To be fair, though, some of us reading and attempting to learn from threads like these are neither so mature in age, nor American. I'm interested in some of this history because of the way it has influenced my own country and intellectual and social trends globally.
As for Trump? Honestly, from this far away, I can't see what the appeal is at all. What is he offering that is a positive contribution?
It is not the rise of the religious right that has made someone like Trump possible. It is the complete moral decaying of the ruling class in America, and the disintegration of anything resembling a functional lower white working class that makes Trump possible.
Look up Fishtown, maybe in First Things, for the background behind this idea.
Trump has tapped into the resentments and discontentment of another Identifiable group with their own set of grievances and wants and needs. With the highest rates of suicide in the country, and lack of any semblance of family structure, and hillbilly heroin, and other ways of drinking or drugging oneself to death, drugs and sex and rock and roll and all the fixin's of the Sexual Revolution have come down hard on the lowest classes of society.
Just like the Dems have tapped into similar resentments from the needs of the losers of the ethnic communities and women, Trump, a life-long Democrat, has taken the same course with the losers of the white male lower classes. It is a path to political power that anyone with Democrat sensitives is intimately acquainted with.
Fishtown is a group bereft of religion actually. The hundred foot Jesus' and the lavish lifestyles of the televangelists of another era are as sneered at and rejected by this demographic as they have been by so many of the more educated and more privileged Christians here. Christianity itself has become something of a joke.
The religion of the religious right is as much a joke to the average Trump voter as it is to everybody else in secular society.
But, by their skin tone, and by their sex, this resentful class of young white males does not get a free moral pass by the dominant culture like other victim groups might. These are the people of White, Male, Privilege. They are blamed as being the authors of their own self-destruction.
And of course that is true. Failed marriages, preferring video games to work, drugs and alcohol to the responsibilities of actually taking care of the girls that they impregnate, and of the kids they spawn, they are the authors of their own destruction, just like everybody else in society is.
When has that stopped anyone for blaming their troubles on the Man though?
Trump was able to tap into this group by playing up their resentments, just like Democrats have been doing with their own Identity groups for years now.
As for conservatives outside of this group, they have been as turned off by the Republican party in general, and it is that indifference that has allowed Trump to carry the day.
And, if he is lucky, he might just get 25 % of the vote against one of the most loathsome and incompetent politicians that has ever risen to the level of Democratic presidential nominee.
Losers in White America have not yet risen to the level where they will be able to carry a nominee to the White House. But they have risen to the level where Trump is now the nominee.
It has nothing to do with the Religious Right or the Moral Majority. The social issues of the Religious Right, from marriage to abortion, to inappropriate contentography and your 'Body is a temple not to be defiled by drugs', have been totally routed from mainstream society, in culture, in law, and, when it comes to the lower classes, in practice too. The mores and the sexual license of the Sexual Revolution have not been kind to the people in our societies who have not had the material and intellectual resources in store in order to withstand that kind of assault.
The only place where the values of the Religious Right have triumphed is among middle and upper classes, mainly liberals of privilege, comprised of all races and creeds and colours, who have come out of that Sexual Revolution of their own making, and go on to churches they once scoffed, and raise families the traditional way, and remain faithful to one another, and in general remain unscathed by the sexual license that they have chosen for society.
Ironic, isn't it