On the face of it, Trump is Reagan on steroids. His towering size, his nativist US supremacism, his down-home talk, and his reality-show confidence make him ideal for the role of bullying and big lies from the oval office. He is America come to meet itself in larger-than-life image to rejuvenate it as its pride slips away in third-world conditions and a multi-polar world.

While Trump’s narrative is that the American Dream seeks recovery again, the dominant media and political elite relentlessly denounce him as an implicit fascist and disastrous fake. Something deeper is afoot. An untapped historic resentment is boiling up from underneath which has long been unspeakable on the political stage. Trump has mined it and proposed a concrete solution always denied of his candidacy. From his promise to halve the Pentagon’s budget to getting the Congress off corporate-donation payrolls, the public money that the big corporate lobbies stand to lose from a Trump presidency are off the charts. But his attackers dare not recognize these explosive issues because they are all part of the problem. More

The April issue of The Atlantic includes a long essay on President Barack Obama. It appears to be based on intermittent interviews author Jeffrey Goldberg had with the president. It is a slick production. Just slick enough to fool the garden-variety reader with little political knowledge beyond the empty carbs he or she has ingested from the mainstream media. The piece is studded with glamorous staged photos of the president in moments of repose—a historical figure resting on his historical laurels.

These images are smartly interspersed with the man at work, that effective contrast of deliberation and decisive action. There is our man of the hour, gripping the podium and delivering the high-flown words on which our fates depend; listening intently to the tomfoolery of Russian leader Vladimir Putin (“He’s not completely stupid.”); deigning to shake the liver-spotted paw of Cuban President Raul Castro (while in other rooms Fidel pens furious denunciations of Washington policy); at times of dreary tedium (sitting at a table flanked with crusty white men in suits and epaulets); staring across the table at the doughy visage of David Cameron, with his cohort of obsequious Atlanticists; dispensing wisdom to Japanese President Shinzo Abe in a stretch limousine; charming children in Kuala Lumpur (perhaps while staff scurry to find his real birth certificate); being given the death stare by frightening U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power; and on and on. More

Let’s face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land -- otherwise considered sacrosanct -- becomes nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared, panicky, or just plain pissed off.

The examples are legion. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln arbitrarily suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ignored court orders that took issue with his authority to do so. After U.S. entry into World War I, the administration of Woodrow Wilson mounted a comprehensive effort to crush dissent, shutting down anti-war publications in complete disregard of the First Amendment. Amid the hysteria triggered by Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order consigning to concentration camps more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, many of them native-born citizens. Asked in 1944 to review this gross violation of due process, the Supreme Court endorsed the government’s action by a 6-3 vote. More