Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Why?

We begin today with Charles Blow of The New York Times offering some explanations why large segments of the American electorate are considering a second term for Donald Trump.

We shouldn’t be here. We have a president who, on the whole, has had a successful first term and has capably performed the principal function for which he was elected: to return the country to normalcy and prevent more damage being done to it by his predecessor. [...]

Some voters exalt in a revisionist history in which destroyers are viewed as disrupters, in which our own past anxieties are downplayed.

In the view of many of these voters, even with his evident faults, Trump “isn’t so bad” and what he did in office is increasingly remembered as positive, including shaking up the Washington establishment and the political status quo. For those losing faith in government in general, this may be attractive — the nightmarish Trump days somehow converted into halcyon ones.

In that same scenario, some seem to be experiencing a false sense of invincibility, the kind that you might experience after surviving a car wreck, in which you come to see your escape from the worst as proof that the danger was less potent than it once seemed, and that you’re more resilient than you might have thought.