It is a little after midnight on a Friday in late January. I am in a strip club in Morgantown, West Virginia, drinking shit American beer that tastes like ice and newspaper. A man is passing me a semi-automatic handgun and telling me to pull the trigger.

The man is John Barron; the gun is a Browning Hi-Power. It once belonged to an Israeli police officer, but now it belongs to Jeff, John’s brother, an early birthday present to himself. Together they own this strip club, the Blue Parrot Cabaret, dark and sparse with a front door the color of cherry skin. Across the street is a place that sells all-terrain vehicles; two miles up the road, a half-dozen fraternity houses sit on top of a steep hill that your car will groan to climb.

John releases the magazine and holds the slide back to show me there’s nothing in the chamber. He is the type of man who could have worked at a video store or sold comic books or telescopes, a man proud to be a connoisseur. And now here he is, in a building that Jeff needed to mortgage his farm six years ago to help him open, on the fringes of a college town, the both of them sitting at a back table in a palace of human fantasies, talking about guns while half-naked women lead men upstairs by the hand to squishy leather love seats.

John passes the Browning to me. It’s heavy and solid, something that should be obvious but is still startling somehow, immediately. “Feel the trigger on that,” Jeff says. I do. It feels smooth and light, like pushing an elevator button, except this is a thing designed for death. Printed on Jeff’s black T-shirt, in skinny white letters: “by reading this shirt you have given me brief control over your mind.”

John and Jeff take out another gun, the recently released Ruger American 9-mm pistol, black and plastic-y, and then another, a tiny .380 Kel-Tec. Jeff’s eyes flash down to the guns and then back up to me and then back down again, all of them laid out on the counter. “Welcome to West Virginia,” he says.

I am in West Virginia to understand Donald Trump. At least, to the extent that the political embodiment of a Hardee’s commercial needs to be understood. Specifically, I’m here to understand the people who want him to be president. Last December, The New York Times published a report—based on statistics from Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm—that found West Virginia to have the highest support for Trump in the country. In its first congressional district—the northern part of the state, where Morgantown is located—45 percent of those polled said they would choose Trump over any other G.O.P. candidate.

On some level, this isn’t a surprise. West Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1996. The state, according to Census data, is 93 percent white and 88 percent native-born. And environmental restrictions targeting the coal industry—the central nervous system of the West Virginia economy—have been taken by many as a personal assault, a condemnation of the state’s culture, its history, its blue-collar virtues. The mess of these things has brought Obama’s approval rating in West Virginia as low as almost anywhere else in the country.

And so I have come here to meet people like John and Jeff, people who see Trump as the renegade out for justice, as someone who is not impulsive but decisive; not cruel but honest; not bombastic but patriotic; not indecent but uninhibited. You may wonder, How could someone vote for a man so resistant to grace, to convention, to good taste? And those people will tell you, look where good taste brought us.

One afternoon at the Bluebird store in Clarksburg—part diner, grocery store, and social club—I meet Shane Shreves, a fourth-generation union coal miner. He wants Trump to be president. In 2015, he says, he lost 262 miners to layoffs at his mine alone, Robinson Run No. 95. “Coal has carried West Virginia on its back for 200 years,” he tells me. “It’s built schools. Communities. It’s not anger [we feel here], really, it’s just very frustrating.” Eric Leaseburg, the owner of the store, sits down at a big round table with us. He has a full plate of food in front of him. Shreves finishes a thought, and then Leaseburg says, as he loads up his fork, “I don’t even know if [West Virginians] want to see Trump president, but they’re just that pissed off.”

And, well, if you’re pissed off, if your hopes for your stagnant town have wilted and died, who better than Donald Trump, America’s tooth fairy emeritus? He is a man who has turned the excruciating, real-life, how-are-we-keeping-the-lights-on pissed off into something marketable, a 140-characters version of pissed off, something easily packaged and disseminated. Trump is politician as pickup artist, as infomercial salesman; someone who will in a single breath pulverize your self-esteem and then convince you that he is the only one who can put you back together again, speaking in empty hyperbole, all “love” and “disasters”; someone to resuscitate all of your sputtering little egos with something grand and implausible. He loves everyone, everything, he’s going to take you home tonight, you have such beautiful eyes, baby, what are you doing here all alone? I can make you great again.

Donald Trump is an American. But before that he is a mogul, a helicopter passenger, a monolith of barely considered interjections. His Twitter feed is a scroll of grave warnings and half-present admonishments of America-down-the-shitter. Is it any wonder that the same day Trump received an endorsement from Sarah Palin, he also received one from the daughter of John Wayne, another counterfeit cowboy?

