It is a little after midnight on a Friday in late January. I am in a strip club in Morgantown, West Virginia, drinking shit American beer that tastes like ice and newspaper. A man is passing me a semi-automatic handgun and telling me to pull the trigger.

The man is John Barron; the gun is a Browning Hi-Power. It once belonged to an Israeli police officer, but now it belongs to Jeff, John’s brother, an early birthday present to himself. Together they own this strip club, the Blue Parrot Cabaret, dark and sparse with a front door the color of cherry skin. Across the street is a place that sells all-terrain vehicles; two miles up the road, a half-dozen fraternity houses sit on top of a steep hill that your car will groan to climb.

John releases the magazine and holds the slide back to show me there’s nothing in the chamber. He is the type of man who could have worked at a video store or sold comic books or telescopes, a man proud to be a connoisseur. And now here he is, in a building that Jeff needed to mortgage his farm six years ago to help him open, on the fringes of a college town, the both of them sitting at a back table in a palace of human fantasies, talking about guns while half-naked women lead men upstairs by the hand to squishy leather love seats.

John passes the Browning to me. It’s heavy and solid, something that should be obvious but is still startling somehow, immediately. “Feel the trigger on that,” Jeff says. I do. It feels smooth and light, like pushing an elevator button, except this is a thing designed for death. Printed on Jeff’s black T-shirt, in skinny white letters: “by reading this shirt you have given me brief control over your mind.”

John and Jeff take out another gun, the recently released Ruger American 9-mm pistol, black and plastic-y, and then another, a tiny .380 Kel-Tec. Jeff’s eyes flash down to the guns and then back up to me and then back down again, all of them laid out on the counter. “Welcome to West Virginia,” he says.

I am in West Virginia to understand Donald Trump. At least, to the extent that the political embodiment of a Hardee’s commercial needs to be understood. Specifically, I’m here to understand the people who want him to be president. Last December, The New York Times published a report—based on statistics from Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm—that found West Virginia to have the highest support for Trump in the country. In its first congressional district—the northern part of the state, where Morgantown is located—45 percent of those polled said they would choose Trump over any other G.O.P. candidate.

On some level, this isn’t a surprise. West Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1996. The state, according to Census data, is 93 percent white and 88 percent native-born. And environmental restrictions targeting the coal industry—the central nervous system of the West Virginia economy—have been taken by many as a personal assault, a condemnation of the state’s culture, its history, its blue-collar virtues. The mess of these things has brought Obama’s approval rating in West Virginia as low as almost anywhere else in the country.

And so I have come here to meet people like John and Jeff, people who see Trump as the renegade out for justice, as someone who is not impulsive but decisive; not cruel but honest; not bombastic but patriotic; not indecent but uninhibited. You may wonder, How could someone vote for a man so resistant to grace, to convention, to good taste? And those people will tell you, look where good taste brought us.

Donald Trump campaign supporters at a rally in Richmond, Virginia. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

One afternoon at the Bluebird store in Clarksburg—part diner, grocery store, and social club—I meet Shane Shreves, a fourth-generation union coal miner. He wants Trump to be president. In 2015, he says, he lost 262 miners to layoffs at his mine alone, Robinson Run No. 95. “Coal has carried West Virginia on its back for 200 years,” he tells me. “It’s built schools. Communities. It’s not anger [we feel here], really, it’s just very frustrating.” Eric Leaseburg, the owner of the store, sits down at a big round table with us. He has a full plate of food in front of him. Shreves finishes a thought, and then Leaseburg says, as he loads up his fork, “I don’t even know if [West Virginians] want to see Trump president, but they’re just that pissed off.”