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 Indeed, one of Zaitchik’s more striking interviews is with a West Virginian named Ed Wiley, a former mine worker committed to stopping the spread of silica dust to the schools in his native Coal Creek. After he failed to get state and local officials involved, Wiley walked some 300 miles to the DC office of his home-state senator, Robert Byrd, in an attempt to get some traction in Congress. (The effort ultimately failed when Byrd, then on the verge of retirement, insisted that he was powerless to rein in the state’s coal industry.)

Wiley could have gone in two directions: the left or the right. Guess which one he ultimately chose? “Trump will get elected,” he explains. “I’m for it…. People in America like his attitude. We’re tired of being broke. People’s tired of bull crap. Jobs never should have left here. They should have stayed in America. He’s a businessman, and mostly everything in the world now depends on some kind of business.”

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 The overall effect of Zaitchik’s unrushed, painstaking interviews is to show a Trump electorate whose members—much like the rest of us—are deeply anxious and concerned about their precarious standing in a political and economic order that hasn’t given them any grounds for hope. He also captures the power that Trump’s positive-thinking gospel has over many Americans who find themselves trapped in grinding socioeconomic despair. That hopelessness does undoubtedly spill over into spasms of racially charged invective. More often, though, it translates into a talismanic faith in Trump’s near-mythical ability to “fix it.” Rather than deriding Trump’s following as a collection of unseemly and ill-informed yahoos, our elite commentariat would be far better served by actually talking to them and considering how Trump has become a symbol of the yearnings for hope and possibility in the American heartland.

Many of Zaitchik’s informants say approvingly of Trump that he’s a businessman—i.e., a nonpolitician who knows how to get things done when no one else will. Trump’s long record of past business failures doesn’t dampen this faith. Quite the contrary: It serves as a credential among some of his supporters—a reminder that, rich as he may be, he’s also faced hard times and prevailed. “Why not give Mr. Trump the opportunity to bring the country back?” asks Eldon Martinez, a retired Native American cop at a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Who better than Trump, a business owner who has failed a couple of times? Who knows how to pick himself up and move forward?”

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