The answer to most things is in a book, somewhere.

The Guardian asked a number of prominent writers to explain Donald Trump.



Here's what Joyce Carol Oates says:

Nathanael West’s wildly parodistic A Cool Million (1934), Sinclair Lewis’s bluntly satirical It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s more subtly modulated and ingeniously conceived The Plot Against America (2004) should provide some plausible background for the rise of Trump. 

The actual rise of Trump was made possible by a curiously limited, outmoded system of primaries in the Republican party that gives wildly disproportionate weight to extremists – a problem with our congressional elections.