Well, it looks like it’s going to be Clinton vs. Trump this fall.
Donald Trump is delivering his victory speech right now, and I see that he’s officially started his great presidential pivot. He’s mostly saying the same things as always, but saying them with noticeably less bombast than usual. (It’s true that he started to relapse into bluster a bit toward the end, but he’s got plenty of time to learn. Give him a few weeks and he’ll seem almost like a normal person.) And that stage! He’s got the whole American flag thing going, along with a setup designed to look like it’s straight out of the White House briefing room. He’s even taking questions like an ordinary politician.
And just to make it all perfect, he’s got his own personal flunky now. Chris Christie, having sold his soul four days ago, was required to stand dutifully behind Trump the entire time. It looked excruciating. But that’s life in Trumpland. If Christie didn’t know this before, he does now.
In any case, this is the stage of the race in which Trump starts to calm down a bit so that all the Republicans who loathe him can start telling themselves that maybe he’s not so bad after all. With any luck, by August they’ll have completely forgotten that they once thought he was a crypto-fascist demagogue and racist. You’ll know this transformation is happening when people start commenting that he’s “really grown” since those tumultuous early days of the primaries. Stay tuned.
