Dean, this is a very thorough catalog of Trump’s manifest failings and inadequacies, but I very much doubt “everything happens for a reason” (this would contradict absolutely everything we know to be true about physics, for a start, as well as being evolutionarily impossible) and I doubt that Trump is a “lesson” for anyone except in the sense that he’s an inevitable consequence of a system of government (representative democracy) that is unfit for purpose in a complex inter-connected world. We used to fetishize Kings and Emperors, believing that their Divine Right made them either (i) wise and just rulers, or (ii) incompetent morons send by some god or goblin to punish people for their always-undefined transgressions. Now we fetishize representative democracy and equally fail to see its woeful inadequacies, conjuring up just-so tales to explain to ourselves why we’re doing so very badly.

In reality we’re just blundering through history as we’ve always done, our tiny ape-brains unable to grasp complex reality and falling back on simplistic nostrums that have the one virtue of being sufficiently easy to grasp that our brains can sort-of encompass them.

But nothing happens for a reason, there are no lessons the universe is trying to teach us. We’re just thick, ignorant, and prone to simple-mindedness.

If we accept these facts, we could begin to design systems of governance that took them into account and acted to mitigate their worst consequences. But for today we’re trapped in the fantasy of believing that in general people can reason from facts, will see the obvious, and vote accordingly. Until we let go of this Disneyesque fantasy we’ll simple watch a succession of ever-worse events generated by ever-worse politicians whose incompetence and venality will appeal to the worst aspects of human nature and thus garner tens of millions of eager supporters.