It’s not clear to me what any of these sojourners hoped to find. Why President Trump won the election? The antidote to “fake news”? The secret to political success? The first thing anyone who talks to Americans who are not part of the bicoastal political allegiance industrial complex finds is that neither of our major parties, in theory or in practice, is representative of most people’s views or aspirations. Trump’s America contains multitudes.

In the small town where I live, I know one man, a veteran, who has three flagpoles at his house, one for the POW-MIA flag, one for a University of Michigan banner, and one for “hanging that son of a bitch McCain.” I know a charming older lady who is the secretary of her Presbyterian church’s historical society who drives a Saab that is older than I am and hoards sugar packets from the diner downtown. I know two high-school kids who complain about their Indian-American instructor at a nearby community college where they go for advanced credit because they “can’t understand him” while trading memes about the awfulness of white privilege on Facebook. I know a man who dips a can of Grizzly Wintergreen every day who enthusiastically supports gay marriage because gay people “should be miserable like the rest of us.” I know a businessman who thinks all welfare should be eradicated and donates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in goods to his local food pantry. Only two of these people — the veteran, a Democrat who went for Trump, and the Saab lady, a Republican who switched for Clinton — are regular voters.