According to the conventional wisdom, President Barack Obama vowed to bring down the wrath of the US on the leaders of Daesh – “You are next” – in order to reassure middle America, currently in a panic about terrorism. Maybe. But he was pushed into the declaration by another panic: elite America’s fear of Donald Trump and the mayhem he’s causing to US political discourse.

This is despite the fact that there are still very few experts on US voting habits who think Trump can make it all the way to the White House. Since October, the aggregated national polls show him losing to Hillary Clinton by several points – a bigger gap than almost all his main rivals.

The internal numbers – the polling details that help explain how different demographic groups spread between different candidates – help us understand both Trump’s great lead over his Republican rivals and why he cannot win a general election.

Conventionally, the voters in the Republican primaries split into two. There are the social conservatives, usually gauged by whether they go to church every Sunday. And there are the moderates, usually gauged by their educational attainment: the higher, the more ‘moderate’ (if wanting smaller government and ever-lower taxes counts as moderate).

This year, these two groups are supporting candidates other than Trump. The social conservatives – around 35 per cent of the total base – are largely splitting between Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, with the former rising at the latter’s expense. The moderates (around 30 per cent) are splitting even more widely, mainly between Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush.

Trump’s supporters have a different profile. Most do not have a college education and their annual income averages at less than $75,000. But they’re not regular churchgoers, either. Trump is succeeding because he’s drawing the support of a new kind of voter, who might otherwise have remained alienated from the process.

And he’s not splitting this group, which accounts for around 30 per cent, with any other politician. Hence his lead.

However, in attracting this demographic, he has very likely burned bridges with groups that will be crucial in a general election. On the basis of his current support, he would very likely not break through the 20 per cent barrier (where the last important independent candidate, Ross Perot, got stuck in 1992).

So why are the US political and media elites wringing their hands over Trump? Well, the Democrats are probably doing a bit less of it but they’re affected too. Even if Trump does hand them the general election, he is managing to drag the general political discourse sharply to the right: first, the other Republican candidates who hope to inherit his supporters if and when he does drop out of the race; but it’s also clearly affecting the Democratic field, which cannot afford to seem soft on security.

There is the ‘optimistic message that the leader can make the country great again

Up to this point, it’s been possible for Europeans to snicker at the US scene. But the French regional elections show that the sinister political turn to the right is not a US monopoly.

In the second round of the French regional elections this weekend, the National Front was kept out of power by tactical voting by the centre-left (largely) and centre-right. Without such tactics, the NF might have won two or three regions.

However, despite an increased voter turnout for the second round, the NF retained almost the same percentage of votes, while, in absolute terms, adding almost another million, to bring its total tally to over six million votes.

Everyone knows it was a close shave. The trend for the NF is up. It is a right-wing party that is almost against every basic principle of the EU: not just anti-immigrant but anti-euro and anti-free trade as well. Oh, and you might have heard the NF loves to excoriate the European institutions, too.

With those votes, it’s no longer possible to stereotype the NF vote into one category or into a protest vote. But there are some indicators: the lower your educational attainment and the farther you live away from a train station, the more likely you are to vote for Marine Le Pen.

In addressing her supporters on Sunday, Le Pen referred to herself and the NF as ‘truly like you’ (the voters) – the contrast with the political caste, cut off from voters, linked only to other elites, being clear.

The similarity to Trump – and hisdismissal of the Washington elite – isalso obvious.

But the similarities go beyond simple populism and vague impossible-to-keep promises. Although Le Pen has cleaned up the party she inherited from her father – ditched the explicit anti-Semitism and other bigotry – the party still displays some indicators of its fascist roots.

And, as close observers of Trump have noted, his rhetoric shows some fascist characteristics. There is, first, the reduction of complex problems to matters of emotion (especially fear) and will (the leader can solve it – you don’t need to ask how, just yet).

There is the game of blaming the outsider. There is the ‘optimistic message that the leader can make the country great again, or first in the international leagues.

Above all there is the simplification of a complex society into ‘the people’, which doesn’t need silly things like complex routine processes or perhaps even mainstream political parties. (Some of Trump’s declarations show he has no idea of the limits on a US president’s executive orders.)

All of these symptoms thrive on a widespread sense of an apocalypse that afflicts or is about to strike society: an end of what social order should be in the cultural, economic and political fields. What Trump, Le Pen and others promise is not a restoration of the previous order but a cancellation of the current mess to build a new supremacy.

What the relative success of Trump and Le Pen shows is not only that the hard right is becoming mainstream but that the sense of apocalypse is going mainstream. In the US, France and, if we’re observant, elsewhere in Europe too.

ranierfsadni@europe.com