There’s a deep irony at play here, where the appetite is for rendering Trumpism as some kind of atavism…primitive or mad…when it’s the end point of an enormous amount of cultural effort that’s quintessentially American.

His shit sounds reasonable because Americans are hyper-individual, and through stuff like New Thought have absorbed many many versions (secular and sacred) of “I can make something true by asserting it’s truth”…and they’ve done so as citizens well-serviced by their position in the imperial center, so they’ve been raised on a diet of self-importance and being told that the world should bend to their expectation through shit like “American exceptionalism” and also presented a very flattering picture of American history in which all good things emanate from Whigs that don’t cuss.