Walter Kim writes for Harper’s about people you might not expect to support President Trump.

In Surf City, North Carolina, I had dinner with a woman who’d read on Twitter that I was in the area and asked whether I might want to meet her and hear her story. I did a little research on her first, and my interest was piqued. I learned that she wrote a blog on relationships and sex, and that she was a single mother in her forties. I learned that she was a Christian, a Free Will Baptist who went by the pen name Kitten Holiday. And I learned that she was a fan of Donald Trump.

This last detail intrigued but didn’t surprise me. A lot of the “freethinkers” I know—people who either voted for the president or don’t mind hanging out with people who did—are remarkably lively, far-out folks. They resemble, in some ways, the liberals of my youth. …

… Holiday works in accounting, not a colorful field, which is why she originally assumed her pen name. Soon she had another reason: politics. Though Holiday considered herself a liberal (“I was on the ‘coexist’ team”) and held impassioned environmental views that she’d promoted on an earlier blog (“I crusaded against plastic bags and all things plastic and taught how to pack a perfect lunch for kids that wouldn’t cause any waste”), certain readers began to attack her as a reactionary. She hadn’t expected this treatment.

“I started getting trolled from the left. They didn’t like that my stories only had one female and one male. But the even bigger objection was that I didn’t write about ­BDSM and kink. They were accusing me of not representing diverse relationships, but my thought was that I’m not the person to represent those things, since I don’t know anything about them. They also were treating me like I was betraying women because I had female characters respecting and appreciating strong men.”

Holiday was shocked. “I’d thought that I was protected as a feminist, but then I started to realize feminism wasn’t what I’d always thought. It wasn’t about lifting women. It was about lifting certain women.”

When Trump appeared on the political scene, Holiday was immediately drawn to him. She liked his defiant, outsized individuality, his bluntness, his sarcasm, and his preposterous hair. Though a Democrat, she saw in Trump the unconventionality that she’d cherished in her young self but now felt she was paying a price for, thanks to scolding liberals whom she’d once assumed were her natural allies.