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In 2016, we heard Donald Trump boast: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

The fact that he still retains, according to the latest ABC News poll, the approval of even 36 percent of the American electorate, in spite of the ever-mounting Russia scandals and evidence that he is dangerously erratic, amoral and unfit for the presidency, clearly demonstrates the truth of his campaign bragging.

There are a number of voters in this country, especially among rural folks and the white working class, in particular men whom the modern neo-liberal and out-sourced economy has effectively emasculated, who cannot understand or rationally explain why they are suffering, nor why no one in high places has seen their plight.

They look for someone to accuse: immigrants, the Washington and media establishments, feminists, gays, university liberals, people of color and homosexuals, among others. If only a paladin, one they could truly believe in, would come along and “drain the swamp” of all those whom they blame for their distress.

As Eric Hoffer famously wrote of true believers: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” A corollary would be that the very need to believe is much more important than the content of the belief.

Donald Trump, a familiar face on TV, a man who has speciously managed to brand himself as a spectacularly successfully businessman, came along and validated their suspicions. He both repeated their fears and endorsed their cast of villains. Was there anyone else in the public realm who claimed to see the world as they did, upon whom they could hang their hopes of economic and social redemption?

No, there was no one else, at least not among any of the others who ran for president in 2016. Why? Because the perceived enemies of the people who ardently support Donald Trump are primarily mis-cast.

Their jobs are not being stolen by immigrants; immigrants mostly take menial jobs, not the better-paying jobs they have lost. Those good jobs were either automated or were out-sourced by the very same people like Trump who now make most of what they sell in factories abroad.

Only a dishonest populist was willing to tell them what they thought they wanted to hear last November. Only a flim-flam artist lies to them today that they will have better health care if his party guts Medicare.

Only an unscrupulous con-man, while he profits from his time in the White House by self-dealing, blatantly placing his immediate family in high office, and systematically goes about destroying public services they depend on, will say he’s going to help them economically, floating such total fantasies as bringing back the hopelessly out-dated coal industry or sponsoring a trillion-dollar infrastructure that his political party will never support in Congress.

Donald Trump’s core base of support is made up people whose demand to believe in a hero to lift them up and restore their lost sense of “American” dignity is much stronger than their willingness to recognize his feet of clay.

Their anxieties obliterate appeals to reason, logic, scientific evidence, morality and the crying need for public ethics or even simple competence in governing. Some will eventually come to realize they have been swindled, but most won’t.

Overcoming this irrationality is today’s primary political challenge to all decent members of Congress, be they Republican or Democrat, and to anyone who values the future of the United States.