I would hope you wouldn't elect a high school student to be President of the United States. I would also hope that knowledge of basic geography of important regions in the world would be a prerequisite for a position that largely deals with foreign affairs.
If we completely ignore basic competency, then I must conclude his rhetoric, which largely revolved around scapegoating immigrants and the people of foreign nations, played a large part in the decision.
Edit: Again, this is intended to give context as to why some, including myself, look to those issues as a driving force in the election.
It is not actually about what they report. It is all about what they don't report. Left wing and right wing propaganda are not the same. Right wing propaganda tells you what you must believe. Left wing propaganda simply leaves out the truth. Either way you have distortion but the methods are very different. NPR is not better than Fox News. Once you realize this, thou shalt be enlightened.
Let's take the case of Islam.
The working class is more religious than the middle class. The middle class mostly treat religion as a weird weekend hobby and don't really think the believers are serious. Deep down they think, these people are not being serious.
Well, I came out of a cult, do not believe in a personal God, and I can tell you these people really do believe in their thing. Belief is real, even if I disagree with it.
So when the working class look to Islam, they see religion and when the middle class look to Islam, they see politics. They simply leave out the religion itself. It is not about right and wrong, it is just that they are seeing different portions of the elephant. When a journalist is captured by ISIS he thinks he might get out alive by a ransom or prisoner trade. The working class understand he'll die because he is a kaffir. Do you see?
This explains the bifurcation between working and middle class perspectives. The worldview of the middleclass has no value at the resolution of the working class. I think George Orwell was one of the few middle class journalists who truly understood his people.
With the possible exception of Julian Assange, there are few working class journalists in the mainstream press, not even at Breitbart.
If you're honest, you have to ask yourself this question:
Which is the more likely?
That journalists were in a bubble? Or the entire working class? Look at the map of voting results by distinct. It is an ocean of red.
I see you deleted your initial response (I have cached replies that enables me to see posts that were deleted), which is fine, but I wanted to respond to three of your queries. To respect your deletion I won't quote from it.
1. Here I am using the colloquial meaning of the word propaganda, which is ideologically biased information, usually it takes the truth but then stretches it to breaking point and beyond.
2. I do not possess a Facebook account. I don't even have a mobile phone. I don't watch Fox News in case you were curious. I hardly watch any television at all since I don't have one. Many readers of Hacker News do not have them, it's a common demographic in geek circles.
3. Class warfare is a real thing. It is not an extreme concept, it's a descriptor. Europeans like me frequently complain that Americans don't grok class or that Americans conflate 'race' with 'class'. You don't have to agree of course. Perhaps America is the one nation on the planet that didn't gradually evolve a class system as it matured ;-)
Humour aside, I do think this (gradually evolve a class system as it matured) is one of the major reasons why many American intellectuals are increasingly interested in old European ideas and books from the 18/19th centuries. Their resonance is much deeper than it used to be.
I just deleted it because honestly, it's not like I'm going to get a real answer anyway. You continue to group people into baskets. Now it's "Americans" and "Fox News", race and class. I was just trying to understand where that comes from. Someday I truly hope to get some better insight as to where the general extremism is coming from. The reality is it's not going to happen in this thread so I was better off just deleting it as opposed to cluttering the discussion for no real benefit.
I think the answer you seek is in front of you. Look at it this way hiou.
There are the Lumpers (everything is the same) and the Splitters (everything is different). If you remember the book Sophie's World (which was full of great insights into this), then it is like the genres of reductionism and holism in philosophy.
The real answer is that people's brains work differently.
If you want some consolation, it is that we cannot live without either group, Lumper or Splitter. Each group has failure modes which can be corrected by the other tribe. I am convinced that is why the left and right exist in all cultures and times. It's a very important human algorithm.
Don't watch or read Fox News, don't believe anything in email chains and don't do Facebook really. I get this information by collecting large amounts of information from various sources. I see the ridiculous things that the Sally Kohn's of this world do to try to equivocate what happened with the Orlando massacre to the general Christian opposition to gay marriage. When leftists try to compare people having and voicing an opinion to the actual murder of fellow citizens, we have a problem.
If we completely ignore basic competency, then I must conclude his rhetoric, which largely revolved around scapegoating immigrants and the people of foreign nations, played a large part in the decision.
Edit: Again, this is intended to give context as to why some, including myself, look to those issues as a driving force in the election.