A little over ten years ago, while writing a book and working as a correspondent for Rolling Stone, I thought I saw a new trend in American politics.

I was spending half my time in Washington watching Congress make some very unsavory sausage and the other half hanging around political extremist movements in vari­ous parts of the country. In retrospect, the setup probably predetermined the conclusion. Nonetheless, I ended up re­turning over and over to the same theme, which had a syl­logistic formula:

The country’s leaders are corrupt and have become unresponsive to the needs of the population.

People all over are beginning to notice.

This being America, as ordinary people tune out their corrupt leaders, they will replace official propaganda with conspiratorial explanations even more ridiculous than the original lies.

This was the core idea behind a book that ended up being called The Great Derangement. Between first-person narratives about fringe political phenomena like the apoca­lyptic “Rapture” movement and 9/11 Truth, the book tried to warn about a loss of faith in national institutions, most notably in my own business, the political media.

I felt sure a collapse of belief in the efficacy of the news media, if it coincided with widespread (and justified) politi­cal discontent, could lead in some pretty weird directions. One possible future was one in which politics “stopped being about ideology and . . . instead turned into a problem of information.”

The 2016 presidential campaign, simultaneously the most thrilling and disgusting political event of our genera­tion, proved to be a monstrous affirmation of the Derange­ment. The stunning rise of Donald Trump marked the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement.

Every mechanism our mighty oligarchy had devised to keep people like Trump out of power failed. This left the path to power wide open for anyone who understood, or sensed, the depth of the crippling weaknesses in our politi­cal infrastructure.

I didn’t see Donald Trump coming. But as a campaign reporter I’d surely seen trouble on the horizon. The most obvious problem was the total alienation of candidates and their attendant media from the population.

I’d struggled with this issue from the first time I was sent out by Rolling Stone to cover a campaign, in 2004. One of the first things that struck me was the way the candidates and the “traveling press” moved around the country in what was essentially a roving prison.

Your route was from a bus, to a charter plane, to another bus, to an event hall (where you were kept behind rope lines most or all of the time), back to the bus, back to a plane. Then the cycle would repeat until you got to a hotel in the next city, at night. You slept six hours and repeated the pat­tern, day after day, week after week.

This moving prison was so airtight that if you needed cigarettes, you had to ask campaign volunteers (the Kerry crew called them “Sherpas”) to smuggle them in.

This seemed like merely a strange detail when I first wrote about it more than a dozen years ago. But it spoke to a much more enormous problem. It was a perfect metaphor for the distancing of the ruling class from the population. Presidential campaigns were bubbles, and the people inside them became myopic codependents. The establishment pols and their lackeys bullied the press into becoming guardians of their orthodoxy. The press in turn savagely policed the agreed-upon lines of decorum.

To campaign professionals, real people became fodder for stylized visual backgrounds and nothing more. In a less self-deceiving future—perhaps under a leader like Donald Trump who better understands that presidential races are now really just big television shows—they will conduct campaigns from a single soundstage in a place like Burbank and just blue-screen in the different crowds and locations.

Campaigns needed “people” only as props. If a candi­date wanted to show that he or she was with it on racial is­sues, that candidate would visit a predominantly black high school and be photographed clapping to a school band per­formance. If he wanted a worker-friendly image, he’d visit a robotics factory in Wisconsin and be photographed wear­ing a hard hat and goggles. And so on.

But neither politicians nor reporters were ever in one place for long enough to see or hear what was really going on with the public. In place of that one-on-one experience, politicians and the press increasingly relied upon polls, and each other, to gauge the temperature “out there.” This re­sulted in a bizarre mutual-admiration-society situation in which everyone inside the plane gradually became more and more removed from the outside world.

When fellow Rolling Stone scribe Tim Crouse wrote The Boys on the Bus nearly half a century ago, he was mostly de­scribing how pack journalism led to faulty reporting. But his description of the culture on the Bus also accurately fore­told the derangement of the whole campaign mechanism, which included the politicians with whom reporters traveled.

Stuck inside the campaign bubble for too long, politi­cians and journalists alike started to operate like high school Heathers, using abuse and shaming to enforce the myriad social rules inside the plane. If Candidate A fell outside ei­ther behavioral or policy lines, fifty reporters immediately cried foul and that candidate quickly retreated, or else.

A classic example was Howard Dean. Now a dependable party creature, Dean in 2004 initially garnered enthusiasm for his opposition to the Iraq War and his heretical reliance upon small online donations as a way around the Demo­cratic leadership’s kingmaking corporate donors.

