Michael: Thank you for your response. I will just address some of your points.

I have used “honesty” in a limited sense. The USA is getting exactly what it saw in the last 30 years of watching this guy. No one should be surprised. I think we agree an that.

The common EC vs. popular vote comes up again. My take is that this debate is partisan: EC is disparaged when the preferred side has lost a close election, it is honored when the preferred side wins the election. The validity of EC as an electoral tool depends on who won.

Mr. Trump got 62m votes to Ms. Clinton’s 65m votes. In the eyes of the voting public, Mr. Trump was not a candidate with no chance of ever getting the job. The EC will never vault a candidate with 40% of the vote into the office of the president.

I like to use the Stanley Cup in the National Hockey League as an anology. If the last series goes to 7 games and the game is tied in the third period and one team scores a goal in the last minute of that period, should we really say that that the winning team is vastly superior to losing team? No, we can’t. There were two good teams on the ice, and a lucky break could have given the other team the victory. Mr. Trump was a viable contender in 2016. Just because some of us do not like him does not mean he was not viable.

I would argue that Mr. Trump has not been in politics until 2015. There is an art/science acquired and required to meet with people and discuss mundane things like whether to put a $100,000 crosswalk on 5th Street because there have been a few pedestrian accidents in the past two years. Mr. Trump never had any of that experience — and it shows. I can’t see him working in the minor leagues of the political world to gain that experience.

There is a whole psychology behind supporting someone like Mr. Trump. To briefly summarize, I would say that many of his supporters cannot admit they made a mistake, so they double down on their support. On a more social psychological level, maybe the supporters sense the USA is heading to a period of a more aristocratic arrangement of government. They see themselves on being the privileged side of that arrangement.