Lyman Momeny at his home in American Fork, Utah, in 2019. (Daniel Allott)
IN THE COURSE OF MY THREE YEARS on the road, I spoke with hundreds of people about President Trump. During in-depth interviews, I had a standard set of questions that I would run through. There was one question that tended to elicit the most revealing responses. If I was interviewing a Trump supporter, I’d say: “Tell me something about the president or his agenda that you oppose or dislike,” and if I was interviewing a Trump critic, I’d say: “Tell me something Trump has gotten right or something about him you admire.”
This was often the point in the interview when a free-flowing conversation suddenly came to a halt as my subject struggled to think of something—anything—that contradicted his or her overall assessment of the president. Very often, Trump fans just couldn’t think of anything he’s done wrong. I listened as church-going Christians told me that they just don’t believe Trump is a serial adulterer (he is, by his own public admission), congenital liar, and generally a man of low character. Either that or they assumed he’d asked God for forgiveness for his sins, even though Trump himself has said he has never sought forgiveness.
Here’s an example of how those conversations usually went. I interviewed a woman named Cathy in the summer of 2018. Cathy had contacted me a few months earlier after watching a documentary film that my twin brother, Jordan, had made about persecuted Christians in the Middle East. When I learned that Cathy lived in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, one of the nine counties I was studying, I asked her if she’d be interested in chatting the next time I visited. On a Friday night several months later, I arrived at the Historic Trempealeau Hotel on the banks of the Mississippi River. The next day I met Cathy for lunch at Beedles Bar and Grill in Galesville, about ten miles north of Trempealeau.
Cathy was representative of the millions of Christian conservatives who had helped deliver the presidency to Trump. Ardently pro-life and pro-gun, she had supported firebrand Texas Senator Ted Cruz during the 2016 Republican primaries before turning to Trump once he clinched the nomination. Two years later, any reservations she’d had about Trump had disappeared. Here’s how part of our conversation went:
DA: “Is there anything about the president you don’t like?”
Cathy: “I’m not a big cheerleader for Trump. But I can’t think of anything I don’t approve of. The tweeting doesn’t matter.”
DA: “Are there things that bother you as a woman of faith?”
Cathy: “Like what?”
DA: “Well, like his treatment of women, the extramarital affairs and porn star payoffs?”
Cathy: “They haven’t proven that that happened. And I didn’t follow it because I thought there was more important issues to follow. There are things that need to be accomplished. If he’s done it in the past, everyone has had some sort of conversion, and if he has then good for him. Do you want something you’ve done ten years ago, do you want that brought up, if you confess your sins? Should that prevent you from being a journalist?”
DA: “But do you think Trump is a good person? And do you think it’s important that we have a person of solid character as president?”
Cathy: “I think it is. As far as being a good person, I don’t know everything he does. As citizens do we know each and every thing that a politician does?”
At this point, I mentioned the Access Hollywood tape, a decade-old video published a month before election day. It contained an extremely lewd conversation about women between Trump and television host Billy Bush. At one point in the video, Trump brags that his fame and fortune allows him to “grab (women) by the pussy” and they wouldn’t even stop him. This was widely interpreted as Trump acknowledging having committed sexual assault.1 When the Access Hollywood tape was made public, some Republican officeholders withdrew their support for Trump. A few religious leaders also renounced their support, but most remained silent or offered only mild criticism. A month later, Trump won a record share of white church-going voters, including Cathy, a practicing Catholic.2
“So if the comments were ten years old,” Cathy said, “he could have gone to confession five years later if he was sorry for it.”
Then Cathy pivoted to her distrust of the media, questioning their ability to accurately report on Trump. “To tell you the truth, all the headlines you read, I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.
I mean, how much is true, and how much is not true? If I’m going to spend all of my time reading every little thing that they said about him, but I couldn’t keep my job then. I have an eight-hour (a day) job…. Also, where do I get the facts? How do I know that some story I read isn’t biased? I’m at the point now that I don’t believe everything I read because I don’t know if it’s the truth.
I asked Cathy to name some of her news sources. She recited a litany of popular conservative talk show hosts: Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Dennis Prager.
“I like Rush because he has a way of picking you up if you’re feeling down about something,” Cathy said.
I got turned off of public news with their treatment of (then-Wisconsin Governor) Scott Walker during the recall stuff. You hear all this, what’s true if you’re hearing one side? What is true? How do you know what’s true? I’d have to research myself to find out what’s true, because what’s being presented might not be true.
I asked Cathy whether she feels similarly compelled to verify what she hears on Tucker and Rush’s shows.
