by Sid Holt
The Trump supporter comes out of the conservative tradition but is not a traditional conservative. He is less patient: something is bothering him and he wants it stopped now, by any means necessary. He seems less influenced by Goldwater and Reagan than by Fox News and reality TV, his understanding of history recent and selective; he is less religiously grounded and more willing, in his acceptance of Trump’s racist and misogynist excesses, to (let’s say) forgo the niceties.
As for Trump’s uncivil speech—the insults, the petty meanness, the crudeness, the talk about hand size, the assurance, on national TV, that his would-be presidential dick is up to the job, his mastery of the jaw-droppingly untrue personal smear (Obama is Kenyan, Ted Cruz’s dad was in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald, U.S. Muslims knew what was “going on” pre-Orlando), which he often dishonorably eases into the world by attaching some form of the phrase “many people have said this” (The world is flat; many people have said this. People are saying that birds can play the cello: we need to look into that)—his supporters seem constitutionally reluctant to object, as if the act of objecting would mark them as fatally delicate. Objecting to this sort of thing is for the coddled, the liberal, the elite. “Yeah, he can really improve, in the way he says things,” one woman in Fountain Hills tells me. “But who gives a shit? Because if he’s going to get the job done? I’m just saying. You can’t let your feelings get hurt. It’s kind of like, get over it, you know what I mean? What’s the big picture here? The big picture is we’ve got to get America back on track.”
The ability to shrug off the mean crack, the sexist joke, the gratuitous jab at the weak is, in some quarters, seen as a form of strength, of “being flexible,” of “not taking shit serious.” A woman who wilts at a sexist joke won’t last long in certain workplaces. A guy who prioritizes the sensitive side of his nature will, trust me, not thrive in the slaughterhouse. This willingness to gloss over crudeness becomes, then, an encoded sign of competence, strength, and reliability.
Above all, Trump supporters are “not politically correct,” which, as far as I can tell, means that they have a particular aversion to that psychological moment when, having thought something, you decide that it is not a good thought, and might pointlessly hurt someone’s feelings, and therefore decline to say it.
Who Are They? (Part II)
I observed, in Trump supporters’ storytelling, a tendency to conflate things that, to a non–Trump supporter, might seem unrelated. For example, in 2014, Mary Ann Mendoza’s son, Brandon, an openly gay policeman in Mesa, who volunteered at the local Boys and Girls Club, was killed in a car accident caused by an intoxicated, undocumented Mexican man who had spent at least twenty years drifting in and out of the United States and had been charged with a number of crimes, including assaulting a police officer, and was convicted of criminal conspiracy, but was free at the time of the crash, having been shown leniency by a Colorado court. At the rally in Fountain Hills, Ms. Mendoza gave a moving speech about her son, which she concluded this way: “This was the kind of man my son was.… Was. Not is. Was. Because of the lack of concern that this administration has for American citizens.… Brandon’s. Life. Matters.” The crowd roared. Something key lay in that juxtaposition and that roar. What was the connection between her son’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement? Couldn’t a person be against the killing of innocent black men and against illegal immigration (or drunk driving, or the lax enforcement of existing laws, etc.)?
A man comes to Arizona from Vermont and finds that “the illegals” are getting all the kitchen jobs for which he’s qualified. “So once Trump started talking about the Wall,” he says, “I was like, all right, now I think I’ve got to start paying attention to this.” How does he know those workers were undocumented? He doesn’t; there’s no way, situationally, that he could. Stephanie, an executive administrator for a finance group in Minnesota, gets laid off, and the only benefit she qualifies for is “a measly little unemployment check.” Standing next to her at the government office are “these people, that are from other countries, nonspeaking—I’m not biased, I have no reason to be—but … I’m seeing them getting cash, getting their bills paid, and, as a taxpaying citizen, I don’t get anything. And so the border thing really resonated with me.” Does she know for a fact that these were illegal immigrants? “That’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer,” she says. “I’m not a hundred percent on it.”
Bill Davis, a funny, genial sales rep in the packaging industry, has nothing against legal immigration but feels that illegal immigration is “killing” the area in Southern California where he lives. How, specifically, is it doing this? He mentions a neighbor of his who speaks no English, has two hundred chickens running around his yard, goats everywhere, doesn’t “play by the rules”—and hence Bill’s property values are going down. Is his neighbor undocumented? It doesn’t matter, he says. He’s “not assimilated.” Growing up, Davis says, he had a lot of first-generation Hispanic friends. These people took pride in assimilating. “Those days are over,” he explains. “So Trump is onto something about that. We don’t want you guys throwing your fast-food wrappers out your windows when you’re driving down the freeway. Take some pride in what you do. And learn to work in this country by the rules and regulations that we’ve developed over two hundred and fifty years. I’m not opposed to immigration, by any means. Come here, but when you leave Mexico—when you leave Germany, when you leave Russia, wherever—you’ve left that culture for a reason. It’s America now. So you can have your parties and your stuff at your house, but don’t expect us to cater to your culture.”
