First, absorb the fact that the President of the United States – the successor to Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower – is still defending himself for not specifically condemning Nazi and white supremacist groups following their weekend violence.
Now ponder for a moment that America's greatest hour between the end of the Civil War and today was the 1945 US-led victory over Nazism in Europe.
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Trump criticised over Charlottesville response
As US authorities begin to investigate the deadly violence stemming from a white nationalist rally in Virginia, many are attacking the Presidents' comments for being too tame.
Absorb that, and then close-focus on the present: a demagogue occupying the Oval Office combatively resists criticising far-right groups, some of whom exalt the swastika.
Something as dire as this did not occur because a wealthy vulgarian captured the White House on a fluke.
Radical shifts like this don't just reflect personnel change. They happen because the country itself has changed. A couple of current theories make an attempt to explain Trump's election better than those quickly assembled after the November 8 poll.
One theory produced by two political scientists relates Hillary Clinton's loss to the disproportionate price paid in battlefield casualties by a few states.
Dr Douglas Kriner and Dr Francis Shen point out that America has been continuously at war for more than two decades. Only a small group of citizens fought in these wars, and those who died or were wounded were a mere one-tenth of 1 per cent of the nation's population.
These academics have been studying the subject for more than six years and have traced a link between communities with higher casualty rates – more rural, less wealthy and less educated – and a willingness to vote against politicians perceived as orchestrating those conflicts in which their friends and neighbours died.
Their conclusion is that "there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community's rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump". Based on their analysis, "if three states key to Trump's victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House".
A second study confirms the deep alienation of working-class whites with the Democratic Party. It was "economic fatalism, more than just economic hardship" that swung them to Trump.
After the financial crisis of 2008, there is nothing left for people in the rusted-out communities to believe, argues Emma Green in The Atlantic on May 9. Certainly not the American narrative that a college education and hard work can propel one ahead. College is now just a "risky gamble". A rise in economic status from education and hard work is no longer credible.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Frighteningly, 68 per cent of white working-class voters agree that "the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence". Nearly half agreed with the statement: "Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country." Voters who agreed with this sentiment, in the poll, had an 80 per cent likelihood of voting for Trump.
In short, this post-election survey says the despair goes well beyond stereotypes about destitute factory landscapes. It is a response to irreversible change in the US economy and culture.
The biggest pathology in US life continues to be race. This is astonishing, so long after the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s and more than 150 years after the conclusion of the Civil War.
This February in Michigan's Macomb County, veteran Democratic political strategist Stanley Greenberg conducted focus groups largely comprised of residents who had voted for Obama, but turned to Trump in last year's election. When Greenberg began his research in Macomb in 1984, the county was 97 per cent white, and expressed a "profound distaste for black Americans, a sentiment that pervaded almost everything they thought about government and politics".
Greenberg's latest study finds this old racial prejudice being overtaken by a robust resentment of immigrants. Many proclaimed their greatest hope for Trump was his promise to build a border wall.
But it's not the President himself. White nationalism will outlast President Trump and find another spokesman in three or seven years.
Minorities will continue to draw the resentment of white working-class males, given that the American system delivers minimal retraining and financial support when their jobs go and is now withdrawing their health cover.
Meanwhile, the Democrats look shabby and unconvincing; congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are seen as untrustworthy deal makers. Their most likely presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren, was busy at a grassroots conference on the weekend reheating the message of identity politics, which failed for Hillary Clinton only eight months ago.
The old industrial jobs aren't going to be roaring back. Washington has recommitted to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and a small part of the country will be asked to yield up its young for each new quagmire.
White working-class resentment of African-Americans, at work since the 1960s, is by some tests becoming more inflamed, not fading.
It's not just Trump. It's a different America.
Bob Carr is a former foreign minister and premier of NSW. He is director of the Australia China Relations Institute.
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