“Um, Tucker, the sense that I get from him is that a lot of what I hear is opinion,” she said. “But I just find it humorous. Some of the stuff I hear from him I’ve heard from other sources. Rush, usually if I hear something that sounds strange, I might Google it to find out what else is being said about it. But I might not search that hard.”
I don’t mean to pick on Cathy. She’s hardly alone in her tendency to gloss over Trump’s faults, to assume the best of him even against overwhelming evidence, and to cry “fake news” when confronted with information challenging her view of the president. What I found most interesting about Cathy was her assertion at the beginning of our conversation that she did not see herself as a huge Trump fan. “I’m not a big cheerleader for Trump,” she had said. And to be sure, Cathy did not come across as a pom-pom-waving Trump supporter. I had a difficult time imagining her donning a red “Make America Great Again” ball cap or joining Sandi Hodgden to wave Trump campaign signs at the passing traffic. But Cathy was clearly a member of the Trump tribe. Perhaps she was less cheerleader than loyal fan—the type of fan who refuses to see any fault in her own team no matter how poorly they’re performing on the field.
Other Trump supporters I met found more creative ways to explain away Trump’s less edifying qualities.
In 2019, I sat down with Lyman Momeny at his home in American Fork, Utah, a thirty-minute drive south of Salt Lake City. Lyman had moved to American Fork with his wife six years prior and became the owner of an escape room business. Lyman came across as self-assured and convicted in the way many older men are. “I am solidly in the constitutional conservative camp,” he said. In many of the interviews I conducted, I felt like I was asking people to ponder questions for the first time, as if they’d never before had an in-depth conversation about politics, values, and culture.
This was definitely not the case with Lyman. He struck me as someone who had thought about most of my questions many times and discussed them with friends. When I asked him whether he was proud to be an American, he immediately said, “I don’t think about it in terms of pride. I think about it in terms of gratitude.” Then he told me a story he’d probably told a hundred times: His life had started inauspiciously, born to alcoholic parents who had been married five times each. He was grateful that he’d been born in America, the only place “where somebody coming from my station in life could have had the life that I had. I now have six kids and ten grandkids, and we’ve been very blessed.”
Lyman was much less introspective when I asked him whether there was anything Trump had done that he opposes. “Yeah, I can’t think of a single thing,” was his quick response.
But then Lyman went further, portraying Trump’s flaws as part of a brilliant strategy. “Remember, most of the things that people don’t like about Trump is all calculated to distract,” Lyman offered. “So almost the entire Trump persona is and always was for effect. While people are busy complaining about him, quietly behind the scenes, massive amounts are being accomplished.”
Lyman Momeny at his home in American Fork, Utah, in 2019. (Daniel Allott)
The most important finding of my three years on the road was how few people have actually changed their minds about Donald Trump. With rare exceptions, those who supported him on election day 2016 still support him today, and the same is true of those who opposed him. That’s not to say that people’s views of the president have not changed; but where they have changed, the change has all been in one direction—toward a more extreme and more deeply entrenched conception of the president. This is the product of the increasingly tribalistic nature of American politics.
Tribalism is a way of thinking and behaving in which people are loyal to their group above all else; or, to put it negatively, it’s a type of discrimination or animosity based upon group differences. When it comes to Trump and our current politics, tribalism manifests itself in an inability to acknowledge any nuance when assessing the president or his policies. I’m picking on Trump supporters in the above examples. But I found political tribalism was just as common among Trump’s critics.
To progressives who couldn’t think of a single thing Trump had done right, I’d mention the FIRST STEP Act, a criminal justice reform law Trump championed and signed into law in 2018. Among other changes, it shortened mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses and eased a federal “three strikes” rule—which imposed life sentences for three or more convictions—and issues a twenty-five-year sentence instead. It also gave judges more discretion to depart downward from mandatory minimums when sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses. The law marked the first major reform to our criminal justice system in thirty years, and it had a disproportionate and positive impact on racial minorities, who comprise two-thirds of America’s prison population.3 What’s more, the law made changes to the justice system that liberals were advocating for many years before Trump was on the scene and, in most cases, before conservatives had embraced this issue.
