It is critical to see Trump as a part of this wider phenomenon. One may debate the reasons for the phenomenon: the destabilizing impact of globalization on Western democracies; stagnant middle-income wages; growing inequality; fear of an automated future; the sheer scale of current migration, with some 68.5 million refugees or internally displaced people in the world; the failure of the United States or Europe to enact coherent immigration policies; the sense of vulnerability that jihadist terrorism since 2001 has propagated; the resultant spread of phobia about Islam; the ease of mob mobilization through fear-mongering and scapegoating on social media.

In the end it does not matter which factors weight most. What matters is to recognize that Trump is strong because of a global nationalist lurch; that his feral instincts make him dangerous; and that he may well win a second term, just as Orban has now won four terms.

To ridicule Trump will achieve little absent a compelling social and economic alternative that addresses anxiety. The Democratic Party, for now, is nowhere near that.

Eighteen months into a presidency during which Trump has shown contempt for the truth, Republican support for him is overwhelming. The fact that this is shameful does not make it any less politically significant. The zero-tolerance border policy that left more than 2,300 children separated from their parents — a policy Trump has now rescinded after coming under enormous pressure — had broad backing until children’s desperate cries delivered what no atrophied Republican conscience could summon: moral revulsion.

Trump likes to go for the jugular. He sees opportunity in a Europe that is split down the middle between nations like Hungary and Poland that make no attempt to sugarcoat their anti-immigrant nativism and states like Germany that have not forgotten that the pursuit of racially and religiously homogeneous societies lay at the core of the most heinous crimes of the last century.

In this split, Orban and his ilk are in the ascendancy. In fact, Orban is the most formidable politician in Europe today. It’s no coincidence that Trump called him last weekend. Their aims overlap.

Nor is it a coincidence that Trump tweeted this week that “Crime in Germany is way up” and that allowing immigrants in “all over Europe” has “strongly and violently changed their culture.”