I have before observed that the great tragedy of the 2016 electoral contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton wasn’t so much what the race was as what it wasn’t: a campaign for mayor of New York City. Mayor of New York is a big job in politics, or at least it used to be (one can imagine Rudy Giuliani as Norma Desmond: “I am big—it’s the politics that got small!”), and it is a job for which either Trump or Clinton would have been reasonably well-suited. Trump’s only real nearly unqualified success in public life was (or ) a local project in Manhattan (he led a renovation of the Central Park ice-skating rink) and Clinton, who has always and at every turn been overestimated in her public life, probably should not have begun her career in elected office serving as a senator from a state in which she had never lived, a job she took very lightly as she sat around waiting to be made president.
Trump’s lack of fitness for the presidency has—this is a kind of historical oddity—been made even more clear by his having served one catastrophic term in that office, during which his laziness, his incompetence, and his penchant for were laid quite bare for public inspection. Kamala Harris is a bit like Clinton in that she was elected to the Senate from a state so entirely dominated by her party as to make the general election a practical formality (California’s Democratic primaries are another story, of course) and then became the Democratic nominee after .