Dean spent much of his campaign’s first summer fend­ing off questions from reporters about whether he was too “liberal” or “pointed,” not “nuanced” enough, etc. Many of my colleagues really didn’t even know what they meant by these harassing questions. They didn’t need to. The con­stant pestering questions were all code. The complaint about Dean was that he wasn’t enough of a company man, that he’d stepped outside the lines of the agreed-upon or­thodoxy.

When the Vermont governor finally stumbled with that infamous scream in Iowa, the press piled on with what an­other reporter I know jokingly describes as the “Seal of Death.” This is a maelstrom of negative reports that is ex­pected to inspire a plunge in the polls, followed by a series of humiliating rituals.

First comes the Abashed Public Apology, a scene re­porters enjoy to the point of it being unseemly. Next comes the short Dead Man Walking period. Candidates, Dean in­cluded, usually try to soldier on after being excommuni­cated by the media, clutching at single-digit poll numbers and speaking in increasingly desperate or even angry tones to half-empty halls. This tragicomic narrative may last weeks, even months.

Finally there is the Anticlimactic Withdrawal, when the already-dead candidate quietly announces his or her exit and disappears for a while to “spend more time with my family” or go into literal or political rehab. Anthony Weiner’s recent exile to Tennessee for a stint of horse-riding therapy to treat his sexting addiction is a typical endgame for a Seal of Death victim.

Before 2016, nobody had ever survived the Seal of Death, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, who pa­thetically squirmed free from the Gennifer Flowers epi­sode.

In the case of Dean, TV stations around the country played the “scream” tape a whopping 633 times in the first four days after Iowa, according to the AP. They were like piranhas skeletonizing a waterfowl. It was viral media be­fore YouTube. As Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, later put it, “The establishment wanted to stop us and they did.”

Trippi’s comment implied that reporters were part of that establishment, which was a pretty damning criticism. But it was true. And people noticed.

It’s impossible to overemphasize the toxicity of this dy­namic. Politicians and political journalists were volunteer­ing to be trapped in an endless conversation with one another about which candidates, and by extension which ideas, were and were not suitable for consumption by the American people.

It wasn’t a substantive conversation, either. The big topic on the Bus was who was winning: the horse race. Pol­icy ideas had no meaning except in terms of their efficacy in helping the candidate win the horse race. Of course, an idea that was too popular, like Dean’s anti-war gambit, could run up against that internal policing mechanism again and be dismissed as “populist,” which was something very bad in the campaign-trail lexicon.

Ultimately, most all of the talk on the Bus ended up being concerned with the narrow question of which party-approved candidate pushing acceptably non-populist ideas would edge out the other. We pretended this was a fascinat­ing intellectual question. It even became fashionable to be­come a kind of PhD in these moronic dynamics.

Nobody thought it was odd when a baseball statistics guru, Nate Silver, became a godlike figure in the campaign bubble and America’s foremost expert on what was going on in the heartland.

I have nothing personal against Nate Silver—I was a big fan back in his Baseball Prospectus days—but elevating a be­spectacled sabermetrics geek to the role of Nostradamus of middle American attitudes speaks volumes about where the country’s political elite was at, mentally, heading into this campaign season.

Even in baseball there’s value in looking beyond the numbers and seeing and talking to a player in person. But trying the Moneyball approach in politics is insanity. Re­ducing people to stats in politics is both a strategic and moral error of breathtaking proportions. Elections may be about winning and losing, but they are not a game—except, sadly, to the people who leading into this campaign season made electioneering their business.

If you want a graphic picture of the cluelessness of the people inside campaign bubbles, just watch Hillary Clin­ton’s now-infamous “Mannequin Challenge.”

Watch as the camera pans over the plane full of pho­togs, aides and pols, proudly clutching their tablets and pens and pizza boxes, all dressed in blazers and “smart glasses” and crisp gingham shirts and buzzed at being on the same plane as two Clintons and Jon Bon Jovi.

As a metaphor for an overconfident and incompetent ruling class that was ten miles up its own backside when it should have been listening to the anger percolating in the population, the “Mannequin Challenge” is probably unsur­passable. Here was a planeload of effete politicos making a goofball video when they should have been frantically bail­ing water to stave off maybe the most disastrous loss in the history of American presidential politics.

