A best-seller at Rob and Laurie Rasch’s memorabilia stores in New Baltimore, Michigan. (Daniel Allott)
ROBERT RASCH had never voted for president before 2016. Then Donald Trump came along. Finally, there was a candidate he could get excited about. Rasch admired Trump’s business sense and political courage. “For somebody to stand up and run for president that has no political background, that’s a set of brass,” he told me when we met one day in 2019 at his Detroit-themed memorabilia store in New Baltimore, a forty-five-minute drive north of the Motor City. Rasch is one of millions of so-called “lost voters” whom Trump coaxed back to the voting booth in 2016. At the time of our interview, election day 2020 was still a year-and-a-half away, but Rasch had already decided that he’d be voting for Trump again, based largely on the president’s stewardship of the economy.
“When you drive down Eight Mile, Nine Mile, Ten Mile (Roads), a lot of those small industrial shops were closed a few years ago,” he said of the manufacturing-heavy southern part of Macomb County. “But now you see them being reconstructed to get new tenants in there.”
Rasch and his wife Laurie’s small business, LR Embroidered Creations, paid less in taxes in 2018 thanks to the Trump tax cuts. “We’ve felt the difference,” he said.
“On a scale from 1 to 10, I think he’s doing an 8,” Rasch said of Trump’s overall performance. “He’s making a change for the good for everybody. I think he’s growing on people here.”
Rasch was seeing that growing support at the Anchor Bay Pit Stop Diner, where he and his friends talk politics on weekends. And he was seeing it among his store’s customers.
“One gentleman came in and asked us to print that Trump hat,” Rasch said, pointing to a display case featuring red ball caps with white lettering that said, “TRUMP: Elect That MF’er again! 2020.”
“The hats sold like crazy,” Rasch said. “And the guy’s been in numerous times and re-ordered. It’s been a big seller.”
Asked whether he thinks President Trump will win Michigan in 2020, Rasch was ready with the same answer he gave a CNN camera crew that had stepped into his store a few months earlier: “If (Trump) was going to the optical store to get some new glasses, he’d have 20/20 vision.”
A best-seller at Rob and Laurie Rasch’s memorabilia stores in New Baltimore, Michigan. (Daniel Allott)
My interview with Rasch was one of more than two-dozen I conducted during a week in Macomb County in the summer of 2019. I had come to find out how residents of this famous swing county perceived Trump. Specifically, I wanted to know whether, two-and-a-half years into his term, Trump’s support there was diminishing. It’s an important question in a state Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes, the slimmest margin of any state in the 2016 election.1 Trump won Macomb County by 48,000 votes, making it the county that delivered Michigan to Trump, and one of three counties nationwide that could be said to have determined the presidency.2 Macomb County voters are accustomed to determining elections. They have sided with the winner in all but three of the last twenty elections for governor and president.3
After speaking with Rasch, I swung by Bad Brads BBQ in another part of New Baltimore. There I met Doug, a clinical psychologist who eschews party labels. He voted for John McCain in 2008, Barack Obama in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016.
“I’m not a party person,” Doug said. “If Trump had run as a Democrat, I would have voted for him.”
Doug said he thought “things are going great” under Trump. And he “definitely” planned to vote for him again in 2020. He was even toying with the idea of coming out of the political closet with his Trump support.
“I was thinking of putting a Trump sign out in my yard in ’16, but I thought, nah,” Doug said, explaining that as an Airbnb host, he doesn’t want to alienate guests.
“I think I would do it more this time than last time because he’s president now, so there’s nothing the Trump-haters can really do. And if people asked me about it, I’d say I voted for him.”
I asked Doug some other questions, including whether he thinks Donald Trump is a racist. He gave the same answer almost every Trump supporter gave: of course not. Doug even seemed a little bothered by the question, and I suspected I knew why. I had gotten to know Doug during a trip to Macomb County the previous year, when I’d spent more than a month living in his basement as an Airbnb guest.
One day stands out in my memory. It was Labor Day, and I had just returned to Doug’s home after a weekend trip to Canada. Shortly after I got back, Doug walked downstairs to chat. But something seemed different—Doug looked distraught. He told me that while I had been away, he’d had a guest in one of the upper rooms that he rents out. The guest, a young woman, had booked four nights, then cancelled her reservation before booking again. The woman had informed Doug that she would arrive in the afternoon, so Doug and his girlfriend waited for her. But the woman didn’t show up until after 10 p.m. When she finally arrived, she walked into the bedroom she’d booked, laid down on the bed and abruptly announced that she no longer wanted to stay in Doug’s home. The bed was too small.
