Writing at The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg states a provocative thesis.
A socially healthy society would probably never have elected Trump in the first place.
Because it is the NYT, you know to the extent she is right, it is for the wrong reasons. She blames social malaise a la Jimmy Carter, basically the existential loneliness.
My alternative thesis: Our unhealthy society's two dominant political parties kept giving people political choices that were too much Tweedledum and Tweedledee (e.g., Bush vs. Gore; Romney vs. Obama). People sensed these establishment figures didn't understand or care about their problems and were unlikely to effect the needed changes.
Groping about for a candidate with solutions they believed in, one who wasn't "Mr. Establishment," Trump supporters took to him in the same way homeless psychotics take street drugs ... in desperation. His MAGA mantra was a promise to return to a society in which they were comfortable, before it became so woke and weird, before they became superfluous when their jobs were exported to the Third World.
Trump supporters knew he didn't live their problems, but he understood and sympathized with their grievances. If the society's movers and shakers hadn't ignored their plight so completely and for so long, a Trump candidacy likely would have seemed a bridge too far, too strange. But ignored it they did, and Trump was nominated, elected, and almost reelected.
