While it is tempting to say King Donald was foisted upon us by the media and the 24-hour news cycle, that’s not entirely correct. Even though it is true that at times the American media has been a willing participant and enabler in Trump’s cynical reality show masquerading as a presidential campaign, he is an American monster, which is to say he comes from America itself. He is the inheritor and one of the great 21st century propagators of multiple lines of venomous thinking concerning race and gender that have existed in the American intellectual soil since its inception as a nation. Over the past eight years—in that soil—there has been an especially bitter and angry crop of these kinds of ideas growing (think Tea Party), which are rooted in the past and ripe for the picking, waiting for any politician to harvest and use them. Trump is the proud harvester of all of these poisonous and malignant ideas, and he uses them as the basis of his campaign.