Airbnb has several cancellation policies for hosts to choose from.4 But none of them allows a guest to arrive late and receive a full refund for a stay that’s already begun. Doug said he told the woman that Airbnb would return her money in the standard timeframe, three to five days. According to Doug, the woman became belligerent and insisted she get reimbursed immediately. She said she wouldn’t leave until the transaction had processed. After some wrangling, she eventually left and got her money back. Doug awoke the next morning to discover that the woman had left a nasty review on his Airbnb page.
To promote trust and transparency, Airbnb doesn’t allow reviews to be deleted. They remain on the host’s page for all future prospective guests to see. But it wasn’t the negative review that exasperated Doug; it was that the woman, who is black, had accused Doug, who is white, of racism.
I had come to know Doug as a conscientious, somewhat highly-strung, and exceedingly nice man. Before I ever interviewed him about politics, we had spent hours chatting about his experiences as a psychologist, the revitalization of Detroit, and our shared affinity for ping-pong. I had never gotten the slightest indication that Doug harbored racist views.
When we spoke that night, Doug was in the middle of haggling with Airbnb to remove the review (which the company did). Doug seemed distraught because the review was visible not only to prospective Airbnb guests but also potentially to his clinical patients, many of whom were people of color. Doug’s experience highlights how potent the charge of racism has become. There is no more pernicious insult in America today. As the linguist John McWhorter has written about the label in its modern usage:
To be a racist is considered not just a matter of bland categorization but of evil, a charge only somewhat less damning than being called a pedophile, as chilling a prospect in modern American life as being tarred as a communist was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.5
I can’t say for sure what happened that night at Doug’s place. I wasn’t there. But I know that many Americans have grown wary of how promiscuously the term is applied.
In politics, President Trump has been persistently accused of being a racist. And so have his supporters. Polls show that half of Democrats believe people are racist merely for the fact that they voted for Trump.6 The accusation deeply offends most Trump voters—including the estimated 7–9 million who, like Doug, also voted for America’s first black president.7 And it invites an important question: Do Democrats believe they can win back these voters by echoing Hillary Clinton’s accusation that they are “deplorable and irredeemable”?
The ostensible point of calling people racists is to shame them. But it rarely has that effect, especially on Trump supporters. To people like Doug, such an accusation has the opposite effect. It angers, it frustrates, and it saddens—but it doesn’t shame. It doesn’t prompt them to rethink their support for Trump. Rather, it hardens and deepens their support for him. Research shows that “telling voters that some people oppose Trump because he supports racism” makes many voters much more supportive of Trump.8
When I mentioned the Airbnb incident to Doug a year later at Bad Brads, he still remembered it like it was yesterday. And he still seemed bothered by it. As he recounted the story, it occurred to me that the incident might have played a role in Doug’s more overt support for Trump. It made me think that there was no way Doug would not be putting a Trump sign on his lawn in 2020—negative Airbnb reviews be damned.
In 2016 Donald Trump became the first Republican to win Michigan in nearly thirty years. But Michigan Republicans took a step backward in 2018. Democrats swept races for governor, US Senate and attorney general, and they gained two US House seats. Michigan Democrats also prevailed in several ballot initiatives, including a referendum on recreational marijuana and a constitutional amendment to streamline the voting process.9 Even so, Republicans argued that 2018 shouldn’t be seen as a harbinger for 2020. By their calculation, 50,000 Trump voters hadn’t shown up to vote in 2018. That number includes voters such as Rasch and Doug.10
Later I met up with Catherine Bolder, another Obama-voter-turned-Trump-supporter who hadn’t voted in the midterms. We met at a restaurant just outside Macomb County. Bolder had been in cancer treatment a year earlier, the first time I had met her. This time, I barely recognized her when I walked in. That’s because she had successfully completed chemotherapy. Her hair had grown back, and she looked much healthier. Catherine is a self-described liberal who supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. The first time we met, she had described Trump as the lesser of two evils compared to Hillary Clinton. This time, she had much more fulsome praise for Trump.
“Honestly, I’m beginning to think he’s a genius,” she said. “The way he trolls Democrats and gets under their skin and makes them say stupid shit.”
Like Rasch and Doug, Bolder had already decided to vote for Trump in 2020, and she was confident he’d win Michigan again. “He’s making people money,” she said. “Why change if it’s not broke?”
“Michigan men are manly men, and Macomb I think is still Blue Collar” she continued. “People here like Trump because he’s a strong alpha male. Nobody’s going to vote for Beto O’Rourke. Come on, you pussy.”
