General Discussion

Massive understatement, I realize.

It's impossible to consider Trump's rise to the presidency and the de facto leader of the GOP in a vacuum, of course, and I'm sure you're right that he's partly, if not primarily, a product of his environment. That being said, I'm not sure anyone else in the GOP currently in the public eye could have pulled off what he was able to. He is uniquely (and inexplicably) able to engender loyalty and devotion, not just from the voting public, but from his staff and other politicians. People to this day continue to throw away their lives and their careers for the guy, for reasons I can't begin to fathom. He's uniquely able to withstand scandal after scandal after scandal that would have almost assuredly doomed any other candidate. After everything everyone has thrown at him, his approval ratings are near three-year highs. He's basically the leader of a nationwide cult, but even Jim Jones had people bail out when the writing was on the wall. He's like Charles Manson, if Manson was a mob boss.

Trump was also an instrumental piece in his own rise. He jacked up the birtherism claims, working through Michael Cohen to conspire with the National Enquirer to push them. He re-ignited his decades-long feud with the media. His disdain was further ramped up by the 2011 Correspondent's Dinner when Obama made him look like the tool he is. He would spend years relentlessly hammering on both, tapping into his and others' resentment over Obama's presidency.

The sense that bipartisanship was important to the GOP was handed a death blow when Obama became president, though the seeds probably date to Gingrich or Reagan. Since then, all bets are off, with McConnell (and now Johnson in the House) stalling everything and eventually stealing a SCOTUS seat.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that it's hard to know if Trump could have done this without the decades of propaganda and disinformation on the right. Likely not, but he was, as noted, a key piece in how we ended up here.

As an aside, the right's (and Trump's) incessant anti-media campaign has been so successful that even many on the left have fully bought into it. As someone posted in another thread, if one looks at what's often posted on DU about the media, one would think that there are no valid sources of news left at all. The line has became a circle. Mission accomplished.