The groundwork for Donald Trump's candidacy was laid five years before he walked down that escalator in his Manhattan tower. It was at the 2010 Tea Party Convention, and could be especially linked back to a speech from right-wing ideologue Tom Tancredo , who sneered at "the cult of multiculturalism" and said that Barack Obama was elected thanks to "people who could not spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English."

The mostly older, mostly white activists of the Tea Party represented the bleeding edge of the new right. They weren't reflexively anti-government and anti-tax like libertarian-minded conservatives; as Harvard researchers found, Tea Partiers were perfectly happy to get government benefits themselves, because they believed they were "hardworking taxpayers" rather than the "freeloaders" getting undeserved assistance from the Democrats then in power, a category that included many minority groups and immigrants in particular. That message might have been ugly, but it caught on—the energy of the Tea Party helped Republicans retake the House that November and would later scare the GOP away from immigration reform. When Trump was on his way to the White House, he sounded a lot like Tancredo did onstage in 2010.