How Did Trump Happen?

     As the epochal train wreck of the Donald Trump victory has the world searching for meaning, I am reminded of a story that was much liked by one of my old newspaper colleagues. It concerned a young boy who yearned to be a railroad man.
     When he came of age, the boy went straight to the railroad company and applied for a job. Well, said the manager, you'll have to take our employment test.  The boy did so, and waited in the lobby while the manager graded the result.
     I'm sorry, the manager said when he had finished.  The test says you don't have the aptitude for railroad work.  But there's good news. The test results say you'd make a perfect journalist.
     A journalist? the boy said. What do you mean?
     It's in your answer to question number seventeen, the manager said.
     I don't remember the numbers, the boy said.  Which one was that?
     The question was: What would you do if you were handling the master controls of a railroad switch yard, and you saw two trains hurtling toward each other from opposite directions on the same track?
     The boy's answer was: I'd run and get my brother, because he's never seen a train wreck.
     In the search for meaning,  I'm with those who think -- for starters -- that the press was complicit by dereliction in Trump's rise. My former associates in the fourth estate were too long willing for him to use them as megaphones, and too long reluctant to call a toad a toad.
     Part of the reason, surely, was simple surprise. We had not before seen this level of barefaced corruption in a presidential nominee. The traditional methods and standards of the press corps were unprepared for it.  In the bedrock ethic of the profession, reporting and commentary were to stop somewhere short of participation. If Trump was a ghastly nominee he was, after all, the nominee.  The selection was not up to the press to make.
    The impact of surprise was compounded by a time-wrought change in the character of the press itself. Competence has declined.  Where once the national press included not a few accomplished students of public affairs, it is now peppered with mere spectators, and polemicists.  When these don't say much of consequence, it's because they don't  have much of consequence to say.
     Trump's nomination emerged from a perfect storm of arithmetic happenstance.  A substantial majority of Republican primary votes were cast against him.  But they were scattered across a splintered and confused field of opponents. A whopping majority of those eligible to vote didn't bother. He took the nomination by winning a fraction of a fraction of the eligible vote.
     Yet, in the general election, half the electorate favored him. (We will be amply reminded in the days ahead that half did not.) Thus the search for meaning: What in the name of sanity were Trump voters thinking?
     Some of them were expressing the racial and ethnic bigotry that Trump vigorously stirred, but this cannot be the centerpiece of his appeal to a nation that twice elected Barack Obama.  Others reflected an aggregation of various single-issue passions. Emblematic might be the evangelical leader who said he was willing to accept Trump's ethical sickness as the price of having conservative Supreme Court nominees.
     A portion of blame can be assigned to party-line voting -- a convention now carried to such extremes that entire legislative districts are ceded to one party or another, and elections are little short of sham. With this verdict goes a corollary hunch: Republican loyalists did not feel that Trump's cynical duplicity represented a fundamental departure from established political norms. This view has surely been fed, alas, by years of dereliction in Congress,  and by two presidential campaigns featuring mercenary, celebrity wannabes masquerading as serious candidates.
     A Trump presidency will be a challenge for him as well as the nation -- and not only because of his comprehensive incompetence for the job.  The bigots and zealots he has energized will be a long time crawling back under their rocks. He will be taxed to sell them on constructive participation in a system whose integrity he himself has savagely impugned.
      The Trump victory will be portrayed by some as a mandate. It is no such thing. It is an aggregation of factors, some of which are cohesively related to each other, but many of which share only this moment in history. (He may yet lose the popular vote, and he ran against an historically unpopular opponent.)
      Some others will say that this phenomenon should have been impossible in the United States. The founders of our country would shush them. Precisely against such eventualities, they designed our system of government to be bigger than any person or party. In particular, it is designed to outlast temporal moods in the electorate. The founders knew that their provisos could someday be needed.
      The system remains in our care. Going forward, the quality of our national life will depend on our not flagging in care of it. If we cannot for a time respect our president, we can hold our noses and do citizens' work in respecting, energizing and enlisting in the rule of law. Today's circumstances have been delivered to us in part by fellow Americans who believed that citizenship could safely be a part-time job.
     It can't.