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Did Trump really go to war with the establishment? His largest legislative accomplishment was a huge corporate tax cut. That strikes me as about as establishment as it comes.
I get that he says things like “drain the swamp”, but it’s very unclear to me that he was anti establishment at all aside from his personality.
His personality is enough to ruin him. The Establishment wants defense in depth. It’s easier to defend your way of doing things when the Schelling point is based on personalities, rather than policies.
If the Establishment didn’t do everything it could to destroy Trump and make an example out of him, then there could be a future Trump who goes a bit further. Someone with Trump’s appeal but who could also seriously change policy and the way things are done.
It’s the same reason why progressives have ratcheted up the social movement lunacy to defend pedophiles (as MAPs) and transgenders. When all of the oxygen in the room is being sucked on these topics, it means that people aren’t challenging gay marriage (which was a controversial topic only 12 years ago). Gay marriage is effectively off-limits until the pedo-question is settled, so progressives have an incentive to waste people’s time on pedophiles so that they aren’t having to defend gays. Even though it’s a harder assignment defending pedophiles rather than gays.
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Different establishment. The establishment that cares about corporate tax cuts probably has some cultural and interpersonal overlap with the establishment that is involved in New York judicial system but it is not like that they are the same set of people with coherent agenda.
The establishment is like the Man -- fuzzy concept that sometimes have informative uses but still fuzzy, which makes it too imprecise and underdefined for other uses.
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Well, he LARP'ed going to war with the establishment, and the establishment had reasons, both valid and more Machiavellian for taking his LARP seriously. The "lock her up chants" were unprecedented norm-breaking, even if he never followed through with it. In many ways, Trump did the worst possible thing by taunting the bear but then being actually very weak in power and letting the establishment run roughshod over him (eg the Russia-gate investigation leading to a crippling investigation and imprisonment of his men).
I think the thing that legitimately scared the establishment is that he would transgress certain taboos, and verbally come out against the bipartisan consensus on certain issues, and rather than groveling after such transgressions he would plow ahead. That meant he could not be controlled by establishment norms in the same way most high-profile Republicans in the past have been controlled.
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