On a recent trip, during dinner at a restaurant in rural Utah, I found myself oddly affected by the sight of an elderly fellow patron wearing a white and blue Make America Great Again cap. No sight could be more ordinary in that part of the country, where MAGA is as common a fashion accessory as “Resist” is in Seattle, where I live. But it still struck me. In part, I was reminded of how much we’ve allowed politics to invade daily life. Farewell to the era of campaign swag that you flashed for a few months and tossed out after Election Day. Now we wear uniforms, even to dinner. But what hit me more was that this man had placed his hopes in Donald Trump, and those remained strong, despite the president’s ceaseless succession of fiascos during his first six months in office. This president is letting you down almost daily, I thought, and he’s just getting started. How can you still believe in him?

There’s the easy explanation that it’s early yet and most people don’t pay close attention to politics. All presidents make flubs right out of the gate, and most people shrug them off, focusing on big-ticket stuff, not trivialities. Trump has got a Supreme Court justice seated, and immigration enforcement has increased. The mainstream press also spent much of the campaign season in hysterics over everything Trump did, leaving precious little margin for turning up the volume on stuff that truly mattered. Trump voters now care mainly about outlets on the right, and those are still linking arms. In sum, most of the deplorables are keeping only half an eye on things, and things look better that way—not to mention that it’s probably wise. Taking a week off, or a month off, from paying attention to Trump is a superb thing for anyone to do.

But something deeper is at work, too, and it has to do with our perpetual partisan war and the mysterious powers of symbolism. Every politician has at least a rudimentary sense of how to navigate our cold civil war, but Trump was exceptional at it. While Dilbert creator Scott Adams has advanced an awful lot of silly claims about Trump (insulting Carly Fiorina’s face was great politics?), he rightly—and before anyone else—pointed out that Trump was a “clown genius” at the game of persuasion and branding. During the campaign, and even now, you could feel every other politician struggling against the slogan of Make America Great Again. Even I do. My head recognizes it as a piece of marketing, but my gut feels its appeal. To put it another way, one way I’ve made sense of the odd hold Trump has on people is by trying to understand the odd hold he has on me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’d submit that we’ve never had a president who was this obviously nuts. The list is too long even to start, and it keeps growing. Trump was never a likely fascist (too old, too undisciplined), but in character he keeps descending to new lows. Decent and stable people don’t tweet out insults about someone’s alleged plastic surgery bruises. Nor do they berate their subordinates in public, as Trump has done with Steve Bannon. That Trump now seems eager to discard his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who took such a big risk to endorse him, says something chilling about how he views his friends and colleagues. Trump’s ceaseless stream of erratic decisions and pronouncements have caused his agenda to stall and his staffers to lawyer up. And those are just his character flaws. I’m not even counting the horrible policies.

But I think I still understand that neighboring diner, somehow. I once argued that Trump’s reputation for honesty, strange as it seemed, rested on a belief that he told unimportant lies and important truths. Similarly, I’d argue that a lot of support for Trump rested on a belief that he was personally crazy but politically sane. Trump was a boor from the start, probably from birth, but what made his campaign bracing was a unique defiance toward fashionable nonsense. Like a leaning tower, the “sane class” that makes up our cultural and political elite has drifted inch by inch into an increasingly unsustainable position, lashing out at anyone who suggests the structure might be off balance. Even as we kick down trade barriers faster than workers can adjust, admit newcomers faster than they can be absorbed, and embroil ourselves in new foreign conflicts faster than we exit old ones, it’s those who call for a tap on the brakes who are treated like extremists.