“So you’re a convert?” I asked.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’ll vote for Trump in 2020, but I don’t know what I’ll do after that.”
I asked Bolder what prompted her unlikely journey from Obama to Bernie to Trump in just a few years.
“The biggest thing that changed me is what the Democrats did to Bernie,” she explained, referring to how Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign conspired with the Democratic National Committee to ensure that the outsider Sanders would not win the nomination.
“And now they’re shutting down any kind of debate, using the race and victim card. I don’t want to hear it anymore,” Catherine continued. “You can only use it so much. They’ve used it too much. People are tired of it. I mean, are you going to call me a racist for voting for Trump? I was married to a black man and have a biracial son.”
Bolder also sees the party as having moved too far leftward on many issues, citing abortion as a prime example. “I was always pro-choice,” she said. “I still am. But with New York and Virginia approving them to abort babies after they’ve been born—look, if you carry a child for nine months and only then decide you don’t want it …” she said, trailing off then shaking her head in exasperation.
“Would you now consider yourself pro-life?” I asked.
“I’m conflicted. I don’t think you should kill a human being after it’s born. (The Democrats) have become radical on a lot of issues.”
As Bolder and I were speaking, she turned to a middle-aged couple sitting beside us at the bar and took on the role of interviewer. “Hey, folks, if the election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” she asked.
The man, an off-duty police officer and security guard whose name I didn’t catch, seemed ambivalent at first. “I think they’re both full of shit,” he said of the Republicans and Democrats.
But eventually he said, “It’ll probably be Trump. The more I hear negative about him, the more I like him. Because I know if you’re pissing them off, you must be doing something right.”
I asked who the “them” was. He said the media, the Democrats, and “everyone in Washington.”
“He’s a liar, he’s a bully. He’s a womanizer,” the cop continued of Trump. “But he’s the first president I’ve seen who actually had a prayer meeting in the Oval Office.”
The cop also said he’d become concerned about the growing Muslim community.
“Once I landed at Minneapolis airport, and I looked out the window,” he said. “Everybody working on the runway was Muslim. And everybody inside too—they’re all Somali. I’m afraid.”
“I think they’re out to destroy this country,” Catherine interjected of Muslim immigrants.
The cop said that when he retires, he plans to move up to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, stock up on food and ammunition, and live a solitary life.
Neither Bolder nor the cop could think of any Trump voters they knew who had turned against the president. I wasn’t surprised. Among the two dozen people I interviewed in and around Macomb County on this visit, not a single one could think of a Trump voter who no longer supported him. That included some Democrats I met, too.
That night, I attended a meeting of the Warren Democratic Club, which was held at the Warren area Elks Lodge. Many local candidates were in attendance. I was struck that this meeting of Democratic activists began not with the recitation of some progressive manifesto, as the Orange County Democrats had done, but with the Pledge of Allegiance and with an American flag displayed prominently at the front of the room. Like most Democratic meetings these days, a significant portion of the meeting was spent discussing ways to make it easier to vote and to expand voting rights to new communities.
Afterwards, I met a young woman named Shelby Nicole, a member of Macomb County Young Democrats. Nicole told me she had knocked on thousands of doors across the county canvassing for the Democratic Party.
“A lot of people will look you in the eye and say, ‘I voted Dem all my life until Trump came along. And I’m not voting Dem ever again,’” she said. “Or they’d say, ‘I stopped voting a long time ago, then voted for Trump and am not going back.’”
I asked Nicole whether she thinks Trump will win Macomb County in 2020. “No doubt in my mind,” she responded before I could even finish my question. She added that many Trump voters took 2018 off but will be back to vote for him in 2020.
Nicole also talked about Joe Biden, whom she was certain the party would ultimately nominate. I mentioned that Biden had been doing a lot of apologizing of late, giving a speech in Germany in which he apologized for America under Trump.11
“Excuse my language but I don’t want to hear that shit,” Nicole said. “And blue collar voters don’t either.”
***
Macomb County is composed of twenty-seven cities, villages, and townships. It stretches from the industrial wasteland of Eight Mile road on its southern border with Detroit to the small towns and open fields of the northern part of the county. Politically, Macomb County gained prominence in the 1980s as the birthplace of the Reagan Democrats—socially conservative, pro-labor union, blue-collar white voters who backed Ronald Reagan but still considered themselves Democrats. The county lost more than half of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010.12 Trump visited the county several times during the 2016 campaign, portraying its residents as victims of international trade. His promise to renegotiate NAFTA, which he referred to as the worst trade deal ever made, resonated with these voters.13 His criticism of Ford’s decision to expand auto production in Mexico appealed to the county’s many autoworkers.14 Trump seemed to understand that manufacturing creates wealth, and that America would not become great again by relying solely on a combination of high-tech jobs and low-wage service work.