Even so, many otherwise well-informed liberals that I spoke with had never heard of it. And perhaps that makes sense. They probably would not have heard much about it if they were watching or listening to their favorite opinion shows on MSNBC, CNN, or NPR. It might have complicated those outlets’ uniformly negative characterization of Trump as a vicious and irredeemable bigot. Meanwhile, outlets like FOX News and conservative talk radio barely mentioned it because reforming the criminal justice system has just never been a priority for most conservatives. Even the president was loath to talk about it at first, stating in Fall 2018 that he believed the issue was a political loser.4
This only began to change in February 2020, when Trump aired an entire Super Bowl campaign ad focused on this legislative feat. This signaled what could become an aggressive push by his campaign to increase its share of the black vote in 2020. But up to that point, the new law had gone largely unnoticed amid the Mueller-Russia probe, the border caravan crisis, the Ukraine whistleblower scandal, and whatever inflammatory thing Trump had recently tweeted out.
A few months after that new law was enacted, I met up with a young progressive lawyer named Ashleigh at a boutique coffee shop in Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles. Ashleigh came across as thoughtful, well informed, and conscientious—except when it came to anything that challenged her opinion of Donald Trump. When I asked her to name something positive Trump had accomplished, she mused for a few moments over the strong economy and Trump’s meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un before ultimately concluding with a laugh that she didn’t want to give the president any credit for that.
“What about the FIRST STEP Act?” I asked.
Ashleigh: “I don’t know anything about that (laughter).”
“You didn’t hear about it?”
Ashleigh: “No. I feel so ignorant …”
To her credit, Ashleigh said she would research the law. But then she said something I found typical of many Americans’ experiences since the 2016 election.
You just kind of reminded me that after the election I was really determined to expose myself to the full spectrum of things. And I feel like I’ve done the opposite. Like even now, I’ve been so burned out with politics that I haven’t even engaged with the primaries. I’m just burned out and I don’t have the energy.
Following Trump’s election, a newfound desire seemed to spring up among Americans to understand the people on the other side of the political divide. Initially, reporters were deployed to Middle America to discover what had motivated people to vote the way they did. There seemed to be a glimmer of hope that after the most turbulent presidential campaign in recent memory, Americans were ready to engage with one another to unite the country. For me, that hope dissipated soon after I started reporting from across the country. Many people I met had fallen out with friends or family members over politics, or had simply stopped trying to understand those with whom they disagreed. Many had retreated to their ideological bubbles, both in terms of the media they consumed and the people they associated with.
During a trip to Howard County, Iowa, I met a university professor who said he uses President Trump as a filter when deciding whether or not to befriend someone. “If I don’t know you and you come out with that Trump shit, I really don’t want to get to know you,” he said. That’s no easy task in a county that Trump won by 21 percentage points and where he still enjoys strong support.
A woman I met began crying as she recalled how political conversations with a group of longtime female friends at her country club had become extremely tense. The tension sometimes erupted into arguments over her exasperation with her friends’ unflinching support for Trump. The woman was a Republican, but she couldn’t see how her friends could support such a man. The group instituted a “no politics” policy during card nights at the club. Once when she announced, “Spades are trump,” another woman got mad and shouted, “There’s no politics at the table!”
A woman in Erie County, Pennsylvania, recalled how, right after the 2016 election, a neighbor had confessed that she was grateful so many of the people living around her had put up Trump yard signs. “Now I know who not to talk to anymore,” the neighbor had said. A man in Macomb County, Michigan, wrote to say that, “hardly anyone in my family speaks to each other since Trump took office. No more holiday parties. My uncles and I used to go fishing every weekend in the summer. Something we did for fifteen years. That came to an end too.”
But no relationship was more revealing of how tribal our politics has become than the friendship between Chris Chilson and his neighbor Todd Mensink, whom I mentioned in Chapter 1. I had first met Chris and Todd in June 2017 at Chris’s home in Lime Springs, Iowa, a few miles south of the Minnesota border. When I arrived for our interview, Chris and Todd were sitting in lawn chairs in Chris’s back driveway. After Chris showed me his gleaming Harley Davidson and we cracked open up some beers, we settled in for a lengthy political discussion. Despite having much in common—both are white men in their forties, born and raised a few miles apart—Chris and Todd were a world apart politically.
Chris, a self-described “big, big constitutional guy,” voted for Trump in 2016. A former sailor, Chris cares deeply about veterans’ health care. For the three years I’ve been Facebook friends with him, he has posted a daily video of himself performing twenty-two pushups to draw attention to the estimated twenty-two veterans who commit suicide every day.
Todd is a progressive sociology professor. He supported Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic nomination before casting a protest vote for Jill Stein, infuriated by how the “Clintonite Democrats” fixed the primary elections.
