To be fair, a large number of people in rural areas feel as though the government doesn't give two shits about them, so when Trump campaigned and promised to pay attention to them and what they needed, they obviously were going to pay attention.
It was a couple years ago, so I don't have the exact source, but I remember seeing a documentary of some kind where they got a handful of Harvard students (the type of people who would be politicians or hold important jobs in the future) and took them to a rural town. They were surprised at how friendly the locals were, and had been convinced beforehand that all rural people were racist, horrible people. So, a lot of people in urban areas where politicians are traditionally campaign the most barely see rural Americans as even people.
If you want to prevent another person like Trump being elected, it would probably be in your best interest to look into the people who originally voted for him and why they did so. What needs did they have that the typical politicians weren't meeting up until that point to make them want to vote for Trump. Keep in mind that back in the 2016 election, all of the various scandals and issues hadn't happened yet, and the most bad publicity was an inappropriate statement that he had made during the campaign. Even after he was elected, the media jumped on him for things like preferring steak well-done with ketchup. (Whether you like it or not, that's not only a petty thing to get in an uproar about, but for rural people can be easily explained. When you're a kid and you eat mainly a parent's cooking, even if they're a horrible cook, you develop a taste for it and can still become nostalgic for it as an adult. Hell, my family was poor enough that some days our dinner was only mashed potatoes and country gravy, and it's still a favorite meal of mine as an adult.) Once the media cemented that they weren't going to see him in a positive light regardless of what he did, and belittle him for things as minor as food preferences, it made it easier to brush away any real scandals as the media demonizing him and at worst making major exaggerations over what were most likely much less serious things that most politicians would have probably done.