This describes nearly perfectly the political phenomenon which made Donald Trump the president and the Democrats an endangered political party. A previous iteration of this piece contained its source, but he asked us to remove his identity for fear that were it to be disclosed he’d suffer economic consequences as a result. That’s where we are, and it’s a pretty good indication of why the public is rejecting not only the Hillary Clintons, but also the Jon Ossoffs of the world as well.

To wit…

“Truly one of the silliest memes the left is trotting out is the idea that Trump doesn’t care about the country or is a traitor to Russia. Those of you repeating this have zero idea how crazy you sound to middle America. Look at it from their point of view.

What America are you even talking about? Let’s say I’m a middle class worker in Ohio. For the last 20 years, and certainly the last 8, all I’ve heard from the left is that I’m a white bigot. Even as my local economy has flailed, I’m told that I’m the benefit of privilege and have to be brought down to size. I’m told that I have to step aside and make room for illegal invaders. That I can’t even call them that or I’m a bigot. The left hates my religion but thinks I’m a bigot for not wanting Islamists in the country.

So let me get this straight: Trump is not for me and my America? But you leftists are? Because Trump supposedly likes Putin? What does that have to do with me? I want to know who likes ME? You leftists hate me. You make that clear each and every day. I have to watch everything I say or you call me names and potentially damage my job. You write article after article basically saying you are waiting until I’m dead or diluted out. You value plants and turtles above me. YOU make that clear to me each and every day.

Why do I care if Trump likes Putin? I’m not even saying he does. I’m just wondering why I would care? Putin is not building a mega-mosque in my town. Putin is not censoring my Facebook posts. Putin is not saying he’s going to shut down the coal mine in my town. Putin is not charging my son with sexual harassment at college. You leftists are not for me and my America. You want me to die out and make room for YOUR ‘new’ America. Because the ‘old’ America, aka me, sucks. You are more loyal to Syrians and Mexicans and European globalists, than to me. You not only hate me, you mock the very idea of me liking myself. Make America Great Again – you hate and mock the slogan. Me liking me makes me a ‘Nationalist,’ a ‘supremacist’ or whatever word you come up with. You sure love to come up with words to bully me.

Trump says he likes me. You say that’s a con? What are you even talking about? You hate me. You hate the country. I’ll take my chances with Trump.”

That’s substantially correct, and the import of it is a real problem for the Democrat Party.

Because while the media and the Left likes to make a big deal about low presidential approval ratings, Trump’s approval rating might be the most meaningless number in America today. Two-thirds of the population might despise the man, and it wouldn’t make the first bit of difference so long as the public despises his opponent more.

Which is where we are. Democrats aren’t competitive in any meaningful way outside of America’s large cities, which they are busy destroying with extreme socialist economic policies and predatory cultural Marxist social policies which rapidly hollow out the tax base of those places, and college towns. In the suburbs and exurbs, they barely even bother to run and when they do, as in the four Congressional special elections they lost this spring, all their money comes from Hollywood, New York and San Francisco.

That money is the major problem. It flows from sources most Americans don’t identify with and are suspicious of, and it drives positions which are anathema to middle class voters. It used to be that most of the Democrats’ campaign money came from unions, and while that is still true it’s much less a factor and has changed in its own right. When your campaigns were financed by the auto workers, coal miners and Teamsters, you had to promote economic growth and national security and you had to hew to some semblance of the country’s traditional culture. Back then the Democrats were tied to the country’s middle class. There’s a lingering perception they still are, but that perception never seems to survive contact with their actual candidates and campaigns.

Because now, what union money the Democrats do get isn’t from truck drivers and stevedores. It’s from teachers and government bureaucrats, and the ideology behind it is Hard Left. But what’s worse is even the public sector union money doesn’t drive the agenda anymore; instead, it’s money from the Tom Steyers and George Soroses driving the agenda.

Or Planned Parenthood.

During the eight years of Barack Obama, that wing of the Democrats had free rein to drive the national discussion, and an uncritical, partisan leftist mainstream media failed to challenge it in any significant way. What resulted was a break in the wall, and the creation of a conservative media ecosystem challenging every assumption behind the Democrats’ reality, and the use of social media to highlight the abuses of Democrat rule.

And now the market is punishing the Democrats. Trump is one example, and their fight to delegitimize him can only result in a Pyrrhic victory given its basis in unhinged conspiracies. Lord help them if, as I noted in my American Spectator column this morning, it should turn out that the entire Trump-And-The-Russians meme should collapse into the recognition that this was all a setup by the Obama administration.

Another outstanding example is what’s happening in American colleges. Since the social justice revolt at the University of Missouri, perhaps the most high-profile manifestation of leftism off the rails on the campuses, freshman enrollment there has plummeted and is now down 35 percent in the past two years. In the meantime, since 2010 the approval rating by Republicans of higher education in this country has cratered from 58 percent all the way down to 36 percent. Megan McArdle blames this on the colleges, and notes that examples like Mizzou and what happened at Evergreen State College in Washington, not to mention the attempts to de-platform conservative speakers at Berkeley and Middlebury have become too numerous to ignore.

But McArdle isn’t even correct, because her assumption is that people are reacting to what they see on TV. That isn’t the whole story by any means. Real life is what’s driving this. People send their kids to college and they get first-hand stories of what’s happening. They hear about the coddled transgenders in the dorms, and they’re told about the fascist lefty professors shutting down alternative points of view, with the power of a letter grade as the ultimate weapon. And they see the tuition and fee bills, and know that the debt piling up in order to endure the leftist indoctrination on campus, an indoctrination which they know does not prepare their children for the working world, amounts to a grand ripoff. They know the product on campus, outside of what goes on in the engineering, hard sciences or business departments, is garbage – just like the product of Hollywood is largely garbage and the product of those crumbling cities is garbage.

Garbage, in application, doesn’t sell. And name-calling from the producers of that garbage similarly doesn’t sell. That’s why the Democrats can’t win, and it’s why Trump, for all his faults and shortcomings and attitudinal eccentricities, will probably end up a transformative two-term president.

Let’s hope that transformation is a positive one. Right now America has only one remotely functional national political party.