He is so grossly unqualified for the position that it is difficult for me to understand what other reason someone would chose to vote for him.
Clinton was a poor choice for sure but Trump doesn't even pass the phone screen of the basic necessary knowledge for the position.
Edit: I should clarify that the point of my comment is not to reopen the debate about Trump as opposed to give some context as to why many people look to those specific issues as a driver of his election.
If we completely ignore basic competency, then I must conclude his rhetoric, which largely revolved around scapegoating immigrants and the people of foreign nations, played a large part in the decision.
Edit: Again, this is intended to give context as to why some, including myself, look to those issues as a driving force in the election.
It is not actually about what they report. It is all about what they don't report. Left wing and right wing propaganda are not the same. Right wing propaganda tells you what you must believe. Left wing propaganda simply leaves out the truth. Either way you have distortion but the methods are very different. NPR is not better than Fox News. Once you realize this, thou shalt be enlightened.
Let's take the case of Islam.
The working class is more religious than the middle class. The middle class mostly treat religion as a weird weekend hobby and don't really think the believers are serious. Deep down they think, these people are not being serious.
Well, I came out of a cult, do not believe in a personal God, and I can tell you these people really do believe in their thing. Belief is real, even if I disagree with it.
So when the working class look to Islam, they see religion and when the middle class look to Islam, they see politics. They simply leave out the religion itself. It is not about right and wrong, it is just that they are seeing different portions of the elephant. When a journalist is captured by ISIS he thinks he might get out alive by a ransom or prisoner trade. The working class understand he'll die because he is a kaffir. Do you see?
This explains the bifurcation between working and middle class perspectives. The worldview of the middleclass has no value at the resolution of the working class. I think George Orwell was one of the few middle class journalists who truly understood his people.
With the possible exception of Julian Assange, there are few working class journalists in the mainstream press, not even at Breitbart.
If you're honest, you have to ask yourself this question:
Which is the more likely?
That journalists were in a bubble? Or the entire working class? Look at the map of voting results by distinct. It is an ocean of red.
1. Here I am using the colloquial meaning of the word propaganda, which is ideologically biased information, usually it takes the truth but then stretches it to breaking point and beyond.
2. I do not possess a Facebook account. I don't even have a mobile phone. I don't watch Fox News in case you were curious. I hardly watch any television at all since I don't have one. Many readers of Hacker News do not have them, it's a common demographic in geek circles.
3. Class warfare is a real thing. It is not an extreme concept, it's a descriptor. Europeans like me frequently complain that Americans don't grok class or that Americans conflate 'race' with 'class'. You don't have to agree of course. Perhaps America is the one nation on the planet that didn't gradually evolve a class system as it matured ;-)
Humour aside, I do think this (gradually evolve a class system as it matured) is one of the major reasons why many American intellectuals are increasingly interested in old European ideas and books from the 18/19th centuries. Their resonance is much deeper than it used to be.
There are the Lumpers (everything is the same) and the Splitters (everything is different). If you remember the book Sophie's World (which was full of great insights into this), then it is like the genres of reductionism and holism in philosophy.
The real answer is that people's brains work differently.
If you want some consolation, it is that we cannot live without either group, Lumper or Splitter. Each group has failure modes which can be corrected by the other tribe. I am convinced that is why the left and right exist in all cultures and times. It's a very important human algorithm.
That is a reason why there's so much talk about this. It's a mistake to think that this is election was just economics. A lot of Trump's support came from very well off people after all.
Having said that I do agree with you a fair bit. For a start, "racist" is a bad term. That implies outright hatred, which in my viewpoint is very minority; "cultural anxiety" is a better phrase to me, future insecurity compounded by tribal instinct. EG: It's not "I hate Mexican people", it's "Mexican people took my jobs". Those two sentences are not equivalent.
This too is not the only reason people supported Trump either (anything from nostalgia to agreement with policies to Hillary hatred played a role). On the flip side Bernie Sanders showed that non-culturally-anxious economics played well with many Trump voters too.
But that initial data point still is troubling to me. And it's less on the people that voted for him and more on the candidate himself. Trump was able to exploit this, and in the process made current culture a lot more toxic.
Michael Moore is the liberal source that I've seen most quoted by Trump supporters. He says the reason people voted for Trump is that they are sick of a neoliberal agenda which focuses on intervention in foreign wars and Free Trade agreements which seem to be little more than corporate protectionism. They're sick of policies which have been proven to increase wealth inequality rather than enrich lower and middle class workers. They're sick of economic uncertainty in a time of unprecedented productivity. Newspapers gloss over this and focus on racial conflict, which is a real problem that needs to be addressed, but it's not the whole story, and editorial boards which generally agree with neoliberalism are unwilling to question it with any depth.