Krugman has hit the nail on the head by pointing out that it is not just the man, but that the party he represents and the constituency and membership that party represents have lost their moral and intellectual compass. The GOP has been heading down that road for a long time now, led by an obsession with rural Protestant religious fanaticism, pathological consumerism and good old-fashioned American racism. Trump has simply taken advantage of those conditions.

There are two elements to his rise. First is his base, that substantial minority of American voters who sense that their civilization is crumbling around them. Their economic decline began forty years ago and it shows no sign of going away, or even slowing down. Their social and cultural hegemony has been under threat for two decades longer. And now they have conflated the two. Their world is fading into history, and they cannot accept that it is the result of blind historical forces over which they have no control, even less that it might be the inevitable consequences of a program that was marketed to them cynically and that they they signed onto enthusiastically. They've been conned, they refuse to admit it, and they are looking for villains and scapegoats to blame it on. Trump has provided them: the "elites", the "deep state", the poor, the foreigners, and yes, the non-white.

But there is another component to the rise of Trumpism that cannot be simply dismissed as fear, hate, anger, or ignorance. Trump has also bought off an entire generation of those who know perfectly well he's a fraud and a demagogue. He has promised them a world of low taxes, minimum government regulation, a desperate working class willing to meekly endure any exploitation or indignity for a minimal paycheck. This is nothing new, its what capitalists have always wanted and worked for. What the GOP have been able to do is convince a substantial minority of Americans that they are capitalists too, that they are entitled to be capitalists, and that only the treason and corruption of the "elites", the "deep state", the poor, the foreigners, and yes, the non-white, are preventing them from achieving their god-given birthright. They have been betrayed, stabbed in the back, and now they have every right, even a patriotic obligation, to get even.

We've all seen this movie before. We know how it turns out.