The election of Donald Trump was not a triumph of conservatism or any other set of political values. Like the upsurge of nativist and far-right movements in many other countries, and even the rise of Islamic extremism, it was a huge and often unconscious retreat from the complexities of globalism, brought on in large measure by technology, mainly the Internet. It and other such radical-right grandstanding phenomena will end only when enough people in enough places decide to embrace and deal with these complexities instead of retreating from them. In the U.S., the 2018 election will be an indicator of whether this pendulum will swing away from this trend. Given Mueller, who is to my mind a kind of personification of dealing with complexities, if I were in Las Vegas, I would bet, maybe more out of hope than cold logic, that Trump will not finish his first term–will resign, a la Nixon.
Photo by Katherine Bouton