I really like this piece by Josh Marshall about how the lunacy of the last two weeks demonstrates where Trump and Trumpism has come from. Maybe it's a bit overdetermined for a journalist to point to journalism as the prime mover towards Trumpistan, but I think it's largely correct.
My version would be a little different and it would incorporate aspects of Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs McWorld.
After generations in the political wilderness, interspersed only by the Eisenhower interregnum, Republicans won back the White House with Nixon making coded racist appeals to white working class voters. Reagan amplified this strategy, adding abortion to the ways to motivate Republican voters. As time went on, however, the economic backbone of Republicanism - massive tax cuts to the rich in order to trickle down to everyone else - became a liability. Bill Clinton in particular demonstrated how a more judicious tax code could stimulate growth. Even on the social issues that motivated many Reagan Era voters, Americans were largely moving away from coded appeals to racism, LGBT bigotry and other issues.
In order to keep stoking their base, as Marshall points out, Republicans had to amp up the rhetoric. Enter Murdoch, Ailes and Fox News as megaphones for the crazy. Fox drew its biggest energy from Democratic presidencies. It was much easier to attack Democratic presidents than to defend Republican ones, and so Fox became the attack dog of the GOP. However, when it came to Obama, there was precious little material to use against him. He and his administration were essentially free from scandal. This meant Fox and the GOP had to gin up nonsense conspiracy theories - Birtherism, the Fast and the Furious, Solyandra and Benghazi. None of these "scandals" had any basis in objective reality. Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother; Fast and Furious was simply a bad idea done poorly, Solyandra was...I'm not even sure what the scandal there was supposed to be; Benghazi was a tragedy, not a scandal.
The batshit lunacy we have seen from Rudy Giuliani and the various Trumpists since the election is entirely a product of having lived in an alternate reality in which "Hunter Biden's" laptop is the most critical thing facing the country. Joe Biden's biggest crime is the occasional act of plagiarism, yet Fox-addled Americans believe he's more corrupt than Trump, who history will show to be America's most corrupt president.
This is the bedrock upon which those who believe America as a unified polity is doomed. When 47% of the country consists of people who believe Donald Trump is qualified for a second term as president, you're screwed.
Barber's argument, made back in the 1990s, was that the world was diverging into "jihad" or excessive localism, parochialism and tribalism (nothing to do with Islam) and "McWorld" the globally integrated economy and culture. His argument further was that neither Jihad nor McWorld cared about or required democracy. Jihad undermined pluralism and McWorld needed workers and consumers, not citizens.
Trump represents an odd confluence of both trends. He's a New York real estate developer with properties and loans all over the world, but he ran on an expressly "Jihad" message: America is a white tribe and Mexicans are rapists and Blacks are the real enemy.
This, perhaps, explains the biggest conundrum of the election: places that are hurting economically supported Trump - the incumbent - the most. We have predicated our understanding of elections where there is an incumbent on the fact that people vote their economic self-interest. If things are going well for them, they reward the incumbent party. What 2016 and 2020 show is that "doing well" is much more subjective.
Trump voters are not "poor." Those pickup trucks with the flags on them can cost $50,000. But it's pretty clear that they feel America is becoming less "America" and more some alternate version that they see on Fox and now OANN. Blue America sees transgender rights as an expression of human dignity and the freedom to be your whole human self; Red America sees perverts trying to enter the "wrong" bathroom. Blue America sees abortion as a necessary resource to allow women to plan for when or if they want to have kids. Red America sees a world where women are aborting healthy babies at 8 months. Blue America sees a moderate redistribution of wealth as necessary for the economic and political well-being of the country. Red America sees Stalinism (Socialism is basically Stalinism, because reasons).
Appeals to fear work when people are already fearful. The "anxiety" felt by Trump voters is both real and imagined. For many of them, McWorld with its declining need for high paying blue collar work IS a real threat to them. But having become fearful, they retreat into Jihad, with its hatred of "outgroups" like people of color, women who don't "know their place," urban dwelling men who use hair products...the list of "not us" is long and growing. Evangelical Christianity is both a precondition and an additional amplifier of this psychology.
Fear breeds hatred, because it channels the powerful internal turmoil outwards at something that does not betray our own weakness and insecurity.
The GOP message resonates with a people fearful of the changes that they see in the world and then amplifies and extends that fear. (If Democrats think that's absurd, I would suggest they think about how their fear of Trump stealing the election has led them to embrace their own crazy versions of conspiracy theories.) Like a drug addict they need to keep upping their dose.
I don't know how we see ourselves through this.
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