In the spring of 2008, during the primary campaign that, on the Democratic side, pitted the veteran political figure Hillary Clinton against the ascendant upstart Barack Obama, I visited a friend in White Bluff, Tennessee. A small, down-at-heel country town that sits in forested countryside about an hour west of Nashville, White Bluff is perhaps best known nowadays for a roadside barbecue place, Carl’s Perfect Pig, that draws customers from miles around. The median income of the town’s three-thousand-odd people, ninety-eight per cent of whom are white, is around forty thousand dollars. One morning, my friend and I found ourselves in a pharmacy, waiting for a prescription to be filled. There was a TV, with its sound turned off, flashing the customary wall of images about the campaign season. Clinton’s face soon appeared on the screen, followed by Obama’s. A man standing in line next to me, holding the hand of a young boy who was perhaps six years old, remarked loudly, “That Obama. He’s a Muslim.” I said, “No, I don’t think he is. He’s a Christian.” He shook his head and retorted, “No, sir. He’s a Muslim. I heard him say so himself, right there on CNN.”

The little boy listened to him with the rapt attention and guileless reverence of most children of that age. I decided not to argue, for his sake, but I was unsettled by the exchange. It was my first encounter in the United States with what we now refer to as the post-factual world. This was before Donald Trump began spearheading his own “birther” campaign against Obama by questioning his identity as an American citizen, and before the virulently anti-Obama Tea Party movement found a champion in Sarah Palin, who became a national figure following her selection as the running mate of the 2008 Republican nominee, John McCain. How could an otherwise ordinary-seeming citizen reject the known facts? Was it a willful mendacity borne out of prejudice, or something else?

My only previous experience with such Know-Nothingness had been in the Middle East. A few years earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which had unseated the country’s longtime dictator, Saddam Hussein, and plunged the country into chaos, I encountered Iraqis who insisted that the attacks that had begun against the American military were not being carried out by Iraqi insurgents but by the C.I.A. The logic of this was plain to my interlocutors: “By killing American soldiers, they seek to justify greater repression and build the argument for a permanent American military occupation of our country,” a well-educated Sunni doctor patiently explained to me one day, in Baghdad.

The same reasoning prevailed in the anti-American conspiracy theories that had been circulating in the region for some time. They included the widespread belief that Osama bin Laden had been a C.I.A. asset, and that “the Jews,” not Al Qaeda, had carried out the 9/11 attacks. All of the world’s evil emanated from the same source: the United States, its government, and an opaque cabal that was said to include all the usual suspects—the bankers, the Jews, and so forth. The United Nations and the International Monetary Fund were often included in this nefarious grab bag as well. The sudden shock of the 2008 global crisis, followed as it was by the first African-American President moving into the White House, merely spread such toxic world views, it seems.

At the inaugural conference of the Tea Party, in February, 2010, held in Nashville, Palin gave a speech in which she called for “a revolution,” forging a link between the fuzzy paranoia of her own fraternity of American conspiracists and the end-time ramblings of the Middle East’s Islamists, accusing Obama of being a left-winger who was “soft on terrorism.” The charge clearly played to the fevered imaginations of Americans like the one I had met in White Bluff, some of whom claimed to believe the man in the White House was nothing less than a Muslim Manchurian candidate. Palin gave voice to a new American identity as willfully ignorant as it was casually belligerent—Know-Nothingness laced through with racism.

Trump picked up where Palin, in her new existence as a cable-TV host, trailed off. But he has managed to go much further. Beginning with his birther campaign against Obama, and carrying on with his misogynistic crusade against Clinton, Trump claimed leadership of the angry white American people’s revolt and, incredibly, also won over a constituency for his Republican Presidential candidacy. We have all watched as he has thrust himself onto the main stage of the American political arena, and managed to dominate it for most of this past year. We have also watched him crash and burn in the Presidential debates. Now, with his popularity plunging in the polls, he seems to have decided to burn down the house and bring everybody with him.

Standing on this Titanic of his own construction, Trump finds himself accompanied by his wife, his children, a small army of paid helpers, and precious few others who are still willing to fulsomely sing his praises. His dwindling circle of celebrity loyalists includes Rudy Giuliani, David Duke, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich—oh, and Vladimir Putin—curious bedfellows indeed for the billionaire groper from Queens. Or maybe not. Trump has reached the ripe old age of seventy without, apparently, acquiring many close personal friends, it seems, but he is known to have enjoyed hanging out in the past with the likes of Mike Tyson, Dennis Rodman, and Howard Stern. (It was on Stern’s show some years ago that Trump agreed that Stern could refer to his daughter Ivanka as a “piece of ass.”)

Did I miss anyone? Oh, well, there’s also sort of Rafael Correa, the left-wing President of Ecuador, whose government has been hosting Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, in its London embassy for the past four years. (Assange has holed up there in order to avoid extradition to Sweden—where he faces rape charges, which he denies—because he says he fears further extradition to the U.S., where he could be tried on espionage charges.) A couple of months ago, Correa said he believed that a Trump win would be the best thing for Latin America, because he was sure that his policies would be so ruinous as to “generate a reaction in Latin America which will build more support for progressive governments.” Correa pointed out that the rise of quasi-socialist governments like his in the past decade was sparked largely by the obstreperous policies of George W. Bush. Because “Trump is so basic,” Correa said, he felt sure there would be a similar response, although he conceded that “it would be better for the United States and the world” if Clinton won.

Trump, then, emerges as the candidate not only of a certain type of American but also of certain characters abroad. The available evidence suggests that Putin’s government is connected to the hacking of various Democratic Party or Clinton-related e-mail accounts. Many of the e-mails taken in the hacks have been posted by WikiLeaks. Trump, for his part, has celebrated the leaks and announced, “I love WikiLeaks.” (Assange denies any favoritism in the U.S. elections and has described the choice between Trump and Clinton as picking between “cholera or gonorrhea,” but Clinton has been the target so far.)

As it happens, Ecuador’s foreign ministry last week cut off Assange’s Internet connection in its London embassy, apparently concerned that its government might be seen as an accomplice. With the polls suggesting that Clinton, not Trump, will become the next U.S. President, it seems like a pragmatic move. In the end, for Correa, whose term in office ends in a few months, and for Putin, who may remain the Kremlin boss for years to come, a Trump loss will most likely be expressed with a shrug of the shoulders. The loss will be greatest of all for Trump himself, although it may also sting for Assange. Whatever else happens to each of them post-election, they will remain forever linked through their respective last-ditch joint efforts to keep a woman, Hillary Clinton, from becoming the first female President of the United States.