Imagine a scenario in which the US returned to power a divisive mountebank, fraud, failed businessman and serial bankrupt, casually cruel, philandering, election-denying anti-democratic snake-oil salesman whose daily language is predicated on hate and fear. And having imagined this, try to explain why many Americans voted against their own interests to do so.

My first thoughts when watching the results of the 2024 US Presidential elections unfold in real time on the New York Times website were of incredulity and astonishment. Of shock and stomach-churning sickness. Surely not again?

Did American voters not recall that Donald Trump had denied the legitimacy of the previous Presidential election, and had tried desperately to convince authorities in several states not to certify the results?

Remember how he described the 2020 election as “stolen” even though it wasn’t, which was ultimately proven by several investigations?

If I recall, Trump had encouraged his incensed, worked-up mob to come to Washington DC on January 6, 2021. Then he watched on TV as the very same mob beat on police officers with flagpoles, truncheons and any other makeshift weapons at hand.

Those individuals who were caught and imprisoned Trump described as “patriots” and “heroes”, promising to pardon them for their misdeeds once he was back in power.

US voters either couldn’t remember this incident – their brains addled by social media or the far-right nonsense that pretends to be media – didn’t think it was important compared to what they thought Trump offered, or simply didn’t care.

Yet the image of a face-painted man wearing a horned fur hat running through the Capitol – possibly in search of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to string up – is one indelibly sketched in the memory.

Section three of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution prohibits anyone who has held public office and who has engaged in insurrection against the US from ever serving in public office again. Trying to overturn election results, hatching plans for your successor not to be certified, inciting a mob to attack the Capitol. If that isn’t “insurrection” then it is worth asking what might be.

And could US citizens not recall the imbroglio about Trump removing boxes of classified files from the White House, and then shifting them around his Florida redoubt, Mar-a-Lago, when authorities came looking for them? Those boxes contained documents relating to spy satellites and nuclear capability.

Surely, Trump’s attack on one of the world’s seemingly most impregnable democracies – his own – would be ample evidence for voters not to return him to the White House?

That and the fact he’d shown himself to be racist, delusional, lying, divisive and dishonest – and not especially competent at any of hats he’d worn in his seven decades, save for reality TV personality.

“I don’t get it,” wrote one of the New York Times columnists covering the event on Election night.

I didn’t get it either. And neither did Atlantic Journal writer Adam Serwer, who observed that Trump prevailed in a sweeping Electoral College victory a mere four years after executing multiple schemes to overthrow an election he lost and seize power by force, and only months after being convicted of state crimes in New York.

Trump, Serwer wrote, ran a race of slander and lies against immigrants and his political opponents, vowing to seize dictatorial powers in a campaign of vengeance.

“The time will come when Americans will have to face the question of why democracy was so meaningless to them that they chose a man who tried to overthrow their government to lead it,” Serwer wrote. “They’ll have to determine why a country conceived in liberty would hand power to the person most responsible for subjecting women to state control over their bodies.”

One of the replies to the LinkedIn post of Serwer’s article was by a US CPA who suggested that the explanation for Trump’s ascendency lay not in lofty “abstract concepts” (i.e., democracy) but rather some simple economic metrics (inflation, rising prices for goods, GDP, debt, etc.,).

Somehow a critical mass had bought into the narrative that Trump was a superior economic manager, and that his egregious brand of trickle-down economics as advised by his financial experts – several of whom happen to be billionaires and may be somewhat compromised – was the best option to serve as President.

“Trump is transactional, Machiavellian, and a zero-sum player – and now America has freely chosen Trump a second time, even after his damning performance on January 6, 2021,” wrote one NYT reader in the letters section. “We don’t care about anything but money and a harsh power that owes nothing to anyone.”

Trump once claimed that he could murder someone in the street and would still be elected, such was his appeal to a certain sub-group of American voters – his loyal MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters.

