by Sid Holt
A Tiny Pissed Voice Rings Out
“Wow, what a crowd this is,” he begins at Fountain Hills. “What a great honor! … You have some sheriff—there’s no games with your sheriff, that’s for sure.… We have a movement going on, folks.… I will never let you down! Remember. And I want to tell you, you know, it’s so much about illegal immigration and so much has been mentioned about it and talked about it, and these politicians are all talk, no action. They’re never going to do anything—they only picked it up because when I went, and when I announced, that I’m running for president, I said, ‘You know, this country has a big, big problem with illegal immigration,’ and all of a sudden we started talking about it.… And there was crime and you had so many killings and so much crime, drugs were pouring through the border.” (“STOP IT!” someone pleads from the crowd.) “People are now seeing it. And you know what? We’re going to build a wall and we are going to stop it!”
Mayhem. The Wall is their favorite. (Earlier in the afternoon, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona and legislative mother of that state’s draconian immigration policies, nearly undoes all the good right-wing work of her career by affirming that, yes, Trump is “going to build the Fence.” Like new Americans who have just been told that Hulk Hogan was the first president, the crowd rises up in happy outrage to correct her.)
“THANK YOU, TRUMP!” bellows a kid in front of me, who, later in the speech, will briefly turn his back on Trump to take a Trump-including selfie, his smile taut, braces-revealing, grimacelike yet celebratory, evoking that circa-1950 photograph of a man in a high-velocity wind tunnel.
“I only wish these cameras—because there’s nothing as dishonest as the media, that I can tell you.” (“THEY SUCK!”) “I only wish these cameramen would spin around and show the kind of people that we have, the numbers of people that we have here. I just wish they’d for once do it, because you know what?” (“PAN THE CAMERAS!”) “We have a silent majority that’s no longer so silent. It’s now the loud, noisy majority, and we’re going to be heard.… They’re chipping away at the Second Amendment, they’re chipping away at Christianity.… We’re not going to have it anymore. It comes Christmas time, we’re going to see signs up that say ‘Merry Merry Merry Christmas!’ OK? Remember it, remember it. We have become so politically correct that we’re totally impotent as a country—”
Somewhere in the crowd, a woman is shouting “Fuck you, Trump!” in a voice so thin it seems to be emanating from some distant neighborhood, where a girl is calling home her brother, Fuckhugh Trump.
The shouter is Esperanza Matamoros, tiny, seventeen years old. The crowd now halts her forward progress, so she judiciously spins and, still shouting, heads toward the exit. As she passes a tall, white-haired, professorial-looking old man, he gives her a little shove. He towers over her, the top of her head falling below his armpit. She could be his daughter, his granddaughter, his favorite student. Another man steps in front of her to deliver an impromptu manners lesson; apparently, she bumped him on her way up. “Excuse me,” he says heatedly. “Around here, we say excuse me.”
An ungentleness gets into the air when Trump speaks, prompting the abandonment of certain social norms (e.g., an old man should show forbearance and physical respect for a young woman, even—especially—an angry young woman, and might even think to wonder what is making her so angry), norms that, to fired-up Trump supporters, must feel antiquated in this brave new moment of ideological foment. They have thought and thought, in projective terms, about theoretical protesters, and now here are some real ones.
