sigh
The sound of jackboots marching in lockstep is something people with an ear for them could hear in the '90s already. Trump is an expression of American culture rot—a symptom—not the cause.
The cause of the USA's decline dates a lot further back than 2015. It dates back to the Southern Strategy that began when I was only beginning to get out of diapers. And the blame falls squarely on the architects of it, as well as those who sleep-walked through the subsequent decades of obvious rising fascism.