What intricacies of the GOP primary process led Trump to win nomination?

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

The GOP establishment, official and unofficial, spent decades cultivating a bumper crop of idiots - a carefully carved demographic block of people incapable of independent or critical thought who, when fed the right mixture of nonsense from the right nonsense peddlers, would vote for whoever they were pointed at.

And then Trump came along and stole the GOP's idiot harvest right out from under them. He stole their medium, by being such and outrageous disaster that (like a car wreck) everyone just had to stop and see, which got him billions in free media exposure. Simultaneously, he spewed out his own Brobdingnagian filth, so unprecedented in its foulness and depth that he could easily trample the GOP's own carefully crafted message into it. And finally, he gave their herd of idiots a way to acknowledge the GOP's inherent contradictions and hypocrisy, and feel like they had reclaim some tattered shreds of decency and self-respect while at the same time drawing them ever-deeper into the exact same set of utterly untrue and reality-denying beliefs, making it nigh-impossible for them to ever abandon him with their psyches intact.


I'd say it was masterfully done, but it really wasn't. Trump is like a lousy thief whose only skill is spotting rich marks.  He realized the rich man outside of town didn't actually protect his gold.  So he waltzed in and stole it, told everyone he was a master thief, and bribed everyone he encountered with his stolen gold. But there are no more such easy victims, his hoard will run out sooner rather than later, and he doesn't understand a single thing about managing wealth, so even with his vast hoard, he has no way to increase his supply legitimately, and he's not the master thief he pretends to be, so he can't steal more either. Eventually the jig will be up and fate will descend upon him.