Donald Trump? Really? Is this the best we can do? Is our national political process so bankrupt that bombast can pass as rational political discourse, and a huckster can pass as a serious contender for the presidential chair previously occupied by the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or even Ronald Reagan?

Make no mistake, this wheeler-dealer real estate tycoon cum reality show personality, this builder of thousand-mile fences, deporter of multi-millions, and amender of the Constitution, stands a fair to middling chance to become the next nominee of his party, and perhaps, elected leader of this republic.

How has this descent into lunacy come to pass?

Take a look in the mirror.

Donald Trump, or someone like him, exists because he represents what a significant percentage of us yearn for—a plain-talking knight in shining armor  who offers simple black-and-white solutions to complex problems, problems that we find to be overly vexing and would prefer not to have to think about too much or in detail.

Donald Trump, or someone like him, exists because he is outrageous and eminently quotable,  perfect for filling air time in our 24/7 news cycle.

Donald Trump, or someone like him, exists because Barack Obama is president.

Excuse me? That sounds a bit far-fetched.

Really?

Even before he took office, the national Republican establishment made the conscious decision that this particular president would get no cooperation, no victories—even at the cost of national gridlock—all designed to ensure that this particular president with the funny name would only have one term.

And yes, the new president could have played things better than he did, albeit there is little evidence to suggest that another approach would have yielded different results.

To cover their tracks, the Republican establishment encouraged the birth of what would become the Tea Party to serve as an attack dog from whose excesses they could plausibly distance themselves.

To their horror, the attack dog turned on its creators and took over the party of Lincoln and Reagan, to the extent that neither Lincoln nor Reagan would be ideologically pure enough to be acceptable to the new political order.

In the process, since the original puppet masters thought they could distance themselves from their attack dogs, the dogs were enabled to do or say whatever craziness came to mind so long as it contributed to the greater good of vilifying the incumbent president of the United States. All of which was duly reported with various degrees of fairness and balance.

And then, despite their best efforts, the devil’s spawn was re-elected. The fact that this re-election reflected the will of a majority of the American electorate meant nothing to the faithful.

Their demand to “take back their country” ramped up into even more strident levels of sound and fury. Take back their country to what, or to when, or for whom?

The key to the nomination for any current Republican candidate is to figure out a way to answer those three questions and successfully package the product as something new, and fresh, and above all, different.

Enter Donald Trump—not a politician, but one heck of a salesman. A shark among little fish.

In place of thought-through policies, he has sound bites—but, based on many national polls, those sound bites speak to what many in the Republican base want to hear, and more importantly, in some instances, they speak to the aspirations of many beyond that base.

Could Donald Trump, or someone like him, be successful as a president? Who knows? The facts would argue against it, but as a friend recently told me, “facts don’t mean anything anymore.”

If it does come to pass, and ends badly, we elected him. Look in the mirror.

To paraphrase an old cartoon character, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Truer words were never spoken.