Only half the country was ready for the Trump message (and perhaps less than that for the particular messenger) but it was the more electorally important half in the key swing states of Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These were the states which Clinton arrogantly ignored (all those irredeemable deplorables!) in favour of building up massive, but electorally unproductive, majorities (in terms of the Electoral College that decides Presidential elections) in the minority-rich east and west coast Democrat fiefdoms. For a political neophyte, Trump astutely out-politicked his Democrat rival for President.
More fundamentally, Trump won the 2016 election because the pro-working class elements of his ‘America First’ political agenda significantly increased the Republicans’ share of the working class vote. Whether low or middle income workers (the latter erroneously called the ‘middle class’ in non-Marxist parlance), these dissatisfied and mainly not overly prosperous people staged a sub-revolutionary class revolt. Although demographically challenged by decades of mass Third World immigration, this class is mostly white hence the observation that Trump mobilised white people in historically great numbers to win the election. This is, of course, meat to the liberals and their favourite anti-Trump slur of racism but it is a simple, and not at all necessarily racist, observation of class reality.
The election of Trump was not illegitimate or stolen – the election is a case study in the left’s political failure to win a debate of ideas. Hillary Clinton’s arrogant sense of self-entitlement to the job of President (as both a Clinton, and as a woman) didn’t help but it was Clinton’s snubbing of the white working class which fatally wounded the Democrats’ Presidential campaign. As revealed in a meant-to-be-secret speech, Clinton’s “dream” was for a global free market of “open trade and open borders”. She stigmatised 63 million Trump voters as “a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it”.
Clinton’s sneering reference to the ‘deplorables’ symbolised the arrogant and dismissive attitude of much of the left to the working class. Having trouble winning over white working-class voters, who were once largely traditional Democratic voters, the Democrats wielded their new super-weapon, left-liberal-identity politics, against the ‘Deplorables’ (Trump voting workers, mostly white) whom they accused or inferred as being racist and whose ears pricked up at Trump, dog-whistling white supremacy.
This is nonsense - hardened racists would never have voted for Obama as many of Trump’s white working class converts had done twice (in 2008 and 2012). Their switch to Trump came not from unleased bigotry but the political failure of Obama’s stock standard Democrat policies of open borders and ‘free trade’ failed to redress their slide in living standards and jobs whilst Obama promoted the anti-white causes of Black Lives Matter (siding with black criminals against white police), retaining discriminatory affirmative action policies, etc.
Hillary Clinton continued this theme - she continually lectured white American workers on the virtues of multiculturalism and identity politics, and harped on about how wicked Trump is, rather than addressing legitimate economic and cultural needs of white workers. As a result, an electorally significant number of usually-Democrat workers, switched to Trump who had stolen the show by sticking to core issues and ideas - borders, trade and an anti-war, anti-globalisation ‘America First’ international policy. The white working class, still by far the majority of American society (albeit a shrinking one thanks to mass immigration) had had a gutful of being screwed over by global capital and its divisive adjunct of identity politics. Trump got this. Clinton didn’t and the left in general still don’t.