One of the luckiest breaks for the United States, and indeed the world, was that Trump never actually governed as the populist he pretended to be.

It’s easy to forget after the last two years — joyrides on the public tab, the evisceration of social programs and consumer protections, the tax bill that seemed to have been written by the Monopoly Man, the handover of regulatory agencies to lobbyists — there was once real danger that Trump would come into office and do something to actually make people’s lives better, pairing a neofascist power grab with the kind of social-democratic policies that today’s Democrats treat with the suspicion of a tourist poking at a strange foreign delicacy.

Had Trump passed some version of universal health care, he would have probably secured a second term, increased the GOP’s domination of Congress, and left the Democrats wandering the political desert for a generation in the political realignment that followed.