The way it makes sense to me that the rural poor overwhelmingly supported Trump comes down to two things: His entire branding schtick (gold-plated everything,

The way it makes sense to me that the rural poor overwhelmingly supported Trump comes down to two things: His entire branding schtick (gold-plated everything, slapping his name on steaks, for God's sake??) is what a poor person imagines a rich person's life is like. He's aspirational, both in the low-quality but glitzy products he peddles, and in how he talks trash about educated people and technocrats. It's true that he's taken advantage of the system, like with outsourcing and all that, but he's in no way smart enough to have developed any of that. He's more of a remora than an actual treaty-crafting shark. So he gets a pass on the economic elitism. The other part of it is that Hillary Clinton, imperfect as she might actually be (and it's nowhere near as bad as her detractors would claim, of course), has also endured a decades-long right-wing slur campaign against her. Literally as long as I've been alive the right has attacked Clinton for one thing or another, occasionally legit, usually not. Enough of a sustained attack just made her easy to hate in a way that, say, Elizabeth Warren just wouldn't be hated.