He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.
He’s a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that’s the crux of it.
Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to “small government” and “traditional values”) lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Well, Trump was the first one who didn’t talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn’t a politician, and that’s a great thing because (as they’d all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, “hey, he’s lying to you!” The voters’ response was, “yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!”
He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he’s exactly like them but he doesn’t give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It’s the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that’ll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don’t care about the democratic institutions he’s destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.
Note: I don’t personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it’s a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I’m just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he’s so weirdly transcendent to them. He’s a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.