When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, he uttered a line that, to most journalists and liberal pundits, seemed bizarre and condescending. “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old,” Trump boasted during a victory speech in Nevada. “We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” 

At the time, Trump’s boast about leading a coalition of the “poorly educated” was widely mocked, dismissed as yet another gaffe that was supposed to eventually torpedo his campaign. No presidential candidate in modern memory had referred to voters in such a way. For decades — certainly in the era of the television campaign — those kinds of Americans were signaled to in more gauzy terms or never singled out at all. Vox, summing up the liberal groupthink at the time, called it the “strangest line” from Trump’s speech.

Trump, of course, is a hypocrite. He constantly brags about his own Ivy League degree and idolizes those who attended elite institutions. As president, he has governed as yet another trickle-down conservative, supporting policies that favor big corporations and oligarchs over ordinary people. His greatest legacy with be fulfilling conventional Republican priorities, like stacking the federal judiciary and appointing right-wing Supreme Court justices.