I don’t think that’s it at all. In reality, many and probably most Trump supporters are perfectly nice, kind and decent people on an individual basis when it comes to how they operate on a day-to-day basis.
In my experience most of them are simply poorly-informed and/or have a very limited understanding of the world outside of their cloistered information ecosystem.
The problem isn’t so much that they are fundamentally “cruel” or hateful, but rather is that our current information economy is such that it’s easy and comfortable for them to live in a sort of unreality that silos them off into tribal-like identities that are self-reinforcing and that as such, create a kind of impermeable membrane that’s almost impossible to penetrate.
That this is so, is not an accident. It comes as an almost inevitable reaction to the fact that for decades now, large swathes of working class white people have been faced with the fact that their interests don’t matter, that no one gives a shit about them, and that the powers that be are more than willing to sell their livelihoods out for the profit of a few elites.
Trumpism is obviously not the answer.
It’s a con job, a fake out, but it feels like the right kind of “fuck you” to a lot of people who hate what globalization has done to their communities.
This has created a kind of tribalistic identity politics that can’t be solved for through things like objective reality.
The only way out is to acknowledge that there are vast swathes of working-class people throughout the West who feel disenfranchised and who cannot be ignored, no matter how much we may think of them as spoiled babies.