> Also, Trump is not acting like a rational ice cream seller. He has not appeared to move his policy portfolio, to the extent he has one, toward the center. “Ra

> Also, Trump is not acting like a rational ice cream seller. He has not appeared to move his policy portfolio, to the extent he has one, toward the center. “Rational candidates end up pivoting, and trying to move as much as they can back toward the center. But of course right now there’s one presidential candidate who’s not doing that at all,” Tom Vogl, a Princeton economist, told me. Because the "rational" policy depends on politics being 1-dimensional. Trump has refused to deal with politics that way. The ice cream theory is how things work normally, the same way that Newtonian mechanics works normally, but when you find yourself in a situation with extreme gravity wells or high velocities, using Newtonian mechanics to solve problems can get you killed. Everyone knows politics isn't really one-dimensional. It just ends up being treated that way in plurality voting races because mathematics enforces it, unless you want to take a big risk and upset the apple cart. When you get an opponent who can triangulate an extreme non-centrist position in multi-dimensional politics, moving to the 1-dimensional center might be fatal because of negative traits that centrism implies on certain dimensions that the other candidate has made the campaign about.