SUMMER RERUNS:

Unlike Reagan and Murphy and other entertainers turned pols who sought and won elective office, however, Trump has no clear or consistent ideology, no set of larger conservative ideas about government's role in America's economy and society. He is more akin to single-issue candidates such as Ross Perot, another eccentric billionaire who made deficit reduction his signature issue on his way to winning 19 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 presidential election. (Like Trump, Perot also wrote a book dispensing life advice for his admirers.) In Trump's case, though, his issue, immigration, extends and deepens the racism and nativism that has deep roots in our politics. Drawing on strains of venom from the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s to Strom Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrat presidential run of 1948, Trump has built his campaign on exploiting issues of race, identity and status to blame the country's economic and social woes on immigrants from Latin America. Wittingly or not, he has made illegal immigration the most identifiable crux of his policy agenda, lashing immigrants as rapists and criminals. [...]

His ability to graft nativist appeals onto his anti-media broadsides (another well-trod meme honed by, among others, former Vice President Spiro Agnew), and his TV-fueled, carnival-like showmanship have all enabled him to become a significant, if not wholly unprecedented, force in the presidential campaign. His brand of politics has been fueled by a cultural and media environment that enables him and his followers to broadcast his messages on Twitter and Facebook and in countless television interviews and news conferences instantaneously. Yet Trump, for all his apparent strength in the polls, is such an outsider in Republican Party politics that other than as a media-entertainment phenomenon, his impact is likely to be short-lived. He has damaged the GOP's brand and sucked some of the air from the Hillary Clinton email story. Yet he has little ideological support within the Republican Party's leadership, even less support among the general electorate, and has mainly served to divide the country further along lines of ethnicity and race.

For all his flamboyance, this is one media and political drama that we have seen before. If nobody knows how or when it ends, its origins are rooted in the history of American politics. Trump has come to embody the contemporary popular affinity for wealthy nonpoliticians and other voices of protest that blame immigrants, people of color and politicians for the nation's alleged destruction and claim to be able to fix Washington and restore America's halcyon days.

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