Most of them are partly closeted Trumpverstehers. That is, they are judicious about to whom and how they divulge their views. But they have said enough to me that I can reconstruct their arguments for being more hostile to President Donald Trump’s critics than to him; for being unwilling to criticize him more than faintly, if at all; and in some cases, for taking an unabashedly positive view of some of his accomplishments.

One of the great fallacies in debate is tu quoque, “you too.” In its contemporary form we call it “whataboutism,” and some of the Trumpverstehers employ that in their insistence on the real and imagined follies and crimes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But this is more than a debating tactic or polemical tic. It goes to the core of the Trumpversteher world view.

That view holds that the Obama presidency represented the culmination of an intrusive, controlling, and in some ways oppressive liberal politics of the last half century or more. Hillary Clinton, in their view, was not merely so corrupt as to outweigh Donald Trump’s peccadilloes—she represented a downright menace to the republic. In their own way, the Trumpverstehers support Steve Bannon’s program of “deconstructing the administrative state,” a governmental system that culminated in the Obama–Clinton ideological program.

They want to shatter the rule of left-leaning bureaucrats reinforced by high-tech Silicon Valley geekery. The Trump agenda of business deregulation appeals to them, but so too does the political neutering of social scientists seeking to “nudge” people into the behavior they think is good for them. The scholars among this group are either refugees from the university world or internal exiles, but all share a vigorous contempt for professors and for the social sciences and humanities, which they view as being purveyors of malign nonsense that subverts patriotism at home and sober realism abroad. Their picture of academic life is one in which it is not Trump but outrageously coddled students aided and abetted by liberal administrators who instill intolerance and attempt to suppress free speech, and whose menace spills beyond the ivied walls.

The verstehers figure that Trump is an astringent antidote to all that, even if a temporary one. To use another German word, they are immersed in Kulturpessimismus, the notion that American society has been going to hell since the end of the Cold War, and that it cannot be quite rebuilt—the reverse of “Making America Great Again.” Like Roman aristocrats crouched in their embattled villas, witnessing a 50-year war on the frontier, they view with relief the victory of one crude and buffoonish barbarian chief over a much larger and more sinister tribal confederation. In a corrupt state, at least a wrecker like Trump may do some useful work of creative destruction.