Fearless #NeverTrumper Dr. William Kristol warns us not to judge the Trump presidency too early, because he may start discovering here's something to like about the autocrat pumpkinhead:
Donald Trump's victory might seem to confirm Machiavelli's judgment of the omnipresence of the vulgar. But it's increasingly clear that it will be important, going forward, not to judge by mere appearance or short-term outcome.After all, you never know what he might do, as you can easily prove by contemplating all the hypothetical things that might have been done by people who didn't get elected:
America might have been better off, at least in terms of Cold War policy, if the loser rather than the winner had prevailed in most of the recent presidential elections. [Professor Adam Ulam] then went on (as I recall) to entertain us with a somewhat lighthearted and of course speculative account of how a Dewey administration might have deterred the Korean war, a Stevenson administration might not have broken with Britain over Suez, a Nixon administration might not have tempted Khrushchev to provoke the Cuban missile crisis, and a Goldwater administration might have kept us out of Vietnam.Brilliant! Though in my counterfactual world it's just as easy to argue that Truman could have prevented the Korean War, or Johnson the Vietnam disgrace, if he'd only listened to a slightly different mix of advisers, as he later wished he had (not to mention Kennedy, who wins the 1964 election in all sorts of possible worlds):