Macomb County is a markedly different place from Wayne County to the south, which is dominated by sprawling Detroit. Much has been made of that divide, and the Eight Mile Road that separates the counties. But Macomb is also noticeably different from adjoining Oakland County to the west. I discovered that Macomb County doesn’t have a very good reputation in southeast Michigan. Whenever I informed new acquaintances in Oakland County that I was reporting on and staying in Macomb, it was often met with a derogatory comment or a sympathetic remark. A college friend of mine who lived in Oakland County texted, “Land of the Deplorables, lol.”
A physician friend who lives in Oakland but works at a hospital in Macomb told me she was appalled by the habits of some of the nurses she worked with. “Just give me one nurse who doesn’t smoke and has all her teeth,” she said.
One day I drove along the border between Oakland and Macomb Counties. On the Oakland side, I saw art supply shops, boutique cafés, and diners. In Rochester, I saw upscale beauty salons, a bike shop, and several juice bars. The liquor stores advertised fine wine, spirits, and cigars. However, as I drove east over the county line on 12 Mile Road, I was greeted by the sprawling General Motors technical center. I also noticed that Michigan’s famously poor roads seemed to go from bad to terrible when crossing over from Oakland to Macomb. Then I drove north on highway 53 and noticed that on the Macomb side there were several tanning and tattoo parlors, numerous dollar stores, pawnshops, and fireworks stores. There were at least two gun and ammo stores, a psychic, and several tobacco shops. The liquor stores didn’t mention fine wine and spirits—only discount “liquor and lotto.” There was even a large Family Video store.
All you really need to know about the difference between Macomb and Oakland Counties is that Kid Rock, famous for displaying enormous Confederate flags and middle finger sculptures at his concerts, was born and grew up in Romeo, a village in Macomb County; meanwhile, Madonna, a frequent Trump critic, grew up a few miles away in Rochester Hills, in Oakland County.
Statistically Oakland is far more prosperous and vibrant than Macomb. Oakland’s median family income is nearly $95,000, putting it at the top of the state’s eighty-three counties and nearly $28,000 higher than Macomb.15
Nearly half of Oakland’s residents over the age of twenty-five have a bachelor’s degree, whereas less than one-quarter of Macomb’s residents do.16 17 In 2016, Trump won the support of white voters without a college degree, 66 percent to 29 percent.18 Given these numbers, it’s no surprise that Trump won Macomb County, and Clinton won Oakland County.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump pledged to revitalize Michigan’s manufacturing base. “We will make Michigan into the manufacturing hub of the world once again,” Trump promised at a huge rally in Sterling Heights a few days before the election.19 At the time of my 2019 visit, nearly three years after that, many manufacturers were nervous about rising tariffs and the status of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was in the process of being considered by Congress. Meanwhile, Michigan’s crumbling infrastructure still hadn’t been addressed. Infrastructure Week had become an internet meme and a symbol of Washington’s inept attempts to discuss serious policy.20
Even so, jobs were abundant and wages were up in the region. In February of that year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Macomb County had added 9,118 manufacturing jobs between the fourth quarter of 2016 and the second quarter of 2018, the largest increase of any county in the nation.21 Fiat Chrysler had recently announced plans for more than $1.5 billion in investment in two Macomb County auto plants that were predicted to create over 1,400 well-paying jobs.
***
Later in my 2019 visit, I caught up with George Martin, whom I had met with his friend Darryl Howard two years before. Black men in their late twenties, George and Darryl defy easy political stereotypes. George is a former sailor who voted for Obama in 2012 before turning to Trump, primarily because of his promise to clean up the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose medical facilities he frequented.
Darryl, a married real estate agent with two children, had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2016, he initially supported Bernie Sanders before “reluctantly” turning to Hillary Clinton, in part because his wife threatened to divorce him if he didn’t vote for the Democrat. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding about that.
Over the next two years, I had many conversations with George and Darryl. Neither had budged much from their initial assessments of Trump.
Darryl Howard and George Martin in Macomb Township in 2017. (Jordan Allott)
George gave the president credit for the “night-and-day difference” between his experiences at the VA, his efforts to reform the criminal justice system by signing the First Step Act, and the economy, which was humming along. “No matter where you stand on Trump, he’s gotten a lot done,” George told me in 2019. Like Rasch, Bolder, and Doug, George didn’t vote in the 2018 midterms, but he told me he planned to vote for Trump again in 2020.
