Everybody, it seems, agrees: nobody has seen anything like the rise of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. He has broken the laws of political physics and brought to life scenarios beyond satire.
Certainly, he evokes strong reactions. I know a woman who is talking about moving from Washington to the crucial swing state of Virginia, solely to be able to cast a vote in November that could sway the election. If Mr Trump is elected she is planning a second move, to Canada.
However, many aspects of the rise of Mr Trump should not be surprising at all: few ingredients of his campaign were truly novel. In 1940 Wendell Willkie, a wealthy businessman who had never served in political office, became the Republican nominee.
“I will be under obligation to nobody except the people,” he said — an argument Mr Trump has appropriated. Willkie lost, but he made Franklin Roosevelt work hard for his win.
During the 1930s the pro-Hitler Charles Lindbergh urged America not to enter the Second World War. Mr Trump has adopted Lindbergh’s isolationism and his foreign policy catchphrase, “America First”.
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Mr Trump says he is a Washington outsider. Who hasn’t? Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Obama — all claimed to be storming the DC citadels.
The billionaire’s antipathy towards African-Americans — he has, for instance, retweeted racist bogus crime statistics — has precedent. Take George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and champion of racial segregation. Like Mr Trump, with his proposal not to allow Muslims into the US, Wallace was described as having a fondness for “deliberately lobbing incendiary pronouncements into the crowd”.
Wallace’s exploitation of the race issue chilled observers. “He has become, at the least, a dark poltergeist whose capacity for mischief in the land is formidable,” the journalist Marshall Frady wrote in 1966. “His candidacy invokes certain questions about the basic health of the American society.”
Those sentences could have been written about Mr Trump and plucked from The Washington Post.
Like the tycoon, Wallace was regarded as a hopelessly implausible political figure, but in 1968 he got almost 14 per cent of the vote as a third-party candidate.
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Mr Trump’s anti-immigration stance and his protectionist trade policies echo those of Pat Buchanan, who sought the nomination in 1992 and 1996, and who says the former reality TV star has tapped into the anxieties of blue-collar whites. “People are saying, ‘This isn’t the country I grew up in’,” Mr Buchanan told me. “You’re seeing it in Europe, quite frankly. And with due respect you’re going to see a lot more.”
Mr Trump’s celebrity has supercharged his campaign — but this is not unique. From 1956 to 1962, Ronald Reagan hosted General Electric Theater, a television show watched in more than 20 million homes every week. By the time he ran to be governor of California he was more famous from TV than he had been as a Hollywood actor.
Mr Trump’s reality series, The Apprentice, served a similar function. One theory of why Washington’s elite underestimated him is that they were simply watching the wrong television shows. Wealthy professionals tend to spend less time in front of the TV than do the masses, and they tend to favour news programmes and highbrow drama.
While they were relishing House of Cards, ordinary voters were gorging on Mr Trump’s reality shows. “I had no idea how famous he was,” one of Washington’s most prominent conservative journalists told me recently.
Mr Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again”, was taken from Reagan, who, like Mr Trump, was a former Democrat and a divorcé.
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No other nominee has had his sex life chronicled in quite as much detail by New York’s tabloids. Mr Trump has boasted of his womanising, once describing the dangers he’d faced of contracting a venereal disease as his own “personal Vietnam”.
The White House, however, is no stranger to tawdry sexual tales, from Bill Clinton’s affair with a 22-year-old intern to Warren G Harding, who fathered an illegitimate child in the Roaring Twenties with a mistress who then wrote a bestselling book about their affair.
Mr Trump’s mastery of social media will force a rethink of how elections are fought. His poll numbers against Hillary Clinton may be dire, but he has defied the odds to secure the Republican nomination, a contest many thought he could not win.
It would be a mistake to write off his chances again.
