I just realized why Donald Trump has so much staying power (other than his billions of dollars). He is a walking, talking (and talking and talking) conspiracy theory. Conspiracists get more ardent the more evidence that is arrayed against them, and "The Donald" and "Dr. Ben" represent the font of anti-evidentiary platitudes. If you feel downtrodden, or paranoid, they are your candidates.

Now, when I started to write this, I was just expressing my opinion, but then I started reading other views. Turns out there is meat on them there bones. Trump
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[is] now supported by 25 to 30 percent of the 25 to 30 percent of Americans who self-identify as Republicans, notes data guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. That works out to about 6 to 8 percent of the total US electorate.

As Mr. Silver points out, that’s about as many Americans as believe the moon landings were faked.
No, Donald Trump supporters aren't actually everywhere. And may very well be the same people.

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Trump’s voters are less-educated, lower-income white Republicans. Carson is a traditional evangelical, social-conservative GOP candidate.
In other words, very, VERY low information voters. (In other, other words, the GOP base - or the basest of the base.) Together they make up the approximately same percentage as Hispanic voters.

And if you think "The Donald" is certifiably crazy, you have company there, too, among the psychiatric community. Clinical Psychologists Diagnose Don...t Pretty, Especially For His Supporters; Is Donald Trump Actually a Narcissist? Therapists Weigh In! To which my response is, "duh!" He is such a classic narcissist that he is used as a case study - I'm dead serious. (“He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics. Otherwise, I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.” - Dr. George Simon)

So how dangerous is that? As one psychologist put it, “For me, the compelling question is the psychological state of his supporters. They are unable or unwilling to make a connection between the challenges faced by any president and the knowledge and behavior of Donald Trump. In a democracy, that is disastrous.” The same can be said of Ben Carson, who insists that the pyramids were created by Joseph to store grain (Ben Carson's unusual theory about pyramids), and espouses other crazy - I mean that literally - ideas.
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On Friday, CNN debunked a story from his autobiography about nearly stabbing a friend in his rage-filled youth. We learned he thinks the pyramids were built by the Old Testament patriarch Joseph to store grain, a theory which is wrong — according to the ancient Egyptians themselves. He claimed the Founding Fathers had never held elective office, an obvious falsehood. Then his campaign claimed he meant they had never held federal office; which is true only because there was no federal government at the time to hold an office in.
Why Ben Carson's Tenuous Relationship To Facts Is Helping, Not Hurting, His Campaign. To those who reject the narrative of the world that is based upon fact, support for a man who is more concerned with "narrative" than reality is a logical choice. For the rest of us it is a disaster.

A well reasoned argument is like a diamond: impervious to corruption and crystal clear - and infinitely rarer.

Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game -- an economy that won't respond, a democracy that won't listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards. - Robert Reich