He's not the cause, he's the symptom.

Trump speaks for those who are finally starting to realize that the American Dream was a vulgar farce perpetrated on them so they would show up to work on time, pay their bills, not cause trouble and never join a union. To be fair, the system once made an effort to deliver, but its simply become too expensive to do so any more. It was starting to cut into profits. Trump offers instead the scapegoat alternative of foreign enemies and conspiracy theories to obscure that the elite they had been promised they could join was actually stealing them blind while simultaneously holding them in contempt.

To reject Trump now would be to admit that not only were they wrong, but that they had been lied to, fooled shamelessly, systematically and continuously by precisely those they emulated and aspired to become. This is the America of Jesus, the Flag and Guns. The fact that Mr Trump has probably never held a gun in his life, never believed in Jesus and sees the flag as mere red tape to obstruct his business activities, is simply too terrible for them to contemplate. No matter what evidence of his ineptness or hypocrisy is produced, it will only be seen as proof of his boldness, innovation and refreshing iconoclasm. He "tells it like it is" really means he "says what we want to hear". The best reason his followers can come up with for voting for him is "he's better than the other guy". They have little choice. The other guy has been telling them for years they are assholes and now its starting to become all too clear.

A modern, industrial, advanced and cultured nation crippled and humiliated by economic reverses, military defeats and a decline in cultural cohesion, desperately seeks to re-establish its lost glory by blaming its problems on treachery, conspiracy and sinister alien forces which have polluted its pristine and homogeneous culture. Sound familiar? "We were never defeated on the battlefield, we were stabbed in the back by traitors--politicians, the media, the Communists, the intellectuals, the Jews...."

Its the dictatorship of the middle class. Or at least, those who feel they are entitled, by their own exceptionalism and innate moral and cultural superiority and work ethic, to be middle class.

And if you have any trouble with that analysis, take a good look at the faces in the audience of Trump's rallies. If there were no Trump, they would still be there.