Toward the end of a 5.1 New York piece that assesses the foreboding cultural-political impact of Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign, Andrew Sullivan writes the following: “More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain.” The word “monster” isn’t a rash or cruel characterization of Trump — as Robert Kagan‘s 2.25 Washington Post op-ed piece explained in compelling if chilling terms, it’s an accurate one. Nor, obviously, is “demagogue” an unfair or inappropriate term. But Trump voters continue to eat, drink and think on another planet. It’s not that they’re oblivious to the game that Trump is playing or the spears he’s been throwing around, but they’re apparently still persuaded that his bully-boy, bull-in-a-china-shop attitudes are overlookable because at least he’ll shake things up and cut through the bullshit. The views of pundits like Sullivan and Kagan and pretty much the entire Washington D.C. cultural-political complex continue to fall on deaf ears. Because the Trump tune is largely about racial pushback, and in the view of white rurals it takes a monster to fight a monster, the latter being (in their minds) a sea-change in the cultural makeup of this country and the shifting power dynamics that have resulted. Trump is about race, stupid.