Almost from the moment that Donald Trump began the odyssey that would end with his surreal election as the 45th President of the United States, journalists, political commentators, and cultural critics struggled to explain what was happening by looking far and wide for historical precedents, connections that would make sense of something that seemed to make no sense at all. Maybe Trump's ascension wasn't as baffling and as unprecedented-and, by implication, as frightening-as it initially seemed. Maybe he was the logical endpoint of a perverse and fragmentary story that had been unfolding for...