When Donald Trump was elected president, there was an overwhelming sense of confusion. How could this have happened? How could it have been prevented? Yet, amidst all of this, one thing appears certain: Democrats did a terrible job of appealing to the uneducated, poor, or working-class white voters who swept Trump into office in blatant defiance of God's will and their own economic self-interest.

Part of the left seems ready to write off Trump's poor and uneducated white following as bigots beyond redemption. But this is a unhelpful, harmful impulse. I have been studying the uneducated white underclass for the past seven years from a rather unusual vantage point: I have been researching Insane Clown Posse and its notorious, overwhelmingly white, poor, and uneducated Juggalo fanbase for a pair of books: 2013's You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me and 2016's 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering Of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane.

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There are a number of commonalities between Donald Trump, the world's most hated man, and Insane Clown Posse, who have damn near trademarked "The World's Most Hated Group." Trump and Insane Clown Posse each have an unusual connection to an unusually loyal, even pathologically obsessive, fanbase. They also share a number of carny hustles / psychological appeals that the left could learn from while trying to figure out how to appeal to the angry voters who made the nightmare of President Trump happen. With that in mind, here are six things I learned about Trump's appeal from many years in the field alongside Juggalos.