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One of the themes of this election seems to be confusion around how anyone could vote for Trump. Many articles have attempted to address this but I want to look at one aspect that I believe is a root cause: Ego Development.
Several people have had a crack at theories of ego development (Piaget, Erikson, Kegan) but one of the most approachable is:
 

Loevinger's Stages of Ego Development

Wikipedia alternative
(If you are really too lazy to read those, here is a similar concept illustrated using goats! - but seriously, this will make a lot more sense if you read the article)
 

In short, we start out as children, thinking like “animals” (eat, breed, compete, etc.), we then gain many other attributes as we grow up, such as empathy, morality, the ability to paradigm-shift, an understanding of the duality and causation of most situations, etc. Somewhere along this progression, people get “stuck” and they stop progressing and sometimes even lose the ability to grow as people.
This leaves us with a diverse spectrum of adults, from people who seem to experience the whole world through their mouths and genitals, to people who see the world as black & white and tribal (us vs them; we’re right-they’re wrong), to people who see the world from many perspectives but are numbed by the “greyness” of every situation.
 

Let’s take one of these attributes as a further example: empathy. Little kids generally all tease and bully each other and get into altercations, but somewhere along the line we get bullied/teased ourselves and see how much it hurts, we then imagine how much it must hurt other people and we stop doing it - we gain empathy. Now consider someone who has never gained empathy, it’s very difficult to imagine it without actually achieving it - in other words, people generally either have empathy or they literally cannot conceive the concept.
 

This is the crux of the paragraph from the article above:

Before going on I should mention that the preceding three stages—the conformist, self-aware, and conscientious stages—are the most common for adults in the United States, and there are fewer and fewer people at the stages we are about to examine. Moreover, Loevinger suggested that we all have a hard time understanding stages that are more than one level above our own, so for many of us who are at the middle stages it can be hard to fully grasp the highest stages.

 

And so the stage is set: A significant portion of the population are locked into the lower part of the scale and cannot conceive a more mature world view, while the other half have progressed through most stages and can see the whole spectrum (because they have grown through it). In many ways this is the essence of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
 

Now let’s look at Trump in the context of ego development - narcissism, sexualisation, winning at all cost, focus on life as a hierarchy, lack of empathy (I could go on) and we see why, when people like John Stewart refer to him as a man-baby, it rings so true to us.
Now consider the large proportion of the population who also have limited ego development, he seems like a hero to them! His base desires (and his success in achieving them!) are the limit of their perspective and he represents the pinnacle of their world view - money/might = right. The progressive dream of a selfless world of co-operation, empathy and equality is almost inconceivable to them and, if they can conceive it, it seems totally unrealistic because “humans are not like that” (implying that humans are fundamentally evil/selfish and therefore would not succeed - this misconception coming from their own stunted world view).
 

In truth, it’s not a liberal-conservative dichotomy, anyone who is significantly high on the scale sees the nuance and duality of every situation - enough for them to never be an extremist. This is the essence of The Political Horseshoe and why most adults see SJWs and Alt-Right as equally crazy.
 

My apologies, this post doesn’t flow very well but, if you read the main article link, I’m hoping my point has come across. Unfortunately the Loevinger’s Scale can become a lens through which one sees the world - for better or worse.