ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE: On the Road in Trump's America.

• Author: Phillips, Noah

On Election Night, I was in my favorite neighborhood dive in Red Hook, Brooklyn, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and watching the television above the bar. A little whoop went up whenever a state went blue. Red-state wins were snickered at or ignored. The TV was muted, the barroom chatter loud.

A few hours later, some people were crying, but nobody was talking much.

Outrage. Despair. Bafflement. In that moment and over the next few days, New York City felt desolate, despite the mass protests. Our public officials vowed to resist the oncoming wave of Trumpism, while our local media resolved to, as Brooke Gladstone from WNYC's On the Media expressed, "make what seems to have been invisible to us, and everyone we know, visible." I believed in this impulse. Donald Trump, whose every word reeks of delusional narcissism, wretched hypocrisy, and gilded incompetence, was going to be our President. I rejected the notion that my Trump-voting countrymen were so small-minded to support Trump as I saw him.

Yet in the months following Trump's Inauguration, I listened to the same opposing voices sneering and shrieking at him, his government, and his followers. I followed the news of his daily blunders and tracked the palace intrigue closely. Nothing I read helped me grasp what I had missed--what we all had missed--before the election.

So this summer I decided to leave my comfort zone, geographically and ideologically, and take a road trip. I would go from Washington, D.C.--my hometown, fittingly enough--to California and back again. For the first part of the trip, I was in the good company of my cousin Hugo, who grew up in and around Britain and is new to the States. I wanted to make a good-faith effort to understand what Trump supporters saw in the man that I did not. I wanted to know what they thought Americans needed to do to come together again, and to hash out honest differences.

What I learned was that constructive discourse is a lot easier than it's made out to be, and that its absence made the rise of a President Trump almost inevitable.

When Hugo and I enter Pillager, Minnesota, we are pulled over by a young police officer named Andrew Rooney. We'd been distracted by the sun setting over the verdant mid-western scenery and hadn't noticed that we were speeding. After writing us a $60 ticket, officer Rooney cheerily directs us to a nearby campsite and tells us about the fair happening the next day.

Pillager is a town of 469 in central Minnesota. Its post office dates to 1886 and its annual fair to 1898. The fair has a horse show, photography contest, and vendors selling ice cream and other concessions. A little train laden with kids hoots through every few minutes. We see officer Rooney in the crowd, and ask to interview him.

After I turn on my recorder, he disclaims that the views he'll express are not those of the Pillager City Police Department (which we later learned consisted of just him and the chief, both part-time). Rooney brings up his identity as a police officer repeatedly throughout our conversation, including when I ask him about President Trump.

"What do I think about Trump? From my standpoint, personally I like him. There's been a lot of stuff in the news about bashing cops," Rooney says. "Bernie Sanders, in his campaign, was talking about 'You know, we need to change this and this with the police,' and I agree some things need to be changed. But just depicting us as the bad people, like Hillary and Bernie were trying to do, I just didn't approve of that. And Trump's standing there and he says, 'I love our cops. They do a great job.' "

Rooney is progressive on social issues, moderate or indifferent on most other ones, and critical of Trump's personality. "I side with Trump on a lot of things," he says at one point, "but I didn't necessarily want to endorse him because of a lot of the stuff that was going on with him talking about women, talking about Muslims."

Trump's rhetoric on police, coupled with Rooney's default conservative family background, made it easy for him to overlook those things. In some ways, Rooney is like many of my apolitical millennial friends, just calibrated differently. Instead of supporting the blue team by default, he supports the red. And he is sweetly optimistic about his side: "If you come to us with open arms, hopefully we'll do the same."

Fred Hage, whom I meet inside the fair's food hall, at the Cass County Republicans table, is more cantankerous. He was born in Minneapolis, but made "good money" as a general contractor in Phoenix, Arizona, before retiring to this area with his wife in 2013. Until this election, Hage was a proud Independent. Now he is the chairman of the Cass County Republicans. He says Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to America in his lifetime.

I tell him this is difficult for me to understand--what of Trump's arrogance, his narcissism, his lies? What am I missing?

"The path to the desired results," explains Hage. "That's what everyone's missing, and they're so blinded by embarrassment of losing the election, which they shouldn't be, we've all lost before. If they can get by the bluster, and get by the arrogance, and the personality quirks that they don't like, they're gonna see a lot of good things happen."

I ask about Trump's qualifications. He mentions Trump's past as a businessman and job creator. I point out that Trump's businesses frequently outsource.

"But how about the ones that are in America?" says Hage impatiently. "See, you only pick out the snippets that are negatives to Trump. You don't give any credit to the positives. And that's what makes the liberals and the left look bad. You can't just pick out the points that support you."

Fair enough--according to CNN Money, Donald Trump is responsible for roughly 34,000 American jobs, including some manufacturing ones. When Hillary Clinton claimed that Donald Trump doesn't "make a thing in America," PolitiFact rated the claim as false.

As Hugo and I are about to leave for the monster truck "mud run," Hage's companion at the table, Les McClelland, mentions that his daughter is a "flaming liberal."

"We've become acclimated to each other's points of view," McClelland says. For example, "both my wife and I have been anti-Planned Parenthood, but we both decided for a...