You can thank Jerry Springer, Girls Gone Wild, and Professional Wrestling for that.
It's only a matter of time until we have wrestling-style political promos with entrance music and pyrotechnics. I mean, they already have the kayfabe part down already.
It actually started with Nixon - virtually the entire country was democrat at the time and nobody thought tricky dick could win - he was seen as shifty and untrustworthy. He asked his campaign strategist how in the hell he was going to win when Republican economic policies were opposed by the entire country. It was proposed that "Americans are stupid" and "want their thinking done for them".
Taking inspiration from the John Birch society, the answer was to appeal to emotion by using theatrics. At that time - people like Don Trump (the .1%) were looked at as greedy and not part of regular society (the 'country club'). They knew they needed to create a boogeyman for middle class white men to get angry at.
The big turning point here was now it wasn't the ultra wealthy causing everyone's problems - now it was the poor, minorities, immigrants, etc that were the cause of all of everyone's problems.
This paved the way for Reagan and the ushering in of trickle down which is one of the most ludicrous economic ideas there is. Let's just give everything to the rich, and they can decide how much they think we should have. But they got certain people to turn a blind eye because supply side economics wasn't the cause of everyone's problems - it's the poor brown immigrant family (who don't even speak the King's English!) down the street that is the catalyst for all of their problems.
Things really accelerated with AM right wing talk radio and Rush Limbaugh, then Fox news, which leads us to today. I think there is also something else at play here. The Internet/social media has allowed virtually anyone to be able to disseminate what they call "news", and because news is just a business, the competition for eyeballs has steadily led news to become more and more outrageous - they keep having to one up each other in order to attract more attention, which blurs the lines of reality and fiction because truth and fact don't matter - what matters is someone sees your headline and is outraged enough to read it. So we get a lot of anomalies paraded around as the general rule.
So I don't agree with an earlier post you had in this thread where you asked 'how did German citizens allow Hitler to do what he did?' and you state that it's inherent in all of us - I beg to differ - it just seems like "a lot" of people because the idiots who fall for populist bullshit and virtue signaling are most vocal and obnoxious about it.
In other words, I would guess that there were plenty of regular Germans who did not agree with Hitler in the slightest. I saw this in a microcosm when I was incarcerated. In CA, everything is tribal and people are divided by race. The white car (clique, race, whatever) is usually controlled by some sort of white supremacy based gang/group. But most the white guys who make up the white car are not racist - it's just the loudest and most aggressive group that directs this narrative and everyone has no choice but to go along with it.
20 years from now, none of these "trumpers" will ever admit that they had anything to do with the trump phenomenon because it will be rightly seen as the most ludicrous and idiotic political event in US history, so I don't agree with you that the trump phenomenon is inherent in all of us.