Clearly, however, this latest win attracted votes from those beyond Trump’s loyal base of the willfully ignorant.

Whether it’s crypto bros, blue-collar workers, those concerned about the treatment of Palestinians, proud US citizens, evangelical Christians, young men and middle-aged women, immigrants – somehow multiple segments of society were convinced that Trump was clearly a better option than Kamala Harris.

You can imagine that in the not-too-distant future, anthropologists and sociologists will attempt to decipher the bizarre collective understanding and cognitive dissonance that facilitated a thoroughly repugnant and unqualified individual to lead the land of the Stars and Stripes.

“I watched in disbelief as businessmen voted for a repeat bankrupt, laborers for a boss infamous for stiffing his workers, evangelicals for a serial adulterer, patriots for a draft dodger who would sell out his country’s secrets for trivial gain, educated men for an ignoramus,” wrote Greg Illes in Southern Man, well before the 2024 election.

Trump showed his hand on the climate in his first term, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, putting a former oil exec in charge of the US EPA, opening up protected land for fossil fuel exploitation, and often being dismissive of climate science in general.

Indeed, Trump’s views on climate change are often contradictory and confusing.

He has called climate change “mythical”, “non-existent”, or “an expensive hoax” – but also subsequently described it as a “serious subject” that is “very important to me”.

Given that 15 straight months from July 2023 set a record for temperature for the hottest of their kind, perhaps the situation is more urgent than American voters may have been informed.

September 2024 was the first non-record-breaking month in more than a year, ending an unprecedented streak of consecutive new records. In fact, it was 1.26°C above the long-term 1951–1980 average and much warmer than any other September since 1880, aside from 2023.

Last year, every day in July in Phoenix, Arizona was above 43°C, the 31-day record shattering the record of 18 days set back in 1974.

Despite the fact the Earth is the hottest since mankind has been upon it, that the last below-average-temperature year (based on the 20th century average) was 1976, that the previous time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere there were forests on Antarctica, despite the absolute urgency to act on climate change, the good people of the US elected an avowed climate sceptic to the land’s (and world’s) highest office.

According to The Guardian, “the impact of Donald Trump enacting the climate policies of the rightwing Project 2025 (a far-right manifesto and action plan) will result in billions of tonnes of extra carbon pollution, wrecking the US’s climate targets, as well as wiping out clean energy investments and more than a million jobs.”

Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson is another who doesn’t understand Trump’s appeal.

“How sad it must be,” he says, “believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.”

Mark Salter is a former longtime aide to former Republican Senator John McCain, a Trump bête noire who passed away in 2018.

Ahead of the 2016 Presidential election Salter couldn’t believe Trump was a serious consideration for the GOP, which he had served across two presidential campaigns.

“I believe empathy is the starting point of wisdom, and imagining things from an opponent’s point of view is essential to solving problems in a closely divided polity,” he wrote for Esquire magazine. “Yet on the subject of Donald Trump, my mind is closed. Slammed shut. Triple bolted. Sealed like a tomb. Nothing anyone could reveal about Trump could get me to change my opinion that he’s an asshole. And not a, ‘Yeah, but he’s our asshole’ kind, but rather a cartoon villain, a fake, a cheat, a liar, a creep, a bullying, bragging, bullshitting, blowhard kind of asshole.”

In his Esquire piece, Warren wondered whether the great US of A was in such dire straits that it needed a caudillo – a “strongman” – to break rules. Was it really necessary to put a mean-spirited, lying jerk in the White House?

No, it was not necessary, but that is how events have unfolded. Donald J Trump is once again the single most powerful human being in the world, with control over a nuclear arsenal, and the ability to pull levers on powerful global financial institutions.

Many who served under Trump during his first term, especially in such portfolios as defence or foreign relations, warned about his utter lack of qualifications, character traits, qualities and experience for the role to which he was re-elected. This was ignored.

How much damage and chaos can Trump wreak in four years? A considerable amount.