It doesn’t hurt his popularity with his supporters that so many hate him, it fits with the overall narrative of that constituency that people want them silenced.

You can see this is in how many conservatives complain about cancel culture silencing them, they use phrases like “you can’t say anything anymore” enmass on social media and run dozens of media publications and TV about how their voices are being silenced.

The irony of all this is ignored in the fury.

To really understand trump’s popularity you need to see him as a symptom not a cause. People who grew up without exposure to difference, in environments where difference was not tolerated, are feeling upset that the differences are being accepted.

They always believed the narrative that those differences just didn’t exist in the past and so the can see a rapid change in the world which they see as the destruction of the world they know.

Had they known that differences were their all along, only being kept out of sight, they’d know this isn’t a slide towards anything, it’s just a recognition of everything that was always already there.