In the past eight months, I have never heard anybody express regret for voting for Donald Trump. If anything, investigations into the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia have made supporters only more faithful. “I’m loving it—I hope they keep going down the Russia rabbit hole,” Matt Patterson told me, in June. He believes that Democrats are banking on an impeachment instead of doing the hard work of trying to connect with voters. “They didn’t even get rid of their leadership after the election,” he said.

We were at a coffee shop, and Patterson wore his goth look: silver jewelry, painted nails. “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life,” he said. “The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.

— from Peter Hessler’s New Yorker article, Follow the Leader: How residents of a rural area started copying the President.

I suspect some readers of this blog site mirror, to some degree, my difficulty in understanding the continuing appeal of President Trump to those “Outside the Beltway” — the title of this particular category of MillersTime’s posts.

Peter Hessler, the author of the article above, is someone I have read for years. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer who wrote one of the best Peace Corps books/memoirs I’ve ever read, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. He followed that up with Oracle Bones, then China’s Lost Cities, and Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2000 reporting from China and Egypt. In 2007 he moved to rural south west Colorado.

If the two quotes above have interest for you, check out the article from which they are quoted. Hessler has spent at least eight months listening to people in rural Colorado (and elsewhere?) and currently lives Ridgeway, CO,