First, we should remember that a large part of the anti-Trump eruption is cultural. Trump is obviously neither a conventional US politician nor a standard-issue international statesman. These differences, mostly stylistic but with substantive implications, are terribly threatening to his opponents; for his supporters, they are beyond doubt among his most attractive attributes. Trump doesn’t light candles to establishment icons, doesn’t talk the way smooth liberals talk, and most assuredly doesn’t care what America’s mainstream media say. It recalls a cartoon (famous among arms-control sceptics) of Indians on horseback circling a fort in the West, shooting flaming arrows at the wooden structure. A soldier on the parapet turns to another and asks: “Are they allowed to do that?” Trump’s answer is “Yes indeed!”

These cultural deviations have assumed an importance outweighing policy shifts like the coming repeal of ObamaCare, substantial economic deregulation, and the demise of the Iran nuclear deal. But that does not reduce the significance of those policy shifts. It merely masks them in a way which is considerably less naive than the usual portrayals of Trump suggest him to be.

Second, there is simply no argument that overwhelming numbers of Americans across the political spectrum were stunned that Trump beat Hillary Clinton on November 8. One can argue about the accuracy of 2016’s public-opinion polls; one can condemn those dead white males who created the constitution’s electoral college; and one can bewail the unfairness that Hillary Clinton has now twice blown politically “certain” victories in presidential contests, but nothing will change the outcome. For “the resistance,” that is the core problem.