To learn the whole dreadful story of Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, one could not do better than to read Thom Hartmann’s forthcoming book, “The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink”.

I have often learned from American media that Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, is a bad leader of his country who has corrupted its government and led it down the road toward authoritarianism. I accepted this conclusion, because I mostly trusted those media, though I didn’t know the details. Finally, I met a couple from Hungary, who had emigrated out of disgust, who gave me the play-by-play details. Now I know.

So I was surprised a few years ago, during Trump’s first term, when an Australian friend asked me, “What’s so bad about Donald Trump?” I realised that, like my more recent lack of knowledge of Orbán, he didn’t know what was so bad about Trump. Just as I had not known what exactly was bad about Orbán, my friend didn’t know what exactly was so bad about Trump.

For anyone who wants to know the answer, Thom Hartmann’s book, to be released on 23 September provides the full details of Trump’s rise and the cynical motivations of the billionaires who backed him.

A little background may help to explain. The US has struggled for more than two centuries to rid itself of its original moral curses: the slavery of Black Africans, and the killing and infringement on the rights of Native Americans, as European immigrants spread across the land. Although the Civil War freed the slaves (a war in which more Americans died than in any other), racism continued to severely burden Black Americans in the subsequent decades. Finally, the direct effects of this racism began to be reduced or eliminated, in part by giving preference to Blacks (and Native Americans) through “affirmative action”.

But like too many reform movements, this one began to go overboard in recent years. A kind of reverse racism set in, ostensibly to make white people understand that they were still racist because they supported the existing system which had “structural racism” built in. Self-confession sessions were held, sometimes in corporate offices, led by well-paid consultants at which white people were pushed to admit that they were racist even if they didn’t think they were. When I debated a Trump supporter in a YouTube debate online a few years ago, it was exactly that grievance he began with, which he referred to as part of “critical race theory”.

Trump, however, grasped this grievance even before it had gone overboard. There was deep dissatisfaction with the attempts that had been made to reverse the structural racism inherent in segregated communities and schools. Trump’s solution was, in effect, to “Make America Racist Again”. The latent, unspoken belief (including in the slogan “Make America Great Again”) was that America was a greater country when it was more racist.

Trump began by promulgating the so-called “birther” conspiracy theory, that president Barack Obama had not been born in the US and was therefore ineligible to be president. There was abundant evidence that this was untrue, but that did not bother Trump. Abundant evidence of his overwhelming and constant onslaught of outright lies had not bothered him before or since.

But this is only the very beginnings of the horrors. The rest is beyond belief.

One might think the birther lie disqualified him from being president, but it was crucial to his ascent. Also crucial, as Hartmann explains, was the financial backing of a small group of billionaires. Many of these billionaires derived their money from activities that offer no benefit to society, such as hedge fund management, which doesn’t even provide benefits to its clients, only to the well-paid managers.

The ability of these billionaires to legally support Trump to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars was due to a very strange US Supreme Court ruling, the 2010 Citizens United decision. No other country allows such absurd levels of financial support of presidential or congressional candidates.

The key decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United was stated by Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority: “… independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption". In other words, if a corporation donates to a political candidate, there needn’t be any suspicion of corruption, such as that the corporation is paying a bribe for government action favourable to that corporation. This doesn’t pass the sniff test, but it unleashed the ability of donors to form “Super PACs”, political action committees that can give virtually unlimited amounts of cash to political candidates.

Why did the justices make this decision? Hartmann refers to the five that formed the majority as the five “corrupt” Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices. Were they corrupt? Not in the usual sense. No-one paid them to make this decision. They based their decision, as they are wont to do, on their particular reading of the Constitution. But they may have been corrupted, in a way (especially as business-friendly Republicans), by their closeness to the corporate community and therefore assumed it would not do any serious wrong.

Hartmann unfortunately goes down a wrong path when, towards the latter part of the book, he shifts the focus to “authoritarianism” versus “democracy”, as if it were black versus white. This is a common American obsession, of both major US political parties. But, there are, of course, many versions of authoritarianism and many versions of democracy. There are examples of each that are mostly benign, and examples that are mostly malign, and in-between versions. It is not helpful to paint them all in black and white.

For an account of the rise, character, and misdeeds of Trump, though, this book is the place to go.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.