People ask, and it’s a reasonable question, why everyone’s so angry, why they’re voting against their own-self-interest, even electing hucksters like Donald Trump who never really had anything but mean little thoughts and now says he’ll clean the swamp as he replenishes it daily.

They ask what the deal is when job numbers are pretty good and Warren Buffett, no less, says the American economy will continue to perform its wealth-making miracle and the world has known a solid quotient of peace for way longer than is usual — and yet there is enough anger for a shallow con man to get elected who says he’ll make America great again with “one of the greatest military buildups in American history.”

What Trump knows about history (or for that matter the Constitution) would not fill a Post-it note. Just for the record, massive military buildups tend to precede a war. My bet would be with Iran, possibly before the midterms. But that’s not the issue here, although it’s scary.

The issue is the anger. It’s a European as well as an American phenomenon. It led a generally cautious people, the British, to hurl themselves over the White Cliffs of Dover last year in a successful attempt to break from the European Union and satisfy an urge to get their country back (whatever that means). A windy buffoon called Nigel Farage led this exercise in the madness of crowds and has since become Trump’s dining companion. I suppose they disparage Muslims over well-done burgers and Coke. Multilateralism gets a guffaw with the ice cream. God help us.