Chris, Todd, and I talked about a range of topics—from the low cost of living in Lime Springs to their pride in the town’s large municipal pool, which features a water slide. And of course we talked politics. Chris and Todd disagreed about a lot—about the core responsibilities of the federal government, about whether the Democratic Party had moved too far to the left or not far enough, and much more. But Chris and Todd spent a good portion of our discussion debating contentious political issues while also emphasizing whatever areas of agreement they could find. They agreed, for example, that Trump tweeted too much and that cable news deserved criticism for fanning the flames of partisanship.
When Todd was critical of progressives’ knee-jerk resistance to Trump’s nascent presidency, Chris said he had felt similarly when Republican leaders in Congress took a break-don’t bend attitude toward President Obama immediately after his inauguration, seemingly more determined to make Obama “a one-term president” than to give him a chance early on.
As I read over the transcript two years later, I was struck by how many affirming statements were peppered throughout the conversation.
“Yeah, I agree.”
“That’s true.”
“You’re absolutely right.” And so on.
Chris and Todd sometimes even finished each other’s sentences. At one point, when Chris began talking about the need to eliminate redundancies in the federal government, the following exchange took place.
Todd: “I agree with some of that. A lot of that, actually.”
Chris: “Isn’t that great? We come at it from two completely (different places), but we can find common ground.”
Todd Mensink and Chris Chilson outside Chilson’s home in Lime Springs, Iowa, in 2017. (Jordan Allott)
Todd: “That’s the only way to be. People take it way too personal.”
Chris: “You can be passionate about your opinions, but don’t be personal. Just don’t do it.”
Todd: “You can disagree with somebody and still respect them.”
I left my interview with Chris and Todd hopeful that at least these two very opinionated men who resided on opposite ends of the political spectrum could engage with one another with civility and mutual respect.
But when I returned to Howard County a year later, I discovered that Chris and Todd’s friendship had soured. First, I met with Chris and his wife, Sandy, at their home. Over pizza and beers—this time while sitting in lawn chairs in their front driveway—I asked the couple whether any of their relationships had become strained over politics. Here’s how that part of the conversation went.
Chris: “You unfriended Todd.”
Sandy: “I did unfriend Todd.”
Chris: “We were going at it pretty good on something (on Facebook) and (Todd) pulled the Nazi card.”
Sandy: “No, (Todd) lit a fire and walked away from it and let people threaten to burn the house and shoot you, and he didn’t shut the conversation down.”
Chris: “Yeah I guess that was it.”
DA: “What was the topic?”
Sandy: “Something political, I don’t know.”
Chris: “Yeah, that’s always what it is.”
Sandy: “He threw something out there, and Chris jumped on it.”
Chris: “And then a friend of his friends came along and made actual threats.”
Sandy: “And I was like, ‘Really? Way to light a fire and walk away.’ Unfriend! I talk to (Todd) when I see him. I just don’t want to … engage with that.”
Chris: “I kind of enjoy it. I don’t like when it devolves into personal threats, (but) I like lively debate.”
Sandy: “Todd apologized for it, but I was like, ‘I’m not going to expose myself to that.’”
A few days later, I caught up with Todd. He told me his version of events. Not surprisingly, he remembered things differently. In Todd’s telling, his falling out with Chris and Sandy wasn’t the result of threats made against Chris by Todd’s Facebook friend and Todd’s failure to defend Chris. Rather, it was about the very nature of truth.
“Chris and I used to be able to have debates over policy direction,” Todd said. “But we agreed on the facts, we just disagreed on what to do with them, where to go.”
Now we disagree on facts, and what are facts and what is truth, and the whole fake news. It gets frustrating and now I don’t post stuff on Facebook. I haven’t probably since October of last year. Because it became so hard, where everything I’m writing has to be backed up by so much. And then they can say, “Well, what about fake news? That’s just your interpretation of the facts.” I pretty much just stopped (engaging on social media) because I’m never changing anyone’s mind. I’m just banging my head against the wall.
When I learned that Chris and Todd’s friendship had cooled, I wasn’t surprised that a politically charged Facebook post was at the heart of it. I’d seen how provocative Chris can be on Facebook. His trolling posts make him seem much more unreasonable than he is in person. Despite all of this, Chris and Todd continued to engage with each other on Facebook. One interaction caught my attention.
