Edward Luce of the Financial Times has done some of the very best writing about America’s shock jock campaign season, in which the eternally insincere Donald Trump, a lower-case insult comic and Reality TV host, a narcissist who manages to steadfastly ignore the many cracks in his mirror, has won the GOP nomination, confounding his own party’s power structure as well as anyone with common sense. The hideous hotelier has carved a surprisingly wide niche by promising to “Make America Great (read: ‘White’) Again,” vowing he can magically bring back manufacturing jobs increasingly handled by robots and make coal cool once more. Those scenarios are as likely as the condo salesman actually reading the Bible he keeps his right hand on when campaigning in evangelical bases.

Luce’s very best piece to date on the topic is his new article about a visit he paid to Buchanan County, the Virginia district that gave Donald Trump his biggest victory percentage-wise in America. In the shadows of the Great Smokies, the mines are dead and dying, not only because of regulation intended to constrain climate change but also because a new era has arrived, which has made many dangerously nostalgic. Problem is, yesterday seldom ever returns and if it does you mostly get only the bad parts.

In the county, Luce encounters 22-year-old nonconformist Daniel Justus, who believes Trump is just the latest opioid to be swallowed by the locals, whom he disagrees with vehemently but loves all the same. He also spends time with Tamara Neo, Trump’s most vocal supporter in the community. An excerpt:

Tamara Neo, Trump’s main cheerleader for the region, certainly sees it that way. Every morning she puts her three children into her Range Rover for the 45-minute drive to a private Christian school across the state border in West Virginia. There is too much godlessness in today’s public schools, she believes. As we drive, Tamara tests her children on the Bible. “John 1, verses 16-18,” she barks into her iPhone’s Siri app. The verses appear on screen. “Now say the verse, Axella,” she says to her daughter, who’s in fifth grade. Axella stumbles over it then yawns. “Again,” says Tamara, until she gets it right. She moves on to Io, her eldest: “Exodus 20, Verse 12,” she says. “Go Io.” Next comes Flux. Then she makes them recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg address — all 278 words of it. She does not stop until they get it right.

With children called Io, Axella and Flux, Tamara betrays her western origins. People in Virginia are conservative with names. Tamara and her husband Flux, also a lawyer, moved here from Colorado 10 years ago because they loved the beauty of the Great Smokies. She ran as commonwealth attorney for Buchanan County — an elected position as chief prosecutor for the area. She lost her re-election in 2010 but not before putting scores of people away for prescription drug-dealing. “In a close-knit community like this, a prosecutor quickly prosecutes herself out of a job,” says Tamara. “You know too many people.” Almost never in her four years on the job did she come across cocaine or even meth. “The epidemic is in prescription pills,” she says. “People will do anything to get hold of them.”

Like many of Trump’s evangelical supporters, Tamara does not mind the thrice-married candidate’s lurid tabloid past. After all, Ronald Reagan had been divorced. “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future,” she says. What most appeals to her about Trump is that he talks without a trace of political correctness. He calls things the way he sees them. Gaffes that would have felled a lesser man — calling illegal Hispanic immigrants “murderers” and “rapists”, for example, or obsessing over supposed slights about the size of his penis — have left Trump unscathed. “He just keeps walking through one fire after another and coming out the other side untouched,” says Tamara. “I take this as a sign.”•