Sasha Issenberg

Donald Trump’s so-called Donroe Doctrine has included saber-rattling towards Venezuela, Panama, and Cuba; tough talk towards the leftist leaders of Colombia and Brazil; and overt interference in the elections of Argentina and Honduras. But when it comes to small, landlocked Paraguay, the Trump administration has deployed a different playbook: assiduous, patient diplomacy enlivened by the government’s newly aligned interests in making the country a hub for U.S.-backed data center projects.

Nobody saw it coming. Not the media. Certainly not Hillary Clinton. Not even Donald Trump’s team of data scientists, holed up in their San Antonio (TX) headquarters 1,800 miles from Trump Tower, were predicting this outcome.

But the scientists picked up disturbances—like falling pressure before a hurricane—that others weren’t seeing. It was the beginning of the storm that would deliver Trump to the White House. President-elect Trump’s numbers were different, because his analysts, like Trump himself, were forecasting a fundamentally different electorate than other pollsters and almost all of the media: older, whiter, more rural, more populist. And much angrier at what they perceive to be an overclass of entitled elites. In the next three weeks, Trump channeled this anger on the stump, at times seeming almost unhinged.