Ironically, if you take a dozen so-called states rights proponents into a room and try to get out of them WHY they think more States Rights is a good idea, you’ll get a different answer from every one of them. At least, once you get past the vague generality/insult version, such as this thread started with.
For some people, they THINK they want more States Rights and less Federal power, is because they hope to have some specific kinds of personal liberty. Most of them know no history, so they are unaware that more personal liberty has come from OVERRULING state power, than by enhancing it.
For some, it’s about restoring racism in government. States Rights has been the cover story for racism since before the Civil War.
Some want to have the ability to ignore more of the consequences of land development and air and water pollution, in order to reduce their business costs by passing them down the river to the next state.
Many simply fantasize falsely that local people will let them run their lives MORE to their own liking, completely ignoring the plentiful evidence to the contrary. Bottom line, they think they are a member of a LOCAL majority, but not a national one.
As for Trump, one way that he is very much a modern Republican, is that he thinks entirely in the short term. Short term immediate profits are all he cares about, and that’s clear from most of his actions to date. Just as the GOP has done for decades now, he lies non-stop, more to his supporters than to his opponents. He pretends to support all sorts of things they do, in order to get their votes and praise, but actually doesn’t care about the issues themselves.
All you have to look at to recognize that in the Republican world, is to look back at their recent behavior about States Rights: they pretended to support them whenever they had to explain away support for racists who wanted to keep Civil War era flags of defiance of the United States itself, flying over state houses; but as soon as the idea of Gay Marriage came up, they changed 180 degrees, and declared that the Federal Government has to tell all of us who we can and can’t marry.
So much for anti-Federalism.