“Thousands of Cubans coming in,” Kathryn Kobor, a Trump supporter and animal-rights activist in her seventies, tells me in Phoenix, as she sits in protest of the Hillary Clinton rally across the street, beneath an umbrella provided by a Clinton supporter. “Three hundred sixty thousand Guatemalan kids and mothers standing at the border, they have to be taken in. We’re going to be taking in thousands of Syrians, whom we cannot vet.” I tell her that the thought of deporting and dividing families breaks my heart. “Of course it does—you’re a human, you care about people. That’s not the question. The question is, Do you want to live like India? Sewage running in the streets? … The infrastructure is crumbling.… I’m not speaking for tomorrow. I’m not speaking for a year, two years from now. I’ll be gone. I’m speaking for my descendants. I have a granddaughter. I have a son. I want them to live a decent, clean life.… Trump just wants the laws enforced.… He’s not a mean-spirited person.”
A former marine in line for a Trump rally in Rothschild, Wisconsin, tells me that, returning to the United States from a deployment overseas, he found himself wondering, “Where did my country go?” To clarify, he tells me that he was in Qatar on the day that Obama was first elected. “I was actually sitting in the chow hall when they announced the results and he gave his speech,” he says. “I saw such a division at that time. Every black member of the military was cheering. Everybody else was sitting there mute. Like stunned.”
What unites these stories is what I came to think of as usurpation-anxiety syndrome—the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions. In some cases, this has a racial basis, and usurpation anxiety grades into racial nostalgia, which can grade into outright racism, albeit cloaked in disclaimer.
In the broadest sense, the Trump supporter might be best understood as a guy who wakes up one day in a lively, crowded house full of people, from a dream in which he was the only one living there, and then mistakes the dream for the past: a better time, manageable and orderly, during which privilege and respect came to him naturally, and he had the whole place to himself.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Noemi?
Talking to a Trump supporter about Trump’s deportation policy, I’d sometimes bring up Noemi Romero, a sweet, soft-spoken young woman I met in Phoenix. Noemi was brought to the United States when she was th
ree, by undocumented parents. A few years ago, she had the idea of applying for legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. But the application costs $465, money her family didn’t have. Hearing that a local Vietnamese grocery was hiring, she borrowed her mother’s Social Security card and got the job. A few months later, the store was raided. Noemi was arrested, charged with aggravated identity theft and forgery, and taken to jail and held there, within the general prison population, for two months. She was given spoiled milk and food that, she said, had tiny worms in it. Her lawyer arranged a plea bargain; the charges were reduced to criminal impersonation. This was a good deal, he told her, the best she could hope for. She accepted, not realizing that, as a convicted felon, she would be permanently ineligible for DACA. Puente, a local grassroots organization, intervened and saved her from deportation, but she is essentially doomed to a kind of frozen life: can’t work and can’t go to college, although she has lived virtually her whole life in the United States and has no reason to go back to Mexico and nowhere to live if she’s sent there.
I’d ask the Trump supporter, “What do we do about Noemi?” I always found the next moment in our exchange hopeful.
Is she a good person? the Trump supporter might ask. I couldn’t feel more sorry for her, he might say. That kid is no better or worse than I am and deserves the best God can give her. Or he might say that deportation would have to be done on a case-by-case basis. Or propose some sort of registry—Noemi, having registered, would go back to Mexico and, if all checked out, come right back in. There had to be some kind of rule of law, didn’t there? Tellingly, the Trump supporter might confess that she didn’t think Trump really intended to do this mass-deportation thing anyway—it was all just campaign talk. The most extreme supporter might say that, yes, Noemi had to go—he didn’t like it, but ultimately the fault lay with her parents.
Sometimes I’d mention a Central American family I met in Texas, while reporting another story. In that case, the father and son were documented but the mother and daughters weren’t. Would you, I’d ask, split that family up? Send those girls to a country in which they’d never spent a single day? Well, my Trump-supporting friend might answer, it was complicated, wasn’t it? Were they good people? Yes, I’d say. The father, in spare moments between his three jobs, built a four-bedroom house out of cinder blocks he acquired two or three at a time from Home Depot, working sometimes late into the night. The Trump supporter might, at this point, fall silent, and so might I.
In the face of specificity, my interviewees began trying, really trying, to think of what would be fairest and most humane for this real person we had imaginatively conjured up. It wasn’t that we suddenly agreed, but the tone changed. We popped briefly out of zinger mode and began to have some faith in one another, a shared confidence that if we talked long enough, respectfully enough, a solution could be found that might satisfy our respective best notions of who we were.
Well, let’s not get too dreamy about it. We’d stay in that mode for a minute or two, then be off again to some new topic, rewrapped in our respective Left and Right national flags. Once, after what felt like a transcendent and wide-ranging conversation with a Trump supporter named Danny (a former railroad worker, now on disability), I said a fond goodbye and went to interview some Hillary supporters across the street. A few minutes later, I looked over to find Danny shouting at us that Hillary was going to prison, not the White House. I waved to him, but he didn’t seem to see me, hidden there in the crowd of his adversaries.
