All right, I’ll assume that you can’t fathom the idea that someone would put Trump into a list for a reason other than personal, political misgrievances, and take you at your word that you don’t understand my second to last paragraph.
I have a series of examples of radicalist, fringe candidates who have experienced unprecedented meteoric rises in their political fortunes.
Now, to some extent, it’s not impossible that an edge candidate might make it to the top of the heap but, most often, the same disordered thinking that allows one to hold radical political positions is tied to a general inability to be particularly organized or effective. Similarly, it is generally tied to an inability to be particularly likable to the mass public - a prerequisite to winning a popularity contest.
Nor is it impossible for a candidate to come out of nowhere and rise to the top of the heap. I doubt that anyone had heard of Bill Clinton (outside of Arkansas) before he was elected, and yet one can accept that he was a charismatic and convincing man, just as Obama was. For people like these to come out of nowhere and rise to the top isn’t surprising. They’re organized, charismatic, and centrist.
Chairman Mao, Lenin, and a variety of South American dictators have risen despite radical sentiments. It’s not impossible for someone to be organized and charismatic while also holding radical principals, but one senses that they grabbed the sentiment of the day and ran with it, as narcissistic sociopaths, rather than out of any true belief.
In Trump’s case, I’ll grant that he probably is a narcissistic sociopath to at least some extent (and no, I do not say that it of political animosity - what Trump does, while amusing, fundamentally affects the Ukraine more than it does me, as an American. I am interested in the topic, but I am not alight with rage in any way), but I do not get the sense that he misbelieves his politics, not do I sense that he chose them out of a canny understanding of what the people want. The Mexico wall, etc. has never been a focal issue of any majority worth gaining. You don’t fall on that particular political position simply out of a desire to achieve ultimate dominion of the land. Communism and Socialism promised to turn countries full of peasants into lands of middle class workers. Trump’s America first policy falls far short of that sort of promise.
You might argue that he is charismatic. I suppose I would agree that he is “entertaining”, but you’ll note that every time he actually got any attention from anyone outside the lunatic fringe, e.g. the debates, the polls careened away from him about as fast as humanly possible. Whatever sort of entertainment value he has does not seem to translate itself into political charisma.
Is he organized, then? Look at the botched rollout of everything from the Muslim Ban to Comey’s firing. It’s clear that in every way, Trump does not run a well-oiled and organized anything.
And I realize that I’m focusing a lot on Trump here, but I suspect that if I knew more about Sanders, Le Pen, etc. that I could show similar examples of ineptitude and mass unappealability. We are not looking at a group of Lenins and Maos, we’re looking at a strangely politically successful group of fringe nincompoops. Their political success departs significantly from historic norms.
And while I’ll grant that this success in recent years could simply be down to the effects of social media allowing people to live in sheltered, unquestioned political fantasy lands, it should be noted that Facebook and the Internet are older than 2 years by quite a bit. If that was all it takes, we should have seen radical, fringe nincompoops making real, competitive bids for office before 2016. And yet we don’t, really. It’s more reasonable to assume that it just took that delay from the creation of these technologies to discovering how to take advantage of them. Russia appears to be a leader in this realm, but one assumes that mainstream, domestic politicians will follow and swamp out Russian propaganda well before Facebook and Twitter devise ways to detect and block false news.
Obama may have advertised online fairly well, but he didn’t sink to the level of creating fake news and fake amounts to disseminate them. Whoever runs against Trump should probably do so.