THE WHITE WOKERS:

[W]hat accounts for the ex-president's continuing grip on the trust and affection of so many Republicans? Ignorance and lack of interest may be part of it, but if so, it is a willful ignorance, because all the facts about January 6 are out in the open, even though Fox News refused to broadcast the committee's hearings.

But talking about the facts may miss the point. To many of his supporters, Trump is more than just a politician. A major part of his appeal is that he was never really a politician at all. People have turned to him as a kind of messiah. They don't just support him, they believe in him as a savior who gives them a sense of pride, not least in belonging to something greater than the life of any individual person.

Class has much to do with this. Trump's most loyal supporters are white Americans without any higher education, often living in rural areas, who feel unheard, condescended to, and even despised by better-educated, more urban Americans. The more that educated liberals deplore what former President Barack Obama once described as people who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," the more the typical Trump voters will double down on their beliefs.

Trump understands this and, despite his wealth, shares the popular resentment of elites that never quite accepted him or his family of shady real-estate operators. The fact that he is a serial sinner against the religious values that many of his followers claim as their own does not faze them. Most people are sinners, after all. Rates of divorce and teenage birth are higher in solidly Republican states than in more liberal parts of America. The more Trump's political opponents criticize him for being an adulterer, a bigot, and a liar, the more his followers defend him. That is why the facts laid out by the January 6 Committee don't matter to them.

The key is that Trump, like all skillful demagogues, gives people who feel powerless a sense of collective power. He fires up a warm feeling of "us" against "them," and of being "patriots" pitted against arrogant cosmopolitan urbanites who coddle non-white minorities, immigrants, and transsexuals.

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