Whatever the taxonomy, though, the same grievances and issues run through the interviews in this book. The Trump victory emerges as an anti-establishment, anti-elitist protest vote, more rejection of Hillary Clinton than embrace of Donald Trump. The authors note that a town they visited in one of the 23 Wisconsin counties that flipped from Obama to Trump had been plastered with Bernie signs during the 2016 primary. And a woman running as a Democrat for the United States Senate outperformed Clinton in Pennsylvania’s “T” — the region between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that James Carville memorably identified as “Alabama without the blacks.”

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But polls have shown Americans’ faith in institutions shrinking for years. The populist fervor these voters express is almost as old as the nation: They see themselves playing by the rules but still getting screwed, disdained by elites above them and mooched off by freeloaders beneath. And like the 2010 Tea Party supporters before them, most of those polled in 2016 did not suffer financial hardship: 69 percent had not lost a job in the past seven years and did not have a family member who had; 58 percent said the Obama years had brought more job opportunities, not fewer, to their communities.

So what was different?

Apparently, the sense of cultural disrespect that Kochie, one of the “Rotary Reliables,” laments, an exasperation with what these voters see as political correctness. “We voted for ourselves, and that is the thing they missed,” Kochie tells the authors.

Although Zito and Todd refer to “a culture careening leftward,” we get hints and code about what they mean rather than context or probing. Interviewees complain about the self-centeredness of protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson, and the laziness of workers who think “everything can be free.” (“The entitlement was crazy,” says a Rough Rebounder.) They dismiss Trump’s sexist hot-mic comments as “just locker room talk.” They repeat the discredited notion the Tea Partiers spread about President Obama’s “apology tour” through Europe. As for the authors, they criticize the Democrats for “multiculturalist militancy,” promoting “sensitivity over the stigmatism of Islam” and the “quest for transgender rights and an ever-lengthening acronym to describe them.”

The misogyny and racism of many Trump voters? The authors decline to consider either, dismissing them as fictional stereotypes of coastal elites. The most maddening example of this lack of context is when the authors mock business executives for “cowering to pressure from liberal activists” when they resigned from the president’s economic councils during “one week in August 2017.” They neglect to point out that this was the week after a march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., when President Trump insisted that the counter-protesters were equally to blame for the deadly violence there.