How can anyone vote for someone so… fill in the blank… racist, sexist, unconstitutional, hateful, unhinged? This is the question asked frequently in the UK and here in the States, where I have spent the past three weeks trying to understand the Trump phenomenon.

Behind the question is an implied superiority; that we, the clever people, have identified the monster that is Donald Trump, but the deluded masses are too stupid to see it. But what I have found at the Trump rallies I’ve been to is not stupidity, but frustration, pain and a longing for respect.

Tucker Carlson at Madison Square Garden captured this sentiment with his usual swagger. “They tell you, the people who can actually change a flat tyre, who pay your taxes and work 40 hours a week, that you are somehow immoral. We have a message for them: you are not better than us, you are not smarter than us.”

To dismiss this as the politics of grievance is to dismiss what it feels like to be disrespected, to feel “a stranger in your own land”. To feel as though the college-educated are looking down at the non-college-educated.

Even now, after his overwhelming victory, many still fume that Trump has returned to power on the back of a pack of lies, sometimes very big lies (like he won the 2020 election). And of course that’s part of the story. But his supporters have some justification for believing that his win has in fact been forged from a powerful........

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