"A Concoction of Celebrity, Wealth, and Alienation"

"When Trump leaped to the head of the Republican field, he delivered the appearance of legitimacy to a moral vision once confined to the fevered fringe, elevating fantasies from the message boards and campgrounds to the center stage of American life. In doing so, he pulled America into a current that is coursing through other Western democracies—Britain, France, Spain, Greece, Scandinavia—where xenophobic, nationalist parties have emerged since the 2008 economic crisis to besiege middle-ground politicians. In country after country, voters beset by inequality and scarcity have reached past the sober promises of the center-left and the center-right to the spectre of a transcendent solution, no matter how cruel. 'The more complicated the problem, the simpler the demands become,' Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California in San Diego, told me. 'When people get frustrated and irritated, they want to cut the Gordian knot.'"

Evan Osnos in The New Yorker writes about how Donald Trump has embraced the paranoid style of American politics.

Jeet Heer in The New Republic argues that Trump is not a populist but "an authoritarian bigot."