To understand how the United States got to where it is today, one must go back in time at least a few decades and begin their research with the rise of television.

Throughout the 1960s T.V. had continued its gradual takeover of radio as the dominant medium in American culture and the turn of the new decade in the 70s marked a tipping point, after which the average household begun to spend over a quarter of their day watching T.V. and never looked back.

With the ubiquity of color T.V. and a new wave of sitcoms, variety shows, and police dramas with socially-conscious themes to replace the tired old formulas of unrealistically wholesome family programs and westerns, the fantasy that lived in the screen only became more appealing as the existential stresses of reality mounted.

Meanwhile, the combination of unsolvable inflation undermining existing economic orthodoxy and a hostage crisis in Iran that dragged out for over a year wore down the public’s trust in their institutions, a relationship already badly damaged by the cumulative effects of the loss of the Vietnam War, paranoid witch-hunts of McCarthyism, and corruption revealed by the Watergate scandal.

As the ultimate existential crisis to humanity loomed, the Cold War froze so solid and cold that it burned at times, causing collateral damage in numerous third-world proxy wars which supposedly, paradoxically kept the peace between the two great powers.

This left the now-T.V.-dependent public in the U.S. regularly rattled to the core by barrages of news that seemed to indicate the world could come to a gruesome end at any moment, so they responded with a decision that may be remembered as ironic through the lens of history but from a psychological standpoint makes sense — they elected a T.V. star for President.

Granted, the decision wasn’t totally insane, considering the beloved Hollywood hero Ronald Reagan had already served as a popular California governor and strategically endeared himself to the Southern far-right years prior with his “time for choosing” speech supporting Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated Presidential run.

Nevertheless, in its hour of need the U.S. threw out their ineffective, incumbent peanut farmer and voted to replaced him with an actor. Contentious as the debate over his legacy may remain to this day, in the end the American people got exactly what they should have expected from Reagan, a great show.

Some wise author once said that the stories of people’s lives don’t always necessarily begin with their births and end with their deaths, that some people in reality live many years in the ‘epilogue’ of their life — still technically alive but having already lived out any meaningful narrative afforded their existence.

Similarly, it appears that with Reagan’s Presidency came the last chapter in the centuries long story of the American Empire. His election marked the moment when expectations began to exceed reality at an unsustainable rate, when the prospects of the future eclipsed any glimpse of today, and it was probably the closest thing to a second coming of Christ that conservative Christians in the U.S. are ever going to get.

When the hostages who had been held in Iran for over four-hundred torturous days of the Carter Administration were released just an hour after Reagan’s inauguration, the celebration, relief, and excitement that washed over the American public inspired a unique sense of hope and unity that remains unparalleled to this day.

As they watched together on CNN, the revolutionary 24/7 cable news network whose founder promised that “we’re gonna stay on until the end of the world”, Americans felt a renewed sense of exceptionalism for the first time in decades — all thanks to the good-natured charm of their new President.

That peak of morale in America’s national consciousness would provide Reagan with the necessary political capital to institute Reaganomics, a set of economic reforms built around dubious math that, intentionally or not, set the country on the path towards oligarchy while hollowing out the welfare state built by F.D.R. and L.B.J.’s new deal and great society programs.

As a debt-fueled, consumer-driven economy allowed Reagan to remain both publicly and privately in denial about the actual effects of his massive tax and spending cuts, the facade still came crashing down via other mechanisms.

Having already coasted into his tenure on unearned popularity when the American hostages in Iran were freed, Reagan skyrocketed to superhero status after surviving an assassination attempt in 1981. By refusing to succumb to the bullet that ricocheted off his limo and into his chest, the President became “teflon” as it were, completely untouchable politically.

Reagan’s indestructible status was put to the test in the twilight of his second term by the Iran-Contra scandal, as his characteristically noble intentions led his administration to violate U.S. policies.

When pro-Iranian groups once again took American hostages, this time in Lebanon, Reagan reportedly said that “he could answer to charges of illegality but couldn’t answer to the charge that ‘big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free the hostages”, according to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s handwritten notes.

Almost undoubtedly recalling fond memories of when the hostages were released from Iran at the beginning of his first term, Reagan made a crucial decision that he was willing to do whatever it took to get those hostages back — the ends justified any means in his mind.

In the end, Reagan had lied. He couldn’t answer to charges of illegality himself, instead sending his Attorney General Edwin Meece to effectively confess the exchange of arms for hostages to a stunned White House press corps.

CBS Reporter Leslie Stahl recalled thinking, “This is another Watergate” at the time, but in the end the President’s teflon status was upheld, despite not extending to all members of his administration.

