“Everybody has a plan,” Mike Tyson once said, “until you get punched in the face.” For a lot of us, that punch is Donald Trump: a messianic narcissist who acts like Chucky, thinks like Archie Bunker, and makes the highest office of the land look like an episode of “The Tiger King;” and his comrade, Elon Musk, who runs around the White House like Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” treating Federal employees like a bunch of moochers looking for some gas for their van, laughing about the desolated families and communities he leaves in his wake. The question is how in the hell did we end up here? What follows is a mini-book of eight “chapters” that unpacks some of the threads of this Orwellian nightmare for anyone struggling to understand how Archie Bunker and a sieg heil-happy Leatherface ended up in the Oval Office. If there’s a simple answer, it’s that political power is today derived more from showmanship than substance, and more from misinformation designed to addict ...