After yesterday’s debate, Trump is the story again. But for all its fascination with Donald Trump, the media rarely bothers to explain the social context of his rise to prominence.

After all, doing so would debunk all the posturing we see in Trump’s campaign blitz as a self-made billionaire (or as a kitsch kind of American Ubermensch) and reveal how much he is the rotten fruit of the American ruling class as a whole. However frightening or undesirable Trump may be to the establishment, he is in perfect harmony with its gross reality.

Superficially, Trump has evolved with the times. He leaned towards liberalism and the Democratic Party in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Indeed, some of his political positions in the past parallel those of the Democratic Party today, since Trump used to be pro-choice, advocated a single-payer health care system and legalizing drugs, a “massive one-time 14.25 percent tax on the wealthy,” and various forms of economic nationalism (which he still does to some degree).