I absolutely agree the American people have legitimate grievances.
While they may not be able to put their finger precisely what is going on and who is doing it, their instincts are telling them there is something rotten in Denmark.
It is during these times when demagogues rush in to tell them EXACTLY who is screwing them over.
It's those Jewish bankers! It's those Mexicans!
Demagogues give the people a focal point for their anger. Trump is a master at demagouery.
As for what you said about "the voices they choose to trust" it is often those very voices who are the actual cause of their problem.
Politicians take bribes from special interests to legislatively tilt the playing field in their favor, at the expense of the common people. This has been my tilting at windmills mission from the get-go.
The tilting of the playing field in America is achieved through tax expenditures and regulations. Tax expenditures are robbing the American people of over a trillion dollars a year. They cause higher tax rates, and they keep growing ever year. I think a new tax expenditure is added to the tax code at the rate of one a day.
Reagan fought against this force and eliminated a huge bulk of them, but special interests began the work of putting them back in almost immediately.
Regulations are used to prevent competition breaking into the market. Pay our politicians to make the entry level cost of regulations high enough, you won't have to compete against newcomers with better business models.
Explaining the complexities of tax expenditures to voters is a Herculean task. Believe me, I've tried. Lord, have I tried. And yet there are people who think they are conservatives who are viscerally opposed to eliminating tax expenditures so we can level the playing field and have lower tax rates.
Most of them nodded off two sentences into this post.
That's why it is so much easier to just blame Mexicans or Jews. That does not require any hard thinking on the part of the angry mob.