No one really hates Trump for any political reason, aside from his maybe daring to touch the sacred cow of immigration restraint. But even there, his championing of that issue might just a part of his Trumpness that has more thoughtful pundits and voters alarmed. Anyone who fears some sort of insane leadership for the country may be written off as a hysterical alarmist, because he's going to be hiring a staff from the same pool of political workers and wonks that everyone uses. Oh, there might be the incidental outlier or unorthodox appointee or hiree that the media will play up for viewership, that his opponents will carry on about and his allies will staunchly rationalize, and Trump himself will even play along with the hysteria to demonstrate how unique is his approach. But it will probably go right back to business as usual if he wins.

The real problem that everyone has with Trump, aside from the professionals disgusted that he's ruining their understanding of the Game, is that he isn't a "real" politician, that he somehow lacks credentials. He has no political experience, he's just "a reality show pitchman" they all say. There is a saying that people get the government they deserve, and I would contend that the possible election of a "reality show pitchman" did not come out of the blue, but has been building for a while, that the people of America have made certain choices up until this point, of which Donald Trump's presidential candidacy is merely the latest in the string of events.

When people talk about Trump's lack of experience, there are several different kinds they can mean. It might be his lack of experience with the electoral process...but he's winning, so what's that worth? It might refer to his lack of experience at handling the administrative and diplomatic aspects of the Presidency, but in the first place, there are the aforementioned advisers and professionals, many of whom remain in place through successive party administrations, at least until the Clintons decide to give their jobs out as rewards to cronies, and try framing them for crimes, but that's a whole other thing, which we might nonetheless want to remember a little later. In the second place, who is to say a different approach would necessarily be a problem for the country as a whole, as opposed to a faction that is personally inconvenienced by the new way of doing things? Another reference to his inexperience is that he might not understand the backroom dealings, and lobbying game, which might be the real reason for the alarm of a lot of parties heavily invested in that game, every time some outsider or other grows too popular. In which case, inexperience might not be a bad thing. With this particular candidate, I strongly suspect he has all the experience one could regret, if on the other end of things.

This is not the Roman Republic, with some sort of mandatory cursus honorum, whereby the deviance of a candidate from the expected career track might legitimately undermine the authority of the government and accelerate abuses the system was implemented to prevent. It is generally considered more seemly if the candidate has some experience in government before, but why? The accepted stepping stones to the presidency are a governorship or senator's seat (as with every president back to Eisenhower, except for two Vice Presidents), but the one affords no national experience, while the other has no executive experience. Experience at a government post might be helpful to the CANDIDATE, in that it is an opportunity to get his name before the general public, and have the voters thinking of him in terms of politics, but it is also not necessary. Supposedly, an established candidate and prior office holder has a voting record we can rely upon, but how many presidents can be said to have acted perfectly in accordance with their prior track records? Many candidates ran on one position, only to act differently once in office. In many cases, their campaign promises were not observed to have been radically different from their histories, yet no one is surprised when such promises are broken anyway.

But if all of these substantive issues are what really matters, why have none of the competent statesmen elected since the last half of the 20th century been excessively ugly, fat, short or bald? Maybe, just maybe, everyone is refusing to talk about the real reason individuals get selected, because pretending the substantive issues matter makes them all feel better about themselves! A lot of people sneering at Trump being a shallow buffoon find it difficult to resist commenting on his hair and skin colors.

Since the Nixon-Kennedy debates, which the television audience believed was won by the more attractive candidate, while the radio audience believed the more experienced candidate won, the importance of looks and telegenic personalities and other details have been kept in mind, but let's also recall that the man who was president during those debates had as much executive and political experience as Donald Trump when he took office. Dwight Eisenhower's sole credential for office was a brief sinecure as a university president, following an undistinguished military career culminating as the figurehead in a victory won by factory managers, in which Eisenhower's alleged specialties were noted weaknesses or irrelevant to the Allied effort. Prior experience of victorious generals in the presidency included the undistinguished terms of William Henry Harrison & Zachary Taylor and the scandal-ridden administration of Ulysses Grant. The glory years of Washington & Jackson were over a century in the past, and yet no one thought the American people were crazy or the candidate a narcissist when he ran for and won a job requiring a very different skill set than his prior vocation, in which his mastery was also highly suspect (a soldier whose career spanned the two greatest wars in American history and yet never saw five minutes of combat - yeah, let's make HIM president). It should also be noted that under Ike, we had a little program known as Operation Wetback, giving us more similarities to Trump.

