In his Monday New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman argued that the rise of Donald Trump from fringe candidate to front-runner isn't a reaction against the Republican establishment, it's the unwitting result of its tacit decision to allow ostensibly moderate party members to attack the "Kenyan Islamic atheist socialist friend of terrorist" in those terms.
Their strategy, Krugman wrote, assumed that voters could be repeatedly fooled without ever catching on -- they could be "persuaded to vote Republican out of rage against Those People, then ignored after the election while the party pursued its true, plutocrat-friendly priorities."
However,
[n]ow comes Mr. Trump, turning the dog whistles into fully audible shouting, and telling the base that it can have the bait without the switch. And the establishment is being destroyed by the monster it created. [So, let's] dispel with this fiction that the Trump phenomenon represents some kind of unpredictable intrusion into the normal course of Republican politics. On the contrary...
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