Across the Great Divide: On the Road in Trump’s America

This summer I decided to leave my comfort zone, geographically and ideologically, and take a road trip.

by

On Election Night, I was in my favorite neighborhood dive in Red Hook, Brooklyn, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and watching the television above the bar. A little whoop went up whenever a state went blue. Red-state wins were snickered at or ignored. The TV was muted, the barroom chatter loud.

A few hours later, some people were crying, but nobody was talking much.

Outrage. Despair. Bafflement. In that moment and over the next few days, New York City felt desolate, despite the mass protests. Our public officials vowed to resist the oncoming wave of Trumpism, while our local media resolved to, as Brooke Gladstone from WNYC’s On the Media expressed, “make what seems to have been invisible to us, and everyone we know, visible.” I believed in this impulse. Donald Trump, whose every word reeks of delusional narcissism, wretched hypocrisy, and gilded incompetence, was going to be our President. I rejected the notion that my Trump-voting countrymen were so small-minded to support Trump as I saw him.

Yet in the months following Trump’s Inauguration, I listened to the same opposing voices sneering and shrieking at him, his government, and his followers. I followed the news of his daily blunders and tracked the palace intrigue closely. Nothing I read helped me grasp what I had missed—what we all had missed—before the election.

So this summer I decided to leave my comfort zone, geographically and ideologically, and take a road trip. I would go from Washington, D.C.—my hometown, fittingly enough—to California and back again. For the first part of the trip, I was in the good company of my cousin Hugo, who grew up in and around Britain and is new to the States. I wanted to make a good-faith effort to understand what Trump supporters saw in the man that I did not. I wanted to know what they thought Americans needed to do to come together again, and to hash out honest differences.

What I learned was that constructive discourse is a lot easier than it’s made out to be, and that its absence made the rise of a President Trump almost inevitable.

When Hugo and I enter Pillager, Minnesota, we are pulled over by a young police officer named Andrew Rooney. We’d been distracted by the sun setting over the verdant midwestern scenery and hadn’t noticed that we were speeding. After writing us a $60 ticket, officer Rooney cheerily directs us to a nearby campsite and tells us about the fair happening the next day.

Pillager is a town of 469 in central Minnesota. Its post office dates to 1886 and its annual fair to 1898. The fair has a horse show, photography contest, and vendors selling ice cream and other concessions. A little train laden with kids hoots through every few minutes. We see officer Rooney in the crowd, and ask to interview him.

After I turn on my recorder, he disclaims that the views he’ll express are not those of the Pillager City Police Department (which we later learned consisted of just him and the chief, both part-time). Rooney brings up his identity as a police officer repeatedly throughout our conversation, including when I ask him about President Trump.

“What do I think about Trump? From my standpoint, personally I like him. There’s been a lot of stuff in the news about bashing cops,” Rooney says. “Bernie Sanders, in his campaign, was talking about ‘You know, we need to change this and this with the police,’ and I agree some things need to be changed. But just depicting us as the bad people, like Hillary and Bernie were trying to do, I just didn’t approve of that. And Trump’s standing there and he says, ‘I love our cops. They do a great job.’ ”

Rooney is progressive on social issues, moderate or indifferent on most other ones, and critical of Trump’s personality. “I side with Trump on a lot of things,” he says at one point, “but I didn’t necessarily want to endorse him because of a lot of the stuff that was going on with him talking about women, talking about Muslims.”

Trump’s rhetoric on police, coupled with Rooney’s default conservative family background, made it easy for him to overlook those things. In some ways, Rooney is like many of my apolitical millennial friends, just calibrated differently. Instead of supporting the blue team by default, he supports the red. And he is sweetly optimistic about his side: “If you come to us with open arms, hopefully we’ll do the same.”

In some ways, he's like many of my apolitical millennial friends, just calibrated differently. Instead of supporting the blue team by default, he supports the red.

Fred Hage, whom I meet inside the fair’s food hall, at the Cass County Republicans table, is more cantankerous. He was born in Minneapolis, but made “good money” as a general contractor in Phoenix, Arizona, before retiring to this area with his wife in 2013. Until this election, Hage was a proud Independent. Now he is the chairman of the Cass County Republicans. He says Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to America in his lifetime.

