Scott Lemieux finds an actually incisive interview with a Trump supporter. I think there's a tendency to reduce many Trumpists to racists. As (I think) Adam Serwer said, "They might not be racists, but racism isn't a deal breaker for them."
What increasingly comes across from all points of the political spectrum is a nihilism about America's political future. This passage was key:
“He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”
“For everybody?” I said.
“Everybody.”
“For you?”
“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”
And it's not just the Trumpist Right. The Very Online Left has convinced themselves that a second Trump term will usher in the proletariat revolution that has otherwise been just over the horizon. The common thread is that there are a bunch of people living in the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the history of the world who are convinced that everything is in desperate straights and therefore electing a malignant narcissist, career criminal, aspiring dictator is "exactly what this country needs."
I'm current in Uruguay (The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful.) a country that slipped into dictatorship for 12 years during the Cold War. They are deeply ashamed of that episode, but when they threw off their dictatorship, they simply went back to normal left of center, Latin American democracy. There is no "clarifying moment" there is only the suffering and global crisis that Trump would bring.
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