The bigger picture of this coup goes back 80 years
The defacto conspiracy we see at work today has its roots in the opposition to FDR's New Deal in the 1930s. Its major founding players made their bones in the anti-Communist era of the 50s (Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph P. Kennedy, Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon). Their first big gambit was the Kennedy assassination. They got more sophisticated after that, when they brought in Lewis Powell to write the memo that set the social and political stage for today's right-wing conservative movement. That groundwork opened the door for Reagan, and then both the Bushes slipped in on his coat-tails. Trump, along with Paul Manafort and Roger Stone are linked in through the influence of Roy Cohn, and the Godfather of the play has been Henry Kissinger.
Although the outlines of the conspiracy can be traced well back into history, today's events are possible only because the script that Lewis Powell wrote in 1971 successfully shifted the balance of American culture to the right.