Do you want the truth, the sad truth, or the unvarnished truth?
The truth is that it was a long time coming, and that we deserve it.
The sad truth, is that we deserve it by culturally deriding intellectualism, and promoting jingoism.
The unvarnished truth is that our nation vilifies and casts scorn and pejoratives on educated people, embraces backward superstition, and has been simultaneously talking out both ends about this. (On one hand, we say that the intellectual elite are right, and everyone else is just wrong-- and on the other end, we deride the "ivory tower" and embrace things "the way GOD intended!"-- with both ends of the political spectrum pulling the populace further and further apart for selfish, short-term election purposes. (And NO, it really *IS* both sides on that.) One side shouts about how 15 genders is too few-- while the other regales us with how horrible it is that a penis can go into an anus, and how it makes baby jesus cry. Any voice in the middle is derided universally by both extremes, and the result is less and less reason, more and more division, more and more tribalism, more and more idiocy on both sides. It took us the better part of a century to get here, and WHOOP-- Here we are.
We carefully cultivated a society where a huge percentage of the population is fucking bugnuts crazy-- and finally we got a moron in office that they could "relate" with.
The proverb is that we reap what we sow. Trump is our bumper crop. Many are just dissatisfied that we didnt elect a transgender heterophobic female (note, this is not a slam against hillary. Rather, this is a purposeful strawman against the 'ideal' liberal candidate), who champions for abortions for everyone, with free contraceptives at every street corner, universal basic income, and abolition of all drug laws aside from the FDA, gets rid of all immigration controls completely, promises free college education, etc--- instead of an orange misogynist who lives in a paranoid 1960s cold war fantasy, who believes yellow rag journalist stories over actual reality, preaches Jingoism and nationalism, consistently fails to accept personal responsibility for his own misconduct, has a history of fraud a hundred miles long, has quid pro quo allegations in the first month in office, and is the very image of conflict of interest, and incompetent ruler who preaches about religious freedom when they really mean religious domination and persecution.
It was going to be one of those two. Both sides were hitting that pendulum as hard as they possibly could, and it just got stuck on the conservative axis instead of the liberal one, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth was heard.
Both sides abandoned reason over a decade ago. Here we are, with no middle ground, just as we deserve.