Trump made impossible promises.

And he is already backing away from them.  In his Sixty Minutes interview last night:

--- He said the border wall will only be a fence in some spots.

--- And his focus on illegal immigrants will be those with criminal records, a focus already in place in the Obama administration.

--- And the retreat from Obamacare will be gradual with no one losing health insurance immediately.

So much for repealing the Affordable Care Act on day one.

Trump will have a hard time matching with deeds the hopes he kindled in the hearts of his blue collar supporters, too.  No wonder number four on Michael Moore's Monday-morning (aka today) to-do list is this:

"4.  Everyone must stop saying they are stunned and shocked.  What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.  YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew."

On Bill's Maher's weekend show, NYT reporter and best-selling author Thomas Friedman talked about the prospects for bringing back the manufacturing jobs that catapulted millions of blue collar workers and their families into the middle class.  He pointed out the obvious... that most of these jobs can never be brought back.

To understand why, let's go back to the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was building steam.  A French version of Bill Maher, named Bastiat, proposed the following law in order to benefit the working man:

"Pass a law to this effect: 'No one shall henceforth be permitted to employ any beams or rafters but such as are produced and fashioned by blunt hatchets....' Whereas at present we give a hundred blows of the axe, we shall then give three hundred.  The work which we now do in an hour will then require three hours.  What a powerful encouragement will thus be given to labor!"

Bastiat's parody of protectionism goes hand in hand with Moore's (no, not Michael) law:

"Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years."

In other words, there is no holding back technology, not in our globalized world.  The Japanese were able to insulate themselves from modernity, until Admiral Perry forced them to open their doors to the West.  There are no new examples, except perhaps North Korea.  And who wants to emulate that regime? Hopefully not Mr. Trump.

And, so, even if he succeeds in creating a manufacturing Renaissance in the U.S., more jobs will go to robots than to people.  There's the rub.  And as Mr. Moore (yes, Michael) suggests, there is an opportunity here to rebuild the old Democrat coalition by luring those blue-collar Trumpsters back where they really belong.

My old man, a coal miner and bricklayer, used to say, "The Republicans are only out for themselves."  When the defectors discover this to be the case, the Democratic Party will have its chance.