This ungentleness ripples out through the crowd and into the area beyond the fence where the protesters have set up shop. One of them, Sandra Borchers, tells me that out there all was calm (she was “actually having dialogues” with Trump supporters, “back-and-forth conversations, at about this talking level”) until Trump started speaking. Then things got “violent and aggressive.” Someone threw a rock at her head. A female Trump supporter “in a pink-peachy-color T-shirt” attacked a protester, kicking and punching him. Rebecca LaStrap, an African American woman, twenty years old, wearing a “FUCK TRUMP” T-shirt, was grabbed by the breast, thrown to the ground, slapped in the face. (She was also told to “go back on the boat,” a perplexing instruction, given that she was born and raised in Mesa.) Later that day, in Tucson, two young Hispanic women, quietly watching the rally there, are thrown out of the venue, and one (as a member of Trump’s security staff bellows, “Out! Out! Out!”) is roughly shoved through a revolving door by a Trump supporter who looks to be in his seventies and who then performs a strange little quasi-karate move, as if he expects her to fly back in and counterattack. A pro-immigration protester named George Clifton, who is wearing a sign that says “Veteran: U.S.M.C. and C.I.A.,” tells me that two Trump supporters came up to him separately after the Fountain Hills rally and whispered “almost verbatim the same thing, not quite, but in a nutshell”: that they’d like to shoot him in the back of the head.
I’m Here for an Argument
In Tucson, Trump supporters flow out of the Convention Center like a red-white-and-blue river, along hostile riverbanks made of protesters, who have situated themselves so as to be maximally irritating. When a confrontation occurs, people rush toward it, to film it and stoke it, in the hope that someone on the other side will fly off the handle and do something extreme, and thereby incontrovertibly discredit his side of the argument. This river-and-shore arrangement advantages the Trump supporters: they can walk coolly past, playing the offended party, refusing to engage.
Most do, but some don’t.
“Trump is racist, so are YOU!” the protesters chant, maximizing the provocation. A South Asian–looking youth of uncertain political affiliation does a crazy Borat dance in front of the line as a friend films him. An aging blond bombshell strolls by in a low-cut blouse, giving the protesters a leisurely finger, blowing them kisses, patting one of her large breasts. A matronly Hispanic protester says that the woman has a right to do what she likes with her breasts since, after all, “she paid for them.” A grandmotherly white woman tucks a strand of graying hair behind her ear, walks resolutely over, and delicately lifts a Mexican flag from where it lies shawl-like across the shoulders of a young, distractedly dancing Hispanic girl, as if the flag had fallen across the girl’s shoulders from some imaginary shelf and the grandmother were considerately removing it before it got too heavy. The girl, offended, pulls away. But wait: the woman shows her anti-Trump sign: they’re on the same side. The girl remains unconvinced; she’ll keep the flag to herself, thanks. “So sorry,” the white woman says and rejoins a friend, to commiserate over the girl’s response, which strikes her, maybe, as a form of racial profiling.
Two tall Trump supporters tower over a small liberal in a green T-shirt.
“Stupid! Uneducated!” Trumpie A shouts. “Do you know anything that goes on in the world?”
“Articulate a little more,” the guy in the green shirt says.
“I don’t want to live in a fascist country!” Trumpie B says.
“You don’t know what fascism is,” Green Shirt says.
“Oh, I’m getting there, man!” Trumpie B says. “Obama’s teaching me!”
“Go back to California,” Trumpie A shouts at Green Shirt. “Bitch!”
The four of us stand in a tight little circle, Trumpie A shouting insults at Green Shirt while filming Green Shirt’s reaction, me filming Trumpie A filming Green Shirt. The bulk and intensity of the Trumpies, plus the fact that Green Shirt seems to be serving as designated spokesperson for a group of protesters now gathering around, appears to be making Green Shirt nervous.
“Obama’s teaching you what fascism is?” he sputters. “Obama’s a fascist? The left is the fascists? This is so rich! So, like, the people who are being oppressed are the oppressors?”
“Do you know what’s going on in the world, man?” Trumpie A says. “You’re not fucking educated.”
This stings.
“You have no idea what’s going on,” Trumpie B says.
“I am very educated,” Green Shirt says.
“You’ve got no idea, bro,” Trumpie A says sadly.
“Ask me a question, ask me a question,” Green Shirt says.
The Tall Trumpies, bored, wander away.
Green Shirt turns to one of his friends. “Am I educated?”
“You’re fucking educated,” the friend says.
Green Shirt shouts at the Tall Trumpies (who, fortunately for him, are now safely out of earshot), “And I’ll stomp the fucking shit out of you!”
