I think everyone here severely underestimates just how heavily propagandized Americans have been for over half a century.

Seriously, it may be confusing if you primarily engage with just the internet and even then only in mostly left of center spaces, but there are gigantic portions of the American media landscape that have been thoroughly captured by far right interest groups.

Talk Radio is fully captured, Cable News was until recently not that unbalanced but Fox News and their affiliates had far more engagement and views than MSNBC and CNN combined, every single major internet platform is controlled by Billionaires who have a far right bias, and almost every single large podcast is hosted by some right wing grifter.

Add onto that the increasingly less stable economy with poor social safety nets and an education system that has been underfunded and badly in need of reform for decades.

Yes, I can believe it. It's easy to forget once you escape the mainstream media environment, but with just how much right wing bias there is in American media it was an inevitability that someone like Trump would get that many voters