For several weeks in October 2018, the nation was seized by a terror campaign and investigation into who had sent homemade pipe bombs to thirteen prominent Democrats and Trump critics, including former Presidents Obama and Clinton. When the police arrested Cesar A Sayoc Jr., a fervent Trump supporter who lived in a van plastered with pro-Trump stickers, many Trump supporters were incredulous. On Facebook, Chris mused over the possibility, given credence by Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and others, that the entire episode had been a false flag operation—a conspiracy engineered by liberals to make conservatives look bad ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. By entertaining this idea, Chris and other Trump supporters could disassociate from a member of their own tribe and even place him in the opposing tribe. Chris’s refusal to acknowledge that a Trump supporter could have committed the crime incensed Todd. Here’s how he responded in a Facebook comment to Chris’ post:
The right will never condemn their own. A ‘R’ by your name seems to override all integrity and decency. Anything and everything that is wrong is blamed as the Dems faults. Including sending bombs to two former Presidents in some sort of conspiracy theory.
In August 2019, Sayoc was sentenced to twenty years in prison after pleading guilty to sending the pipe bombs.5
The media deserve a large share of the blame for our deep political divides. Just as politicians win votes by stirring up their base voters, media outlets generate and maintain audiences by playing to people’s sense of outrage and grievance. The old newsroom saw about what goes on the front page was that “if it bleeds, it leads.” That’s still true, but the modern version is something more like, “if it’s going to trigger people, it leads.” And as the above example illustrates, social media has taken things further. Facebook and Twitter have a unique ability to bring out the worst in us by drowning us in outrage and toxic partisanship, cocooning us in our tribes. Its anonymity allows us to attack other tribes with impunity. A 2017 Pew study found that Facebook posts demonstrating “indignant disagreement” received nearly two times as much engagement as other content.6
With Todd and Chris, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they would have fallen out absent social media. Given my experiences with them in person, I had to conclude that they would not have. Chris and Todd aren’t alone. Politics in the Trump era is bringing out the worst in us. As the headline of a USA Today poll put it, “On Trump, we can’t even agree on why we disagree. But we assume the worst.”7
People are purging their friend groups of anyone outside their political tribe. Trump administration officials have been refused service and harassed at restaurants. And it is not uncommon for opinion pieces to appear with headlines such as, “No, we don’t have to be friends with Trump supporters.” The author of that article argued, “When they go low, stomp them on the head.”8
A 2017 Pew Research poll found that 35 percent of Democrats said that finding out that a friend had voted for Trump would put a strain on their friendship.9 Interestingly, only 13 percent of Republicans said the same about learning that a friend had voted for Hillary Clinton. The differential there is striking, suggesting that Trump supporters are at least somewhat more accustomed to hearing or engaging the opposing view—maybe not surprising, given that anti-Trump views are dominant in most mainstream media.
I learned firsthand just how tribal things could become on social media. A few months into my reporting, I launched a Facebook page called “Into Trump’s America” with the goal of promoting my articles and videos and perhaps bringing about lively debate about what I was finding as I traveled across the country. Unfortunately, the page immediately became a silo for Trump supporters, with the most tribal ones being the most vocal, showcasing their blind loyalty to Trump. I often posted photos of interview subjects, accompanied by quotes or brief stories about them—sort of like Humans of New York for Trump’s America. Any pro-Trump post would be liked and shared hundreds or even thousands of times. But if the quote or story was perceived to be even mildly critical of Trump, dozens and sometimes hundreds of commenters would lay siege, often with ad hominem attacks. It made me feel awful. On several occasions, I apologized to people I’d interviewed, who I knew would see the comments. I considered closing the page, but I kept it going because I deemed it a useful way to understand the Trump tribe.
One post featured Darryl Howard, a black man in his late twenties whom I had interviewed several times over multiple visits to southeast Michigan. In a post from the summer of 2018, Howard explained his reasons for moving from Macomb County, Michigan, back to his birthplace a few miles south in Detroit. Here’s the post:
I was born in Detroit. My parents moved me to Macomb Township, and we stayed there for fifteen years. And during the last election, I decided that my family would be better off in a new county. We just didn’t really feel … I don’t want to say we felt unsafe, because we didn’t feel unsafe. We felt fine. It was just, I didn’t want the ideologies of Trump being portrayed to my kids. My daughter, she was going into the first grade, and they had a mock election in the classroom. It was in kindergarten. Trump won the mock election in her class. That made me think. I didn’t want her growing up in this age, in that culture, with his ideologies.
I included a photo I had taken of Howard, smiling at the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit where we had met for our interview.
Darryl Howard at the Renaissance Center in Detroit in 2018. (Daniel Allott)
As soon as I posted Darryl’s photo and quote on the ITA page, the tribal arrows came thick and fast. Here are just a few of the seventy-three responses.
Cathy Zornek: When your ideology takes over your brain, then you’re the problem. If you can find a better country and better leader, then leave no one cares, you don’t need to broadcast it on Facebook. You won’t find a better country than the U.S.A.
