The broadly accepted meme is that the Trump voter is one of the white working class that globalization has left behind. They have no college education and are easily tricked by the propagandists at Fox News into mistaking who is truly exploiting them and making their lives desperate and miserable. The media focuses on them because there is a kind of perverse sympathy to be gained for people who time and again shoot themselves in the foot by voting against their own interests.
But in fact the class of deplorables is much wider — it includes what used to be called "country club Republicans." And that is a part of the story that the media has far less focused on, perhaps because those are the people who have influence with their employers, or are their employers.
So-called “country club Republicans” are people with great wealth and education who back in the middle of the previous century used to know better, but now have been given licence by Trump to give in to their very worst instincts.
This article in The New Yorker discusses the deplorables of Greenwich, Connecticut, as a case study in elite deplorability:
At home one night, watching television, Campbell happened on a Trump rally in Iowa. “I’m not a hard-core conservative—I’m a Republican from Greenwich,” Campbell said. “But I listened, and he had that line that he would use: ‘Folks, we either have a country or we don’t.’ And I felt the chill—like Chris Matthews with the little Obama zing up the leg. I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God, this is a really good line.’ ” To Campbell, Trump was describing immigration in ways that resonated: “Could somebody finally say that we’re allowed to enforce the law at the border without being called a racist? I lived in Switzerland for ten years. Do you think I was allowed to go around without a passport?”
Campbell tapped out a text message to a friend: “Trump live - can’t turn the channel. Unbelievable. I don’t think any R can beat him.” Campbell watched the rally for forty-five minutes. “He was mesmerizing,” he said. Not long afterward, he saw a Republican debate in which Trump described the invasion of Iraq as a mistake. For Campbell, the acknowledgment came as a catharsis. “Of course it was a big, fat mistake,” he told himself. “He says everything I think.”...
Four years later, Trump signs are still scarce in Greenwich (population 62,600), but his supporters are easy to find. There is the first selectman—the local equivalent of mayor—and the chairman of the Greenwich finance board, as well as an ardent backer who serves in the state House of Representatives. Some local Republicans helped fund Trump’s Inauguration, and some joined his White House, including Linda McMahon, the former professional-wrestling executive who headed the Small Business Administration, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s longtime communications adviser. (She once captained the Greenwich high-school lacrosse team.) Others in town have abandoned their objections to Trump. Leora Levy, who called him vulgar in the local paper, took to applauding his “leadership” and quoting him on Twitter, where she adopted some of his rhetorical style. “AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A SOCIALIST COUNTRY!!!” she posted. “WE ARE BORN FREE AND WILL STAY FREE!!!” Last fall, Trump nominated her to be the American Ambassador to Chile....
How did America’s country-club Republicans, the cultural descendants of Prescott Bush, learn to love Donald Trump? They don’t have much in common with the clichéd image of his admirers: anxious about losing status to minorities, resentful of imperious élites, and marooned in places where life expectancy has fallen. But the full picture has never been that simple. As early as May, 2016, exit polls and other data showed that Trump supporters earned an average of seventy-two thousand dollars a year, while supporters of Hillary Clinton earned eleven thousand dollars less. Two-thirds of Trump’s supporters had incomes higher than the national median—sometimes, as in Greenwich, much higher.
They may have long considered themselves the elite of America, and with that came the responsibilty for noblesse oblige. But no longer:
The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of America’s élite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power. Long before anyone imagined that Trump might become President, a generation of unwitting patrons paved the way for him. From Greenwich and places like it, they launched a set of financial, philanthropic, and political projects that have changed American ideas about government, taxes, and the legitimacy of the liberal state....
The success of their greed for their vastly accumulating new wealth has left a physical imprint on the landscape:
Many of the new estates going up were no longer surrounded by the simple stone walls, stacked to the height of a farmer’s hip, that crossed the New England landscape. Instead, the builders introduced a more imposing barrier: tall, stately walls of chiselled stone, mortared in place.
The fashion for higher walls had little to do with safety; Greenwich has one of the lowest crime rates in America. To Frank Farricker, who served on the town’s planning-and-zoning commission, they symbolized power and seclusion. “Instead of building two or three feet high, people got into six-footers—the ‘Fuck you’ walls,” he said.
The difference between the mores of 1920s Greenwich and today's Greenwich, with its "fuck you" walls closing out the rest of "loser" America is discouraging and disheartening.
In 1927, Owen D. Young, a Greenwich resident who was the first chairman of General Electric, gave a speech at Harvard Business School, in which he scolded businessmen who “devise ways and means to squeeze out of labor its last ounce of effort and last penny of compensation.” He encouraged them instead to “think in terms of human beings—one group of human beings who put their capital in, and another group who put their lives and labor in a common enterprise for mutual advantage.” Rick Wartzman, a longtime head of the Drucker Institute and a historian of corporate behavior, told me, “This really was beyond rhetoric. We were much more of a ‘we’ culture than an ‘I’ culture.” On Young’s watch, G.E. became one of the first American companies to give workers a pension, profit-sharing, life insurance, medical coverage, loans, and housing assistance.
The ethos today is very different:
“For an earlier generation, even if your heart wasn’t in it, you’d say, ‘I’ve got to join the local charity board, to project that I deserve this wealth.’ ” The current generation, instead of focussing on the local charity board, prefers targeted private philanthropy, bypassing public decisions on whom to help and how. “The underlying massive change is that wealth no longer needs to justify itself—it is self-justifying,” Harrington said. “I look back, and I think, That’s when we gave up on being a ‘we.’ ”
A lot has been written about the white working class Trumpsters. A lot less about the rich and well-educated ones who should know better, but have followed Trump's lead and given in whole-heartedly to the dark side. It's a long article but well worth reading, just to see how low these despicably selfish people have fallen, letting go of any standards of decency in support of a civilized society, in the space of a mere few decades.
This is beyond the result of the simplistic propaganda of the Fox News talking heads. This is a moral collapse of the stratum of American society from which its leadership has traditionally been drawn. And while sharply raising taxation on them will solve part of the problem, it’s hard to see how restoring any kind of social responsibility and sense of proper moral action can be brought to people who’ve now been encouraged and licenced and rewarded by a president to let go of it all.