George is represented in Congress by Rashida Tlaib, one of the president’s loudest critics. She came to national prominence by shouting at a party on the night of her swearing in, “We’re going to impeach this motherfucker!” in reference to Trump.22
Interestingly, George, a Trump supporter, had nice things to say about Tlaib because she’s fighting to drop Michigan’s highest-in-the-nation auto insurance rates. “When it comes to actual governing, I think she’s doing a phenomenal job,” he said.
These Michigan voters highlight a trend. Many pundits said that the 2018 midterm elections in which Democrats made significant gains in places Trump won in 2016 presaged success in battleground states for Democrats in 2020. But that’s probably not true. A November 2019 poll by The New York Times’s Upshot newsletter and Siena College found that nearly two-thirds of voters in six battleground states—including Michigan—who had voted for Trump in 2016 and for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 planned to return to Trump in 2020.23
George told me he planned to vote for Trump again. When asked whether he thought Trump would win Macomb County again, he said, “Anywhere that he won before I think he’ll win again. I don’t think anybody who voted for him wouldn’t vote for him again.” But George added a note of caution. “I don’t think he’s picked up any voters either.”
I heard something similar from former State Sen. Jack Brandenburg when I met with him at the Crews Inn in Harrison Township on Lake Saint Clair. A Republican, Brandenburg had spent six years in the Michigan state house and eight in the state senate. When I asked him how he thought Trump was doing, he said, “He’s rockin’ and rollin,’ man. They love him here. Love him here.”
Michigan State Sen. Jack Brandenburg in his office in 2017, (Jordan Allott)
Brandenburg explained the thing that matters most to Macomb County voters but, like George Martin, included a note of caution:
I myself think the guy’s doing great. The things that I’ve always deemed important—GDP, unemployment, trade, people vote with their pocket books. I have seen no slippage of his support, but I haven’t picked up on people coming over. And I think that’s very, very important. You’ve got to continue to grow your base.
As the week wore on, I was desperate to find at least one regretful Trump voter. So as a last-ditch effort, I wrote an ad on the politics page of Craigslist Macomb County, asking people to respond if they had switched their vote. I got just one reply, but it was illuminating.
“I was a lifelong Democrat until this last election,” wrote Don Soulliere in an email to me. “And to be honest everyone I know feels that way too! Every person I have talked to said the same thing: the Democrats have gone off the rails. They have lost a lot of their base.”
I asked Soulliere whether any of the former Clinton voters he knows plan to vote for Trump in 2020?
“Everyone I know!” he responded.
***
Donald Trump won white women voters in 2016, despite a long history of sexism and despite running against the first female major-party nominee in US history. An important question going into 2020 is whether Trump can replicate or even improve upon that success with this important group of voters. The question is whether the weight of Trump’s conservative policies, erratic governing style, and character flaws will alienate white women, and specifically well-educated suburban white women.
But breaking down voters’ policy preferences by sex is rarely illuminating. The surprising truth—surprising even though polls bear it out so consistently—is that women generally want the same things men do, even when it comes to so-called women’s issues. Consider abortion. When Democrats and journalists talk about the issue, it’s usually with the assumption that women support fewer restrictions on it. But according to decades of Gallup polling, women are as likely to think abortion should be “legal under any” circumstances as they are to think it should be “illegal in all” circumstances. And compared to men, women are actually more likely to support a blanket ban on abortion and less likely to support its legality “under any” circumstance.24 In my interviews, women were more likely than men to raise the Democrats’ embrace of late-term abortion as a barrier to their voting for Democratic candidates. In spring 2019, as Democratic lawmakers in New York and Virginia were considering laws to loosen restrictions on late-term abortions, at least half a dozen women raised the issue with me.
Consider the controversy over Brett Kavanaugh, who in 2018 became President Trump’s pick to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. As Kavanaugh’s nomination was being considered, several women accused him of sexual misconduct decades before. Many pundits predicted that women across the country would be sympathetic to the accusers and demand that Kavanaugh’s nomination be withdrawn or voted down in the Senate. But most women came down the same way men did—along party lines. I asked more than a dozen Trump-supporting women to respond to the accusations. I wasn’t surprised to learn that every one of them vehemently defended Kavanaugh. It never seemed to occur to the pundits that women have fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, and that they would fear a world where the men they love could have their personal and professional lives destroyed by an unproven, uncorroborated accusation.