Judi Kays Degitz: Just don’t come back!
Martha Samudram Rah: Canada or Africa is waiting for you. Green grass there for you.
Gwen Spansel: Good one less disrespectful Socialist, Liberal!!!!!
Barbara Crumpler: Bye Bye you will not be missed
Barbara Tallent: Hope you are already gone, AMERICA has too many of your stinking thinking, bye!
Edward Thrift: Move farther away, maybe another country
Tom Wilson: Buh bye! Neighbors are happy, I’m sure! I know I would be! Now you got you grandstanding moments of fame!
Liz Miller: LEAVE! Go to Russia!!!! Jerk
William A. Brandt: Bye dumbass
Donna Edgerton: Idiot.
Jerome Webster: Treat you child to be a loser also. So sad!
Kevin Sabo: Donald Trump is a better man than you can ever be, regardless of his presidency. He’s given to the poor, flown dying young people to surgery around the world free of charge, helped minorities with employment, and hasn’t taken a single paycheck yet! Your ignorance is astounding fella. Go to Mexico or Kenya with Hussein.
It would be easy to write off these responses as being all about the inherent racism of Trump supporters. But I have little doubt that if I had posted the same photo of Darryl but with him saying something that reflected well on Trump, it would have generated extremely supportive quotes about Darryl.
How can I be sure? Because when I had posted a photo of Darryl’s friend George (a former sailor who’s also black) a week earlier with a mildly pro-Trump quote about reforms at VA hospitals, it prompted nearly as many responses, nearly all of them supportive of both Trump and George. Several were of the “May God bless you for your service” variety.
I’d also posted many quotes by white Trump critics, and they generally elicited just as much ad hominem vitriol.
So the disgusting reactions to Darryl weren’t about race; they were about tribe. To these Trump supporters, the problem with Darryl wasn’t his skin color. It’s that he opposed Donald Trump. And it was that he opposed Trump so much that he was physically moving away from a place where many Trump supporters lived. By rejecting pro-Trump Macomb County, Darryl had rejected the entire Trump tribe. So now the Trump tribe had to make it clear that they were rejecting him too.
What I found most disconcerting about the responses is how quickly these people rushed to the worst possible conception of Darryl simply because he’d rejected their tribe. Did the commenters care to know that Darryl was a hard-working real estate agent who was trying to help revitalize Detroit while providing for his young family? Did they know that he was a political independent who voted for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012?
It didn’t seem to matter to them. All they knew about Darryl was that he had rejected their side, so they went straight into attack mode. Search and destroy! If Darryl had overreacted to what life would be like for him and his family in Macomb County after Trump’s victory there, these comments probably only reaffirmed his decision to leave. In fact, Darryl himself commented on the post, writing, “Just to clarify. We left because, after the mock election the kids in my daughter’s class said they would not play with her because she was brown. Some of the comments here reflect that same mentality. I’m not surprised.”
With his move, Darryl was also demonstrating a sort of tribalism—a geographic tribalism that has become more and more common. More people are seeking out places to live near those who think and vote like they do. This long predates Trump. In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop wrote “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.” But it’s happening more and more now. Rural America is increasingly becoming the domain of Republicans and urban America of Democrats. Besides Darryl, several people I spoke to mentioned politics as the primary reason for moving to new areas. It’s actually a strange reason to move.
Historically, people have stayed in place, moving only for new jobs or educational opportunities. But today, increasingly, each tribe just wants to give the other a wide berth. Todd Mensink told me in 2018 that he was considering leaving Howard County, Iowa, over politics. Todd said he was heavily invested in his hometown and community, even serving on the Lime Springs town council. But something had changed when he moved back to the area in 2015. It was he who had changed, he explained, not his hometown. His education had made him a different person. He no longer understood his neighbors. He lamented that there was no longer any Democratic presence in the county, and that the people there think that, “everyone’s out to milk the system, which is unfortunate because these communities are exactly the ones that need these programs.” He planned to move to Waterloo, a relatively diverse, medium-sized city seventy-five miles to the south.
***
Few institutions in America are as tribalistic as its political parties. It’s common for politicians to lament today’s bitter partisanship and to wax nostalgic for a bygone era when moderates were in abundance and members of Congress mixed frequently and would come together for the good of the country. Even though such lamentations can become tedious, it’s true that in this age of tribalism people in politics step outside of their tribes at their own peril.
