Yeah, the “take government benefits away from those people” thing that winds up substantially impacting the people voting for it is cute too.

I remember this analysis of Trump appeal from his first term:

https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/story-of-trumps-appeal

This descriptive portrait of Trump supporters is consistent with an influential explanation for Trump’s appeal, particularly among white working class voters in communities that have seen better days. According to sociologist Arlie Hochschild,(iii) this is the “deep story” these individuals tell themselves to make sense of their world:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs.

An honest take there is that there was a period of time where the US had industrialized, where much of the rest of the industrialized world had destroyed iself in two world wars, some of it lacked the infrastructure for industry, and a lot of the rest of it was hamstrung by command economies. In that time, there was enormous demand for US low-skill manufacturing labor. The world bought goods manufactured in the US.

Markets allocate labor by using prices. If there is a shortage of labor in an area, wages rise, and labor flows into that area. A surplus, and wages drop, and people exit. Still happens – look at the North Dakota oil boom, where wages shot way up for people willing to work there.

In the 1950s, you could, if you were willing to live and work in a US manufacturing center, stick item A into part B on a line and earn a wage that was higher than the typical wage in much of the rest of the US, and much higher than the rest of the world.

The problem is that the economic conditions that created that environment are long-gone, and are not coming back. Labor-intensive manufacturing is an area where the US is especially uncompetitive now. The world does not want the output of a costly American assembly-line worker when someone in Indonesia has the same requisite skillset.

There is no magic Make America Great Again button that is going to turn the US into a (much wealthier, because the same people aren’t going to want a 1950s standard of living) 2025 version of 1950s America.

So now the fallback idea is “well, maybe lets create artificial demand for something that the US isn’t all that good at doing by preventing anyone else from competing for the domestic market. We will impose high tariffs, effectively tax all non-manufacturing workers, and transfer wealth from them to American manufacturing workers”. The problem there is that there is very limited willingness to do that. It is not in the US’s interest to do that, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any intention to do that. Trump, however, is at least willing to go to great lengths to give the impression that he is doing so.