Temperamentally erratic individuals […] schooled by special class privilege […] will readily see the merits of warlike enterprise and keep alive the tradition of national animosity […] Where it happens that an individual gifted with an extravagant congenital bias of this character […] exposed to circumstances favoring a truculent megalomania and […] placed in […] a position of irresponsible authority and authentic prerogative as will lend countenance to his idiosyncrasies, his bent may easily gather vogue, become fashionable, and with due persistence and shrewd management come so ubiquitously into habitual acceptance as in effect to throw the population at large into an enthusiastically bellicose frame of mind.

Donald Trump's presidency will surely rate among the strangest and most consequential, if not necessarily successful, of American history. And its success is by no means foreclosed. Peace may at last come to the Korean peninsula; the economy might weather tariffs and trade wars; a southern border wall might yet be built; the Russia investigation could come to naught. The nation, history and Robert Mueller will make such judgments. Moreover, in some ways, the Trump presidency is not all that atypical either. It is even familiar. Like other recent Republican presidencies, it has upended regulation, slashed taxes on capital, placed corporate agents in key policy making positions, championed the use of force domestically and abroad, placed generals and neoconservatives in charge of national security and the White House staff, and appointed very conservative judges to the US Supreme Court. Trump has also enjoyed the continued lift of a slowly gathering economic rebound since the calamitous collapse of 2008. Such things would have happened, albeit without so much clamor, bravado and boast, if less barbaric Republican candidates such as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio had become president. Paul Krugman's biting description of the Republican Congress's 2017 oligarchic tax cut could just as well be said of the larger partisan imprint on the Trump era: “both the broad outlines and the fraudulent sales effort would have been pretty much the same under any Republican president.” In the same vein, a Hillary Clinton presidency would have preserved Obama- era social and environmental regulations and probably added some more, but it would have also called on corporate executives as well as technocrats and reformers to operate the government, and it would also have rattled sabers.