Mr. Gaertner, that is the best analysis of what Trump's rural voters are hearing, that I've read anywhere. Impressive!

Most of our communities were gutted by two things.

1. globalization - corporations that once depended on rural workers, closed their factories and shipped our jobs overseas where they could pay workers ten times less to do our work.

2. monopolistic corporations - big box retailers - KMart, WalMart, AutoZone and NAPA auto parts, Home Depot and Lowes, and fast food franchises, like McDonalds, and Taco Bell - moved into our towns and put our mom and pop retailers out of business.

In my town, 18 months after KMart and AutoZone opened, 62 mom and pop stores were out of business. The economic devastation snowballed. Our mom and pop retailers had relied on local professional services, But none of the big box retailers used any of the professional services in our town - not our banks, our attorneys, our advertising agencies, our bookkeeping and accounting companies, our realtors, our civil engineering companies, etc. As a result, most of our professionals went out of business too.

Since big corporations send their receipts to out of town banks, even our three locally owned banks were forced to close their doors.

Our town went through frigging hell, but we recovered and are doing really, really well today. Unfortunately, the vast majority of America's small, rural towns, cities and communities kept going downhill and dragging their residents down into depression along with the economy. Trump sounds like hope to them, and that is the reason they won't ever give up on him.