If those people had known the election was even going to be close, they would have outlawed smiling on that plane, let alone making nutty souvenir videos. But they had no clue what was coming.

Why would they worry? After all, there were fail-safe mechanisms built into the campaign infrastructure to pre­vent any of this foolishness from ever backing up on them.

Until 2016.

Yes, Donald Trump’s campaign was massively fueled by racism and xenophobia. But racism and hatred and fear of foreigners were not irreconcilable with hatred of the ar­rogant establishment that controlled major-party politics. Many voters out there hated both, and some hated those latter folks with the heat of a thousand suns.

Donald Trump was tuned in to this. Better than any candidate we’d ever seen, he ran against the Bus.

The media was the only group on his long list of cul­tural villains that was actually in the room for all of Trump’s enormous rage rallies. We were part of his act. And his triumph over us was a major factor in convincing ordinary people that he could deliver on his rebellious rhetoric.

A key moment in the race came in the days after July 19, 2015, when Trump made his infamous comments about for­mer prisoner of war John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Earlier, Trump had made even more outrageous com­ments, calling Mexicans “rapists.” For some reason, that scandal was not seen as immediately disqualifying across the political spectrum.

But insulting veterans? That was a bridge too far, espe­cially for other Republicans. Republican National Commit­tee spokesman Sean Spicer tweeted: “There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably.”

New Jersey’s Chris Christie added, “Senator John McCain is an American hero. Period. Stop.” Wisconsin’s Scott Walker said of Trump, “I unequivocally denounce him.” Lindsey Graham said, “At the heart of [Trump’s] statement is a lack of respect for those who have served—a disqualifying characteristic to be president.”

With universal statements affirming that Trump was now “disqualified” from running, reporters rolled out the Seal of Death script. There were a gazillion stories. The vid went viral. Twitter went nuts. We anticipated Trump as­suming the position and commencing the Expected Ritu­als, beginning with the Abashed Public Apology.

It didn’t happen. Trump not only didn’t apologize, he even denied that he ever said McCain wasn’t a war hero.

“If somebody is a prisoner, I consider them a war hero,” he said.

Reporters freaked out. How could he deny he said it? It’s right there, on video! He said it!

But it worked. Trump not only didn’t sink after the McCain incident, he rose in the polls.

This happened again and again and again in Trump’s campaign. First, he would say something crazy, something that would have eliminated any previous candidate. Then reporters would try the WWE takedown maneuver, only to find themselves chair-whacked and tossed out of the ring.

For instance, after Trump’s comment about Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever” in the first primary debate, journalists and political analysts alike harrumphed: “nobody can win after making a joke about women’s menstrual periods.” Women were 51 percent of the country. How could any candidate survive alienating more than half the voting population? It was impossible.once again, we tried to apply the Seal of death. But trump survived the Kelly episode. He similarly survived episodes in which he mocked disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski, threatened to kill the families of terror suspects, promised to ban all Muslim immigrants, offered to pay the legal fees of anyone who beat up people protesting him, insisted that women who had abortions should suffer some kind of “punishment,” and a hundred other things. By the end of the campaign, even more serious accusations and scandals bounced harmlessly off that maddening false pompadour of his, seemingly having no impact at all. America’s population of otherwise Smart People was stunned. How could the electorate not care that a billionaire admitted to not paying taxes? Why was no one troubled by the threat of a child rape lawsuit? How was the “pussy” thing not fatal? What about the mountain of extant lawsuits— 75 open cases, according to some reports— for offenses ranging from simple nonpayment for services to sex discrimination? Why did no one care? Incredibly, the popular explanation floated inside the nY- Washington- LA corridor was that this was the media’s fault, that reporters were “not calling trump out” while simultaneously overfocusing on issues like Hillary clinton’s emails. But this explanation itself was a continuation of the same original misread of the public. Here was this massive new revolutionary movement rising out of the population, and the first instinct of the establishment was to turn other members of the establishment for an explanation of why this was being allowed to happen. As in, where’s the Seal of Death? Why haven’t you vaporized this guy yet?

But we not only couldn’t draw blood against Trump, we actually helped him every time we tried and failed to knock him out.

In his speeches, Trump would rip into the “crooked peo­ple in the press” for criticizing him and inevitably follow up with a tale of how well he was doing in the polls in spite of us.

Sometimes he’d call us “bloodsuckers” and “dishonest people” or even “highly paid,” a dig that seemingly makes no sense coming from a Richie Rich real estate scion like Trump, unless you’ve listened to a lot of his voters talk.

