John Feehery:
“…It was a 150-1 shot.
That’s where Ladbrokes set the odds when Donald Trump announced three years ago that he was running for president.
I guarantee that nobody in either political establishment took that bet from the London bookies when the New York billionaire descended down that escalator with wife Melania, announcing that he was going to stop illegal immigration, rip up unfair trade deals and make America great again.
He was a joke, a laughingstock, an afterthought. He had no chance against the powerful Bush family or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), the great hope of the Republican consultant class.
In full disclosure, I was one of those doubting Thomases, a prisoner of my own set of expectations. I saw a path forward for John Kasich, the talkative Ohio governor, but not for The Donald. Trump didn’t have the experience or the know-how or the backing of anybody who mattered in politics.
But it turned out that what mattered was not the consultant class or the experts or political whiz-kids. What mattered was the voters. And the voters had grown to detest a political establishment that refused to change the status quo, refused to stop illegal immigration, refused to stop the flow of jobs from the Rust Belt to Mexico, Vietnam and China, refused to care about their concerns about how globalization was destroying the America they once knew and loved…”