Opinion | The Wave That Could Carry Trump to Re-election - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...trump-2020-campaign.html
populism elite backlash immigration climate change policies
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our “America First” president ought to be viewed in a global context
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Mr. Trump benefits from incumbency and continued economic recovery, and he’s riding a wave of national populism that has yet to crest.
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Only two of the nine presidents up for re-election since World War II have lost. In the past century the public has booted a party from the White House after a single term just once
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The United States is not engaged in a major war. And the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 has continued under Mr. Trump, with unemployment at half-century lows. Manufacturing employment has increased. Economic growth approached 3 percent last year. The Dow Jones industrial average has increased by about a third since Inauguration Day 2017
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The willingness and capacity of electorates to absorb large numbers of newcomers would be on the ballot. The answer was not what leaders had in mind.
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Mr. Trump is wary of foreign entanglements, and a slowdown is not the same as a recession. Sustained peace and prosperity improve Mr. Trump’s chances of a second term.
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Behind the rise of outsider politicians such as Mr. Trump are the interrelated issues of unchecked immigration, terrorism and the imposition of carbon taxes and other measures to mitigate climate change
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Elites’ inability or lack of interest in tackling these problems — or even seeing them as problems — generates a crisis of representation in which large numbers of voters look for alternatives
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Mr. Trump was among the first heralds of an anti-elitist turn that has disrupted politics from London to Melbourne. The issues animating this upheaval have not disappeared.
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The attacks at the Bataclan theater in Paris in November 2015, at an office party in San Bernardino, Calif., two weeks later and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016 heightened fears of terrorism. Elites downplayed the ideology of the assailants for fear of an anti-Muslim backlash, opening themselves up to charges of political correctness
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Efforts to fight climate change through regulation, international treaties and carbon pricing provoked a similar anti-elitist response.
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What unites these issues is the idea that elites insulate themselves from the costs of the policies they impose on others. It is the idea on which Mr. Trump and his anti-elitist supporters base their campaigns