There is a media network in this country that was built by paying churches to keep the rubes scared enough to spot a communist. That network created the Talk Radio industry that is reliant on tax-free church money and now does the same act for the GOP.
They’ve been around for 70 years. All Trump did was free what was a caged voting force. His being rich makes him the American epitome, and all those years on TV playing the powerful white man didn’t hurt.
Regular Americans who had been screaming out for a politician who was not a politician could rest on Trump’s success to prove themselves fulfilled, and a whole cross section of the political spectrum bought that. It tilted the 2016 election for Trump, but barely.
Making the rural paranoid and heavily armed has been a double win for the gun money backed GOP, and a cross-link between the religious right and the NRA. The absolute fact is we’re living in a construct that cannot die while the churches have money.