As an American living in Australia, there is one question I get asked more than any other. Put bluntly, it’s “What the f--- is going on in the US?” The underlying issue: How does a hateful, lying, criminal, vulgar and chaotic person like Donald Trump remain a viable presidential candidate?

While the American political scene is very complex, there is, when it comes to this particular question, one overriding simple answer. It is this: the Democratic Party, over the years, has allowed itself to be culturally branded in a way that makes it very difficult for it to make inroads into big parts of the US population.

Donald Trump’s continued appeal is a mystery to the world outside the US. But he won in 2016 and can win again in 2024 against Kamala Harris.Credit: AP

I grew up in the very red state of Arizona – among conspiracy theorists, soi-disant psychics, antisemites and more (and that was just in my own family). I then spent a career in places like San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, DC. Then, for family reasons, I moved back to Arizona – and was reminded what real America is like.

Outside of Democratic enclaves in the city centres of Phoenix and Tucson, you could just feel something in the water. It wasn’t that everyone there was a right-wing lunatic, though many certainly fit that bill. It was that people were Republican, culturally. Everyone knew that Democrats were free-spending, weak on defence, anti-religion, and overly concerned with black people (particularly black people on welfare, which in this world was almost a redundant phrase). I could go........

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