Chris Matthews on Friday tried to explain Donald Trump’s appeal to MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, saying that the GOP presidential nominee’s supporters were patriots angry over the country’s direction.

“It’s patriotic; they believe in country,” he said on MSNBC. “It’s a deep sense of the country being taken away and betrayed.”

{mosads}“That’s so deep with people they’re looking at a guy who’s flawed as hell, like Trump,” Matthews continued. “[Trump] knows that the average guy out there, the average Joe, the regular guy and woman, is very angry about the way the country’s gone.”

Matthews said lawmakers had repeatedly failed to solve the problems voters care about, opening the door to political outsiders like Trump.

“[Our leaders] don’t regulate our immigration, it seems. They take us into stupid wars. Their kids don’t fight, our kids do. They don’t regulate trade to our advantage, the working man’s advantage and the working woman’s advantage.”

Matthews said Trump’s supporters ignore the nominee’s shortcomings because they think a Hillary Clinton win would mean business as usual.

“Hillary’s the symbol of the establishment,” he said of the Democratic presidential nominee. “She is the symbol of the way things are headed. And they don’t like that.

“They’re just trying to ring the bell and say ‘no,’ and Trump’s the only way to ring it,” the “Hardball” host added.

“[Trump] may not care for a second when he goes to bed at night, if he goes to bed at night, about immigration. He may not care about trade at all. He may not care about these stupid wars, because his record’s been very mixed on that, to say the least.”

Clinton and Trump clashed last Monday at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., in their first of three presidential debates.

Polling since that contest shows Clinton getting a modest bump nationally and in battleground states.

Clinton leads Trump by about 3 points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of national polls.