On the editorial page of its January 18th issue the New York Times, in a gesture of fairness, devoted an entire page to 13 letters to the editor from Trump voters who remained pro-Trump at the end of his first year in office. How these letters were selected was not explained. Out of how many received? Who did the selecting? We don’t know. We are left to rely on the newspaper’s reputation for integrity for assurance that they were in fact representative of a larger number and were chosen without bias.

The thirteen letters were printed in full, including the names of the writers. That’s admittedly a small sample on which to base conclusions. Nevertheless, in view of my great curiosity about how pro-Trump voters have managed to reject the mounting evidence of his incompetence in favor of keeping his base solid, I thought it was worth the effort to resort to an amateur form of reverse engineering to try to construct a portrait of a typical Trump partisan with whom I might then be able to attempt to empathize. Probably not agree with, but perhaps sympathize with to the point where we might be able to converse without shouting.

So to start with I started by carefully deconstructing the letters. I identified and recorded every point cited by each writer as a reason for his(her) approval. This resulted in a list of 25 separate topics.

(I made four omissions from the list : four critical comments in which the writer characterized Trump as 1) “low-rated for character, personality, and temperament”, 2) “the least presidential president of our time ; crude, ruthless, clueless”, 3) [user of] inappropriate and juvenile language, and 4) a vulgarian. Those opinions hadn’t discouraged the writers from hailing him as their savior, although four out of thirteen represented almost a third of my sample.) The other topics I could discern went beyond Trump’s character to more familiar political concerns, such as foreign entanglements or the Mexico Wall.

By plotting the 25 remaining topics against the 13 writers’ names on a piece of graph paper, I hoped to get a feeling for his supporters’ main concerns. I think I was fairly successful.

Five of the 13 (38%) cited

• The defeat of ISIS

• Showing a more assertive attitude toward our enemies

• Withdrawing from foreign entanglements

• Lowering taxes.

Four of the 13 (31%) cited

• Stopping (or deporting) illegal immigrants

• Appointing conservative judges.

Three (18%) cited

• A ‘booming’ economy

• Showing full support for Israel.

A total of eight subjects were mentioned by only two writers out of the 13 (15%). They were

• “I was against Hillary”

• Killing unnecessary regulations

• Law and Order

• Cutting back on entitlements

• Making sure Obama’s legacy would be a failure

• “I like his chutzpah”

• The stock market is up

• Promised repeal of Obamacare.

The remaining topics that could muster only one mention from among the thirteen writers included were

Lowered unemployment, reining in the ‘agencies’ [presumably the ‘Deep State’], making other countries stop taking advantage of us, killing free trade agreements, ‘national security’, greater respect for the flag, and reduction of the national debt.

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What can we conclude from this analysis?

We can note that the majority of these concerns express dissatisfaction with the prevailing situation. They aim at reversing current policies rather than proposing new or better ones. For the most part they do not include any new proposals. They may be fairly characterized, I think, as mostly just kvetching, except perhaps for the one to back moving our embassy to Jerusalem.

One might have hoped to see more references to plans to deal with some of the major domestic problems facing us, such as health care, support for education, child care for working mothers, the plight of the ‘dreamers’ (illegal immigrants seeking a way to stay here and contribute to the America they abandoned everything at home to reach — DACA), refugees (abandoned people with no safe homelands to return to), CHIP ( the Children’s Health Insurance Program), global warming (the welfare of our grandchildren), disarmament (especially neutralization of nuclear weapons before we fall victim to a ‘Hawai’i mistake’), the future goals of NASA, our corrupt privatized prison, hospital, elderly and veteran care systems, the future role of diplomacy versus bicep flexing in our international relations, and the endless Washington bickering that seems to have replaced the once-respectable art of politics. These are apparently expected to be dealt with on an ad hoc basis as the chutzpah and assertiveness of our White House confronts them.

But I did develop a picture in my mind of typical Trump voters. They seem to be angry revolutionaries mostly concerned with demonstrating America’s muscle to an ungrateful world, obsessed with presumed threats to their lives (foreign terrorists actually killed a total of 15 people in the U.S. in 2017; automobiles killed roughly 37,000, a slight discrepancy in priorities here?), resentful that our powerful country has been saddled with the responsibility and expense of acting as the leading underwriter of the world order, pissed that illegal immigrants (like the prodigal son) threaten to reap the benefits of national compassion while those who played by the rules have to see their tax money used for Good Samaritan-ship, and feeling frustrated by the judges who actually have the temerity to enforce the rules of Law and Order they claim to be in favor of. The only thing they seem to be happy about is the prospect of lower taxes; the fact that they will be trivial for 99% of the citizenry compared to the major coups Mr. Trump and his crony circle of billionaires and corporate bigwigs will reap seems not to bother them. While they seem to agree that their Pied Piper is a poor excuse for a considerate human being, much less a President, they also seem to agree that they like the tune he is singing so much that they are willing to overlook his lack of qualifications. This is, to say the least, a sorry state of affairs. Their Uncle Sam seems to have the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder. It seems to me unlikely that that posture will achieve much in the way of turning over the planet in decent shape to our grandchildren.

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I confess that this exercise, while it has clarified my understanding of what makes Trumpists tick, has also depressed me more than I was to begin with. It seems to me that the Republicans, in control so far of all three branches of government, are in danger of squandering their political capital (I like that expression, a reminder that it has to be earned and should be guarded carefully and not frittered away on meaningless showboating) exclusively to tearing down the achievements of 80 years of gradually increasing acceptance of the idea of the prime responsibility of government is to its citizens (Rousseau called it the Social Contract) in favor of plotting on the domestic front to push all the chips toward the one percent and internationally to use our muscle to get our way.

How do we get Mr. Trump and his Republican enablers to face reality rather than indulge in the profanity-laced battles with straw men Twitter encourages? The only way I see is an overwhelming defeat for all Republican candidates in the upcoming mid-term elections. Given the apparent determination of most Washingtonians to remain Washingtonians forever at all costs, this seems unlikely. Could the ladies in those pussyhats really become our saviors? Are there enough of them? If I am ready to ditch the Y chromosome where do I send my dollar?