I tell him this is difficult for me to understand—what of Trump’s arrogance, his narcissism, his lies? What am I missing?

“The path to the desired results,” explains Hage. “That’s what everyone’s missing, and they’re so blinded by embarrassment of losing the election, which they shouldn’t be, we’ve all lost before. If they can get by the bluster, and get by the arrogance, and the personality quirks that they don’t like, they’re gonna see a lot of good things happen.”

I ask about Trump’s qualifications. He mentions Trump’s past as a businessman and job creator. I point out that Trump’s businesses frequently outsource.

“But how about the ones that are in America?” says Hage impatiently. “See, you only pick out the snippets that are negatives to Trump. You don’t give any credit to the positives. And that’s what makes the liberals and the left look bad. You can’t just pick out the points that support you.”

Fair enough—according toCNN Money, Donald Trump is responsible for roughly 34,000 American jobs, including some manufacturing ones. When Hillary Clinton claimed that Donald Trump doesn’t “make a thing in America,” PolitiFact rated the claim as false.

As Hugo and I are about to leave for the monster truck “mud run,” Hage’s companion at the table, Les McClelland, mentions that his daughter is a “flaming liberal.”

“We’ve become acclimated to each other’s points of view,” McClelland says. For example, “both my wife and I have been anti-Planned Parenthood, but we both decided for a whole bunch of reasons it’s really a good idea if we keep that funded. Not for late-term abortions, there’s plenty of options, but other than that we’re on board with the government supplying birth control to people that need it.”

“What was talking that out with your daughter like?” I ask.

“Well, it was painful at times. Very painful,” McClelland replies.“But parents have a special bond with their kids. They can fight with them and get mad at them and whatever, but yet you still get together at holidays and talk to each other. And the more you do that, the more you see the other person’s viewpoint.”

He says his daughter has moved on some issues too, like “the fact that covering all the ills of society with government money doesn’t work very well.”

At the mud run, everyone rises for the national anthem. As it plays over the loudspeaker, a girl holding an American flag rides around the course on a horse.

As we drive west on Highway 12 in South Dakota, something clicks for Hugo. I turn on the recorder and ask him to repeat himself.

“I’ve had this revelation,” he says. “We’re driving along in South Dakota, with this amazing flat, incredible landscape, and we decided to turn on the radio, and Brad Paisley comes on and it’s this song called ‘Last Time for Everything.’ I just got very emotional suddenly, listening to this music, and it was the first time that country music made sense to me. This earnestness, this simplicity.”

“Before, that’s what turned you off about it,” I point out.

“Yeah! Because I just didn’t get it, I didn’t understand. It’s like, the life out here, that’s what you want. There’s something to be said for the small-town pride.”

Hugo and I are enjoying the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo until the tie-down roping event, at which point we take our bleeding liberal hearts downstairs for another beer. It’s Veterans’ Night, and most of the thousands of attendees in the concrete arena (including us) are wearing red, white, and blue. The event happens in Casper, a city of 55,316 that, according to a woman we’ll meet in a minute, is home to Wyoming’s only two escalators.

At the beer counter, we get to talking with the servers, who are volunteering—all proceeds from sales will go to benefit the local Special Olympics for children. I tell them about my research project, and one of them, Wendy Lucas, exclaims that she is a Trump supporter. We agree to talk in the morning.

Lucas is a social worker. In addition to her day job and volunteering at the rodeo (which she does every year), she is president of Interfaith of Natrona County, a nonprofit group that helps the homeless get work. She was raised in Colorado by conservative parents and had a son at age sixteen. At nineteen, she “met a boy,” moved to Wyoming with him, got married, and had a daughter.

“Then we got divorced eight or nine years ago because he wanted somebody who can cook and clean and have dinner on the table at 5:30 when he got home from work, and I told him my dream is to work four jobs and go to school full time and raise my children,” she says.

