THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

That's an old phrase from WW II repeated by troops shipping out to combat. They couldn't be told where for security reasons but they went because the military gave them no choice. For somewhat different reasons, the same may be said of Trumpoons. And their support of Brexit is the latest example of a demographic driven by multiple emotions and few if any conscious reasons.

Many of his supporters at a rally in a college gymnasium in Ohio shared Trump’s support for Brexit, seeing the vote as a step towards Great Britain being liberated from Europe.

Cathy Brown, a Trump voter who drove seven hours from outside Richmond, Virginia, though British voters “made a good choice to become free”. She celebrated the fact that the vote “means that people can make their own choices they can decide on a lot of things that were decided for them”. In her opinion, British voters will now “have say” on issues like “trade and open borders”.

Brown also dismissed concerns about the impact the deal will have on the US because now “we’ll be able to work out a deal that’s better to put us to work and get our people going” with the UK.

Her view was echoed by a voter named Paul, who declined to give his last name, from Carrolton, Ohio. Paul, a middle-aged mustached man wearing a Make America Great Again hat and a brightly colored T-shirt featuring Trump wielding an assault rifle behind a background of explosions and American flags, agreed that the vote was “good thing for Britain”. In his opinion, the referendum result means “they can be free, they don’t have to rely on anybody else to make their decisions. They can make their own.”

While an increasing number of decisions and regulations governing the UK emanated from Brussels, and parliamentary sovereignty was called into question in the aftermath of the 1990 Factortame decision by the European Court of Justice over a conflict between British law and EU law, Westminster still remained the fount of British government. Further, many civil liberties protections in the UK stem from the European Convention on Human Rights and legislation passed by Parliament – not the EU.

Another Trump supporter, Chris Shamey, from Dayton, Ohio, took a slightly different take on the vote. “Well, I think it’s because their government was corrupt and the people just got fed up,” he told the Guardian. When pressed for an example of government corruption, he took a long pensive pause and responded: “Good question, I can’t think of any right now.”

Having bought into his domestic nonsense, his supporters are going along with his Brexit nonsense but they don't know why. It sounds good and pushes all the right buttons in their angry and confused souls but in the end they are just saying "We don't know where we're going, but we're going".