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Notes -
I would like to second the linked post about political parties (as understood in the rest of the democratic world) being illegal in the United States. This is something where Americans don't realise how weird their political system is - in most of the world, parties make their own rules for how they select candidates.
One of my not-widely-held views is that Duverger's law is not the main explanation for the US two-party system - other FPTP countries have fewer serious parties than PR countries, but they don't normally have exactly two (Canada, the UK, and India all have systems with two dominant parties but the smaller parties consistently get seats in Parliament and aren't going anywhere).* The big difference between the US and other FPTP countries is that in the US the easiest way for an outsider to run for President is to capture one of the existing party lines with an outsider primary campaign, whereas in other FPTP countries the easiest way is to set up a new party. Ballot access laws in the US are a relatively small part of the difference - the main one is that the primary system makes it easier for an outsider to skinsuit an existing political party.
If the US had a Commonwealth-style political system, the Republican party would have kicked Trump out - in the same way Kinnock kicked Militant out of Labour in the 1980's or the Tories kicked out their remaining pro-EU MPs between 2016 and 2019. He would have had to do what Farage did, and set up his own populist political party.
FWIW, I think that political parties which can police their own political boundaries are a good thing and skinsuit candidates are a bad thing. The American system appears to produce worse candidates than allowing party organisations to select candidates, and there is an obvious reason for this - if you are a professional politician or a serious activist, you are a lot more motivated to take electability and competence into account when voting in an internal party election (being in power is a lot more fun than being in opposition) than you would be as an armchair supporter. American primaries are either successfully managed by party insiders so they don't actually function as open primaries (the The Party Decides thesis), elect the candidate with the most cash and/or name recognition, or elect an ideologically pure candidate who is going to turn off the median voter.
* Any discussion of two-party systems gets confused by the period c. 1945-1980 where almost every democracy including Germany (PR) and Australia (AV) had something close to a two-party system because of the dominance of class-based politics.
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