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Is anything Trump has said more staggering or depressing than the idea that in egalitarian America, a couple of small-time business owners can get fined $135,000 for not baking a cake? Where deviation from any of the “progressive dogmas” lights Internet fires and Twitter outrage flash mobs? More absurd than banning American soldiers the right to bear arms on their own bases and their home soil? More absurd than Fort Hood’s slaughter of 13 by a self-professed jihadi being labelled “workplace violence”?

Trump is not the swamp: he is the creature emerging from it.

Donald Trump and his campaign have a lot of catching up to do before he can be seen as more ridiculous, more frustrating, more crazy than the reality of American politics as it was before he entered it, and which itself both fostered and enabled a candidate such as he to become the force he now is.

My own view on Trump is fairly plain — he is a boor and a hyper-egotist, a shallow and avaricious blowhard, whose candidacy can almost stand as a rebuke to the idea of a democracy. But it is not Trump who should bear the responsibility for his success. It is the practice of politics itself and the political class (which includes, more and more, the news media) that has for so long abandoned honest representation of ideas, facing difficult issues with real language, which has so professionalized campaigns and elections that the sound of a human voice saying something it actually means is so rare.

It is the toxic atmosphere of political correctness that suffocates so many voices that enables a Trump, when he rants with full stream-of-consciousness abandon, to be seen as a plain speaker, authentic and different.

How sad a world it is when what even those of us outside America see the campaign for what should be regarded as the sublime office of the presidency of the greatest democracy in the world brought down to a spectacle not much more dignified than the Housewives of Beverly Hills, and of less class than the clammy gropings of The Bachelorette.

National Post