"Make America Migrate"—this was the headline on the cover of today's edition of one of New York's finest newspapers, the Daily News, following Donald Trump's success in yesterday's primary elections. Much has been written about how the Republican party has come to this (including E. J. Dionne's columns posted here as well as his latest book, Why the Right Went Wrong). But for logic, evidence, and brevity it is hard to beat Thomas Edsall's analysis, "Why Trump Now?" in one of New York's other newspapers.

Edsall surveys the fall in wages, downward mobility, jobs to China, the 2008 financial collapse, the bail out, and the foreclosure epidemic. The populist appeal for Trump lies in the accumulation of all of these events. 

Edsall sums it up: "The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand. If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader. If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him."

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Margaret O’Brien Steinfels is a former editor of Commonweal. 

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