Trump behaves like a man bored enough by fame and wealth that he can manufacture an adversarial relationship with a nation just to challenge it. Someone so aroused by the idea of being outrageous and condescending that it seems to almost border on erotic for him. Someone who has spent his life negotiating, convincing, selling you things you don’t need for a price you can’t afford. He is selling not a commodity now but an inspirational hokum, a life raft, a rope ladder from a helicopter.

I am getting coffee for my ride north, stopping in Charleston, West Virginia, in Gino’s Pizza & Spaghetti House. There are posters on the wall for “Our Famous Pubwich” and “Ginos Original Sicilian Baked Sub” and “Old World Pepperoni Cheesy Bread.” The pictures of the items on the posters look “famous” the way mug shots look famous.

The store manager, Cheryl Hall, has short blonde hair and punctuates every sentence with sweetie-sugar-honey-baby, putting her elbows on the counter to listen to you talk. She moved from Ohio to West Virginia in 1982, and in April she’ll have been working at Gino’s for 11 years.

“I started and I didn’t think much of it,” she says. “I didn’t know it was gonna be a career. I wish I was like my son sometimes, he makes me realize maybe I’m not so ambitious.”

Her son is 22. “He’s the light and the gift,” she says.

I ask her about the election. “Me and my husband, we almost don’t wanna say it out loud, but we kinda like Trump, his ideas. He just doesn’t have, what’s the word for it? Couth?”

I make my way to Clarksburg, the two-hour drive on I-79, empty and wide, the sunset pure and purple and orange against the snow-covered hills, barren for miles and miles except for the little dots of civilization, smoke coming from a house you can’t see at first, tire tracks in the dirt.

In West Virginia, no matter where you are, you never feel far from nowhere.

I spend part of my night at the Brickside Bar & Grill, just outside Clarksburg, the fifth-largest city in the first district. Population, according to the 2010 census: 16,578. State motto: Jewel of the Hills. Denny’s locations: one.

At Brickside, I meet a man named Steve. Steve asks Tammy, the bartender, for some menu guidance.

“You can’t go wrong with the steak hoagie,” she says.

“Where are your apps?” Steve asks.

“We have a sriracha-agave wing sauce, it’s sriracha, agave, and spices they won’t tell me about,” Tammy says.

Steve makes a face that says, “secret recipes are bullshit.” Then he asks her if they still make the fried-bologna sandwich. They do. He orders that, and an order of the wings. He tells Tammy, “Make sure they don’t cook the hell out of the wings. You know these pre-cooked wings, you don’t need to cook them for 10 minutes like they say.” Steve is a managing partner at the Outback Steakhouse near Clarksburg, so as a purveyor of mass-consumed deep-fried products, he is something of an expert. “I’ve worked in restaurants all my life,” he says.

The conversation turns to the imperiled local economy. Steve, by way of explanation, quotes a scene from Dumb and Dumber in which Jim Carrey’s and Jeff Daniels’s characters come back to their apartment after a day hunting for employment. He recites Daniels’s line: “I can’t believe there’s no jobs in this town.” Then Carrey’s: “Yeah, unless you wanna work 40 hours a week.” His sentences tend to start peacefully, calculated, then the words gather like storm clouds, heading toward a profanity, pieces of crust from his fried bologna sandwich falling onto his black Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt. “What this country is right now is a hornet’s nest.”

He has some more sandwich; we drink beer. “I’m all about conservation, you know. I love to fish, I love the beauty of nature. But China, Japan, you think they give a shit about the environment? But we’re supposed to?” He continues, “It’s the hypocrisy of it all. You know, like Hollywood. You remember Clint Eastwood, he gets up there [at the Republican National Convention in 2012] and he gets shredded. And he’s never been late on a movie set, he’s never been over budget. But he gets shredded. But then you have some of these actors up there, these motherfuckers all think they’re statesmen, and some of them didn’t even finish high school.”

Before he leaves, he gives me a list of places to visit around town; it’s one of the few moments in our conversation he speaks with an unrestrained love for something. This will keep happening to me, people talking about the decency of other West Virginians and ordinary-seeming food as if it were a dream they had.

Outside at the Brickside, there is an enclosed patio with heat lamps and stationary towers that have flames spitting out of them. A guy with dark bushy hair dances sloppily to “Love Shack” by the B-52s as someone else sings it in karaoke. The waitress says to Tammy, “That kid outside is kinda cute.” “Yeah?” Tammy says. The waitress adds, “I think that’s because he’s sort of hipster-ish, I don’t know.” This, apparently, is progressivism in West Virginia: semi-unkempt hair and an earring.

The D.J. shouts, “We got some Nicki Minaj coming at you!,” and the crowd cheers like it hasn’t all night, like it’s preparing to bungee jump over the waters of rap music and dangle there for a few moments. Then a bunch of West Virginians with identical buzz cuts dance like they have nausea. Someone does the raise-the-roof motion. A pretty, tall blonde woman in a snug leather jacket indulges a dozen half-advances from guys in hats bearing logos for golf brands or sporting-goods chains.