Lucas is a case manager for people with developmental disabilities and acquired brain injuries. Her job includes signing these individuals up for waivers so they can live at home. The waiver program, introduced under President Reagan, is operated at the state level but paid for by Medicaid. I ask her why she would support a party that wants to cut Medicaid.

“They can’t,” she tells me. “No matter what you believe in, Down syndrome isn’t going away. Autism isn’t going away. These people have to be cared for. They can’t take away the Medicaid that takes care of these individuals that I work with. I mean, they can, but what are we going to do, put them on a sidewalk? They’re not going to take it away.”

“But they can,” I counter.

“No. They can’t. They won’t.”

If the day comes when the personal lives of her or her clients is affected, Lucas says she’ll “take a stance, get educated, do what I need to do.” It may come to that: This spring, U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (Wyoming’s sole representative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney) voted for the American Health Care Act of 2017, which would have seriously jeopardized funding for the waiver supporting Lucas’s clients.

Hugo and I are sitting around a campfire in a national forest outside of Yellowstone. The mosquitos are overwhelming, and we are informed by a man on a motorcycle that a grizzly bear was seen nearby the day before. We are sharing the site with Liza, who is taking a three-month road trip with her dog, Rena. Liza was working in a microbrewery in Austin, Texas, but she quit her job when her lease ended and has been “city-shopping.”

Keeping an eye on Rena the dog, who is keeping both eyes on my bratwurst, I tell Liza about my project. “We’re talking to Trump supporters around the country, to see where we can find common ground,” I say.

“What a nightmare!” she says.

Hugo flies home from San Francisco and I make my way south. I stop at a farmers’ market in downtown Los Banos, California (population 35,972). There I meet Bruce Kinabrew, a grape farmer, conservative campaign consultant, and former political science professor. Bruce has “mixed feelings” on Donald Trump as a person, but as a conservative Christian he likes the direction the President has taken so far.

“What direction is that?” I ask.

“I would love to see America go back to the values that we used to have, prior to even the 1960s or so. The family, the original family, not the family that they’re creating right now.”

During our ninety-minute conversation, we are frequently interrupted by people buying grapes. About half are using vouchers from the federally funded Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which helps mothers buy nutritional food for their young offspring. Kinabrew tells me that he does not support the program “in essence.” He thinks rescue missions and food banks are a better way to go. “Whenever it’s handed to the private sector, they get a whole lot more bang for the buck.”

This was an important point for me in understanding how conservative Christians, as a group, can call for cuts to programs like this: They think it is up to individuals, not the government, to pick up the slack.

Kinabrew and I also talk about schools (“That’s a problem, that you believe in centralized lesson planning,” he tells me) and climate change (“I believe climate change is not only a hoax, it’s the worst hoax that’s thrust upon us”). We dicker about the causes of the California drought, the validity of data, and the groupthink of liberal academics. But then the conversation takes an abrupt and enlightening turn.

“Well, here’s the other thing,” he says. “I believe that God created this world. And in one day, God could wipe out all that and clear the air. In one day, the air can be completely clean.”

Climate change problem solved.

Kinabrew allows that Trump has said some things that give him pause, like when I remind him that Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. “Absolutely against that!” he exclaims. “You and I would be on the same page on that!”

But, Kinabrew continues, “I would think something that’s more offensive is someone who says, ‘I support gay marriage.’ That would be more offensive.”

I make my way to Lordsburg, New Mexico, population 2,797, founded by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880. Freight trains tear through the town every forty-five minutes or so. The town—and the county it’s the seat of—has been losing population steadily since the 1950s. The median income for males in Lordsburg is $21,332—for women, $14,727.

I go into the one open business I can find—a liquor store—and am told the one other place open on this Saturday evening is a bar called Maverick across the tracks.

There are five other customers at Maverick. They’re all Latino, but speaking English. I sit at the bend in the counter and order a Bud Lite. The guy on my right is wearing a red shirt. He is from El Paso. He likes Trump, but his favorite President was George W. Bush. He doesn’t want to be interviewed. On my left is a man and his college student daughter. They are liberals. I tell them about my project, and a blonde woman looks up from playing pool. She is a libertarian and voted for Trump, although she preferred Ben Carson.

