For MSNBC viewers who had the chance to watch Chris Hayes’s townhall special Bernie Sanders in Trump Country on March 13, nothing could have been more instructive in revealing why Red State America remains so committed to Donald Trump.

I’m not talking about the more fanatical, right-wing cadres that worked so hard to bring this president to power, all of those Tea Partiers and dittoheads, the alt-right acolytes and the Bannonites, the usual drunken hooligans wearing shirts that read, “Trump That C---!” I mean nice, working people. So nice and polite, in fact, that they applauded almost everything that was said throughout B.S. in Trump Country, whether by Chris Hayes, or by Bernie, or by their own representatives, or by one another, no matter how fanciful, inaccurate, or thoroughly contradictory those things were.

The town hall was held at Mountain View High School, in McDowell County, West Virginia. Despite the “Daniel in the Lions’ Den” atmosphere suggested by the show’s title, Bernie was well-received. West Virginia might have handed Trump a 40-point victory last November, but Sanders carried its Democratic primary handily over Hillary Clinton, taking every county in the state. He would have been hard-pressed not to, after Clinton’s widely reported quote that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of work.” Those words were ripped, rather unconscionably, out of a highly sympathetic statement about coal miners and her plan to put them back to work in “clean energy,” while Bernie himself is on record with such statements as, “To hell with the fossil fuel industry.”

But as they say, that’s so much blood under the bridge. On Monday, Sanders remained rigorously on point, reiterating his green energy views and support for the local environment and “universal health care,” but repeatedly calling the McDowell’s miners “heroes,” who produced the coal that kept him warm as a kid in Brooklyn. He reminded everyone of how hard he was working to get Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to restore pensions and health care that they had been cheated of by the mining companies. He told them that what they were enduring in McDowell County—which has been hemorrhaging jobs and people since the coal industry went south in 2010, and now has the highest rate of drug-induced deaths of any county in the United States—was “what’s going on all over this country,” including “my state of Vermont, where kids are leaving small towns, even if they wanted to stay, because they can’t find decent jobs.”

This was good politics, but it also seemed heartfelt, like everything Sanders says. It went over well, but then, what did not? These were very nice people, here in McDowell County, almost heartbreakingly nice, considering what they had been through, and they applauded everybody who spoke as you might expect in a desperate community, just trying to come together and reason things out.

