Why is Donald Trump popular? Travelling around America’s south for his most recent book Deep South, the writer Paul Theroux got some ideas. “It’s the gun show guys,” he says, sitting in his Hawaii home. “Virtually everything Donald Trump says, you can find on a gun show bumper sticker. Anti-Obama stuff, anti-Muslim stuff, anti-Mexican stuff, anti-immigrant stuff.”  The 74-year-old warms to his theme. “Gun shows are about hating and distrusting the government … people who have been oppressed by a bad economy, by outsourcing. They have a lot of legitimate grievances and a lot of imagined grievances. There is this paranoid notion that Washington is trying to take their guns away, take their manhood away, take this symbol of independence away. They feel defeated. They hate the Republican party, too. They feel very isolated.”  Theroux reflects on Trumpmania dominating the Republican primaries and caucuses. “It’s a whole undercurrent of feeling that runs all the way through the United States. The mood I saw in southern gun shows seems to resonate even with educated, white-collar, Massachusetts Republican voters. Because Trump won my state of Massachusetts, he won a fairly sizable majority.”  Related: Deep South review – Paul Theroux’s journey through the southern United States  The writer witnessed the striking economic and cultural impact of outsourcing in southern towns such as Alabama’s Greensboro and Allendale. He sharply evokes Flowers Lane’s hovels and trailers, writing: “The heat made it all the smellier, as of roasted flatulence. It was the smell of poverty, a stink that no one, not even someone in the submerged 20th, could get used to.”  Theroux emphasises that 20% of southerners, black and white, below the poverty line need help. “Manufacturing has been outsourced. Their jobs have been taken away, so there’s nothing for them to do. They sit crowded together in their shack and watch a jumbly picture on a TV set. It’s very distressing. “You don’t see that in many other countries. The level of poverty, and the level of despair, too. Of people thinking, ‘Nothing’s ever going to happen to me. I will never go to college, I will never get healthcare’.” Theroux’s abiding memory of his journey was southern towns with their economic heart ripped out, factories shuttered, from Mississippi to hinterland Arkansas. Southerners complained to him about the unfair effects American trade deals such as Nafta have had, a complaint Trump is now tub-thumping. “Trump was making some kind of clothing line, but it was made in China. He’s a complete hypocrite in virtually everything that he says,” Theroux says scathingly. “I suppose that will come out. He’s hired undocumented workers, he’s manufactured things in China.”  Theroux agrees with Bernie Sanders that Trump is a “pathological liar”. He thinks a candidacy-curbing Trump scandal isn’t far off. “Trump is not unstoppable. I think that the Trump campaign will unravel because he’s such a devious man. He is untruthful. People who make that much money in business, and who talk like that, have hid a lot … I think something will emerge.”  Though Theroux is feeling the Bern, he thinks Sanders’ campaign isn’t ultimately going to get enough traction. “If you say you’re a socialist, or a democratic socialist as Bernie does, people think you have photos of Stalin on your walls. He’s said a lot of the right things, but Americans aren’t ready for that amount of truth.”  He is sceptical about Hillary and Bill Clinton. “Bill Clinton is the quintessential southern huckster who doesn’t know when to stop,” he says. Visiting Bill’s old stomping ground of Hot Springs, Theroux is trenchant: “Still a disgrace 50 years after Clinton lived in town,” he writes. “Langston looked like a black ‘location’ in South Africa, ripe for uplift from an NGO, the very sort of place that should have been a target for improvement by the Clinton Global Initiative, but wasn’t.”  “Bill Clinton is a very complicated character,” Theroux adds, sounding conflicted. “I understood a lot of American politics better by being in the south. Him in particular by going to Hot Springs … What Dickens called ‘telescopic philanthropy’, where you look far, far away to look for poor people to help. Why is Clinton not in places like the Ozarks? And the Clinton Foundation has done some very questionable things.”  Theroux believes the Republican establishment only have themselves to blame for Trump’s rise. “Trump is the natural reductio ad absurdum of rightwing Republican thinking. Most Republicans echo what Trump says, but in a coded way, the dog whistle. Trump is merely saying out loud what most Republicans think … Sarah Palin was the Republican’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate. She’s worse than Trump. She’s done nothing, she’s stupider than Trump. Her views are all the same as his.”  In Deep South Theroux traces dog-whistle racism back to Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 campaign in the unnerving Mississippi place where civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964. “He did. I’m glad you noticed it. Reagan knew who he was talking to. He was talking about state’s rights, and so forth. He went there deliberately, Philadelphia, Mississippi. It was horrible; Reagan took advantage of this lynching and shooting of three civil rights workers. The memory of that has faded.”  He criticises fellow Massachusite Mitt Romney for being so enthusiastic about Trump’s 2012 endorsement after Trump’s “grotesquely racist” rise to national prominence as a “birther”. “Romney is totally opportunistic, not authentic at all.”  Theroux still believes Obama’s got true grit. “A wonderful president who has done marvellous things – with healthcare, getting Bin Laden, opening up Cuba, keeping Israel at arm’s length. Probably the best president of my lifetime. And I can remember Eisenhower, Truman … I wasn’t disappointed by Obama. I know what the limitations are on people who seek power.”  Theroux is disappointed that the deep south will vote for the Republicans in November. But he is cautiously optimistic about the south’s future, buoyed by the kindness, generosity, and warmth of people he encountered on his travels. The seasoned global explorer – who anticipated Tiananmen in the 1988 classic Riding the Iron Rooster – believes Russia, India, Brazil and China will implode. “I think China’s going to fail … when China fails, we’ll have to rebuild here in the south.”
In his new book, Deep South, Paul Theroux explores the depressed pockets of America that, he says, have incubated an anger and despair fueling Trump’s rise