These are the voters who’ve never met a New York bil­lionaire, but they’ve sure met a lot of corporate middle man­agers and divorce lawyers and professors and other such often-overcompensated members of the intellectual class.

Trump voters almost uniformly don’t begrudge some­one for being an entrepreneurial success (“If the guy pulls his own weight, I don’t care how much he makes” was a typical comment I heard). But they can’t stand the book-smart college types who make cushy livings pushing words around in what these voters see as competition-averse pro­fessions that reward people who in real life need to call AAA to change a tire.

Trump tapped into all of this. His speeches were visual demonstrations of his power over us. We in the press, obedi­ently clustered inside our protective rope line and/or stand­ing mute on a riser in the middle of the hall, would sit looking guilty, like the pampered, narrow-shouldered, overgroomed hypocrites we are, while Trump blasted us as the embodi­ment of the class that had left regular America behind.

Then he’d point to our very presence following him in such huge numbers as proof of our defeat and moral lassi­tude. Even as we dismissed his campaign in print, we kept flocking to it in ever-bigger numbers. No matter how much we sneered, he insisted, we were slaves to his success. Just as everyone else would be. The Mexicans. The Chinese. ISIS. Everybody.

“See all those cameras back there?” he’d say. “They’ve never driven so far to a location.”

Very often this victory over us was the first thing I heard about when I went into crowds to talk to Trump supporters.

“What do I like about him? He’s got all you assholes jumping through hoops,” hissed an older Trump supporter in Wisconsin, before launching into an impressively ob­scene tirade about Rolling Stone and the UVA rape case.

“He’s gonna be his own man,” a Trump supporter named Jay Matthews told me in Plymouth, New Hamp­shire. “He’s proving that now with how he’s getting all the media. He’s paying nothing and getting all the coverage. He’s not paying one dime.”

This was part of the reason Trump’s supporters seemed so stubborn in their lack of interest in “the facts.” They were contemptuous of anything that came from us and our habit of trying to rub their noses in their mistake—well, it was just as off-putting as correcting their spelling, another thing educated liberal types tended to do a lot, especially on social media.

But the ineffectiveness of “facts” didn’t stop there. The election of Trump was not just a political choice, a vote against minorities and foreigners, against intellectuals, a cry for better jobs, etc. This was also a metaphysical choice.

Sixty million people were announcing that they pre­ferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts.

Blue-state America could not wrap its head around this during election season. Facts, they protested, are facts! But Trump voters did not agree. They believed facts were a choice. We had made ours, choosing to ignore certain things, and they would make theirs, doing the same. No amount of “calling Trump out” would change that.

Once upon a time, if the three major commercial networks said a thing was a fact, everyone agreed it was a fact. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because the three networks lied a lot, but still. Back in the day, when America argued with itself, it mostly argued over the same data.

News programs originally had little financial incentive to lie. They were designed to be loss leaders. Way back when, the Communications Act of 1934 set out the media business as a civic trade-off. The government would license out use of the public airwaves, but in exchange, private media companies would use those licenses for “public inter­est, convenience and necessity.”

Eventually this morphed into a model where big media companies made money through sports and entertainment and satisfied the “public interest” portion of their mandate by creating news shows that had some degree of ethics and factual standards.

That worked relatively well, until the networks started to see that they could make very good money by altering the formula.

A key innovator was the new fourth major network, Fox, which along with conservative talk radio began cleaving media consumers into two groups in the Eighties and Nine­ties.

For decades, CBS, ABC and NBC mostly told America the same story. But when Fox and figures like Rush Lim­baugh came along, they preached an alternative political gospel with starkly different interpretations of the news. This new consumer choice often offered very different “facts” as well.

In 1997, Fox fired a husband-and-wife duo of TV inves­tigative reporters named Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. They’d refused to water down a documentary about the po­tential hazards of bovine growth hormone.

In a lawsuit, it ultimately came out that the Fox station manager in Tampa had told the pair, “We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.”

Looking back, we should probably have paid more at­tention to moments like this. There was clearly an under­served market of reality-agnostic media consumers, and it was hardly invisible. It had already identified itself in the vast audiences for tabloid television news shows, lurid day­time talk shows, absurd televangelists, infomercials, home-shopping networks, and, of course, reality TV. Fox News decided it wasn’t above picking its audience from this low branch of media consumers, and it became phenomenally successful.