Spotting a round-faced, brown-skinned youth in a “Make America Great Again” T-shirt, who’s been quietly listening nearby, Green Shirt snarls, “And you can get your fat fucking Chinese face out of here.”
The kid seems more quizzical than hurt.
I ask Green Shirt for clarification: did he just tell that guy to get his Chinese face out of here?
“No, I was calling his shirt Chinese,” he clarifies. “I told him to get his Chinese shirt out of here. The Trump campaign gets those shirts from China.”
I’m relieved. My liberal comrade did not commit a racial slur.
“I did call him fat, though,” he admits, then dashes back over to the kid, hisses, “Why don’t you make your waistline great again?” and slips away into the crowd.
“This is America!” a Trump supporter rages desperately into the line of protesters, after one of them forces his phone camera down. “I’m American! I’m Mexican American! Are you a marine?” he demands of an elderly protester in a floppy fatigue hat. “I’m a veteran. I’m a veteran. You’re idiots. You’re idiots. I’m a navy corpsman! I saved marines’ asses. Mexican, white, and black. We’re red, white, and blue!” The guy in the floppy hat answers, in heavily accented English, that, yes, he was a marine. This conflict rapidly devolves into a bitter veteran-off: two old guys, who’ve presumably seen some things in their time, barking hatefully at each other. I know (or feel I know) that, on another day, these two guys might have grabbed a beer together, jump-started each other’s cars, whatever—but they’re not doing that today.
“What are you doing here?” a girl shouts at the Trump-supporting Mexican American former corpsman. “You should be ashamed!”
“What am I doing?” he shouts back. “I’m supporting a man who’s going to clean up Mexico, build a wall, fix the economy!”
“Puto!” a protester snaps, as the corpsman storms off, to go home and, I’m guessing, feel like crap the rest of the day.
If you are, as I am, a sentimental middle-aged person who cherishes certain Coplandian notions about the essential goodness of the nation, seeing this kind of thing in person—adults shouting wrathfully at one another with no intention of persuasion, invested only in escalating spite—will inject a palpable sadness into your thinning, under-exercised legs, and you may find yourself collapsing, post-rally, against a tree in a public park, feeling hopeless. Craving something positive (no more fighting, no more invective, please, please), forcing yourself to your feet, you may cross a busy avenue and find, in a mini-mall themed like Old Mexico, a wedding about to begin. Up will walk the bridesmaids, each leading, surprisingly, a dog on a leash, and each dog is wearing a tutu, and one, a puppy too small to be trusted in a procession, is being carried, in its tutu, in the arms of its bridesmaid.
And this will somehow come as an unbelievable relief.
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Where is all this anger coming from? It’s viral, and Trump is Typhoid Mary. Intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse, we are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason differently; they draw upon nonintersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems. You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the other only Game of Thrones. What is the meaning, to the collective “we,” of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it. You, the other knight, strike me as bafflingly ignorant, a little unmoored. In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, preimprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional. (As a proud knight of LeftLand, I was interested to find that, in RightLand, Vince Foster has still been murdered, Dick Morris is a reliable source, kids are brainwashed “way to the left” by going to college, and Obama may yet be Muslim. I expect that my interviewees found some of my core beliefs equally jaw-dropping.)
A Trump supporter in Fountain Hills asks me, “If you’re a liberal, do you believe in the government controlling everything? Because that’s what Barry wants to do, and what he’s pretty much accomplished.” She then makes the (to me, irrational and irritating) claim that more people are on welfare under Obama than ever were under Bush.
“Almost fifty million people,” her husband says. “Up 30 percent.”
I make a certain sound I make when I disagree with something but have no facts at my disposal.
Back at the hotel, I Google it.
Damn it, they’re right. Rightish.
