I still don’t get why rural voters latched onto a clearly narcissistic big city property developer who lies constantly and treat rural people like shit

I’ll go with the easy answer/low hanging fruit: he said the same racist and xenophobic shit they think instead of trying to couch it politically correct speech (which is one of the most ironic things I think I’ve ever said). The perfect encapsulation of this is a well known Lee Atwater quote:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, N*****, N*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “N*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, N*****.”

Unfortunately, republican mindsets haven’t changed in the last 60 years, so we’re still dealing with the same bullshit.