He plays upon their schadenfreude with his stories of clawing his way to Princeton University then feeling like a miserable fraud there.
The city in New York State whose name he plays upon (possibly derived from the Mohawks' word for "near the pines") is going through industrial hard times, but worried residents can hope to have found their avant-guardian.
"If you wrote a piece saying, 'I think Trump is a buffoon and he's reckless, and he doesn't really know that much, and he's kind of the accidental President, and he plays upon people's fears in order to gain power' — I'd say, Yeah, O.K., that's totally defensible," he said.
His speech was a warning of how deeply he might be willing to divide the country in order to deflect attention from his own policy failures, and how dangerous the resentments he blithely plays upon could be.
He plays put-upon local business mogul Meic Pierce in Pobol y Cwm (People of the Valley), the Welsh-language soap that celebrates its 40th anniversary on 16 October.
The genius of Roger Ailes is that he intensified and played upon that alienation, and then, as it shaded into paranoia, channelled it against his enemies, or anyone who dared tell him that his childhood was a lie.
I suppose I just try to keep ahead of it.' It's a quality that Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, the eponymous central character he plays, stumbled upon almost too late.
All bite gone, he plays a put-upon data technician out to break the world record for species-spotting, and finds himself up against world-weary tycoon Steve Martin and oily building contractor Owen Wilson.
He felt that the scene successfully played upon the sexual tension between the two lead characters.
