There was mockery:

“From the parts of the report I’ve seen,” said Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel who twice ran for Senate here as Tea Party favorite, “it seems silly…” Of the comments he had seen from fellow Trump supporters on Facebook and in emails, he added, “90 percent of them are like, ‘What’s the big deal?’”

And perhaps the most troubling response:

In Louisiana, David Gubert, 56, chain-smoked Eagle 20 cigarettes in the cab of his pickup, with stacks of firewood for sale behind him in the bed. Like the Willises, he ruminated on what it would mean if the Russians had gotten involved, and possibly even swung the election.

But Mr. Gubert came to a different conclusion.

“If that’s what it took,” he said, “I’m glad they did it.”

These answers can be explained by a number of factors. Trump supporters, like other American conservatives, have been subjected to decades of disinformation by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Here, the phenomenon described by philosophy or political science as “epistemic closure” has created a fact-free alternate reality for Republicans, their supporters and movement conservatives.

Many Americans come to conclusions about political matters first and then reason backwards, discarding any information or facts that are inconvenient or that threaten to change their minds. Partisanship can sustain gross and obvious hypocrisy: If a Democrat such as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had been accused of being aided and abetted by a foreign power to win a presidential election, Trump supporters would instead be braying about high crimes, treason and impeachment.

The Americans who voted for Donald Trump are not pod people as in the 1956 classic science fiction film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or brainwashed tools like Frank Sinatra in “The Manchurian Candidate.” They are not aliens from another world, even if the differences between red- and blue-state America often feel insurmountable. Nor were Trump’s voters coerced or brainwashed by foreign interrogators. Instead, Trump’s supporters made a conscious and active choice to support an authoritarian fascist and demagogue.

It is abundantly clear that Trump’s voters have little regard for America’s political institutions. It also appears that they do not believe in the sanctity of democracy. In an era of the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, a new gilded age of dire wealth and income inequality, a corporate news media that has abandoned most of its responsibilities to properly educate and inform the public, and extreme political polarization, such cynicism is not unreasonable.

Trump’s voters — as well as Republican elected officials — will place few if any checks on the power of the incoming president. Russia did not vote for Donald Trump. Unfortunately, the American people — those who voted for Trump, those who stayed home on Election Day and those who supported third-party candidates in this most critical and unusual election — did it to themselves. Despite whatever plots or machinations were cooked up by Putin and his spies, there is no avoiding that basic truth. This is a pitiable state of affairs. America’s democracy has been plundered from within, not from without.