The author is an American scholar  The fabric from which contemporary US politics is cut: stage performers and octogenarians, rhetoricians and bullies. Long gone are the calm, measured orators in rumpled suits doing their best to represent local constituencies- Those who try to wave Trump off as a temporary phenomenon, a hallucination, or a fever dream simply deny the deeper, long-term transformation that defines US politics today ISTANBUL "You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a ghost … I