Maybe America needed Trump

You don't appreciate political norms until they're gone.

If you squint hard enough you can find a silver lining about the blood-soaked legacies of even the worst tyrants and dictators. Fidel Castro gave poor Cubans access to health care. Pinochet left Chile in a pretty good economic position. Joseph Stalin beat Hitler. Adolf Hitler killed Hitler.

Donald Trump was not a dictator - being a real dictator would have taken too much of his precious golf and Fox and Friends time - and amidst the wreckage of his failed, divisive Presidency, he occasionally did something right. He made a few tentative steps toward criminal justice reform, brokered some peace deals between Israel and Muslim states, and actually avoided getting his country involved in any new wars.

Most importantly, I feel like the United States of America needed a populist demagogue like Trump to get elected to illustrate, once and for all, just how populist demagoguery works in practice. Stop taking politics seriously, take for granted the political norms that have served the co…