Donald Trump just pulled off the greatest scam in American history

Having spent a good portion of the last year and a half documenting, exploring, and considering the depths of Donald Trump's depravity, I confess that at times I wondered whether there was much point to it all. Sure, he was an interesting character — even if he lacked the kind of moral and intellectual complexity that would make for a truly compelling villain — but if what everyone assumed would happen did indeed happen and he went down to an emphatic defeat, what was it all for? Yes, Trump as a phenomenon was still vitally important for what it told us about our politics, our media, and our society. But as an individual person, how much would his quirks and pathologies really matter in the end?

Well things look rather different today, don't they?

Trump's supporters will say that nobody thought this was possible because everyone doing the predicting was a coastal elitist out of touch with the heartland folk who pushed him to an Electoral College victory. But the truth is that no one involved in politics — Republican, Democrat, or otherwise — predicted he would win. The only people who claimed he would were in the employ of the Trump campaign, and even they didn't seem to believe it when they said it.

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There are a hundred explanations for what happened on Tuesday, and it will take a good deal of time to sort them all out. But I'm sure many on the right will gleefully compare the shock among Democrats to what happened to Republicans in 2012, when they were convinced that Mitt Romney was headed for victory. The difference is that four years ago, Republicans refused to believe what the polls were telling them, and the polls were largely right. This year, Democrats believed what the polls were telling them, and they were largely wrong. Though perhaps not as wrong as you might think — the margins were small but persistent, and they all pointed in the same direction, and as of this writing it appears that Clinton will have won more votes.

But now, Donald Trump's personal quirks will matter a great deal. An ample majority of the public has thought all along that Trump has neither the qualifications nor the temperament to be president — yet millions of people believed that about him and voted for him anyway. And they'll find out what they were voting for.

In modern history we've never seen a president who was less a creature of his party, and for many of Trump's supporters that was a big part of the attraction. But what they may not have realized is that when they bought Trump, they'll be getting the GOP and its agenda as part of the deal.

How many of those working-class whites are on Medicaid, or use subsidies to get health coverage from the Affordable Care Act? They can kiss that goodbye. Were they hoping for a big tax cut? Sorry, when congressional Republicans write their tax-cutting bill it'll be the wealthy who reap the benefits. Hope they're ready for some new restrictions on abortion, and more pollution in their communities, and fewer rights on the job, because all that's coming too.

And if they think Trump will put the brakes on it, they've got another thing coming, because the most important thing to understand about Donald Trump when it comes to policy is, he just doesn't care. His ignorance is matched by his indifference. He didn't get this far by reading briefing books and having a grasp of how government works.

And that's where his personality matters: It will allow Republicans to go hog-wild on legislation, while he spends his time... well, doing something or other, it's not quite clear. The area of most profound danger is in foreign policy, where the president has the greatest latitude to act on his own and where Trump's pettiness, his vindictiveness, his stupidity, and his impulsiveness could lead to outright catastrophe, and not the slow and steady catastrophe of Republican economic and social policy, but the kind of quick and dramatic catastrophe in which large numbers of people wind up suddenly dead.

But Trump voters aren't worried. They are sure President Trump will convince the Chinese to give us back our jobs, and bring back coal and steel, and roll back the last half-century of social progress. And then there'll be so much winning, we'll get tired of winning.

Eventually they'll wind up like the marks he took in with Trump University — taken in by the flash of golden cufflinks and the power of his celebrity, they'll eventually figure out that it was all a scam. But by the time they do, the damage will be done.