DONALD TRUMP: Fishtown’s Champion Against Belmont, as Charles Murray would put it, by Rod Dreher. Why Trump gets so much support, when hardly anyone in the chattering classes or either left or right would vote for him.

Trump’s voters, instead, wear an almost existential sense of betrayal. … Cruz’s voters dislike Jeb Bush because he has strayed from conservative orthodoxy. Trump’s voters loathe Jeb Bush because their lives are falling apart, and they blame people like him.

…

When I go home to [deleted] I see so much despair, it just feels bleak. If you have any acquaintance with actual working class folks Trump should be easy to understand.

…

Trump may well be a false messiah; that’s an easy case to make. But we should try to remove the scales from our eyes and see the conditions that a lot of our fellow Americans live in, and ask why it is that the kind of candidate we have been voting for all these years, and have been pushing, have no credibility with these people. The Democrats tend to think of people like that as racists, and therefore beyond caring about. What’s our excuse?