Eisenhower was followed by Kennedy in the ultimate triumph of style over substance to that point in history, and people still refuse to recognize the scope of the foreign policy disasters of that administration, choosing instead to mythologize his term for his looks, untimely death and whatever potential they chose to envision for his presidency. Two decades later, a former actor was elected president. While Ronald Reagan had served as a governor, he is hardly remembered as campaigning on his record, with his filmography being a far greater point of reference.

Then came Bill Clinton, who, regardless of his policies or positions, cannot be regarded as anything less than one of the sleaziest individuals to hold such high office in recent memory. A con artist and shyster back in his home state, involved in a more brazen and blatant version of sort of shenanigans that brought down the housing market in 2008, and prone to using image and emotion in place of facts or reason, he was hardly a model of professionalism while in office. He and his staff sold access to both the office and its trappings and history, while engaging in wholesale abuses of executive privilege and authority. He fired federal prosecutors who were investigating him and his allies (as was his prerogative, but traditionally, incoming presidents would allow such officials to wrap up their casework before replacing them with the new administration's ideological kindred), and he attempted to fire the apolitical staff of the White House travel office in order to arrange a beneficial deal on behalf of associates. When that was too much for some people to swallow at first, the head of the Travel Office was investigated and indicted on spurious grounds. When a former supporter of the administration claimed he was coming to realize Hilary was a liar, a White House spokesman claimed it was only Clinton's heretofore undetected respect for his office that kept him from punching the critic's nose. Trampling all over procedures and customs for the sake of immediate convenience only serves to degrade procedure in everyone's eyes. Sure, in isolation, those incidents are not such a big deal...but the lowering of such standards of dignity make it possible for someone like Donald Trump to come along down the road and make allusions to his penis size during a debate. And of course, Clinton's infamous misuse of that same organ deflates a lot of complaints about Trump's dignity and stature. Is a blowhard really a less worthy occupant of the Oval Office than a sexual harasser and accused rapist? His defense was so unethical his own Supreme COurt appointees boycotted his State of the Union Address. At the end of Clinton's term of office, the outgoing staff vandalized the West Wing with obscene graffiti, damaging equipment and sabotaging furniture, even while the Clintons themselves attempted to loot the White House for their personal profit, with many of their allies and supporters chiming in on the criticisms, now that there was nothing at stake.

Finally, we come to Barack Obama. While he served a brief political career before ascending to the Presidency, Obama's career was hardly typical. He ran for his first office unopposed, by challenging the nominating petitions in the special election to fill a vacated seat, and thereafter retained his office with the advantages of incumbency. When running for the US Senate, his supporters (namely, the newspaper that had endorsed his first Senate bid, against a civil rights hero, in opposition to the rest of their party) had his opponents' divorce records unsealed, against the wishes of both the candidate and his ex-wife, including records they had sealed to protect their child. The allegations were suspect, and even if true, hardly constituted wrongdoing, with the most scandalous accusation being merely a discussion of a married couple's sexual boundaries. But Obama's supporters made hay out of it and drove his opponent to resign, after earlier trying to manufacture a scandal accusing the Republican of a tactic (videotaping an opponent's public appearances) even Obama himself would later admit was commonplace. And people did this not because Obama was their hero or some sort of leader, but because they wanted him to win, largely for superficial reasons. He had written a book publicizing his scandalous family history as exotic and emphasizing aspects of his origins that had little to do with actual qualifications for anything, but implying some sort of special status, romanticizing his public persona. As a Senator, Obama was infamous for operating in service to his future aspirations, often merely voting "present." He was invited to make a critical speech at the Democratic national convention before he even won his election for Senate, and seemed to spend most of the half a term he served accepting awards and making speeches.

