Clearly millions of people did vote him, and Brexit, and loads of other crazy & repulsive things.
However, and you can see this from the marginal victories and/or loss of popular votes (to which the UK and US are both particularly vulnerable due to voting systems), Trump won 63 million votes, Clinton won 66 million and 90 million didnt vote, in this respect I think that targeted psyop acted as a force multiplier, applying pressure at very specific points in order to game the system. You also see it with twitter bots, in their attempts to control agendas by suggesting that there is huge weight of opinion behind certain viewpoints.
The sentiments exist like they always have, and also in more worrying numbers than previously, but there's a chimeric element too it. Its the Gruffalo's mouse making shadow monsters on the snow.