The Elephant in the Room
The average Trump supporter is not the rally pugilist, the white supremacist, the bitter conspiracy theorist, though these exist and are drawn to Trump (see: the Internet)—and, at times, the first flowerings of these tendencies were present among some of the rank-and-file supporters I met. A certain barely suppressed rage, for example, is evident in the guy in Phoenix who wears his gun to a protest against Hillary (“I’m out here with two friends, Smith and Wesson”). One of his fellow protesters tells me that Hillary has had oral sex with many female world leaders (“She’s munched with a lot of our enemies, man”).
After a rally in Eau Claire, a handful of Trump protesters stand silently in the Wisconsin cold as the Trump supporters file out—a spontaneous little lab experiment investigating the Trumpies’ response to silent rebuke. “I guess you guys don’t read too much,” someone shouts at the protesters. “Or watch the news. Fox News! Watch that once in a while!” Other Trump supporters yell over incredulously, “Fifteen bucks an hour?” And “Go to socialist Europe! Save your checks and move to a socialist country!”
But the line I won’t forget comes from a guy leaving the rally, alone, who shout-mutters, if such a thing is possible, “Hey, I’m not paying for your shit, I’m not paying for your college, so you go to hell, go to work, go to hell, suck a dick.”
Not far away, a group of enterprising Girl Scouts is out late, selling cookies under a winter-leafless tree. “Cookies for sale, last time this season,” they seem to sing. “Girl Scout cookies, last weekend to get them.”
So, yes, there are bigots in the Trump movement, and wackos, and dummies, and sometimes I had to remind myself that the important constituency is the persuadable middle segment of his supporters, who are not finding in Trump a suitable vessel for their hate but are misunderstanding him or overestimating him, and moving in his direction out of a misplaced form of hope.
Who Are They? (Part III)
Sometimes it seemed that they were, like me, just slightly spoiled Americans, imbued with unreasonable boomer expectations for autonomy, glory, and ascension, and that their grievances were more theoretical than actual, more media-induced than experience-related.
Before the rally in San Jose on June 2, I talk to a group of construction workers, each of whom is in some state of layoff: current, recent, chronic. One, who’s hoping to get a job working construction on the Wall, rails against millennials, the unions, a minimum-wage hike for fast-food workers, and “these people” who get fired, then turn around and sue. I ask for examples. He says he isn’t going to give me any names. I say forget the names, just tell me a particular story. A guy got fired from his workplace just last week, he says. “Is he suing?” I ask. “Well, probably,” he says.
I ask one of his friends, a thoughtful Chinese American guy, how his life has been made worse over the past eight years. He comes up with this: he pays more for his insurance because of Obamacare. Anything else? Not really. How has he personally been affected by illegal immigration? He hasn’t, he tells me, but he’s been fortunate enough to have the resources to keep his family away from the danger.
At one point, in line at the Fountain Hills rally, frustrated by a litany of anti-Obama grievances being delivered by the woman in front of me, I say that I think life is good, pretty good, you know?
“You think this is good?” she says.
“I do, yeah,” I say. “We’re out here on a nice day, having a beautiful talk—”
She groans, meaning, You know that’s not what I mean.
But I don’t, really, so I ask her what, in terms of her day-to-day life, she thinks is wrong with America.
“I don’t like people shoving Obamacare down my throat, OK?” she says. “And then getting penalized if I don’t have insurance.”
Is she covered through Obamacare?
No. She has insurance through her work, thank God, but “every day my rights are being taken away from me, you know?” she says. “I mean—this is America. In the U.S., we have a lot of freedoms and things like that, but we’re not going to have all that if we have all these people coming in, that are taking our—”
“We have our own people to take care of, I’m sorry,” interjects a seventeen-year-old girl who is standing nearby, holding up a sign that says “Marry Me Don.”
Who Are They? (Part IV)
American presidential campaigns are not about ideas; they are about the selection of a hero to embody
the prevailing national ethos. “Only a hero,” Mailer wrote, “can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste less strength in hiding from itself.” What fantasy is Trump giving his supporters the liberty to consider? What secret have they been hiding from themselves?
Trump seems to awaken something in them that they feel they have, until now, needed to suppress. What is that thing? It is not just (as I’m getting a bit tired of hearing) that they’ve been left behind economically. (Many haven’t, and au contraire.) They’ve been left behind in other ways, too, or feel that they have. To them, this is attributable to a country that has moved away from them, has been taken away from them—by Obama, the Clintons, the “lamestream” media, the “elites,” the business-as-usual politicians. They are stricken by a sense that things are not as they should be and that, finally, someone sees it their way. They have a case of Grievance Mind, and Trump is their head kvetcher.
