"A buried footnote with regards to Trump’s political career is that he made his first serious foray into the swamp as the presidential nominee in Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 2000 elections. When those efforts fizzled out, Trump, aware that the road to the White House via a third-party platform was largely inaccessible, began to weigh his chances at running for the presidency on the Republican ticket. Not a bad idea considering that the last time a president was elected in the US who did not identify as either a Democrat or Republican was in 1848, with the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor. At the time, however, much of Washington wrote off the tycoon’s dream as a bad joke; the egoistic yearnings of a billionaire who thinks the White House is just another real estate venture.

But Capitol Hill seriously underestimated both the dark mood that had descended upon the nation, as well as Trump’s ability to capitalize on it. With an uncanny gift for electrifying audiences wherever he went, people no longer laughed at his political ambitions. Eventually, Trump went on to do what the polls said was virtually impossible – he defeated the veteran Washington insider, Hillary Clinton, becoming the 45th president of the US. At this point, Trump the ultimate interloper began to use the Republican Party as his own personal Trojan horse to enact radical changes that could not have been achieved otherwise.

For example, despite Washington’s bipartisan love affair with overseas entanglements, Trump held back the dogs of war. He has given the US military arguably its longest break from the battlefield in living memory."