In a comment on the Trump the Trickster post, Sam M went all Occam’s Razor on us:

Strangers to the primitive. Jungian analysis. Psychogenic storms.

Gadzooks. Maybe that’s our Loki right there. I mean, look. We can talk all day about what kind of mass psychosis is leading to Donald Trump. Maybe sometimes the hardest thing is seeing what’s right in front of your face.

In 1993, while I was in college, I got a summer job in a factory in my hometown. I made $11.66 an hour and time and a half for anything over eight hours in any day. I worked a ton and made about $10,000 in three months. Guys in my high school class who were working there full time made about 30-40 percent more per hour.

Right now, the starting wage in this area is more like $9.50 an hour. The plant I worked at is gone.

Twenty three years later, and the NOMINAL starting wage has gone DOWN 18.5 percent. Of course, $9.50 an hour today is the equivalent of about $5.60 an hour in 1993. So the real starting wage has gone down more like 53 percent.

Over that time a regular-cab Ford F-150 has gone from starting at about $11,000 to starting at about $26,000.

In 1993 I could have put a 90 percent down payment on a new truck by working part time at a summer job for a few months. Twenty three years later a guy would need to work the same job for a year and half or so. Except he can’t because that job went away.

In the summer of 1993 I earned enough to pay for TWO full years of tuition at Penn State. Today a kid in my position might earn enough for half a semester.

So that guy is mad. And now he’s hearing that he’s a racist, the big problem for college kids is racist chicken dishes in the cafeteria and an insufficiently militant attitude toward sombreros, and by the way tell your daughter to watch out for the occasional penis in the school locker room. Because she will need to graduate and get a good job to pay all the reparations required to pay for her unfair privileges.

Do we really need to look to Jung to see why this guy thinks he might need to pull the level for someone other than Mitt or Jeb or Hillary or any of the other politicians who oversaw that transition? Is it really that mysterious? Do we need to bring Joseph Campbell into it?