A great America: "an unsentimental place: not a tight-knit community defined by old-fashioned values but a big and shiny and rather nonjudgmental country where everyone has a good job, stays safe, and adores the President."

Kelefa Sanneh writes in the New Yorker, that it

... was not impossible, during the campaign, to find prominent Trump supporters, even setting aside members of his immediate family. Populist-minded commentators like Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, and Laura Ingraham were among the early adopters, mainly because Trump gave voice to their belief that unauthorized immigration was one of the country’s biggest problems. But, among conservative pundits more broadly, skepticism of Trump was so widespread that it began to threaten the business model of cable-news networks. CNN dealt with this problem by hiring Jeffrey Lord, an obscure columnist and former Reagan aide who had met Trump in 2013 and been a supporter ever since. Lord was genial but unyielding in his defense of Trump, and he became one of the season’s most unlikely new television stars: he is sixty-five and lives in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where he takes care of his mother, who is ninety-seven; every weekday, CNN sends a car to drive him nearly two hundred miles to Manhattan, and back again. Lord still calls himself a Reagan conservative, but he says his belief in Trump’s political instincts has been bolstered by a series of private conversations. He has come to regard Trump as “a serious guy,” and he suspects that some of the #NeverTrump crowd will come around. “In the day, some of the people who were conservatives didn’t think much of Reagan, either,” he says.

...(When reporters from the Times asked Trump about the alt-right, in November, he said, “I disavow the group.”) But it is also true that partisan politics in America are stubbornly segregated: exit polls suggest that about eighty-seven per cent of Trump’s voters were white, which is roughly the same as the corresponding figure for his Republican predecessor, Mitt Romney. It is no surprise that many of Trump’s critics, and some of his supporters, heard his tributes to a bygone American greatness as a form of “identity politics,” designed to remind white people of all the power and prestige they had lost.

...what is striking about Trump is how little he engages, at least explicitly, with questions of culture and identity. The “great” America that he talks about is an unsentimental place: not a tight-knit community defined by old-fashioned values but a big and shiny and rather nonjudgmental country where everyone has a good job, stays safe, and adores the President. Whether he was in a rural white town or an urban black church, Trump avoided moral exhortation, preferring to focus on the economic renewal that his Presidency would bring. Accepting the Republican nomination, in July, he bemoaned the number of shootings in Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago. But then, rather than adducing the usual list of social pathologies, he implied, preposterously, that the major source of crime in America was “illegal immigrants with criminal records,” who are “roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.”

Read more here.