Trump Turned GOP Into Party of Wishful Thinking

Gerard Baker: “For a political class that likes to think of itself as a hardened cadre of cold-eyed realists, the leadership of the Republican Party has indulged in comically wishful thinking about the most consequential figure in recent political history.”

“When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage to lead his improbable insurgency of the dispossessed, most top Republicans assumed he was a joke and could never win. The party’s senators, who wouldn’t recognize an insurgency if it were presented to their nether regions on the sharp end of a pitchfork, with one exception dismissed him as a carnival barker.”

“When the iron duly entered their hides—if not their souls—they hurriedly made their peace with their new leader. When, against the odds (and, one suspects, the wishes of more than a few of them), he won the presidency, the wishing only intensified. Some believed, or hoped, that somehow the office would become him, that the mystical mingling of the man and the presidency would elevate the former rather than debase the latter. How did that work out?”