There it is again, lighting up the phone like a digital saint's card: Donald Trump, in full messiah drag, haloed and ready for worship. Not exactly a joke, not quite a prayer, fuzzier than blasphemy and more telling.

You could call it trolling and move on. Or chalk it up to branding--the Internet's favorite trick when words fail and image take over. But if you let it linger, it stops being a punchline. It's when politics starts to mistake being visible for being real, as if showing up on your feed is the same as being in charge.

Which is where Edmund Burke comes in. He gets hauled out so often he's practically a mascot--just add a wig and you've got instant gravitas. But if you actually read "Reflections on the Revolution in France," you get a way of tiptoeing through politics with a raised eyebrow, allergic to revolutions that promise to start from scratch, partial to anything that's already survived a few rounds in the ring.

Burke called society a partnership--not just among the living, but among the dead and the unborn. People love to quote that as if it's poetry. It's a leash. Translation: whatever you're trying to fix, you're also stuck with, and whatever you inherit, you're supposed to hand off without dropping it on the floor. That's the part that feels distant now.

The best case for Trump points to the economy before everything went sideways, to deregulation, to a judiciary tilted in a new direction, to a tougher line on trade and immigration. It wants you to grade on results, not vibes. It's an argument about what gets........

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