we should give credit where credit is due.

Donald Trump has done more to make Liberal policies and Progressive government possible in this country than any other President since FDR.

Just think, at the end of the Obama administration, and with Obamacare finally installed after a hard fight and unscrupulous Republican opposition, we had a government medical insurance system in place that was essentially only a minor improvement over what we had before. Basically, we had the Mitt Romney plan.

The GOP effort to dismantle Obamacare was a flop, in spite of bitter opposition throughout the Obama second term, and two years of Trump after, we still have a health care plan that owes much to the Affordable Care Act. And the Republicans were unable to implement any replacement for it, even with solid majorities in the House and Senate. What they have managed to do is leave behind a great nostalgia for the ACA and a bungled mess that pleases nobody. The Obama reforms were popular, and now the public is clamoring for them, and the GOP is unable to deliver anything. At the start of 2008, even the slight reforms of the Obama plan were barely possible, in spite of his legislative advantages. Today, people are talking about Socialized Medicine and Medicare for All as if they were achievable with the next President, and essentially every declared Democratic candidate for 2020 has that on his or her platform. A full National Health program, as now exists in the rest of the civilized world, is on the horizon for America.

In 2016, we had a wild maverick candidate from Vermont with the courage to call himself a Democratic Socialist. Today, every Progressive in the political arena is proudly declaring himself a Democratic Socialist. Think about it, “Socialist” is no longer a dirty word in American politics. That is an enormous change.

Trump, like many a Republican before him, ran on a platform of bringing a businessman into the White House. Well, now, the American people see what that got us. There is no other way we will elect another one any time soon after his performance.

The organization and rank and file of the GOP is now totally part of the Trump camp. Without him, there will be no other Republican institutions, press outlets, think tanks, funding sources, etc left to campaign for the next GOP nominee. The moderate Republican institutions and personalities have been broken up and driven off (even the Tea Party is no more) as RINOs and the Freedom Caucus and other Trumpers are so discredited and tainted by his excesses that it will take them another generation to re-emerge from the wreckage. When Trump goes, the Trump GOP goes with him. Rush and Alex may survive, but FOX News will go under. The major, respected Conservative institutes, publications and personalities that do survive will have been burned so badly by his antics that it will take them decades to regain their influence. How long before the National Review comes back, eh? And it will look as much like the old one as the new Firing Line resembles the old.

But most of all, the solid Republican constituency once represented by McCain, Dole, Rockefeller and Eisenhower will remember how their fellow Republicans caved to a grotesque buffoon, a thug and a bully, a fraud and a traitor, and handed the party of Lincoln to the Robber Barons and the knuckle draggers without even a token struggle. And Democrats will remember it too. We know now that Conservatives simply cannot be trusted with power. Their only intellectual principle is the cutting of corporate taxes and the maximization of corporate profit.

The mess left behind will need cleaning up, and its unlikely too many Conservatives will be chosen for the job. They’ve had their chance, and now we know what they did and what they really wanted for this country. And the country will be younger, and browner, better educated, more urban, and more Liberal. Not only will “Liberal” no longer be a dirty word. Neither will “intellectual”. And people will call themselves “Conservative” only after first specifying in great detail how much they differ from the last one.

Just think, Donald Trump may not just be remembered by history as the President that made a Socialist America possible. He will probably be remembered as the President that made a Socialist America necessary.