Braandon Davis found that out when he took over as president of Volusia County Young Democrats in Florida. When I met Davis at a Starbucks a few steps from the shores of Daytona Beach in late 2018, he told me the following story:
When I first started in a leadership role at this club, as president, I wanted to grow our club. So I invited the mayor of Port Orange to come and speak. I thought it would be a good way for people to find out about the club. The plan was to put it on at one of the local restaurants, and it’s a win-win for everybody. But then I got a call from higher ups, or different groups in the DNC locally, and they completely wanted to shut it down because (the mayor is) a Republican even though his son is a VYD (Volusia Young Democrats) member.
Davis explained to me that VYD is under the auspices of the Florida Young Democrats, not under the local Democratic executive committee, which is the organization the caller represented. Still, the warning had been issued. The Democratic official told Davis: “If you do this, we’re going to have to shun your club.”
“The official really used the word shun?” I asked.
“Yes that was the word he used,” Davis said. “And I was like, ‘You can’t (shun us), because we aren’t under your umbrella. But what purpose will it serve?’ We had a back and forth. Another lady who was running for a position in the local Democratic Party, she said the same thing…. So I held off on this idea,” Davis said. “This was my first time being in a leadership role, and looking up and seeing the foot come down on me, it was eye-opening.”
The political tribalism infecting our body politic manifests itself in other ways—in Republican politicians going silent or twisting themselves into rhetorical knots to defend every errant Trump tweet or scandalous remark. This is usually done for fear of facing a primary challenge or being pushed out of office, as many Republican lawmakers have been. They are right to be fearful. Most Republicans have learned that they have little to gain and plenty to lose by criticizing Trump. Many Republicans who have spoken out publicly against Trump are no longer in office.
I already told the story of Mia Love, the Utah congresswoman whose unwillingness to fully embrace Trump may have cost her re-election. But consider also the case of Mark Sanford. A little over a decade ago, Sanford was the extremely popular second-term governor of South Carolina. He was seen as a possible presidential candidate. Then for a week in 2009, he suddenly went missing, and it was revealed that he had secretly traveled to Argentina with state funds to carry out an extramarital affair, leaving his wife and four sons behind. Once the truth was exposed, Sanford stepped down and his political career seemed to be over. But South Carolina voters are a forgiving bunch, and they gave him a second chance. He was voted into Congress four years later in a special election, then cruised to reelection in 2014 and 2016.
Then in 2016, Sanford was critical of Trump, claiming he had “fanned the flames of intolerance” and had a tenuous hold on facts and the Constitution.10 For this criticism, Sanford drew a primary challenge in 2018 from state legislator Katie Arrington, who embraced Trump and made the primary election a referendum on Sanford’s criticism of Trump. Trump endorsed Arrington, tweeting of Sanford, “He is nothing but trouble” and “very unhelpful to me.” Sanford lost that primary by five percentage points.
The lesson? You can be forgiven for abandoning your family and your constituents for a mistress halfway across the world; mild criticism of President Trump, however, is unforgivable. And mind you, Sanford was not some vociferous “Never-Trumper.” He voted with Trump 89 percent of the time and applauded much of what Trump did. During the 2018 primary contest, he spent close to $400,000 on TV ads in which he told voters that he “overwhelmingly” supported Trump.11 But it just didn’t matter. In the age of tribal politics, any criticism at all is unacceptable. Why give aid and comfort to the enemy?
***
Human beings are tribal by nature. And tribalism is connected to feelings of belonging and solidarity, which are inherently good things. But taken to the extreme, tribalism prevents us from perceiving one another accurately. Tribalism means assuming the worst of those outside the tribe—about their intentions and their character. Tribalism means surrendering individual judgment. Tribalism doesn’t allow for nuance or context. It’s a zero-sum game. It requires complete allegiance to our tribe and complete rejection of other tribes.
Lyman Momeny strained to turn Trump’s flaws into a feature. “Remember,” he had assured me, “most of the things that people don’t like about Trump is all calculated to distract.” This allowed Momeny to defend his tribal leader’s most glaring flaws. At the same time, when I asked Momeny whether President Obama had done any good, he managed to turn the one positive thing he could think of into a negative. “I think he pursued the terrorist elements around the world fairly aggressively,” Momney said after a long pause. Then he added:
But I also think he did that so that he could get away with some of the other stuff he did, like the Iran deal. I think his head was always with the Muslim world. I think he favored them. And I think that he went after a few terrorist bad guys so that people could say he was even-handed. Generally speaking, eight years of Obama were a disaster for the country in every imaginable way.
