Mark S. Weiner says Trump, despite his ignorance, malice and mendacity, masters the skill of “popular storytelling.” He has also managed to tap into his supporters’ sensitivity to emotive issues and can feel deeply how they respond to his agitation. His interaction with the mass audiences at a rally serves as an “emotional input” which is then politicised as an output on Twitter.

The author says although Trump is “no philosopher,” he does “channel certain concepts instinctively.” In his view, there is “one thinker whom Trump seems to channel most – and who can help make sense of his behavior, especially his widely-condemned moral equivocation toward Russia – it is the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt,” the infamous Weimar – and later Nazi – scholar, whose aphorism “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

Yet Trump knows most likely very little about Schmitt. What he parrots reflects Schmitt’s “disdain for liberalism’s universal aspirations.” In fact Trump had been brainwashed – rather than indoctrinated – by Steve Bannon. His former White House strategist is a true postmodern fascist, exemplifying the Nazi jurist’s sinister ideal of a political leader, who unites his followers by creating enemies for them to hate. Trump feels no qualms about lashing out at blacks, Jews, Muslims, Latinos and other minorities.

Schmitt was the first political philosopher explicitly to speak of "the other", the enemy who must be identified not only in order to be defeated but also to sustain the coherence of the state. For Schmitt, politics was war, and Trump’s belligerence is unsettling. His politics also appear to depend on mobilising the masses against the marginalised - those suspected of crime or terrorism, or immigrants and refugees.

Most of all Trump relishes putting the blame on his predecessor, Obama, and the Democrats for creating the “mess.” Their political correctness, like placing “individual rights at the core of their political communities, which are “non-exclusive,” has been ridiculed. Schmitt approved of the "rule of exception" - that sovereignty, at crucial points, must exclude certain people from having rights in order to enforce its power.

Trump and his supporters do not believe that, the rights they enjoy should be extended to “everyone.” In their “anti-liberal view, there is no reason to view Russia as an absolute enemy. And there is every reason to undermine international institutions and to cut loose America’s traditional allies.” It explains why Trump sees “those nation-states and institutions that seek to place external limits on sovereignty and conceive of political community in normative rather than territorial and cultural terms” as his “true enemies.”

America, in Trump’s view, has been “raped” and “robbed” or “taken advantage of” by the rest of the world. Now he has to ensure that America comes first. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argued that, when presented with crisis, liberal democracies will put aside constitutional niceties in order to survive. The public consents to its government violating liberal values because crisis is a state of exception, which requires desperate measures. No wonder Trump’s supporters are ready to turn a blind eye to his moral nihilism, as long as he does what they voted him for.

The German playwright, Bertolt Brecht wrote against the dangers of inertia in 1935 as Hitler was changing Germany beyond recognition. Although the US has a strong civil society and robust institutions that will survive Trump’s presidency, he has already divided the country further and changed the world for the worse – showing disdain for the truth and the rule of law, grovelling to dictators and human rights abusers, humiliating allies and friends, scrapping decades old treaties and agreements, sowing discord etc.

Ever since the two World Wars, Western liberals have considered war “'unthinkable”. Now they are seeing an increase in the indulgence of political violence that echoes the 1930s. In the view of Schmitt's conservative admirers, this only means that war has become more thoughtless, not less frequent or less brutal. Trump’s toxic ideology and zero-sum game approach are a good mix for conflicts.