During my 2019 trip, I attended a local business awards dinner called the Eddy’s in Port Huron, a small city just north of Macomb County near the Canadian border. A middle-aged woman named Crystal Mosher rushed over to me when she heard that I was a journalist researching Trump voters. Perhaps I’d found my regretful Trump voter, I thought. But it wasn’t to be. Mosher told me that even though she had been taunted on Facebook for supporting Trump in 2016, she was excited to vote for him again in 2020.
On this trip, I talked to several women who had not voted for Trump but who said their opposition to him had softened. One woman, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic in her mid-thirties, said her opposition to Trump had diminished from “12 out of 10” to “8 out of 10” on the strength of his policies. She said she’d never vote for a Democrat, though she didn’t elaborate on why. Still, she wasn’t ready to consider voting for Trump.
Later I spoke on the phone with a woman named Kate, a friend of a friend who lives in Macomb County. Kate grew up in Upstate New York, and moved to Michigan more than a dozen years ago. Kate and her husband, who works for General Motors, have two grown children. Kate told me she had initially supported John Kasich in the 2016 primaries, before ultimately turning to Trump. “My vote was for Trump but it was also anything but Hillary,” she said.
“He’s a savvy businessman,” she said. “And I believe if he can manage all of his assets and companies and be as successful as he was, he certainly can help the country. I believe in taking care of vets before people that are here illegally. If I share that with a Democrat, I’m evil. Well, so be it. I guess I’m evil.”
I asked Kate whether there was anything Democrats could do to win her vote.
“No, I’ll be honest. No,” she said. “And I’m not a far-right Republican. I just feel like a lot of Democratic policies are leaning toward socialist policies, and I’m not going down that road. I’d venture to guess that I’m not alone.”
That’s not to say some women I met weren’t reconsidering their support for Trump. An example was a woman named Megan, whom I met in 2017. A middle school principal and teacher in her late thirties, Megan had voted for Trump in 2016. But during our initial meeting in July 2017, Megan was already starting to have second thoughts. She was nervous that Trump was trading grade-school taunts over Twitter with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
The following year, Megan invited me to a chocolate fondue party at her parents’ home near Grosse Pointe, just south of Macomb County along the shores of Lake St. Clair. Roughly a dozen family members were present—mostly aunts, uncles, and cousins. Megan and I were the youngest in the group, and the mood was somewhat somber because Megan’s mother had recently died. Megan’s family is Catholic, and the walls of her parents’ home were adorned with religious icons—crucifixes, angels, saints, and the like. A prayer was said before the meal, and then each family member took his or her turn sharing a memory of Megan’s mom. Chatting with Megan’s family after dinner, I sensed that most were Trump voters.
One uncle said he worked for the city government in Dearborn, where more than a third of residents are Arab American, the largest proportion of any city in the US. He told a series of stories of Middle East immigrants gaming America’s welfare system, shaking his head as he relayed each story of fraud and abuse.
Megan reiterated her anxiety about Trump, as did her father, also a Trump voter. They had become weary of Trump’s unhinged behavior. “He’s an embarrassment,” Megan’s father said of the president. “I feel like I don’t want to leave the country ’til he’s gone.” Megan said she wished Trump would carry himself more like JFK. I suggested that President Kennedy was as much a philanderer as Trump. Megan agreed but said she didn’t care about the sexual stuff. At least Kennedy acted like a statesman, she said.
***
Donald Trump won Macomb County on the strength of his support from white working-class voters, to whom he had promised to restrict immigration and bring back jobs. But he also won by attracting the support of Chaldeans and other Middle Eastern Christians, who came out in strong numbers to vote for Trump. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians have resettled in the United States in recent decades, first to flee the chaos of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and more recently to escape the genocidal intentions of the Islamic State and other jihadist Islamic groups. About 120,000 Chaldeans live in southeast Michigan—the largest concentration of Chaldeans anywhere in the US.25
Chaldeans practice Eastern rite Catholicism. They have erected churches, started businesses, and become pillars of their communities. Chaldeans have also become reliable supporters of Republican political candidates, including Donald Trump in 2016. But shortly after Trump’s term started, some Chaldeans were regretting their vote for Trump. On my first visit to Macomb County, I corresponded with a Chaldean woman. She texted:
You are not allowed to use my name, but I can tell you that Trump won Michigan bc he lied to the Chaldeans saying he would protect Iraqi Christians. The churches asked everyone to vote for him. Chaldeans from east side went out in droves to vote. My mom has lived here for over 40 years and never voted. She went out that day and voted for him (angry emoji). That’s where your story is. He won by like 100k votes here right? … 80% (of Chaldeans) voted for him … All for the promise that he would protect Christians in the Middle East. Then made a deal with Iraq to deport Christians home. Not home but back to the county they were born in.
