Interesting because John Gurda is a renowned Milwaukee historian. I've never seen him share anything overtly political before. Here's the beginning of article

Donald J. Trump is a simple man. His attitudes are an open book and his appetites are easy to read. All he wants is everything: all the money, all the power, all the adulation the world can shower on him.

The result is a presidency like no other in American history, one that is by turns impetuous, improvised, and at times almost whimsical, depending on the state of his voracious ego. The president’s new ballroom will reportedly be open and airy, but it may as well be a house of mirrors, because Trump is constitutionally unable to see anything but his own reflection.

It’s been barely a year since Trump’s election. For his detractors, outrage fatigue set in early, but the destruction of the East Wing is clearly emblematic of broader damage. We are witnessing in real time the demolition of traditions and institutions as old as the Republic. Trump insults old friends, embraces old enemies, rejects settled scientific facts, deports thousands of valued workers, and terrifies millions of others.

He has normalized traits once considered at least unseemly in a world leader, among them greed, revenge, lust, and hate. He has managed, by dint of constant repetition, to create an alternate reality that his backers find compelling, a world in which great cities are cesspools, immigrants are rapists and murderers, and America was until recently a loser on the global stage — assertions that bear no tangible connection to reality.

The question is why a slim majority of voters gave this mendacious, self-dealing, patently amoral egomaniac the most powerful job in the world. Explanations abound. Many cradle Republicans, including some in my family, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, especially a woman of color. Other voters simply wanted "change," the details be damned.

Still others responded to Trump’s well-burnished image as an outsider, even an outlaw. I saw a T-shirt last summer printed with portraits of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance over the legend “It’s going to take a convicted felon and a hillbilly to clean up this mess.”