It occurred to me the other day that Donald Trump – not the actual man in the trucker hat, but rather the slow-motion train wreck we're all watching right now – is the natural culmination of several ugly trends.

The Trump campaign – whether it survives the primaries, propelling Trump to a Hindenburg-style general election disaster, or not, leaving someone else (Cruz? Rubio?) to lose more gracefully to Hillary Clinton next fall – was inevitable, and we should perhaps all celebrate that this is happening now rather than these trends continue on without some relief.

There is, first, what a lot of my friends on the left like to call the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency. Green Lantern, as a comic book hero, is defined not merely by his green onesie but also by his character: Only people with strong wills and pure hearts can be trusted with the power to guard the universe from evil. The metaphor originated during the more recent Bush administration, when it became a way to describe complaints among the elite DC press – that's Washington DC, not DC comics, which publishes the Green Lantern books – that if the president would just lead, just use his strong will, then the world would settle down and all would be well.

Green Lanternism has remained rampant through the Obama administration – actually, it's probably much worse given that the DC press is overwhelmingly harder on Democrats than on Republicans. Constant cries of "Why won't Obama just lead?" accompanied everything from the debate over health care reform in 2009 to, more recently, gun control, climate change and dealing with ISIS.

If the Green Lantern theory were true, Obama could have averted everything from government shutdowns to the Trump campaign itself just by willing it to be so.

The obsession among some in the DC press corps about the specific words Obama says rather than the actual actions he takes is a leading symptom of this Green Lanternism. It's not enough that Obama says something was an act of terror; he has to actually say the magic words "radical Islamic terrorism" or else it proves he's a secret ISIS sympathizer. It's not enough that the Obama administration rains down more ordinance on ISIS territory in a single day than France did the week after the Paris attacks; the French government trumpeted their "massive" campaign and that somehow proves Obama is less serious about defeating ISIS.

Enter Donald Trump. Trump does everything that the DC press complains that Obama does not do. Where Obama quietly gets things done, Trump has his own horn, it seems, surgically attached to his lips for constant tooting whether he's earned it or not. Where Obama uses careful, diplomatic language to describe complex and nuanced geopolitical conflicts, Trump offers monosyllables and bumper-sticker solutions. Where Obama expresses frustration that the GOP will not work with him on commonsense reforms, Trump insists that Congress will do what he says just because he's Trump and Trump is awesome.

While many people, especially reasonable Republicans appalled at what Trump is doing to their brand, are eager to blame the media's fascination with celebrity and controversy for the Trump phenomenon, it's clear to me that Trump is so much more than a celebrity to them. He is the Green Lantern. He is the man who will just lead – unlike that wimpy old Obama.

But we can't discount the celebrity part of this. For brevity, I won't belabor what has been well belabored already: We are a nation obsessed with celebrity, and now there is a literal reality TV star running for celebrity in chief – and winning.

A third trend, though, is the conservative – often Christian, often specifically Republican – tendency to feel and act as though they are the true victims of all society's wrongs. I've written on this in other forums before, but also here at OnMilwaukee, about the way some of those who are clearly privileged and clearly in the majority in every way complain about being constantly oppressed. The bogus War on Christmas is both a seasonal and, frankly, archetypal example of how this manifests.

There's also a recent poll that brings this into focus. The Public Religion Research Institute found that 43 percent of Americans now believe that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.

I am sure some of you are among that 43 percent – I've read your emails, so don't deny it – but I hope most of you see the problem here: In reality, by a large margin, whites – white men in particular – hold the power, in politics, in business, in share of national wealth, in almost any measure you could possibly imagine. Not surprisingly, those who identify as Republican or with the "tea party" feel most strongly this way about anti-white discrimination, according to the poll, at 64 percent and 68 percent respectively, though only half of all whites in general expressed that statement.

The theory is that whites feel this way now because gaps between whites and other groups in many areas are closing, and success in achieving the American Dream is no longer solely the purview of whites. Some whites are panicking that they have to compete now, rather than benefit from unearned privilege. They want to close the country to immigrants and refugees alike, because they don't want demographics changing any more than they already have.

Last week saw arguments in the US Supreme Court on another affirmative action case. The court has not been kind to affirmative action policies in recent decades, and court watchers expect such policies to suffer further once this case is decided. The plaintiff in the case is, in fact, white; she was, though, apparently a pretty mediocre student. When she was not accepted to the school of her choice, sidelined because of that mediocrity, she sued, claiming that less-qualified minority applicants got in ahead of her.

However, according to reports, 168 black and latino students with better grades than hers were also rejected, and of the 47 students with lower grades who did get in ahead of her, 42 of them were white. On its face, looking at those facts, there's simply no way that any reasonable person could believe that her rejection was because of an affirmative action policy. Yet she is now the most recent poster child for this strain of white-people animosity about other people getting a fair shake while the mediocre among us can't automatically count on falling upward, and the last vestiges of this country's affirmative action policies will probably be removed by SCOTUS because of her.

How is this related to Trump? Obama. Forty-three out of 44 presidents have been white, but only one has been compared to a tribal witch doctor, a Muslim terrorist, and much worse (including in emails by Milwaukee County staff under then-Executive Scott Walker). As I write this, there's a Trump rally on TV with a man sitting behind Trump on camera brandishing a banner that says, "Obama bin Lyin." Trump himself is a "birther," and he funded efforts in 2012 to challenge Obama's legitimacy as president.

That is, Trump is not only white and running for president, he has openly offered that the black man who got the job ahead of him was unqualified. Trump is nothing if not a literal manifestation of the feelings whites expressed in that poll.

Last week, the Internets were abuzz with a focus group of Trump supporters organized by professional pollster Frank Luntz. The attendees were brutal toward Obama, stating as fact long-debunked rumors and threatening to throw gasoline on Obama should the president catch on fire (as opposed to just not urinating on him).

Is it possible Luntz assembled, and the nature of the Trump campaign merely brings to the top, the worst of the worst? Sure. It is true that we never hear about all the Trump event protestors who don't get beaten up; or the Trump voters who aren't religious bigots and 9/11 truthers; or the Trump supporters who refuse to tell CNN or MSNBC that Trump is finally giving voice to all the racist, offensive things they've been afraid to say themselves.

But nothing Trump has said or done has stripped support from him in the polls – even voters who support other primary candidates favor Trump's most extreme positions. Indeed, the take-away from Luntz's group is that supporters just like Trump more the more others attack him for being racist or even fascist.

There is no other presidential cycle, but this one that could have produced a Trump. Considering these trends – the media's desire for a president who will just lead, the nation's obsession with celebrity and the indignation of whites who are losing automatic privilege and seeing non-whites achieving some level of success – a Trump candidacy was bound to happen.

With luck, this is the one and only time it will happen, and it will end soon. I do worry that its end will not be pretty (I mean, look at its beginning and its middle), and that the trends themselves will not wrap up with a neat little bow. The media will still complain that Hillary isn't leading, the Kardashians will still be on TV and whites will still have to cope with a changing American landscape.

But let's hope this one giant, public, massive baring of an ugly public id is enough to exorcise the need for any future Trump. The election of Obama sadly did not bring about a post-racial America, though maybe the defeat of Trump finally will.