On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump regularly lamented the deaths of Middle Eastern Christians at the hands of Islamic jihadists, and promised that if he became president, he would protect them. In between talk of a Muslim ban and building a wall along the Mexico border, Trump assured besieged Christian minorities that his commitment was ironclad. But on June 11, 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested and detained 114 Detroit-area Chaldeans in immigration raids. Another 85 Iraqis from other parts of the country were also incarcerated.26 Most of the men (and a couple of women) had come to the US legally and acquired green cards, which were revoked after they were convicted of crimes. But these men and women had not been deported because Iraq refused to take them.
That changed soon after Trump became president. The Iraqi government agreed to accept the immigrants in exchange for being dropped from the list of countries on Trump’s travel ban. The immigrants were taken to a detention center in Youngstown, Ohio, where they awaited deportation for two years. Some of the detained immigrants had committed serious crimes, including murder and rape. But most had committed lesser, nonviolent crimes, paid their debt to society, formed families, and begun contributing to their communities.
Hadeel Khalasawi falls into the latter category. I learned of Hadeel’s story when I visited his family at Kabob and More, their restaurant in Hazel Park, just outside Macomb County. Hadeel had immigrated to the US as a child. When he was seventeen years old, he committed a nonviolent gun crime and spent the next nine years in prison. With his criminal conviction, Hadeel lost his permanent resident status. Still, he was never forced to leave the country, and over the next couple of decades he married, had two children, and became a stepfather to his wife Sumar’s daughter, Marcella.
Sumar, Marcella, and Hadeel’s two sons, Mariano and Malano, are US citizens. Sumar doesn’t protest the US government’s right to deport criminal immigrants who have lost their permanent resident status. But she says that it’s wrong that the government waited so long to do so. “They should have deported them from day one after they committed their crimes,” she said. “If they didn’t want them in this country, they should have sent them back, not let them go and after twenty or thirty years, come and snatch them away from us and break our hearts.… My husband did make mistakes. He paid for his crimes. They let him out. He started a family. And now they just came after we built this life together.”
What’s more, Sumar and other Chaldeans said, their loved ones would face near-certain death in Iraq.
“Eventually he’s going to get killed,” Sumar said of Hadeel if he is forced to return to Iraq. “My husband has tattoos of Christianity. He’s a target there after he goes there…. This is my home, this is his home,” she said of the US. “He came here when he was four. He doesn’t know nothing about Iraq.”
Sumar blamed the Trump administration for her family’s predicament. “Mr. Trump promised he would help the Chaldean community, he said this is his number one priority, to help them. We voted for Trump. All the Christian people, the Chaldean people, voted for him, that was the first thing he said, that he was going to help them. But he did the opposite.”
Hadeel’s stepdaughter, Marcella, said it “felt like a really big piece of me was stripped away” when her father was taken away in June. “He took a piece of all of us with him. He was the one to wake me up in the morning, take me out to eat.… We did everything together. He is my father, not biologically, but he earned the privilege to be my father.”
“I blame Trump,” Marcella added. “(Hadeel) has a family. All of them have families … and he took away the one thing that built the family, the father.”
Sumar added, “We respect this country; we love it. We pay our taxes. We voted for Trump because of the things he said, and he lied to us. I’m so embarrassed to say this, but our president lied to us.”
Later that day, I spoke with Hadeel, who called in from the detention center. Hadeel said he hoped Trump “could find it in his heart to look over this, and give us a second chance.”
The Trump campaign also repeatedly called for the creation of safe zones for persecuted people across the Middle East.27 Many Chaldeans and other Christians have been calling for a safe haven for Christians in the Nineveh Plain, the establishment of which many Iraqi Christians see as their only chance of survival there. During the Obama administration, Congress and the US State Department declared that a genocide is taking place against Christians and other religious minorities in parts of Syria and Iraq.28
Nahren Anweya, an Assyrian Christian activist in Macomb County, believes the Obama administration didn’t do enough to help persecuted Christians. She became an outspoken supporter of Trump. Anweya’s activism included speaking at several Trump campaign rallies in Michigan and appearing as a surrogate on national media outlets. Many Iraqi Christians voted for Trump with the expectation that he would champion the creation of a safe haven for their loved ones in Iraq, she said, “and I really hope he does not let us down.”
