heavy glasses’ and ‘sit around the table,’ the ‘political hacks’ selling out American interests overseas.”