Root causes.
Warren was right when she said that things were messed up in this country before Trump got elected. But the problems run much deeper than the policy choices of the last few decades. Here are the main long-term root causes for where we have gotten, as I see them. Feel free to suggest others.
Fundamentalist Religion. The US consistently ranks much, much higher than other advanced democracy in the amount of religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalist religion poisons everything, particularly the strain of fundamentalist Christianity that flourishes in the US. It is anti-science, anti-woman, anti-gay, and generally hateful and closed-minded.
Racism. It's hard to overstate the effects of racism in all aspects of society. It is, for example, the primary reason we don't have a decent safety net: racists (of which there are many) see a safety net as helping lazy minorities at the expense of hard working white people. And despite gains during the civil rights area, progress against racism has been painfully slow, and often moves in reverse. It is extremely troubling that a man can become president in 2016 by running an openly racist campaign.
Anti-intellectualism. I recommend Richard Hofstadter's 1963 book on the subject, which is just as relevant 50+ years later. American culture has a long history of devaluing "book smarts" in favor of "street smarts", and in some cases this can be a good thing. But it also leads us to question evolution and climate change, and elect people like Trump.
Our non-democratic democracy. The house, senate, and electoral college are all based on designs that give some citizens much more influence than others. The senate is the worst: citizens in Wyoming have some 50x as much senate representation than citizens in California. Also, the winner-take-all elections we have make it impossible for more than two parties to exist, unlike the proportional representation systems that most of the rest of the democratic world uses.
The cult of individualism. Individualism, deeply ingrained in our history, is both a good and a bad thing. But there's no doubt in my mind that the US takes it to a cultish extent. Ayn Rand is not a thing in other countries.
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