Trump and the Collapse of the Old Order

Peggy Noonan: “I would like to point out a simple fact. A major and unnoticed part of Donald Trump’s power is that 100% of Americans know who ‘the president’ is, including children above 5 and nonnative speakers. I base this on personal interactions with strangers of all sorts. Since I made up ‘100%’ because there’s no way to prove it, I will guess at some other numbers I believe to be true. Eighty percent know, in some broad sense, what his policies are, and more than 60% have some sense of an action he took last week: ‘He fired everybody.'”

“No modern president has achieved this level of complete cultural saturation. It gives him power in this ill-educated, broken-up, low-attention-span country…”

“You have to keep this in mind to understand the moment we’re in. Mr. Trump has pierced American consciousness in this way. He has broken through as an instantly recognizable, memeable, cartoonable figure—the hair, the red tie, the mouth—but he also provides, deliberately and not, iconic moments that connect to other iconic moments.”