>>My point is a practical one.
>>If you don't like Trump (I haven't met many people who do) it's might be a good idea to look at what made so many people desperate enough to vote for someone like him.

I can think of a few reasons why some people are still glad they voted for him. Quoting from that political journal the Hill:

- The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index increased in October “to its highest level in almost 17 years” dating back to December 2000.
- The latest labor market report was solid with the official unemployment rate at a 17-year low and a broader measure many economists consider the real unemployment rate, known as the U-6 rate, is at a 16-year low.
- For the first time in three years, gross domestic product has grown by at least 3 percent for two consecutive quarters. The reports from main street are also positive.
- Earlier this month, the trucking industry provided a very positive sign of increasing economic growth when the transportation intelligence firm FTR reported that October orders for Class 8 trucks increased an impressive 167 percent over last year. It was the fifth straight month of increasing gains. These are the semis and big rigs that move goods across the country. When the economy is growing, we need more of them. FTR expects this “strong production environment to persist into 2018.”

Millions of Americans care a great deal about things like jobs, consumer spending and getting trucks back on the roads.

Does Trump deserve credit? Maxine Waters says he deserves absolutely no credit as he's passed no legislation and has no idea what's actually going on. CNN also did a "fact check" and came to the same conclusion.

But quoting the Hill again:

This “Trump gets no credit” approach says a lot about how poorly progressive Democrats understand what drives economic growth. It isn’t more government; its less. In his first nine months, President Trump has taken a machete to the Obama era’s rules and regulations... In fact, a recent analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think tank, found that Trump is deregulating the economy at a pace no other president ever has.
According to CEI, Trump’s has reduced the Federal Register’s page count by an impressive 32 percent compared to President Obama at this time last year. This put him on course to beat President Reagan’s record of a “one-third reduction in Federal Register pages following Jimmy Carter’s then-record Federal Register.”
But that reduction took Reagan years to accomplish. Trump has been in office nine months. “So, by this metric, Trump is moving much faster” already making him the “least-regulatory president since Reagan.” There is little doubt that he will exceed Reagan’s record becoming the least regulatory president period.

Worth noting that the Reagan era is remembered for its prosperity. Income across all brackets rose sharply, 20 million jobs were created, the number of poor shrank markedly as they moved into higher brackets and the once-bemoaned withering of the middle classes now is explained by huge migration of middle class families into the high income bracket. It's unlikely they complained about that. ;-) So if Trump can achieve similar, straight away there's another 20M incentivized to vote for him next time, even if some are amazed that anybody could be so stupid.