When Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015 to announce that he was running for president of the United States, the world laughed.

And when I landed in Washington late that year to lead the ABC’s coverage of the election, there was an expectation that Hillary Clinton would walk into the Oval Office.

Throughout that campaign, as the other correspondents and I crisscrossed America trying to understand the grievance politics that was creeping across the nation, especially the inland states, we battled a perception from Australia that Trump was just a sideshow.

And yet he masterfully commanded centre stage, attracting outsized mainstream media coverage because he drove clicks and ratings, creating a massive unfiltered Maga echo chamber via social media and successfully undermining journalism as fake news.

By the time the media snapped back at him, along with the whiplashed political classes trying to hold him to account, it was too late. Criticism was read as conspiracy against the will of the people.

Those who stormed the US Capitol in January 2021 were accused of treason, but in their minds it was the reverse. They believed the election had been stolen from Trump.

Even attempts to hold Trump to account (via impeachment no less) merely fed his popularity.

He was able to capitalise on a fragmentation of trust – in politics, in the media, in........

© The Guardian