Why is Trump popular?

Mainstream opinion seems to be that it’s all bigots and deplorables

Institute for new economic thinking has a research paper on  Trump’s popularity 

As usual, it’s the economy…

the classic vision of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelations starred only Four Horsemen: Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The Fearsome Four are all obviously romping over the globe and not just in Ukraine. But nowadays the quartet travels in the company of a veritable thundering herd of other monsters: creatures representing serial climate disaster, inflation, rising interest rates, looming global debt crisis, and broken supply chains, to reel off a few. Not the least of the newcomers is one native to the USA: the prospect that the U.S. midterm elections may confer significant power on a true anti-system party akin to those that terminated the Weimar Republic.

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we think a fresh analysis of the voting base of the Trump wing of the Republican Party provides a perfect opportunity to test out twenty-first century machine learning techniques to see if they might shed additional light on the roots of Trump’s appeal. Could they perhaps yield new evidence on the hotly disputed question of how much economic issues matter to Trump voters?

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These results, we think, confirm that Trump’s appeal to his base rests importantly on economic issues, especially economic growth. We repeat that we are not claiming that the economic issues are all that matter: anyone, now, should be able to see how Trump routinely exploits racial and ethnic themes. But the economic appeal is important and not reducible to the others.