“How,” asks Stephen Walt, “could a serious country possibly choose as its leader a narcissistic, manifestly unqualified self-promoter with a long track record of failure and deceit?”

The answer, in great measure, is that too many Americans stopped caring about capacity or knowledge, and so elected an uncredentialed ignoramus. But Donald Trump is merely the apotheosis of a growing disdain among Republicans for the intellect, experience, wisdom, and respect for expertise essential to governance.

Historically, American anti-intellectualism has been as bipartisan as ignorance. But by trafficking for decades in a pseudo-populist contempt for perceived elites, the GOP wound up creating a political Frankenstein monster: an American idiocracy governed by an idiot.

-snip-

In place of reason, he treats his followers to that staple of a stunted worldview: a mind-numbing series of conspiracy theories. One of the latest—that antifa fomented the disorder following George Floyd’s videotaped murder—is patently false; another, Obamagate, is so diabolical that it not only defies refutation, but comprehension. Not even our genius of a president can explain it.

This exemplifies a lynchpin of Trump’s quest for re-election: the deliberate destruction of our shared belief that verifiable truth is the foundation of political discourse. As our societal agreement about credible sources and objective fact crumbles, so does our capacity to resist baseless theories, political quackery, and rank demagoguery. This fact-free environment provides Trump with a credulous audience unwilling, or unable, to perceive his constant lies and lethal grandiosity—or to comprehend his subversion of our democratic institutions and traditions.

-snip-