Trump's voters loathe Jeb Bush because their lives are falling apart, and they blame people like him.
The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs but also a sense of purpose and community.
What unites Trump's voters is a sense of alienation from America's wealthy and powerful.
I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money.
If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, 'Well, what's going to happen to this kid?' you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility.
From the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale, from other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had.
We need to ask questions about how we're going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home.
When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it's very easy to read a slice of that book and say, 'Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that's what I'm going to say the entire book is about.'
Airing the family's laundry can make people upset.
One of the things that concerns me is that so few people who go and get an education elsewhere... feel any real... pull for returning home.
I'm not one of these people who thinks I know all the answers.
I eventually got to the point where I was like, 'Well, if I can't believe in the Big Bang Theory and be a good Christian, then maybe I'm not a good Christian.'
When I started law school in 2010, I would have called myself an atheist. When I graduated law school in 2013, I was exploring my faith again. A lot changed in those three years.
Faith gave me the belief that there was somebody looking out for me, that there was a hopeful future on the other side of all the things I was going through.
If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.
Policies that promote better wages and better jobs would be super-helpful, and I'm a big fan of programs that encourage people to go where jobs are.
Stanford's law school application wasn't the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren't a loser.
We spend our way to the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.
I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn't know how the world of the American elite works.
It's not just that government has failed us. It's not just that we have failed ourselves. It's government. It's individuals. It's sort of everything in between, from families and communities and neighborhoods, churches and so forth.
I have been waiting for someone to come along and tap into that very real frustration that exists in a very large segment of the working-class Republican base. And no one had done it until Donald Trump. I very clearly saw a void, and I knew somebody would fill it. And the moment I knew he had filled it, I knew he would win the nomination.
It's amazing to think how powerful of a force optimism and hope can be. It's the thing that saves me. I believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world. I still believe that, and consequently, I believed that I had a chance, even though things around me were absolutely crazy and difficult.
We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn't teach me.
My military service is the thing I'm most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can't help but tell myself I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.
My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.
The idea that working a blue-collar job and living in a working-class community provides barriers that are unique to your circumstances - that's not a very controversial subject anymore. I think it's something that people on both the Left and the Right probably accept.
I don't think that the Left has a monopoly on bad ideas. I don't think the Right has a monopoly on good ideas.
If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don't understand them, that the political elites don't care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things.
Politicians of both parties told us that free trade with Asia and Latin America would spur economic growth, and maybe it did somewhere else. In our towns, though, factories continue shutting down or moving overseas.
I don't think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban.
Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation's highest office.
As a culture, working-class white Americans like myself had no heroes. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. I doubt my neighbours could even name a high-ranking military officer.
It seems that in the rush to be the first one to the story, the media overstates things. Not maliciously; I don't think they're intentionally misleading. But the credibility gap is already there, and in this rush to get to the story first, a lot of mainstream outlets just erode their credibility further.
Every two weeks, I'd get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.
We are so isolated in our own little worlds, in our own little geographies, that it's pretty hard to understand where someone else is coming from. And so I think that we have to really think about what that means as a country and, frankly, whether this segregation that we have is durable over the long run.
I didn't come from the elites. I didn't come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America's working class.
I believe that I'm a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don't want to lose that. I think it's possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you're self-reflective and meaningful about it.
It's very hard to be a practicing Christian in the 21st-century world if you set things up as, 'Everyone is against us. You can't believe modern science, modern media or modern political institutions because they're all conspiring against Christians.'
People don't want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate meaningfully in politics, because most of us don't speak like Obama or Clinton.
It's not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don't recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.
Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.
I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn't learn how to get ahead.
It's hard to strike that balance: to tell a kid that life isn't fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter.
I happen to think that conservatism, when properly applied to the 21st century, could actually help everybody. And the message of Trump's campaign was obviously not super-appealing to Latino Americans, black Americans and so forth. That really bothered me.
If you're graduating from high school, and you come from a lower income family, you're effectively given two options. One is get a four-year college degree; two is work at a low-wage job, potentially for the rest of your life. We've got to do better on that front. We have to provide more options.
Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.
Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.
When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.
People listen to what their political leaders are telling them, and my view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes.