I was watching a recent Daily Show episode and how it blamed Trump's rise entirely on the news media hungry for viewers, and I couldn't help but remember how this same show literally begged Trump to run just last July, and how hypocritical they are to point fingers now. Did they think we'd forget?
It reminds me of how DKos denounces Trump daily, while still giving him ample front page space. Is DKos looking for more clicks?

What almost everyone is guilty of is just how superficially the Trump phenomenon has been covered.
For example, a Huffington Post column declared that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.”
While Trump certainly does say racist things, and there are racists within his supporters, that doesn't mean racism is the only motivating factor here. Correlation does not prove causation.
The simplistic dismissals of Trump's supporters reeks of elitism.
Does anyone even know Trump's policy stands beyond immigration? Believe it or not, he has some.

The Atlantic asked this question last December, and they found something that most news sources have failed to find - nuance.

For example, if Trump’s support is fueled simply by whites disliking minorities, how then does one explain Kevin Scott?
Scott is a self-described Reagan Democrat from Warren, Ohio who, he told me, voted for Obama twice. This time around, he’s backing Trump, because Trump is, he says, the lone candidate talking about one issue that resonates with him closely. “He’s the only guy who’s mentioned the UAW and the Ford plant going to Mexico,” Scott said. For Scott, who’s a United Auto Worker member and shop chairman at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, the plans to build facilities in Mexico hit close to home.

To be fair, Trump isn't the only candidate talking about free trade agreements. Bernie Sanders has too.
Just check out this headline: 
Bernie Sanders Wins in Michigan Thanks to Trade Policy;  A senator who is clearly identified with opposition to free-trade deals triumphs in a state that has been particularly hard hit by those pacts.

Thomas Frank more recently looked into the Trump phenomenon and also found something other than racism.

Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

Thomas Frank referred to an AFL-CIO survey of its members, and it found strong support for Trump. Not because of his racism. Not even because of immigration.
But because of fear for employment.

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”
Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

Other, more general surveys, show the same trend of economics concerns among Trump supporters.
Handling the economy is the overwhelming reason for Trump's lead in the polls. "Immigration issues" rank a distant third in Republican voter priority.

At least one journalist put two-and-two together when this study came out last month.

What’s killing Donald Trump’s voters?
That’s my reaction to the highly disturbing health news that two Princeton economists have uncovered about a key slice of the billionaire presidential candidate’s support base.
Since 1999, middle-aged white Americans with a high school diploma or less education have been dying in record numbers, according to Angus Deaton (a winner this year of a Nobel Prize) and his wife, Anne Case.

The biggest group of Trump supporters also happens to be the exact same group showing signs of measurable distress. This isn't a coincidence.

It is to the left-behind crowd, whose demographic profiles closely resemble those of Donald Trump’s base, that Trump speaks most directly and effectively.
“In terms of demographics, Trump’s supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican,” Real Clear Politics reported in September, citing YouGov polls....
What unites Trump’s supporters is a profound sense of discontent, betrayal and abandonment by a country and economy that promised them a better life than what they’re struggling through.
...
Most of this rising mortality, says the Deaton-Case study, is driven by an epidemic of self-destruction: Suicides and substance abuse, particularly alcohol-related liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

Middle-aged whites are in obvious distress in the most clear and undeniable way science can measure - they are killing themselves.
If you look at any group, race, or even animal genus, a rising mortality rate is incontrovertible scientific evidence of real distress.
So why are so many middle-aged whites killing themselves? I found the first responses to this study enlightening. For example: Is 'white privilege' killing off middle-aged white people?

Middle-aged men and women alike fell prey to their own choices and the consequences.

That was a mild example. Less mainstreams outlets such as here and here have outright shadenfreude.

I can safely say that something is seriously wrong with you when you can't work up any empathy from poor people killing themselves by the thousands out of hopelessness and despair, just because they are the "wrong" skin color in your eyes.
The best example was Bill Maher's rant.

