A little bit of both. He didn't create the movement, but he's the only one who could have amassed his coalition, if that makes sense.
This. He both exploited and motivated the GOP's carefully cultivated base of hateful ignoramuses in a way no other candidate would have done. Trump took advantage the GOP's decades-long effort to eliminate critical thinking among its voters and combined it with a real dissatisfaction with the status quo by lying in a prodigious and previously unseen fashion, with the end result of transforming them into something more akin to a cult (or MLM scam) than a political party.
