My explanation would be that the GOP was moving towards fascism for decades (dogwhistles etc.). Worsening of material conditions (effective QOL), propaganda or “talking points” on news and social media that became more and more detached from reality, fearmongering (wars, terrorism, islam, socialists, corruption, climate change) paved the way for him. He’s just the symptom. Without the greed of the mainstream media to give his BS free airtime he couldn’t have done it. But the time was right for someone like him because the old bullshit didn’t cut it anymore. You see very similar all around the world (south america, india, europe, russia)
Normally the political system also heavily filters who gets to rise to power. He managed as an outsider because he was known.
On the bright side, once AI actually CAN answer things like this we’d have “Artificial Ethics”. A way to judge questions objectively or at least without emotional tempering for each specific case. This could solve some fundamental problems like “who watches the watchers” - we simply build the perfect watcher.
Of course we’re far away from that yet. And then we’d just ignore our perfect watcher anyway 🤣