Evading consequences where Nixon couldn’t, Reagan was painted as a well-intentioned, slightly spacey old man who claimed that “I cannot recall anything whatsoever about whether I approved.” Ultimately, for one reason or another, Iran-Contra just wasn’t quite as bad as Watergate to the American people.

Willing to forgive their beloved President perhaps beyond the point of reason, the public’s misdirected disillusionment ended up more focused on the press, who would frequently pepper Reagan with incessant questions about the scandal.

T.V. journalism, which established trust with the public by quickly covering the assassination of President Kennedy and later peaked when Nixon announced his resignation, simply no longer wielded the influential power that it used to when the big three networks dominated.

As critic David Bianculli pointed out, “The eighties may have been the last gasp where the people watching the media liked and trusted the media.”

David Letterman once noted quite accurately that “There’s nothing sacred about television.” A lesson that translates quite literally to the U.S., there is similarly nothing sacred about the nation, despite what its most ardent patriots might claim.

Revelations of Reagan’s lies and backchannel dealings disregarding the law put the final nail in the coffin of the mythical ideal of American exceptionalism that he had so perfectly embodied at first.

For the man who begun his first term by invoking the image of the “city upon a hill”, his defining scandal proved an apt analogy for the overarching story of the American empire: Reagan committed an illegal act with noble nationalistic intentions that benefitted Americans but hurt people of other races in other, unfamiliar places — a familiar theme throughout history.

As the public glued themselves to their T.V.s to watch the Iran-Contra hearings, the revelation that Reagan was human punctuated the end of the final page in the last chapter of the American empire, and the reality of his failures became glaringly obvious.

For one, thousands died during the AIDs epidemic and Reagan didn’t address it until his 30th press conference after the disease had begun to spread.

When he did finally answer a question about it (also the first time a reporter bothered to ask him), Reagan wouldn’t say that there was no danger in sending a hemophiliac child who had contracted HIV to attend school with his peers — disparaging the scientific community by saying that medicine wouldn’t say ‘unequivocally’ and ‘for a fact’ that it was safe.

Additionally, the havoc that Reaganomics would prove to wreak on the U.S. economy over the coming decades and the degree to which the welfare state was hollowed out led to a disappointing stagnation in median wages, while leaving the middle class and poor with a shredded version of the social safety-net they had relied on since the end of the Great Depression, and of course the rich only got richer.

Following the end of his tenure, the election of President Reagan’s successor, his former vice-President George H. W. Bush, was just about the closest thing to a third-term that anyone’s gotten since F.D.R. Regardless, the stories of all four Presidents who followed Reagan turn out not to be so different in the grand scheme of things.

Despite each bringing their own leadership styles and policy proposals to the job, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama all presided over a continued decline in the U.S. welfare state (although Obama made a dent with the ACA and deserves a fair deal of credit for guiding the country out of a recession), a dramatic increase in U.S. surveillance capabilities, and the steady growth of the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned about in his farewell address.

With his good looks, charming personality, and god-like status to conservatives, the ‘great communicator’ left the office of the Presidency after effecting the paradigm shift of a generation in American politics — leaving an undeniable legacy of having changed the game forever.

Part of that legacy being turning the race for President into an even more shallow competition of personalities than it had already started to become in the age of the televised debate, Reagan opened the door for just about anyone to run after his stunning success. As the fictional Toby Ziegler from Aaron Sorkin’s West Wingonce said, “once the White House got demystified, they got the impression that anyone can do it.”

Donald J. Trump certainly had the idea that he could do it in the back of his head for a while, the bombastic billionaire first appearing on T.V. in the eighties to boast about his over-the-top materialistic lifestyle, claiming he had no political ambitions and making the country wonder if this was all hedonism had to offer.

He then proceeded to wait thirty years, dipping his toes in but waiting to pull the trigger while the U.S. puttered through its epilogue, neoconservatives like the Bushes lashing out militarily with no meaningful goals as the gulf between America’s institutions and citizens only grew wider.

When he felt the time was right (or he was getting too old to wait any longer) Trump swooped in, shook the U.S. out of its post-Reagan haze by reminding them what a ‘teflon’ politician who wasn’t afraid of the media looked like, and boldly promised to write his own sequel to the story of the American empire.

An entirely different sort of T.V. star in his own right, Trump resembles a much more cranky and mean-spirited, freeze-dried, stuffed in the back of a closet for a while, then slightly moistened and microwaved-for-too-long version of Reagan.

He spews dark, often barely coherent and wildly inaccurate narratives about American decline, immigration, and terrorism from the stump while repeating whatever falsehoods he felt like — making himself sound more like the great communicator’s evil twin and killing off whatever spirit was leftover from the mythical ethos of Reagan himself.