I go back to the hotel; my room looks out over a gas station and a place called Eat’n Park. Its sign reads: “CALORIES DON’T COUNT IF THEY SMILE.”

The next day, as I’m walking around downtown Clarksburg, I see a tall man in his 70s, Jim Hileman, standing in the entrance of the Lord’s Pantry food bank. Hileman is a Trump supporter: “I support the man because he’s crazy like me.” Then he laughs in a tone somewhere between mall Santa Claus and Batman villain hatching a diabolical plan. He’s been helping at the food pantry for about 10 years. He started out volunteering after he left his job at a funeral home, then he just kept doing it. He tells me to get to Ritz Lunch at some point to try their hot dogs.

You have never heard people speak so fondly, so intimately about hot dogs. Not, like, the nuances of them, but their very existence, the way you would talk about a grandmother or an old Labrador. It’s part reverence, part nostalgia. I have never cared as much about anything as this man did about a hot-dog recommendation. It was sincere and beautiful, him imparting this to someone, a kind of treasure map.

Two men are talking at a table when I walk into the Bluebird store. “Tobacco by itself probably doesn’t even cause all those cancers—it’s the chemicals,” a man says. He finishes eating and leans back in his chair. “That’s a pretty good lunch right there now. That’s like a dinner.” It isn’t a bad lunch, it must be said.

I ask a woman named Pam if I can sit down and eat next to her and her friend. I tell her the purpose of this story and she almost deflates in her chair. Donald Trump alters her posture, literally. “We always get dumped on,” she says. “There’s this idea of [West Virginians] as bumpkins or whatever, but Kentucky has rural areas, too, you know? No one thinks of them like this. I hate to see us in a poll like that leading for Trump because it almost makes us look dumber. . . . At first I thought: Wow, he’ll go where no one else goes. We need that. But the more I hear him the more I think he’s just dangerous.”

Across town, there are people trudging through the snow, pushing strollers around puddles, catching their breath outside the Dairy Queen. I walk into the Humane Society thrift store. There are bottles of half-used lotion, open boxes of Band-Aids for sale, a playpen full of stuffed animals, a bookshelf with a bundle of plastic bags tacked to it and a sign that reads, in black marker, “BOOKS 50¢ BAG.”

Next to the cash register: a Donald J. Trump–brand shirt that looks like everything he has ever worn. White cuffs and white collar, a shade of blue that is just a little brighter and bluer than it needs to be.

A volunteer named Joyce Insani looks at it and says, “Is anyone even gonna buy this shirt?” Another volunteer named Becky Steptoe walks by. “Careful what you say about our next president,” she says.

I ask Becky if she likes that idea. “Well the country is a business. I think we need a businessman to run it.”

Joyce is wearing a fleece vest the color of pink jelly beans. I ask her what she thinks. “I don’t really know what to think about him. He’s very successful, so he’s got to be smart.” She’s sorting women’s tops while she tells me this. “But I don’t think we’ll be able to fix this till we restore our faith in God.”

There are pockets all over West Virginia where business is something simple and utilitarian, practical, hand-painted signs hanging from stores that say “Junk Junk,” and beneath it, pots and pans and brooms and plastic lawn chairs. The next day, I head to the Northeast, through towns of a few hundred people, towns that are 97 percent white (Grafton) and 99 percent (Rowlesburg). I pass cemeteries and trucks that look abandoned, rusty machinery in backyards. Everywhere there are things leaning, teetering; you might consider this metaphorically, but it is literally true, the houses are breaking. I pass small shops and enterprises, one after another, places called Morgan’s Muffler Inspection and Dave’s Autobody; Larew’s Used Car, Jack’s Car Wash, Debbie’s Pantry, a human with a name who had an idea for a place to do a thing and then did it.

I pull into a roadside restaurant in Grafton called Biggie’s. In the magazine rack, behind two candy machines that sell Skittles for a quarter, is a December 7 issue of the tabloid the Globe. On the cover in all capital letters: “IMPEACH OBAMA,” and a crosshair over the Statue of Liberty.

There is one other customer inside Biggie’s; he’s a corrections officer at the Pruntytown Correctional Center. He has pale blue eyes and dime-size pupils that make everything he says seem wild and intense and on the verge of recklessness. “I like the idea of Donald Trump. He’s going to run it like a business. He don’t care who he offends. He’s gonna pull no punches. One of the things America was formed on was saying what you feel. We built this country on offending people.” He won’t give me his name, and I don’t make any progress asking a second and third time. “You don’t need my name.”

