In the summer of 2016, hundreds of reporters descended into the hollowed out ex-industrial towns where Trump was finding success, ostensibly to answer that question. These places were often in a state of near-devastation, overrun with unemployment, debt, an opiate crisis, and, unique in industrialized countries, declining rates of life expectancy. People in these places were pissed, and had been for a while. But newspapers rarely commented on this. By the summer of 2016, Trumpism became very nearly synonymous with terrorism, i.e. something whose origins you didn’t need to ask about if you were
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