Revenge of the Deplorables

President Trump. A handful of syllables still hard to get one's mind around. How on earth did this happen?

There's no single reason. Any number of factors were involved, and it wouldn't have taken much for things to have turned out differently. If the Republican Party had been slightly less willing to be stolen by a populist demagogue; if James Comey and the Federal Bureau of Investigation hadn't waded in (twice) so clumsily; if Wikileaks hadn't supplied a constant stream of reminders about the hypocrisy and venality of the professional political class; if the professional political class had been a bit less hypocritical and venal in the first place; if any of these things and who knows what else had been different, then Trump the outrageous outsider might have lost.