During his campaign for President, Obama, rather than any policy or substance, merely used simple images like "Hope" and "Change" while his real campaign platform consisted entirely of being the first black nominee. He ran solely on his own appearance, having little to do with the black community in the United States. He was born to a white woman, by a black foreigner (Africans and Caribbean blacks are notoriously prejudiced against African-Americans), and lived in privileged circumstances with a white family his whole life, which was a subject of great derision from his primary opponent during his first Senate run. This did not stop Obama from shameless pandering to memories of the civil rights movement and appropriating whatever symbols of the history of blacks in this country he could. His supporters responded with hair-trigger accusations of racism towards anyone who leveled any sort of criticism toward Obama, and even the circulation of a memo proposing such tactics made little impression on the general public.

The major difference between Trump's style of campaigning and Obama's is that Obama didn't need to employ the same antics Trump does, because the media took care of it for him. He could afford to be gracious and non-confrontational, and posture as the voice of reason in the battle between the media and his Republican opponents, because he knew he'd never find himself on the other side of that fight. And in his own book, he pretty much came right out and said that was the strategy of his political image, to play on white guilt and the desire of white people to see blacks succeed. He comes right out in the book and says that as long as you are not being threatening, white people are eager to help out. He knew, and was right, in that everyone would be all too willing to see the good in his taking the high road (while ignoring the point that it cost him nothing to do so). He didn't have to criticize opponents, the media, and even other politicians, would do it for him.

And in spite of that, no president has been so racially active in his behavior in office. In nearly every racial issue that broke out, before all the facts were ever heard, Obama was leaping in on the side of the black party, regardless of the established facts of the matter, such as the arrest of Henry Gates, or claiming racial solidarity with Trayvon Martin. In the latter case, there were any number of ways to weigh in in support, from the perspective on non-violence, or calling out the risks of citizens taking justice into their own hands. Instead, he sided with Martin based on their shared skin color, which rubs most people absolutely wrong, and was the whole reason for the civil rights movement in the first place. By taking such a tack, he gives tacit permission for others to do so as well. Maybe if he had a son, that boy would look like Trayvon Martin, but I have nephews who, like George Zimmerman, have a German last name and a Hispanic mother. If Obama can take sides on such frivolous criteria, so can the rest of us. It's hardly a crime, but it is an example of the shallow perceptions with which Obama coasts along, rather than the example and leadership of a serious statesman. His predecessor was no mental giant, but his gaffes and lapses consisted of mispronunciations and malapropisms, rather than statements whose content is as ill-considered as any number of Obama statements. Furthermore, Obama has not had satirical TV programs mis-attributing statements or errors to him, as they have done to Bush and Sarah Palin. A lot of people might be surprised that Bush did not coin the word "strategery" or that Palin never said she could see Russia from her house.

A detail often celebrated in recent years is that people of a certain age get their news from comedy programs than from actual sources of news, much less investigating facts and events on their own, despite a capacity to do so that is unmatched in the history of the world. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert, even when you agree with them, are remarkably short on substantive criticism, preferring to mug and posture and make childish insults. The beauty of their particular scam is that they are explicitly comic performances, and so are not held to any standards of integrity or journalistic ethics. Yet, at the same time, it quickly became fashionable for those with similarly aligned ideological positions, to credit their commentary as if it was legitimate journalism, and their jokes were genuine political debate. They gained legitimacy without having to earn it.

