How Trump Connected With So Many Americans

The forces that propelled President-elect Donald J. Trump to victory will be endlessly analyzed. Many Americans woke up on Wednesday morning shocked that he could win again. But there is no doubt about one thing: Mr. Trump was a ferociously effective campaigner.

To watch him up close on this third run for president was to see him blend comedy, fury, optimism, darkness and cynicism like never before. He was an expert communicator, able to transmute legal and mortal peril to build upon his self mythology. He won new supporters and kept old ones in thrall.

At dozens of events, I watched as he connected with all sorts of people in all sorts of places. Suburban mothers in Washington, D.C. Military personnel in Detroit. Evangelicals in South Florida. Bitcoiners in Nashville. College football fans in Alabama. Firemen in Lower Manhattan. At rallies in Charlotte and Atlanta and Bozeman and Virginia Beach and the Bronx and beyond, I had countless conversations with people who were quick to dismiss or rationalize whatever controversy happened to be swirling around him at any moment. People saw in him whatever they wanted to see. And they believed that, after so many years, they knew him, and that he knew them, too.

“He gets us,” a hay and beef cattle farmer told me one afternoon in September in Smithton, Pa. It seemed a head-spinning assessment, but one I heard constantly and in the most unlikely of places. How could the man with the silver spoon and the golden triplex above Fifth Avenue understand anything about this woman’s life? “He just knows where we’re coming from,” she shrugged.

We were standing inside a barn when she said this. Mr. Trump was a few yards away, sitting at a big wooden table. Behind him were stacked bales of hay and a John Deere tractor. He led a discussion about seed cost and fertilizer and shale and animal feed. Farmers nodded along as he reminded them how expensive everything had become because of inflation. “I feel very comfortable with the farmers,” he said. And they felt very comfortable with him.