SEAN TRENDE: Trump, and the Punditry’s Scary Groupthink.

I believe that most people in my Twitter feed, left and right, don’t know many genuine Trump supporters, if any. I can count two, maybe three among my Facebook friends, and I went to high school in Oklahoma. It’s the exact problem I discussed back in January: There’s a cosmopolitan vs. traditionalist divide that runs through our politics, with cultural cosmopolitans running both parties.

The fact that Trump is so firmly positioning himself against those cosmopolitans, more so than any national politician since Ronald Reagan, makes it difficult to evaluate his campaign, and deprives us of the conversation we need, because for the first time in a long time, a major party candidate isn’t really trying to curry favor with opinion leaders.

None of this is to say that Trump will win. I would not at all be surprised if Trump implodes before autumn, or next week for that matter. Clinton really could bring home the Sanders voters, and the remaining NeverTrumpers could prove intransigent. President Obama’s popularity could continue to rise. Democrats will undoubtedly sharpen their attacks. All other things being equal, I still think there’s probably a 70 percent chance of Clinton winning.

But I will confess it is really difficult to sort out how much of this is a dispassionate analysis of the data.

I have no idea who will win, or how good Trump’s chances are, but I agree about the pundit groupthink. And I confess to being amazed at how many people seem to think Trump is Hitler. He’s basically running a 1970s rust-belt Democrat campaign, which is getting traction because in the current economy, a lot more of America feels rust-beltish.

But if Trump is Hitler, it means our elites of politics and journalism rubbed shoulders with Hitler, stayed at his beach place, flew on his jet, and sponsored his TV shows for decades without noticing. Which doesn’t say much for our elites of politics and journalism either.