In Arizona, where Trump’s presidential campaign went from joke to winning proposition in July 2015 with a speech in which Trump said Mexicans were “taking our money” and “killing us,” the honest-man Trump view resonates. Trump was always about language. It didn’t matter that he was a loose cannon. He connected with the widespread disgust at the political class and the media. This was his winning intuition: that he could triumph as the subversive plain-speaking outsider.

Trump had that “kind of bluntness and occasionally even crass language which, if nothing else, at least meant authenticity,” said Jay Heiler, a lawyer considering a run against Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a rare Republican critic of Trump. “The president just hit a lot of nerves that a lot of conventional politicians didn’t even know were there.”

Those nerves still tingle. Nine months into the presidency, the support of Trump’s base remains fervid. I am often asked whether I believe that Trump will be impeached. I’ve taken to responding that it’s more likely he’ll be a two-term president. I’d put the chances of impeachment at under 10 percent and of his re-election at about 25 percent.

That’s partly because the Democratic Party has not yet begun a serious reckoning with its defeat last year. It hasn’t grasped the degree to which it lives, still, in a coastal echo chamber of identity politics and Trump-bashing. Just being anti-Trump won’t cut it. As Chuck Coughlin, a Republican political consultant who once worked for Senator John McCain, put it to me, “Somebody who speaks to common-sense American values — that is what the Democrats need.” I’m not sure who that person is, but I am pretty sure she or he does not reside in New York, Massachusetts or California.

Coughlin went on: “A Democratic Party that can’t tell me how many genders there are, that ain’t flying in this country.”