Her name is Tara Peterson. She grew up in Animas, nearby. She’s a waitress, but used to work at a power plant in El Paso. It emerges that Peterson hates Obama, who she says “didn’t even run shit—he was ran. And now we have Trump, who has the worst case of verbal diarrhea I’ve ever heard. I mean, like, just holy shit just shut up! Right?”

But she backs Trump’s position on the wall. Living as she does just fifty miles from the Mexican border, she sees improving border security as imperative.

“There isn’t anybody walking across the border that isn’t being illegally trafficked by coyotes or having their family kidnapped in Mexico and forced to bring drugs over,” Peterson says. “And the liberal country doesn’t realize that. ‘Oh no, we’re just being mean!’ No, we’re not being mean! This really is a security issue for the Mexicans as much as it is for the Americans.”'

“No, we’re not being mean! This really is a security issue for the Mexicans as much as it is for the Americans.”

This is not a rationale I’ve heard before, but it’s easy to see why someone with this perspective would celebrate the drop in illegal border crossings under Trump.

“Ask the Border Patrol,” Peterson continues. “Ask anybody. We find bales of pot, we find Muslims out here with loaded guns, North Koreans, South Koreans. I mean, it is not just Mexicans that cross that border.”

“Wait,” I say. “Muslims with loaded guns?”

“Yes!”

“And North Koreans?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“I’ve never heard that.”

“My neighbors down there had, like, five Asian guys show up in like full military garb carrying AK-47s and wanting to know where the hell they were,” she says.

“What’d she tell them?”

“Where they were. And where the hell to go. Because what else are you going to do?”

I’m in Happy’s, a small diner in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The waitress says that people don’t really talk about politics here too much, except for sometimes her older customers. She nods to two gentlemen a few tables away. But she assumes people here voted for Trump, and she’s considering blocking her leftwing friends on Facebook because they post so incessantly about it.

Drew Bullard’s family has been in Snyder, Texas, since “like 1899.” He’s served in the Peace Corps, taught high school, and started a computer store that he ran for twenty-three years. He still manages his family ranch, which has about 350 head of cattle and several oil drills. Bullard has been the chair of the the Scurry County Republican Party for twenty years. He’s also the chair of the Snyder Historical Association and on the executive committee of the Texas Republican Party. On the phone, he instructs me to identify his building by looking for his blue pickup truck. It takes me awhile to find him—there are a lot of blue pickup trucks in Snyder.

When I lay my recorder on the table in Bullard’s book-lined office, he does the same with his phone, so he can also record the conversation. “I’m assuming you’re going to be fair on everything that I say,” he says. “Not put something in there that I didn’t mean.”

Bullard believes in regulations in principle, but he thinks that bureaucracies reach a tipping point after which they do more harm than good by becoming inefficient and stifling innovation. He uses the example of climate change, the existence of which he cautiously accepts.

“What most conservatives think is that climate change is a codeword for regulation,” he tells me. “[That liberals] want to create this disaster that you’re talking about—‘in fifteen years it’ll be too late, everything will be wiped out’—so that you can go in and you can regulate these big, bad oil companies and tell them how much they can produce, and tell them how much they have to pay for the changes that you want. And that’s a recipe for a country destroying itself, like the Soviet Union did.”

I ask Bullard where he gets his news. He says he looks at Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Post. “I glance at them. I try to see where the other side is coming from.” He also reads The Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, and Breitbart. I ask him about this last one, condemned by many as a platform for white supremacists.

“That’s too much! That is fake news. It’s fake news!” Bullard retorts. “Ninety percent of conservatives are not white supremacists. They would vote for a black conservative in a second. They love [Clarence] Thomas. Or Herman Cain. Just like here in Snyder. There’s not a huge black population here, but we had a black president of our college—the junior college—and he was the first black junior college president here and he was very well accepted in the community. The prejudice or dislike of blacks or Hispanics isn’t what drives conservatism.”

“Does it concern you at all that the likes of David Duke and Richard Spencer are so pro-Trump?”

