Some excellent points here: The Right Way to Resist Trump

Now that Mr. Trump has been elected president, the Berlusconi parallel could offer an important lesson in how to avoid transforming a razor-thin victory into a two-decade affair. If you think presidential term limits and Mr. Trump’s age could save the country from that fate, think again. His tenure could easily turn into a Trump dynasty.

Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no different.

We saw this dynamic during the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton was so focused on explaining how bad Mr. Trump was that she too often didn’t promote her own ideas, to make the positive case for voting for her. The news media was so intent on ridiculing Mr. Trump’s behavior that it ended up providing him with free advertising.

Of course, you could argue that the media was obsessed with the trump-personality/hillary-emails angle to the exclusion of all else…but even back in July, during the Democratic National Convention, I felt they were making a YUUGE mistake in focusing so much on trump and how he was “different” from normal republicans. The focus should have been on the too-little-too-late campaigning Obama did as the election neared, focusing more on GOP obstruction and how trump just slapped his name on their festering rot.

Had the Dems done this from the start - bolstering their own policies and slamming those of the GOP, regardless of who they chose to be their standard-bearer - perhaps the results on Nov 8 might have been different :/