Donald Trump's Virtual Political Reality

In 2008, many people considered U.S. President Barack Obama's election proof of a tectonic shift underway that was reshaping the racial contours of U.S. politics. But today, the changes wrought by that election seem insignificant compared with the possibility of Donald Trump becoming the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nominee. Now deeply immersed in the 2016 presidential primaries, political scientists feel like tourists who, having flown into a new country late the night before, open the hotel curtains in the morning to see a brand new landscape. On Planet Trump, even familiar landscapes are not as they seem. There appear to be mountains and valleys, rivers, flood plains and volcanoes, but they don't belong to the political landscape typologies we once accepted as the earthly norm. We need a map for this new political world we are about to enter. ...