[!@#$%!]

Forget the Trump Circus: Focus Instead on his Ruinous Policies

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When Trump was elected, Luigi Zingales, an Italian-born professor and a close observer of the smarmy Italian tycoon and politician Silvio Berlusconi — in my view, the closest modern-day parallel to Trump — advised Democrats not to focus on the man or his personality or the latest scandals. Doing so would only reinforce Trump supporters’ views that the discredited establishment was trying to frustrate their champion. Instead, Zingales said, the opposition should probe the forces that brought Trump to power and expose the big lie behind his fake populist posturings.

As Zingales argued, demagogues such as Trump come to power because people are alienated and angry — often justifiably so. The demagogues behave repugnantly, but when the opposition focuses on that awful behavior — as Hillary Clinton did in the election campaign — it is playing a losing hand. The more the elite go after Trump, Zingales suggests, the more people think, “He’s one of us.” Reflecting on this, David Leonhardt of the New York Times concluded, “The successful strategy . . . is to treat the demagogue like a normal politician who is failing to deliver. . . . Democrats need to cast [Trump] more like a plutocrat and feckless president and less like a buffoon and a cartoon villain.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...17b_story.html