“We are still waiting,” she said when I met her at her home in Sterling Heights in 2017. “We hope that we are not let down. It’s a life-and-death situation for us. We still have hope for him, and we’re praying every day that he will follow through.”
***
On October 13, 2017, President Trump delivered a speech to several thousand people at the Regency Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC.29 The occasion was the Values Voters Summit, an annual gathering of conservative Christian activists from around the country. During his speech, Trump made a minor gaffe, referring to the governor of the Virgin Islands as the president of the Virgin Islands. That slip became the headline of many media outlets’ coverage of the speech, reinforcing the notion that Trump is not just ignorant but also that he doesn’t much care for brown people who live in US territories, such as the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico.
“Trump says he met with the president of the Virgin Islands. But that’s him,” a Time magazine headline mocked.30
But the media characteristically missed the real significance of Trump’s speech. For the thousands of attending Christian conservatives, the speech was a full-throated defense of their view of America’s Christian founding, “In America, we don’t worship government; we worship God,” Trump said to wild applause. “We know that it’s the family and the church—not government officials—who know best how to create strong and loving communities,” Trump said.
Trump repeatedly used terms like “Judeo-Christian values” and “radical Islamic terrorism.” He talked about respect for the flag and saying, “Merry Christmas.”
The speech was everything these activists could have wanted and more. More important was Trump’s presence at the event. Trump was the first sitting president to address that annual gathering of Christian conservatives.
President George W. Bush was a born-again Christian and conservative Republican. But he never attended the Values Voter Summit even once during his eight years in office, instead sending Vice President Dick Cheney or another surrogate. Like Hillary Clinton’s absence in the Rust Belt during the 2016 campaign, Bush probably felt he didn’t need to show up because these voters would support him regardless. But Trump didn’t take their support for granted. He showed up and told them everything they wanted to hear. They roared their appreciation. Trump attended the summit again in 2019, garnering a similar response.
According to exit polls, Trump won a record 81 percent of white evangelical voters in 2016.31 This baffled many experts, who couldn’t understand how a man who hadn’t darkened the door of a church in years and who seemed to personify many of the seven deadly sins could attract such robust support. But for most Christians, the calculus was simple and strategic. With Hillary Clinton, they knew their policy priorities—the appointment of conservative federal judges, the enactment of pro-life laws and executive orders, support for Israel, and the like—would be ignored. At least with Trump there was a good chance they’d get some of what they wanted.
And here’s the thing: They now feel Trump has come through. He’s delivered on the issues Christian voters care about most: two conservative, pro-life Supreme Court justices, hundreds of conservative lower-court judges, a slew of pro-life laws and executive orders, religious conscience protections, unbending support for Israel to the point that the US embassy is moving to Jerusalem, and more. Trump has also delivered rhetorically. He has shown up and made speeches at events, like the Values Voters Summit and the March for Life, and given unprecedented access to pastors and Christian leaders to the White House to pray with him. Many of these same Christian activists had been frozen out of the Bush White House. But Trump regularly invites them to events at the White House, including into the Oval Office.
This is why Trump’s character flaws ultimately do not matter that much to evangelical voters. Trump is delivering on policy in a way no other Republican president has done, and he’s coming through symbolically too. As the cop Catherine Bolder I met at the bar put it, “He’s a liar; he’s a bully. He’s a womanizer. But he’s the first president I’ve seen who actually had a prayer meeting in the Oval Office.”
This perspective was explained to me by Gayle, a woman I met at a Tim Horton’s in Macomb Township one rainy Saturday morning in 2018. Gayle, a church-going Catholic in her early thirties, had spent most of her life in and around Macomb County. Gayle impressed me as thoughtful and self-assured in her faith. When I asked whether she had voted for Trump because of his personality or policy, she was quick to answer. “I didn’t vote for Trump because of a(n emotional) connection,” she said. “It was policy.” Gayle frequents conservative Christian websites such as LifeSitenews.com and Catholic News Agency, where Trump’s speech at the Values Voter summit was covered in a much different way than at CNN or Time.
Trump’s verbal slip about the Virgin Islands wasn’t mentioned at all. But the content of Trump’s speech was. LifeSite News’s headline read: “President Trump: Our ‘religious heritage’ will be cherished, protected, and defended.”32
When I asked Gayle which of Trump’s policies she liked, she said, “I am very pleased with his Supreme Court nominations. Very pleased. So that’s the reason I supported him, and he’s coming through.” Gayle added that she was very likely to vote for Trump again in 2020.