“Middle-aged American whites are dropping like flies,” Maher said before Jay Leno pretended to collapse next to him to audience laughter. But what is killing the old guard? Drugs, alcohol, suicide and “possibly trying to fit into skinny jeans” the report finds (excluding that last bit).
The findings also include suicide rates for whites are now four times that of black Americans and due to a rise in heroin use among whites, the death rate from it is also up. But, no fear, Maher has some advice, “You’re white! Cheer the fuck up!”

I realize that Bill Maher is just a comedian, but he's also representative of the comfortable liberal class of this country, so its no wonder so many whites are pissed off at liberals. After all, if liberals are so eager to stereotype them and dismiss obvious pain and distress based on nothing else but skin color, then "F U too" is a normal, healthy response.
It's not really a mystery why the white, working class abandoned the Clinton Democrats. And visa versa.

And as for Maher's comment about how "It's always a great time to be white" in history, perhaps Bill should look into the history of the Irish. I'm sure the the people of Ireland would be very amused at Bill Maher's interpretation.

Or white serfs during the many centuries of feudalism. Or the conditions of those factories during the Industrial Revolution.
Oliver Twist and The Jungle weren't stories about white privilege. Or how working class whites did during the Great Depression.

Come to think of it, what period in history was Bill Maher thinking of when being poor and white did not suck?
It appears that liberals can be just as guilty as conservatives when it comes to historical revisionism to fit a political agenda.

I have news for these people: People don't kill themselves because they are whimps. Or because someone else is getting ahead. Suicide is a very personal thing.
What's more, suicide is a tragedy, not a joke. It's amazing that I even have to point this out.
If you find yourself working hard to find reasons to dismiss it, then you are the one who's messed up. When the suicide rate climbs 40% in a decade in one part of society, its a health crisis in addition to being a tragedy.
When one small segments of society accounts for 70% of all the suicides, then its a sign that something is wrong with that society.

And if the reactions listed above to this study is an example of liberal society in America, then something is seriously wrong with liberal America. It isn't just conservatives that are willing to reject scientific evidence if it conflicts with their dogma.

It's outrageously hypocritical to watch liberal America work itself into righteous outrage at the obvious racism of some of Trump's supporters, while in the same breath find amusement in the equally obvious pain and distress of many of Trump's supporters simply because their skin is white.
I'm sure this irony isn't missed by Trump voters.

Let's not forget the close cousin of racism - classism: the last socially acceptable prejudice in America today. Trump supporters are often the losers in this capitalist system, and its safe to discriminate against that class even in liberal circles.

I'm a British immigrant, and grew up in a northern English working-class town. Taking my regional accent to Oxford University and then the British civil service, I learned a certain amount about my own class consciousness and other people's snobbery. But in London or Oxford from the 1970s onwards I never witnessed the naked disdain for the working class that much of America's metropolitan elite finds permissible in 2016....
These Washington friends, in case you were wondering, are good people. They'd be offended by crass, cruel jokes about any other group. They deplore prejudice and keep an eye out for unconscious bias. More than a few object to the term, "illegal immigrant." Yet somehow they feel the white working class has it coming.

“They like, 'We don’t do it like that anymore, that’s racist. We classist now.'”
— Kayne West

There is one thing blatantly obvious that both Trump supporters and critics can agree on: Trump didn't build any political movement. He merely tapped into something that was already there. So defeating Trump without addressing the concerns of his voters will do nothing but kick the can down the road for a single election cycle.
You can chose to try to defeat Trump by demonizing his supporters, and then deal with it again in four years. That seems to be the more popular choice right now.
Or you can cut the legs out from under Trump's political support and acknowledge the harm that these free trade agreements are doing to poor, working class people. Maybe even do something about it. Unfortunately, that seems to be outside the Overton Window. Both the Democratic and Republican establishment are prepared to go down with the ship before questioning the merits of FTA's.