Now here's the thing. Lots of people have been bullied. Really bullied, not criminally assaulted, as bullying is depicted in 80s movies, or having their feelings hurt by rude remarks, much less whatever the fiction of which cyber-bullying consists. Bullying most often involves an individual with some degree of power in a limited setting embarrassing the subject with demonstrations of his control or power. In other words, the bully does things because he can, and he and his victim know he will face no consequences. While most people forget these experiences or put them out of their minds as quickly as possible, they retain the emotional recollection of the experience, and do not like it. And while the political classes might think the typical unsophisticated voter doesn't get the subtleties of their work, at a visceral level, a lot of people do. Even if they are not going to articulate it or even be conscious of it, people are aware of how low the political climate in America has slid. They see Jon Stewart smirking at them, not giving a shit that he is mocking ideas and values they hold dear, because he's playing to young people who adore snark and irony because they think it's daring and rebellious. They see Obama getting away with stuff they know no white man would. Like a bully's teasing, the political class might claim they're doing nothing wrong, and might even convince themselves of that, but what they really believe is that they have the right to exercise their power, because they are better than those who don't have it.

That's what everyone thinks about something they're good at - they know how hard they had to work to get that good, it assumes a disproportionate significance in their minds, since it has consumed a good portion of their lives, and they resent people who don't appreciate what they went through to get here. And so the political class has become increasingly isolated and ever more content to put on shows and cynically play to one another, rather than really appeal to the voters. They hit the talking points and craft an image, or a message, while saying less and less. And more and more, they've been shutting out anyone who doesn't play along with them, not just through the normal channels, but using the tactics of public perception, of political correctness and in trying to define the way debate is conducted. And people want to hit back. They don't being told what they can't say or what ideas they can't have. Maybe at one time or another, they got excited by a non-traditional politician, whether John Anderson or Ross Perot or Ralph Nader or Ron Paul or Howard Dean, only to see them belittled and mocked, and marginalized. Maybe they just liked a mainstream candidate, and got sick of seeing his verbal slips ridiculed by a professional entertainer delivering a prepared monologue. It's like having a professional athlete mock a businessman for stumbling. Can you blame them for their satisfaction in someone like Trump who can't be handled by the usual restraints, who has been going along taking criticism and ridicule for over 20 years in the public eye, building up a tolerance to newsprint criticism while not having to respond to it, lest he lose an election? The man has been delivering a product for years, and knows something about appealing to people. Individuals who have met him in casual professional circumstances describe him as possessing the common touch. He doesn't tell construction workers and janitors whom he employees "You're fired." He saves that for the sort of dipshits who go on reality TV. And people don't care, because those folks have it coming. People have been trying to go outside the system for decades and looking for something else, and being told they can't have it, while the establishment becomes ever more smug and certain of itself, and more blatant in the exposure of their craft. Maybe Trump isn't what people want, but at least he's not taking their crap anymore! Maybe he's lying, maybe he'll disappoint voters, but how can they be any worse off? What candidate hasn't?

The political types now look for candidates with appeal and Q-ratings and all that other crap, rather than what they are supposed to be doing, which is serving the issues and assisting in the governance of the country. Instead, it's all about the elections. Elections are no longer the means to select leaders, they are the metric by which the political class sorts out their professional hierarchy, and an office-holder is driven by the election cycle, seeking to move up or hold on, rather than actually accomplish anything beyond personal enrichment or aggrandizement, the latter seeming to have captured the administrations of the last two presidents.

Pundits nowadays discuss the State of the Union address the way entertainment reporters discuss the Oscars - it's a big show, all stage managed. It originates from a directive in the Constitution that the President keep Congress informed on national conditions, and is now a quasi-entertainment event in which no new or important information is delivered, aside from coded cues that signal changes in political positions and the rise and fall in favor of the President's courtiers. Who better to headline such a spectacle than the man who once ran the Miss America pageant and a reality TV show star?

Donald Trump is where he is, because we have embraced, for generations now, the devolution of the political system to his natural environment. No one would have taken Donald Trump too seriously as a candidate when he first rose to prominence as a theoretically successful businessman, and his first divorce and remarriage would have killed any such notions back then. It was only when he stooped to even greater depths of public behavior, and traded down for an even more flagrant trophy wife, and engaged in more shameless public pandering that he found the carnival barkers and ringmasters who had taken over politics were his peers, and we all discovered that he was even better at putting on a show than they.

Trump is a perverse kind of Batman - He's running because we have to chase him. He's the candidate America needs right now, but hopefully not the one we deserve.