“Anyone can be for whoever they want,” he says. “If you start saying that kind of stuff you’re never going to get any kind of cooperation with the person you’re talking with, because that’s an insult. If you seriously start saying that to people and calling them white supremacists, you’ll totally shut down any form of communication.”

"If you seriously start calling them white supremacists, you’ll totally shut down any form of communication.”

He says that Hillary Clinton’s comments about “deplorables” and Obama’s comments about how conservatives “cling to guns and religion” had a huge impact on Republicans. This slightly startles me, the same way I feel startled when, listening to rightwing talk radio, the hosts play recordings of liberals to mock and jeer at. The realization that conservatives are listening to us, taking offense, unnerves me somehow.

When I take my leave after two hours of discussion, Bullard and I agree we have a lot more common ground than we initially expected. I’m sitting in my car thinking about where to go next when he comes out and knocks on the window, just to wish me luck.

We live in a deeply divided nation, and one of the major fault lines is the person of Donald Trump. His approval ratings hover in the mid-thirties, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Among Republicans, his support is about 80 percent; among Democrats, it’s less than 10 percent. One recent poll showed that six out of ten Trump supporters, or about 25 percent of the population, say they cannot “think of anything that Trump could do, or fail to do, in his term as President” that would cause them to disapprove of him.

It isn’t easy to reconcile this with the views of people I speak to, who are more nuanced in their approach. Even those that strongly identify as Trump supporters concede that there are things about him that they don’t like.

I am at the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas. Bill Clinton is the first President I remember, and it is pleasurably nostalgic to see the pictures, listen to the recordings, and look at the paraphernalia. Also interesting is reading about issues as they existed back then—charter schools, which Clinton championed; welfare reform, which Clinton signed; the increasingly personal partisan divide, which Newt Gingrich broadened.

In the full-size replica of Clinton’s Oval Office, there are several volunteers. I tell them about my project, and one agrees to an interview during her lunch break—they are not supposed to talk politics on shift.

Her name is Susan Chapman. She is a liberal Democrat. After the election, she and some of her liberal friends started regular “huddle” meetings, where they coordinated their response to the Trump agenda.

“The first time we met, we just were so angry,” she recalls. “We didn’t get anything done. We just were reeling. There was a lot of anger and disappointment. And we very quickly decided that we couldn’t do that. We decided that the anger had to go. That we had to step into listening.”

And it’s worked. Chapman has since had many productive conversations with Trump supporters. Her background isn’t all that different from others I’ve talked to. She grew up conservative in Kansas. She had a baby at fifteen. (“I am pro-choice. I try to tell people that the choice is not always abortion.”) She moved to Arkansas forty-two years ago, and is now a semiretired teacher. She says one of her daughters went to high school with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary. She’s been volunteering at the library for three years now.

Chapman says it’s a mistake for people who think like her to dismiss Trump supporters. “Don’t go with your first instinct,” she says. “That hasn’t worked for us. That ain’t workin’, to write ’em off.”

When I hear on the radio that the President is going to be addressing supporters that evening, August 3, in Huntington, West Virginia, I am a six-hour drive away.

It’s hot and humid when I arrive, with infrequent but intense downpours. The line of people waiting to get in starts at the big double doors of the Big Sandy Superstore Arena. It stretches off to the left, as far down Third Avenue as I can see. To the right, across Eighth Street, are a few hundred protesters. They are holding signs and shouting.

I go near the doors, where the crowd is thickest. I ask some women in line what they think the protesters are trying to express.

“I don’t know, they’re just not happy with him.”

“Why do you like him?” I ask.

“I like everything he stands for. I believe in welfare reform, I believe in being hard with foreign countries, I believe—“

“Illegal immigrants!” interjects her friend.

“Illegal immigrants,” the first woman continues. “I believe in the wall, I believe in you come into this country illegally you go back out, whether you’re a good person or not. I believe a law is a law. I believe everything, pretty much, he believes.”

“What do you think about his personality?”

She laughs. “Well, that could be improved.”

