It's the reality, stupid.  Call them what you will – coastal elites, the favored or ruling class, whatever your label for an establishment that has created "a smug culture" of corruption and ineffectiveness.  Donald Trump is forcing them to confront a reality in which more than three quarters of the nation neither likes nor respects those who lead – citizens who, as The Federalist publisher put it, "know the leadership class which held power for the past generation has not looked out for them."

Much in the way the Bill Clinton presidential campaign used the phrase "It's the economy, stupid" to hammer (trigger warning!) a reality-challenged President George H.W. Bush a quarter-century ago, the continued strength of Trump is an affront to leaders who have not only failed to understand the quality of life underpinning American exceptionalism, but elevated corruption and incompetence to record levels.  Or, as that great observer of the American scene – Robin of the Batman television series – might have put it, "Holy Brexit, Batman!"

Reality bites.  For our elites this year, reality is biting back in the form of support for Trump.  Americans want a champion, and he has stepped forward, both saying and showing, "I'm with you: the American people."  The elite reaction, of course, is to deny reality and shoot the messenger (once again, trigger warning).  As a result, Trump will catch the same break throughout this presidential campaign and beyond from established politicians, media, and cultural elites that the rest of us have been getting for years: none.  His most recent speech, for example, saw reporters from major networks and NPR vilifying him as he spoke, thoroughly in the bag for Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party.  NBC News, NPR, The Washington Post, etc. – institutions trusted by a whopping six percent of Americans – had their claws out for The Donald and his supporters, thereby demonstrating how they've managed to acquire roughly 15 percent of the trust earned by chiropractors, ten percent of public confidence in bloggers, and barely two thirds of the trust given to car salespeople.

Donald Trump is for us; they are against us.  It is that simple.  And the rise of The Donald is a two-by-four reminder (time for a lumber control bill, Democrats) to the head of a resentful establishment that, ultimately, reality cannot be denied.  The continuing voter support of Trump reinforces the reality that our elites have been wrong about nearly everything, and especially the attractiveness of Trump as a candidate.  The establishment view can be summed in seven simple words: United States bad, rest of world good (except for the Jews, of course, who were Donald Trump long before Donald Trump was born).  Our sophisticated class has nothing good to say about Trump...or the average American, for that matter.  In fact, it's cool to disparage the Queens-born billionaire and, according to what our mainstream press calls an "insightful, even brilliant" journalist for Salon, the "idiot Donald Trump supporters."

A generation of reality-challenged leaders have redefined the American experience as one that values playing the game over honesty, mouthing politically correct pieties over results, and scorn for the bedrock desire of ordinary Americans to, as FOX commentator Dana Loesch put it in her new book, Flyover Nation: You Can't Run A Country You've Never Been To, live as "down to earth, god fearing...people that have common sense and believe in quaint ideas like hard work, patriotism, and the right to bear arms."  In the world built by our elites, results – of the kind that Trump has had to deal with as a matter of course in his businesses – do not count.  Only what you say, or the faux diversity boxes you check.  And so the crusade against Trump will continue, as he represents a return to a nation based on results and respect for all individuals – even those who live in flyover country.  They can't have that, for their power comes from what commentator Roger Simon calls "moral narcissism": "If you have the right opinions and say the right things, people will remember your pronouncements, not your actions or what happened because of them."

So what do you do when nothing you do actually works; when, for example, Obamacare is destroying health care, the Veterans Administration is killing veterans, law enforcement plays catch-and-release as it tries to deny Islamic terrorism?  You lie...and oh, how they lie.  No matter how many times we are told we're better off for having had the sophisticated stewardship of the many branches of the Democratic Party (consisting of Democrat and Republican politicians, mainstream media both right and left, education, entertainment – you name the institution, it's populated by Democrats in thought and manner), the reality of life outside the protected classes tells a different story.  Barack Obama and others, for example, tell us the economy "is pretty darn good right now."  Reality: We are in the latter half of what The Economist calls "almost a lost decade" for the average American.  Forbes, meanwhile, has looked at the results of government regulation, corruption, and incompetence and termed the last four years of economic growth "the worst four years in history."

The anger directed by our elites at Trump is the frustration vented on someone who refuses to play by their rules, which have become the rules.  Trump, however, has shown those rules to be – as J. Robert Smith put it in American Thinker – "a lot of hooey."  The successful entrepreneur insists on living in the real world with the rest of us and boldly describes "a rigged system" in which insiders "wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money."  And he understands the lies that defy reality.  Recent hearings before Congress revealed that the government lied to play down the extraordinary number of violent crimes committed by released criminal aliens.  Meanwhile, illegal immigrants account for more than "30% of murders in many states," while media manipulate crime statistics to dispute the reality experienced by Trump and the rest of us in which violent crime is up across the United States.

But, as that greatest of all intellectuals in the public space, Homer Simpson, observed, "it takes two to lie...one to lie, and one to listen."  The success of Trump tells us that growing numbers of Americans have stopped listening.  Gallup summarized it this way: Americans "generally have lost faith in their national institutions – the biggest and most powerful of which is, of course, the federal government."

No doubt about it, the deck is stacked this election season.  But perhaps the former colonies will take their cue from England's Queen Elizabeth, who quietly backed Brexit.

The Donald to America: Time to dump that tea, this time in the Potomac.

Stuart Schwartz, formerly a media and retail executive, is on the faculty of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.