I agree with everything in this article except the choice of question it seeks to answer. Why Trump beat Clinton is important, but why Trump beat JEB and Kasich is far more important. Trump is an opportunistic infection. What about our national immune system failed?

In 1975, Majority Leader Mansfield changed the filibuster rule so that a filibuster could be conducted (i) without a cloture-defeating minority being present in the chamber, and (ii) without all other business of the Senate being halted. (The action was arguably related in some way to the filibuster’s use against the Civil Rights Act; if so, our original sin again rears its ugly head.) As a result of the change, the minority party had only to threaten to filibuster a bill that had less than sixty votes in support for that bill to be stopped. No one had to do a Mr. Smith, and no one could be embarrassed by the charge that he had slowed other important business down. And so the “virtual” filibuster was born.

One can make the argument that requiring a sixty vote majority in the Senate is a rational prudential requirement. But that argument is irrelevant in the era of hyper-partisan politics. When it became apparent that a party could make a President look feckless by stopping all of his bills, the minority, most notably the Republicans in the Obama years, set about to filibuster every bill they could, especially judicial nominations. Although the strategy didn’t work against Obama in 2012 — maybe because McCain/Palin was so weak a ticket — it certainly had the effect of making Congress look awful. And therein, I submit, is the source of Trumpism.

The underlying premise of Trump’s ascendancy is simply “How could he be worse than what we’ve got?” He ran when the government could not get out of its own way. That’s on the Republicans. They made Congress dysfunctional in the hope of defeating Obama, and instead they defeated Hamilton, Jay, and Madison. America literally stopped working as a constitutional democracy. So we elected an anti-Constitutional asshole as President.

The Constitution wasn’t doing us much good, anyway, what with its free press and rule of law and the grid-lock and the swamp. We needed someone who could get things done, a deal-maker-in-chief. Or at least someone who played one on TV. And that’s what we got.