I cross the street into the chanting, sign-brandishing crowd. The many law enforcement officials see my recorder and let me pass without comment. A woman with a megaphone shouts “You want me to carry my rape child!” at a man walking past. She addresses the crowd. “The thing about fascism, you guys, is that we have a window of time to act, before it becomes too late!” The protesters cheer.

I ask a man named Maurice why he’s here.

“Just to make my opinion known, that I don’t agree with Trump or his Cabinet, or the decisions they’re making. I think he’s dragging the office of the President through the mud, he’s ruining the reputation of our country. He’s a prolific liar, he’s just a complete charlatan, and does not deserve the position that he holds.”

Two young women wearing “Make America Great Again” hats walk by. I ask them if they would mind doing a joint interview with Maurice. They agree. Their names are Danielle and Cassidy. All three are from West Virginia. The young women say they are here to support the President, and Maurice says he’s here to express his displeasure.

“What do you think you all have in common?”

“We’re American,” says Maurice.

“We’re all American,” Cassidy agrees.

They also agree that it’s hot outside. So that’s a start.

It turns out that Maurice and Cassidy went to the same high school, are both teachers now, and both have massive student debt. They talk for a while, respectfully, until the young women leave to go inside. The speech is starting.

I don’t go in, because I’m not here for Trump. I sit in the grass with my back against the building as his voice emanates out.

“We support the Constitution of the United States of America,” I hear over cheers. “We believe school should teach students to love our country, to have pride in our history, and to respect our great American flag.” I think of the girl with the American flag riding around the monster truck rally back in Minnesota.

“We stand with the incredible men and women of law enforcement,” I hear. I think of officer Rooney. “Since our election—not mine—since our election we’ve added more than one million new jobs,” I hear. I think of Fred Hage. “We believe that we must take care of our own citizens,” I hear. I think of Wendy Lucas. “We believe in God, we believe in family, we believe in country,” I hear. I think of Bruce Kinabrew. “We believe strongly that a nation must defend and protect its borders,” I hear. I think of Tara Peterson.

We’re locked into a spiraling pattern of delegitimization, and almost nowhere is there a concerted good faith effort to bridge the gap.

There is a large overflow crowd outside the arena doors (though not the “thousands” he claims during the speech), and they cheer during these remarks. They also cheer when Trump fulminates about the special prosecutor probing his campaign’s alleged Russia ties. “What the prosecutor should be looking at are Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted e-mails,” Trump says. “Or let them look at the uranium she sold that’s now in the hands of very angry Russians.”

Meanwhile, the protesters are still shouting. Some Trump supporters are shouting back, now, and it’s getting nasty. There’s a sporty, nihilistic thrum in the air. A fight breaks out, and the reporters all rush over to it. I turn to the man nearest me.

“What do you think about this fight that’s happening?”

“Well, I’m kinda in-between, I’m just here for the show.”

“What do you think of the show?”

“It’s all right. It’s good for Huntington.”

His name is Kevin Bowen. He grew up in Rockville, West Virginia, and lost a daughter to heroin, which he says sent him “on a path to homelessness. I’m finally getting back on my feet again.”

Bowen is ambivalent about the President. “I don’t believe him. I think that he’s a fake. But then again, what if I’m wrong? What if he does change this country? This country does need change.”

He’s right; it does. The presidency of Donald Trump is a symptom of a schizophrenic body politic. We have magnified disagreements over policy and distorted honest cultural differences beyond recognition. We’re locked into a spiraling pattern of delegitimization, and almost nowhere is there a concerted good faith effort to bridge the gap.

We must be more fair-minded. “Fair” doesn’t mean lip service to beliefs we know are false. It means engaging with others in good faith, listening to their ideas and how they frame them. It means not automatically conflating conservatives and Trump supporters and white supremacists and neo-Nazis. It means not feeling threatened by people with whom you disagree.

I shake Bowen’s hand and I leave the rally grounds, exhausted at the acrimonious spectacle. As I move with the mass of “Make America Great Again” hats, I see a state trooper, now off-duty, buying a Trump mug. Someone is busking with a ukulele. I wonder how I’m going to readjust to New York. 

Noah Phillips is a New York City-based writer.