Disruptive. That’s a good word to describe Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and to describe the sometimes-ramshackle Republican National Convention his campaign more or less superintended in Cleveland.

Apple disrupted the music industry; Uber disrupted the taxi cartels; Amazon disrupted the mega-bookstores. Global competition has been disrupting American manufacturing for decades. The inundation of low-skill immigrants unintentionally produced by the 1965 immigration act has disrupted many communities and big metro areas.

Over history, America has mostly been built by disruption. Certainly the Loyalists in the American Revolution thought so. So did the farmers who cheered for William Jennings Bryan’s free silver as industrialization was disrupting the farm economy.

The New Deal was disruptive. So was World War II. As Yuval Levin points out in his book “The Fractured Republic,” both the political left and political right see the two post-WWII decades as normal, with high family formation, low crime, strong faith in institutions and relatively smooth economic growth.

But that period was the exception, not the rule. Postwar America was massively disrupted by the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, high crime, urban riots and antiwar protests.

That’s the point in time when Donald Trump began using his father’s political connections to move his Brooklyn/Queens real estate business to Manhattan and beyond.

When Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower 13 months ago and announced his candidacy, almost no commentator took his chances seriously.

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