There's an element of clowning and entertainment to Trump, that makes it surreal and hard to understand to what extent he is pretending to be a fascist or an authoritarian.

Donald Trump will be a tragedy, a sad joke in American history.

One of the things we've learned during the Obama era is how important norms are, because we've seen how the Republican Party behaved against Obama. So much of what they did was to smash pre-existing norms, which were nothing more than assumptions of how people would behave, which didn't have any real basis in rules or limits.

At best, Trumpism will be a more right-wing version of the same old Republican Party.

In the long run, however much damage we come through, Obama's vision is the one that's going to be left standing. It's a question of how much pain and suffering America has to endure in the meantime.

Illiberal left ideology has its greatest strength on campuses because campuses are one of the few places in American life where a certain kind of far-left politics can actually impose hegemony on other ideas and really control the discourse in a way it can't in most places in American life where even moderate liberals are more of a minority.

In some ways, Trump is just going to continue the trend: by continuing the norm-smashing behaviour that Republicans used in opposition.