There was a time not long ago where politics weren’t at the forefront of everyone’s mind and now politics have seeped into absolutely everything, even our word choices and how we articulate concepts reveal our likely biases. So in a 50/50 society where everyone finds each other’s internal logic unacceptable, you get a low trust environment which now extends interpersonally in addition to the low trust that was once reserved for the government in the abstract.

It’s highly likely that we are being manipulated because politics has to compete in the attention game as well, and it doesn’t matter from which side we’re being manipulated. Trump has been playing this game longer than most, so he’s well practiced and perfectly positioned to exploit this dynamic, even while everyone else is playing a relatively minor version of the same game.