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There has been a steady decline in British media understanding of American politics over several decades now. In the long-past glory days of The Economist one might well get a more in-depth analysis there than anywhere in the popular U.S. media, and now it is wandering around rudderless and the Beeb, never at the forefront of the effort, is just about useless. I'm only guessing, but that seems to track with the wave of political correctness that has smothered current European intellectual life and threatens to do the same here.

There is this, however - somebody apparently knows that something unusual is happening:

But here's where we cut-and-paste those words of caution in every Trump polling story published since last autumn. The normal political rules don't seem to apply to the man. Just because things have happened one way in the past doesn't mean they will play out that way this time.

And here's where the analysis fails: the zeitgeist isn't a function of Trump, it's Trump that is a function of the zeitgeist, and if it weren't he, we'd be looking around for somebody else similarly anti-establishment. It's really very simple: the country is fed up with the establishment, with the political correctness, with the powers that be, and that includes the media commentariat and the parasitical class of "experts" who are apparently too thick to realize that they are not managing the problem, they are the problem. If this sounds like shades of Ronald Reagan, that isn't accidental.

Maybe it's just the fish not noticing the water. Maybe it's the mood the country was in in 1775 that everybody thought was just another little temper tantrum. Whatever it is, the media don't appear to be getting it and watching them flounder is becoming part of the fun.