If You're So Smart...

A white colleague is critical of Trump supporters.  All of them, even though some their individual reasons for voting for Trump were very separate from him as an inept and generally bad person (in any way people want to judge others).  Regardless of his policies and tenuous ties to the GOP, he thinks it should be apparent by voting for an obviously stupid, rudderless, petulant, and immature person as president is really poor judgment, and that people should see that.

Well, everybody doesn't see that.  Not everybody has learned gobs of perspective at college.  Not everybody has traveled to and spend significant time seeing a few cosmopolitan parts of the country, much less lived in another country entirely.  Not everybody reads a lot of books and is able to understand other viewpoints and ways of living/behaving that may be different and still OK.  Not everybody lives in a multi-cultural environment and sees the whole thing -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Not everyone has had the benefit if seeing young immigrants struggle to learn English and succeed in America.  Not everybody has been in their houses, seen their effort to survive and still make it.  Not everyone has the benefit of friends and workmates of different persuasions, and has experienced, second hand, some of the things they've experienced.  

OF COURSE, anyone who has had some or most of those experiences, and has been blessed with a critical, open or intelligent mind could never vote for someone who has shown such irresponsible behavior as a public figure.  But clearly there are enough people without that level of discernment.  The long term fix for that is to make it possible for way more people to have some of those experience, like college, overseas experience, and life in multi-cultural worlds (a eventuality that our changing demographics will help with).  How to make them broad readers, curious, open minded?  A tough task, but it's possible that public education could make that one of its priorities for real.

You said "If [Trump] wins the election it will mean that America stands for what he stands for."  There is a certain portion of voters -- I hope a small minority -- for whom that is true.  There are many more voters who disagree with much of what he stands for but will still vote for him because they've come to hate Clinton with irrational zest (flaws, yes, but several orders of magnitude less than what most Republicans (and even non-Republicans) believe because of the relentless attack she's been under, all because Republicans have known since she was FLOTUS that she would be a legitimate contender for the White House). They've utterly convinced themselves and many others, through the sheer volume of vitriolic rhetoric, that she's Satan.  [I think it's easy for them to go there because there is enough carelessness on her part to open that door a crack, and of course they exploit that doubt to the nth degree.]  Anyway, there are also many voters who don't agree with him who will vote for him anyway for personal financial reasons, for political and SCOTUS reasons, and even just anti-Establishment motivations.  And there are those voters who will vote for Clinton.

So in a very real sense, equating what he stands for (as evidenced by his actions and frequent unscripted blathering, not the teleprompter-Trump) to America at large is false.  And in another real sense, as the President, he would be the face of America to the world, and would indeed represent what America stands for to many here and abroad.

And with all that said, I don't think I contradict you.  Niels Bohr said "The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."