1. Attention conservation notice: a thread, composed of halfbaked mixture of blindingly obvious and frankly speculative. Starting from the proposal that Trump's failure to even try to "unite" the country after the bombs doesn't only stem from his character but his business model.

2. Or otherwise put, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his continued political success depends upon his not understanding it. Trump's prospects for political survival don't depend on uniting country but continuing to divide it in ways that are reinforced

3. by political geography of Senate, rural-urban divide in House seats etc. Even if (implausibly) he wanted to build unity, he couldn't stick to it without undermining his only viable political strategy (the people who hate him are going to go on hating him). This seems obvious.

4. What is maybe less immediately obvious is that the Democratic party face very similar strictures. The broad aspirational claim that the country could be 'united' by a president depended on a very different ecosystem, where TV etc had a highly pronounced centrist bias.

5. As the historical work of @pastpunditry and the ecosystem mapping of @YBenkler et al. demonstrate, this has been radically transformed. We now have a bifurcated media ecosystem with Fox News and its satellites radically at odds with the old consensus and persuading viewers

6. into a version of @normative epistemic closure (see also @drvox passsim). This means that Democratic presidents aren't ever going to be able to unite the country either - a substantial minority will always believe they are a madrassa/benghazi/communist/globalist plot.

7. It's notable that the last moment of purported 'unity' was GWB and the Iraq war - when the traditional media flocked to Fox's view of the world, rather than vice versa. But there is a substantial minority that will never, ever be united beneath a president that has the (D).

8. So this creates a problem for the Democrats. They're going to be asked to bring unity back to American politics, but they're not going to be able to. When Clinton complained about the "deplorables" she was absolutely right. They may not be deplorable in the sense that they...

9. may be good to their neighbors, not kick puppy dogs for fun etc, but they are going to be eager consumers of conspiracy theories and difficult to impossible to persuade given prevailing media structures. What this means is that "uniting the country" is perhaps plausible as an

10. organizing myth for a coalition that would _like to think of itself_ as the unifying spirit of the country, but should never be mistaken as a program for practical action. Indeed, it's likely to be a continuing problem, insofar as the coalition is likely to get cross pressure

11. from a mainstream media that is still drinking its own homebrewed Koolade, when it takes politically divisive measures that are politically necessary under current circumstances. Justifying these measures in terms of broad political programs that are hard for media to assail

12. because of their urgency - e.g. the need to restore American democracy a la Ezra, or the threat of global warming - is one possible way of responding that is obviously good on its own merits, albeit not always going to be effective in convincing media figures who still think

13. they are in an earlier and very different America that operates according to different rules. But if my barstool punditizing is right, then Trump's immediate departure from uniting to dividing does not just represent his personal drive to spite and chaos.

14. It also reflects the real state of a country that is so profoundly divided that Humpty Dumpty ain't never going to be reassembled properly. While deploring the ways in which Trump uses this state of affairs, Democrats should be under no illusions it can be fixed. Finis.