An essential aspect of Ailes’s strategy was to create an enemy that needed to be attacked relentlessly, causing members of the tribe to rally together against it. In Trump’s case it was both and necessary to make that enemy the media. “The duty of the journalist,” wrote the London Times in 1852, “is the same as that of the historian—to seek out the truth, above all things, and to present his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know, but the truth as near as he can attain it.”

CNN’s Jim Acosta once summed up the turpitude of the Trump administration by explaining, “Lying to the press is just another day at the office.” There was no requirement within that administration to tell the truth if the truth did not support the goals of the administration. There were no penalties for lying or cheating or even stealing.

Trump repeated his big lies about the media over and over, and in this effort he had an unshakable ally: Fox News. Roger Ailes had cynically created Fox News with only one mission: to reinforce the often-unfounded beliefs of the radical right wing, to reassure those viewers that they were right and good and even godly in their fervor and those who disagreed with that were the enemy and must be smote.

It worked too. Fox News became the go-to place for aging white America. Opinion often disguised as fact was delivered in neat packages by indistinguishably attractive blond women and big-haired men no better informed than the viewers. The truth was whatever Fox told its viewers was the truth. Russia good; the Western alliance bad. Ailes raised pandering to new heights: Right-wing media told its followers what to believe; those people repeated it and were then congratulated by the right-wing media for their insight.

Trump and Pence successfully undermined the basic structures supporting American democracy, making the whole system wobbly. They staggered to the finish line. The well-meaning administration that followed tried too hard to be too much to too many, accomplishing little other than adding to the confusion and leading directly to the election of an Independent, Ian Wrightman, whose popularity arose mostly from the fact that he wasn’t one of “them.”

Trump had set the bar lower than the finals of the world limbo championship. The American public decided that any candidate provably breathing was an acceptable improvement. What Americans craved most was normalcy. Not great promises, not stirring rhetoric—normalcy. And that was Ian Wrightman, whose greatest attribute was that he was nothing special. His choice of Artie Hunter for vice president satisfied any concerns that Wrightman might not be tough enough.

By discrediting the news media, Trump had done the heavy lifting for Wrightman. The rest was easy. The Wrightman administration parlayed that into control of social media, limiting negative commentary, then utilizing influencers and faux polls to shape public opinion. He enlisted the support of the business and advertising community by eliminating burdensome and costly regulations, thereby ensuring that supporting the administration would be the most profitable position.