What I find over the next hour or so, from a collection of websites, left, right, and fact-based:
Yes, true: there are approximately seven million more Americans in poverty now than when Obama was elected. On the other hand, the economy under Obama has gained about seven times as many jobs as it did under Bush; even given the financial meltdown, the unemployment rate has dropped to just below the historical average. But, yes: the poverty rate is up by 1.6 percentage points since 2008. Then again the number of Americans in poverty fell by nearly 1.2 million between 2012 and 2013. However, true: the proportion of people who depend on welfare for the majority of their income has increased (although it was also increasing under Bush). And under Obama unemployment has dropped, GDP growth has been “robust,” and there have been close to seventy straight months of job growth. But, OK: there has indeed been a “skyrocketing” in the number of Americans needing some form of means-tested federal aid, although Obama’s initiatives kept some six million people out of poverty in 2009, including more than two million children.
So the couple’s assertion was true but not complexly true. It was a nice hammer with which to pop the enemy, i.e., me. Its intent: discredit Obama and the liberal mind-set. What was my intent as I Googled? Get a hammer of my own, discredit Bush and the conservative mind-set.
Meanwhile, there sat reality: huge, ambiguous, too complicated to be usefully assessed by our prevailing mutual ambition—to fight and win, via delivery of the partisan zinger.
LeftLand and RightLand are housemates who are no longer on speaking terms. And then the house is set on fire. By Donald Trump. Good people from both subnations gape at one another through the smoke.
Who Are They? (Part I)
It’s clear enough to those of us who don’t like Trump why we don’t like him. What isn’t clear is why it isn’t clear to those who like him. The Trump supporter is your brother who has just brought home a wildly inappropriate fiancée. Well, inappropriate to you. Trump support, nationwide, stands at around 40 percent. If you had ten siblings and four of them brought home wildly inappropriate fiancées, you might feel inclined to ask yourself what was going on in your family to make your judgment and that of your siblings so divergent.
It seems futile to try to generalize about a group as large and disparate as “Trump supporters”—like generalizing, sa
y, “people who own riding lawnmowers,” who, of course, tend to be, but are not exclusively limited to, people with large or largish lawns but can also include people with small yards who, for whatever reason, can’t manage a push mower, and/or people (both large- and small-yarded) who may have received a riding mower from a father-in-law or an uncle and don’t want to rock the boat. But sometimes, standing at a rally among several thousand madly cheering Trump supporters, I’d think, All these people have something in common. What is it?
I didn’t meet many people who were unreservedly for Trump. There is, in the quiver containing his ideas, something for nearly everyone to dislike. But there is also something for nearly everyone to like. What allows a person not crazy about Trump to vote for him is a certain prioritization: a person might, for example, like Trump’s ideas about trade or his immigration policies or the fact that Trump is, as one supporter told me, “a successful businessman,” who has “actually done something,” unlike Obama, who has “never done anything his entire life.”
The Trump supporters I spoke with were friendly, generous with their time, flattered to be asked their opinion, willing to give it, even when they knew I was a liberal writer likely to throw them under the bus. They loved their country, seemed genuinely panicked at its perceived demise, felt urgently that we were, right now, in the process of losing something precious. They were, generally, in favor of order and had a propensity toward the broadly normative, a certain squareness. They leaned toward skepticism (they’d believe it when they saw it, “it” being anything feelings-based, gauzy, liberal, or European, i.e., “socialist”). Some (far from all) had been touched by financial hardship—a layoff was common in many stories—and (paradoxically, given their feelings about socialism) felt that, while in that vulnerable state, they’d been let down by their government. They were antiregulation, pro–small business, pro–Second Amendment, suspicious of people on welfare, sensitive (in a “Don’t tread on me” way) about any infringement whatsoever on their freedom. Alert to charges of racism, they would precounter these by pointing out that they had friends of all colors. They were adamantly for law enforcement and veterans’ rights, in a manner that presupposed that the rest of us were adamantly against these things. It seemed self-evident to them that a businessman could and should lead the country. “You run your family like a business, don’t you?” I was asked more than once, although, of course, I don’t, and none of us do.
