Donald Trump’s Appeal Sir: Peter Murphy (May 2016) writes with great knowledge and authority about the history of populism, but seems to be all at sea in his attempt to explain Donald Trump’s appeal. Sure, populists may “hyperbolically” magnify “odd bedfellows”, make virtues of “vertiginous equivocality and high-wire ambiguity”, they may be “protean political personalities” that walk “impossible tightropes”. He even accuses the Donald of “inscrutable Left-Right political hermaphroditism”! Murphy says that populism lacks a sunny optimism, but what could be more optimistic than the slogan “Let’s make America great again”? He uses terms like contradictory, incongruous, blended positions, antitheses,…