Fred Hiatt, editor of the Washington Post editorial page, notes an interesting and welcome development that he calls the “Trump Boomerang Effect.” Whatever Trump is for seems to boomerang the other way. Orrin Hatch defends transgender rights because Trump caused for the expulsion of transgender members of the military. After Trump and Brexit, European elections swing decisively against Trump-style politicians. In reaction to Trump’s war on Obamacare, more people see the logic of single-payer healthcare.

We have a long three-and-a-half-years to go, but the Trump boomerang effect seems to strengthen opposition to everything he supports.

Did your head spin when Utah’s Orrin Hatch, a true conservative and the Senate’s longest-serving Republican, emerged last week as the most eloquent spokesman for transgender rights? Credit the Trump boomerang effect.

Much has been said about White House dysfunction and how little President Trump has accomplished in his first six months. But that’s not the whole story: In Washington and around the world, in some surprising ways, things are happening — but they are precisely the opposite of what Trump wanted and predicted when he was sworn in.

The boomerang struck first in Europe. Following his election last November, and the British vote last June to leave the European Union, anti-immigrant nationalists were poised to sweep to power across the continent. “In the wake of the electoral victories of the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump, right-wing populism in the rich world has appeared unstoppable,” the Economist wrote. Russian President Vladimir Putin would gain allies, the European Union would fracture.

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom Trump belittled for having allowed so many refugees into her country, has grown steadily more popular in advance of a September election…

It turns out that Americans really don’t like the idea of poor people not being able to see a doctor. We don’t feel right cozying up to a dictator whose domestic opponents are rubbed out and whose neighboring countries are invaded and occupied.

And even if some Americans don’t know all that much about transgender people, it turns out we are less comfortable treating anyone as a “burden,” as Trump said in his tweet, than in valuing every individual’s service, a spirit that Hatch captured in his straightforward, humane response.

“I don’t think we should be discriminating against anyone,” Hatch said. “Transgender people are people, and deserve the best we can do for them.”

And Americans aren’t unique. Millions of people in Europe and around the world are just as appalled by the scapegoating of minorities and the celebration of police brutality.

Maybe even Fred Hiatt might begin to see the dangers of privatizing public schools and see the value of strengthening them instead of replacing them with private management.