Donald Trump built a career on fraud and gangsterism. He is our first gangster president:

Now that The New York Times has gotten access to many years of Trump’s tax returns, we have new confirmed details about one particular aspect of his corruption — getting paid for political favors. In essence, he has turned the American executive branch into a giant bribery scheme. Wealthy people with business before the state stuff money into Trump’s pockets through his many properties, and in return he gives them the contracts or policy concessions they want.

One of the great enigmas in American history. But I conclude the obvious. Trump is a natural product of a two-party system that divides us in half. This was decades in the making. And it once again has us on the verge of a civil war:

There are also, of course, many Trump voters who are convinced that he is the lesser evil, because Biden is supposedly plotting to turn the United States into a “large scale version of Venezuela,” even while suffering from “dementia.” They claim Biden is a “puppet” of the far left, even though he opposes Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, a ban on fracking, defunding the police, expanding the Supreme Court and other progressive ideas.

The very fact that so many are so willing to believe such balderdash about Biden — a lifelong centrist who remains far more articulate and coherent than Trump — is a worrisome sign of how cut off from rational, factual discourse so much of the country has become. Many voters are still supporting Trump because they’re living in a hermetically sealed disinformation bubble that is impermeable to reality.