Farther east, the town of Rowlesburg used to house the largest sawmill factory in the country. Now it has a population of 584. Three bars are boarded up, the church is closed, and the VFW’s walk isn’t shoveled. At the Sidetracked Bar and Grill, the bar is empty for the hour I’m there. Two trains pass. Mary Goff is standing behind the counter in front of two tap handles: Bud Light and Budweiser. I ask for a Budweiser, but they don’t have any beer yet; they’ve been waiting months for their license. I ask Goff what she thinks about Trump. “He’s maybe not the greatest person in the world,” she explains, “but he’s a businessman.”

When West Virginians talk about the man, there is a mystique, an almost shamanistic wisdom granted to “business” people, anything associated with tycoons or their largesse, the implied clout and sophistication of a New Yorker in a shiny pink tie. “I’ll be honest with you,” one college kid named Eric tells me later that night, at a bar in Morgantown. “Trump has a ball sack, but I don’t know if he knows what the fuck he’s doing.” His friend, Erik, leans in, “But can you imagine him approaching, like, Saudi Arabia or something with that kind of mentality?” Eric interjects before reason can get in the way. “He’ll be fine,” he says, nodding confidently.

And that, really, is its own sort of currency. Trump’s red-lining testosterone, his brazen dismissals of rivals, the way he duels with other candidates in ways that have nothing to do with policy, but everything to do with something essential about being a human, getting embarrassed and ignored in public. When Trump says, “Rubio, I’ve never seen a young guy sweat that much,” he’s winning in a way that seems irrelevant but also sort of irrefutable.

The Blue Parrot almost never opened in the first place. Jeff and John began renovations in March of 2010, but by mid-April the town was trying to stop them. Eventually, the county passed an ordinance that prohibited adult-entertainment venues from operating within 2,000 feet of churches, schools, or residential areas, but only after the Blue Parrot Cabaret was grandfathered in. And the county still fought them. Six years later, the club’s still here. “We had a terrible, terrible time,” John says. “There was no winning or losing. There was only winning. Once everything you own is on the line, it’s no longer options. It’s no longer choices. It’s going to work.” I’m talking to John about how the state’s population has hovered at around 2 million for the last 70 years, rounding myself into the same sort of defeatism I’ve heard in the people I’ve met here. He describes for me how the literal topography, the shape of the earth, restricts what sort of industries can survive.

I ask him how it’s possible to not walk around mad all the time. Then Jeff says, from a few steps away, “Well you do. I think that’s why Trump appeals.” What do you do about any of this? “A lot of what gets done in West Virginia is through brute force,” he says.

I imagine all these people left on their own, stranded, forgotten. I think about what Albert Camus said in The Stranger, “It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”

I find no bumpkins in West Virginia. Nor do I find any Trump shrines. The only political paraphernalia I see, over three and a half days, is for Bernie Sanders. Instead of the burbling hints of a revolution, I find a pervading sense of resignation. People drift occasionally into states of indignation or anger, but mostly they express ambivalence. These are people who are familiar with dense winter skies, interstates that stretch and bend over the horizon, things that feel all around like they’re breaking or on an incline or carved through rock or forest or around rivers.

Whether Trump exists to you as Vine superstar, or a political pioneer, or the hellion king in the cockpit of a kamikaze mission, something seems inescapable: this is West Virginia, this is its plight, things giant and immovable.

And so I imagine you can get mad at the Democrats, at the idea of political correctness, at the grinding wheels of bureaucracy, at the notion of people trying to take your guns or your strip club or your job digging coal from the earth. At the passing train that momentarily brings your dying little town to a halt. At the person who keeps asking you for your name. You can be furious at things so big and maddeningly abstract that a tyrannosaur parade float of a man seems like a savior. But sometimes, all you can do is get mad at the mountains.

Donald Trump has zeroed in on America’s percolating xenophobic aggression, harnessed the impulses behind it and tried to amplify them, using simple-as-that declarations that he will ban Muslims and Syrians and build walls, file lawsuits, circling the wagons and rebuilding, transforming. Delicate takes time, restraint takes time. Sledgehammers get right to it. There are people either tantalized by the mirage, tantalized by a man who would so shamelessly peddle the mirage, or leveled enough by rhetoric and empty idealism that they don’t have time for any of it. Sometimes the mirage looks pretty, sometimes the mirage looks real, sometimes it’s a con and we know it.

On the last day of my trip, a man with a beard creeping high up his cheeks and a 30-case of Busch Light in one hand is on his way out of a convenience store. We talk about presidents. He’s holding the door open now with his foot wedged at the bottom, the cuffs of his pants torn and caked with mud, as people come in and out of the store. I ask him if he likes Trump, if he likes anyone, if he cares. It’s starting to snow. He turns and spits a long stream of black tobacco juice through the air, and then he looks back at me. “Whoever it is,” he says, “if they ain’t a thief now, they will be by the time they in office.” Then he’s gone.