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All concepts of strategy and tactics have wide application and, to use a military simile, Trump’s mopping-up of the disaffected vote was like the German army bypassing the Maginot Line of antiquated Bush-McCain-Romneyism, and sweeping the British and northern French armies into the sea at Dunkirk in 1940. The sequel began with the Republican convention, and a sober and unfrightening and syntactically unexceptionable Trump now regales the nation with the unfathomable duplicity and corruption of the Clintons, as the southern march on Paris (Washington) gets underway. (I am not assimilating Trump to the Nazis any more than I am likening Clinton to the semi-fascist defeatists of Philippe Pétain and Vichy; this is strategy.)

The last forest, still undetected by the commentariat, is that this is the last play for the American political centre. A democratic Marxist, Sanders, pulled Hillary Clinton 60 degrees to the left and still received almost half the primary votes, defeated only by the ex officios as Clinton herself was by Obama in 2008. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican runner-up, took 30 per cent of the vote for a far-right program, and most of Trump’s supporters were voting for a cultural revolution, though for little policy radicalism apart from the issues of illegal immigration and some trade agreements. The traditional centrists are not a majority in either party or in the country.

If the next president, Trump or Clinton, is not more successful than anyone in that office since Ronald Reagan, the far right or the far left is going to take over the most powerful government in the world in four years. Then the fatuous alarms about Trump being an extremist, as opposed to just a rather coarse candidate at times, will be well founded. There will then be no distinction between woods and trees, and instead of Longfellow’s “union strong and great” we will be wandering in his “forest primeval.”