Donald Trump: America's Berlusconi?

[The Wonkette]

Is Donald Trump Jimmy Carter?  This Slate writer appears to believe so.  He considers the possibility that Trump might be FDR but puts the odds of that as low.

Quote:Is Donald Trump going to be a transformative president, in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan? Or will he be more like Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter, a president whose failures pave the way for a transformative successor?

A number of thinkers on the left, including Jack Balkin of Yale Law School, have been asking that question since Trump’s victory in November, drawing on political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s influential “political time” thesis. The basic idea is that there is a recurring pattern in presidential history, which starts when a transformative presidency creates a new political order out of the ashes of an older one (think the transition from Hoover to FDR). This transformative president is typically followed by a loyal disciple (Harry Truman, for example), and then by a president of the opposite party who has little choice but to operate within the existing political order (Dwight Eisenhower). As long as a given political order persists, power rotates between presidents who are devoted to the reigning political orthodoxy (John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) and those who resist that orthodoxy but can’t quite dislodge it (Richard Nixon). Skowronek’s cycle ends with a president who seeks to uphold a political order that is on the verge of collapse due to internal conflicts and contradictions that grow ever more difficult to reconcile. In the cycle that began with FDR, the unlucky president left holding the bag was Carter. The Georgia governor tried to keep together a New Deal coalition that united Northern liberals and Southern conservatives via his idiosyncratic mishmash of Christian moralism and technocratic wonkery, but he instead triggered intense intra-party opposition, up to and including a formidable primary challenge from Ted Kennedy. These “disjunctive” presidencies inevitably fail and pave the way for the next transformative presidency.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...arter.html