FOR those who care to look, the signs have been there for years, long before the emergence of Donald J Trump. One nation under God is no more, its disintegration a long, gradual process which can be traced back to the assassination of Kennedy, the folly of Vietnam, and the moral collapse of Watergate. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the devastation of the 2008 crash would finally blow any remaining trust the majority of Americans had in their government and its institutions.

I discovered the first clue for myself in Worcester Massachusetts at the American Antiquarian Society, of all places, during a month-long residency. It was April 2009 and with Obama in the oval office it was easy to believe that all was peace and harmony in this new America.

Then I switched on the radio to catch a weather forecast and found myself transported into a shock-jock zone. The object of the talk show host’s invective was Bill and Hillary Clinton’s belief that people should drive smaller fuel-efficient cars. This exposed them as “child killers”. After all, ran the argument, it was not simply the right, but actually the duty, of every American mom to protect her kids by trundling them around in a gas-guzzling Sherman tank-sized sports utility vehicle.

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I tuned in a few more times to experience the mood of this sub-nation I’d previously been unaware of. Tea Party mania was at its height. The phone-ins were particularly alarming. People who’d lost their jobs and their homes were venting their communal anger, which was understandable enough, yet their resentment was being manipulated by rabidly right-wing commentators who endlessly insisted that the cause of their problems could be summed up in a single word: liberalism.

These darned liberals, being by definition unpatriotic, were out to destroy the American way of life. They were more interested in helping feckless minorities through affirmative action deals than they were in protecting the wholesome family values of decent hard-working folks. They were all for more foreign immigrants and all against hand guns. They were running the schools and the colleges and poisoning the minds of the young. They were perpetually hectoring people about climate change and other distractions, and basically just wanted to restrict everyone’s God-given freedoms.

Such repetitive rants were not particularly informative, but they did reveal an uncomfortable truth. America was not a nation at ease with itself. The listenership of these grudge broadcasts consisted, for the most part, of people of low educational attainment who craved an outlet for their anger. That anger was being harvested, moulded, and weaponised. They formed a tribe apart from most of the Americans I knew, those thoughtful types with listening preferences which inclined to National Public Radio, set up under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, whose worthy programmes such as All Things Considered are followed by appeals for listener donations and collegiate sponsorship.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act opened the door to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio, with a concentration of broadcasting ownership weighted to the political right. This was followed a year later by the introduction of subscription satellite services, which were unregulated. First Amendment rights to free speech, in any event, meant that this broadcasting version of the wild west could let rip, and that was exactly what happened, with the blessing and encouragement of the venture capitalists, hedge funds and asset management corporations with interests to advance.

Meanwhile, America’s newspaper industry was imploding, with literally thousands of local titles putting up the shutters, leaving many states as print-press free zones, and the field free for such supermarket tabloids as The National Enquirer, whose main contribution to political debate seems to have been shelling out $150,000 to model Karen McDougal for the sole purpose of burying the news of her affair with Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election.

Make no mistake, this tweet-infected free-for-all was a propaganda coup for the rabble-rousing far right and a host of mind-bending conspiracy theorists of every stripe. Several of whom, it seems, were being nudged by such external disruptors as Russian intelligence and Cambridge Analytica. The malign influencing of the masses is not new, of course. It had been described in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds published by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in 1841 and in Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind in 1895.

The strategy of those who would manipulate is as cynical as it is effective. “All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another,” so said Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.

There are, admittedly, a number of crucial differences between Trump and Hitler, one being that at least the latter was entitled to wear a military uniform, having seen action in the trenches, if only as a lowly lance corporal. Trump’s attitude to the military is less than supportive. He has characterised fallen soldiers as “losers and suckers” and posthumously lambasted the Republican’s own in-house war hero, Senator John McCain. Despite this, his adoring base continues to support him.

A Biden presidency will have to deal with this brainwashed horde. They represent between 40% and 50% of the population and are mad as hell about having the election stolen from them, as they see it. Many are armed, organised, and nurse a pathological grudge. Trumpism is their cult. If the Mar-a-Lago man-god is hauled before the courts and found guilty of financial irregularity they’ll simply hail him as a wronged martyr. If he goes into exile, he will be their king over the water. Like the vanquished Confederates of a century and a half ago, they will be out to avenge a lost cause.

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The left, all too often, has fed the paranoia. TV footage of rioting, looting and the hauling down of statues, even Abraham Lincoln wasn’t spared, must have been music to the ears of such Trump outriders as Roger Stone and Steve Bannon – first, it’s our statues, next your white picket fence. The open indifference of a top Democrat like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to such events was breathtaking (“people will do what they do”). Hillary Clinton’s description of the resentful left-behind white working classes as “deplorables” had already lost hearts and minds.

That remains the reality. Donald Trump’s failing was that an instinctive cunning which could, at times, be brilliant, was not sustained by a well calibrated strategic intelligence, far less a moral

compass. The evangelical fervour of his cult simply wasn’t enough. In the end, America’s man-god became merely an Abbot of Unreason inveighing against the imagined injustice of his overthrow from a White House bunker, his legacy a Jekyll and Hyde America.

The man may have gone, but his toxic message has yet to be eradicated. There are more than 70 million Trump voters out there, stuck in their silos, many convinced their man went down because of an electoral fraud. The chip is still in the brain, and they won’t be going away anytime soon.

That’s one heck of a scary thought.

David J Black is an author, playwright and journalist who lives in Edinburgh