I had an interesting talk with a friend of mine last night. He explained to me why he's supporting Trump. Allow me to relate the high points...
He doesn't particularly like Trump as a candidate, but he's convinced that every rumor about the Clintons that he's heard in the past 30 years is true and this allows him an escape hatch for every one of Trump's weaknesses as a candidate.
For example, he's not thrilled that Trump's foundation was illegally raising funds and then illegally spending those funds to personally benefit Trump's family, but he thinks the Clinton foundation is a global conspiracy designed to subvert American interest abroad in exchange for funneling personal bribes to the Clintons. He said "pay to play" a lot, and thinks Hillary is a money-hungry opportunist who literally sold out America to foreign powers by committing treason for profit. He has no awareness of the actual charitable activities of the Clinton foundation.
As a corollary example, he thinks Trump should have released his tax returns just to get everyone to shut up, but he also thinks the Clintons have committed widespread tax fraud for decades. He argues that the Clintons' combined net worth is larger than their lifetime earnings, and that the only way this is mathematically possible is if they're receiving money under the table somehow. I didn't tell him that my net worth is also higher than my lifetime earnings. He also thinks that the IRS already knows about this dirty Clinton money and is actively conspiring to cover it up, as part of an official government conspiracy between multiple federal agencies to get her elected, just so that she will increase their federal funding. He apparently doesn't know that Congress sets budgets.
He acknowledges that Trump is probably a sexist, but he carefully distinguishes between sexism and racism and bigotry as separate evils.
He finds the sexism charge insignificant, in part because he's personally a raging misogynist who is always posting Bill Burr clips from youtube. He thinks that when Trump said "you can grab them by the pussy" he wasn't denigrating women, he was accurately reporting what it is that "money-grubbing whores" want him to do when they throw themselves at him, so that it's really the women's fault for being so trashy.
He argues that both Trump and Clinton are casual racists, like they don't personally associate with black people, but not "real racists" like the kind he grew up with. He thinks that Trump's history of denying housing to minority applicants was commonplace in the industry when it happened and not indicative of personally racist feelings, just like Clinton's praise of her mentor Robert Byrd wasn't indicative of personal racism because Robert Byrd also lived in a time where racism was common. So he basically calls this one a tie.
He thinks Trump University was clearly a scam, but that Donald had no personal involvement in it and therefor no personal liability. By contrast, he thinks Hillary has personally orchestrated a series of criminal enterprises, and I'm not exaggerating the language there. Like he thinks she's literally the head of a multi-faceted criminal organization that has maintained a thin veneer of public respectability while simultaneously running a variety of illegal operations. Think of Frank Underwood in House of Cards, all shady associates and sex and murder and bribery and power plays.
I could go on, but the pattern holds. On every single issue for which Trump has said or done something that I find clearly self-destructive, he finds a lens to view Trump's behavior as relatively acceptable and Clinton's behavior on the same topic as at least as bad, and usually catastrophically worse. He thinks Trump is a rough and unpolished politician, but that Clinton is actively working to destroy the very ideals on which America was founded. He's not even choosing between two bad candidates, he feels like he's choosing between a mediocre one and an actively evil one.