You see what he did there? After giving Obama some credit for something he thought he’d gotten right, Lyman reversed his compliment by accusing Obama of doing it all just to distract from another bad policy. And to emphasize his tribal affiliation, Lyman added that Obama was a terrible president in every conceivable way.
In a tribal culture, those outside the tribe need to be dehumanized. They automatically become our enemies. Meanwhile, those inside the tribe are to be defended at all costs. As a last resort, as with the would-be mail bomber, we might argue that the offender was never really a member of the tribe to begin with; in fact, we convince ourselves that the whole thing was a conspiracy by members of the other tribe. An academic research paper found that 42 percent of the people in each political party view those in the other party as “evil.” The researchers even found that nearly 20 percent of Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals.” They further found that roughly 20 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans sometimes think the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition died.12
As I traveled around the country, it didn’t take long for me to realize that the tribalism had become so endemic and so toxic that I could accurately anticipate exactly how people would respond to political events as they unfolded. I knew that none of the evangelical Christians and female Trump supporters would have a bad word to say about Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh even after multiple accusations of sexual impropriety were reported. I also knew that no matter how high the Dow climbed or how low the unemployment rate fell, many liberals wouldn’t give the president any credit at all for the state of the economy. It became very easy to anticipate where people would come down on any issue. Where do you stand on Trump? That’s the only question I needed to ask.
By the end of 2019, as President Trump was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives, a poll found that the tribalism of our politics had reached its pinnacle. Ninety-one percent of Republicans approved of the job Trump was doing, while just 6 percent of Democrats said they approved. The 85-point gap was 20 points higher than the gap seen at that point in President Obama’s first term.13
In February, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney became the first senator to vote to convict a president of his own party in an impeachment trial. For this act of betrayal, Trump attacked Romney in a series of scathing tweets. Several Republicans members of the Utah state legislature proposed bills to recall or censure Romney. And Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Committee, withdrew an invitation to the former Republican presidential nominee to address its annual conference. “This year, I’d actually be afraid for his physical safety, people are so mad at him,” Schlapp said.14
***
More than a year passed before I finally got back to Howard County, Iowa. But in November 2019, I met up again with Todd Mensink, who had actually followed through and moved from Lime Springs to Waterloo. We met at a bar on a Sunday night. It was loud because the Green Bay Packers were playing on one of the televisions, and patrons, decked out in green and gold, were cheering the team on. Todd and I sat down at a booth away from the bar, and I asked him about his move to Waterloo. “My heart still belongs in (Lime Springs),” Todd said. “It’s where I was born and raised, and I owe a lot to the people of that town, and it’s a great community to grow up in.”
He stressed that politics weren’t the only reason he had moved. The much shorter commute to his job was also part of the calculus. But he reiterated that politics had played an important role. “The Trump election did play a pretty big part in my thinking, too,” he said.
I was definitely (politically) isolated there. When I have DACA students coming to my office, scared, after Trump got elected, asking, ‘Am I going to get deported to a place that I haven’t been to since I was three months old, that I have no living relatives at, I don’t know anything about the country, I don’t know anybody there?’ What am I supposed to do?
Todd said he didn’t spend much time with Sandy Chilson anymore. “The damage was done,” he said of the Facebook incident. Things were a little more complicated with Chris.
Chris and I, we don’t really talk all that much anymore since I moved down here. I don’t really respond too much on his Facebook stuff anymore because it’s pointless. It’s not pointless for me and Chris, but it’s not just me and Chris. Oftentimes there’d be so many other people that jump on that, and then if I try to explain it, I can’t tell you how many times that either I had to or he had to privately message other people and tell them to back off.
“That’s the dangerous part about Facebook,” Todd continued. “So what I did is, I just quit following him. I don’t actually see his posts anymore.”
It might seem obvious to some that Donald Trump has caused the current age of political tribalism. But that’s not quite correct. Trump did not create the divisions that are tearing our country apart. He embraced and amplified them, certainly. But Trump is more properly seen as a consequence of our tribalism, not its cause. The real causes lie elsewhere, in things that cannot be erased by an impeachment or an election. They’re embedded in many parts of American life. Everything about modern politics encourages such tribalism—increasing income inequality, seismic demographic shifts, declining social mobility and the class divide, partisan redistricting, and a badly broken media model that rewards expressions of outrage.
There’s virtually no trust in the media or in the capacity of any authority to judge fairly among competing truth claims. As Chris and Todd’s story demonstrates, social media amplifies extreme views and keeps people separated in their silos. Surveys show that public trust in nearly every societal institution—from the media and the political system to the courts and organized religion—has plummeted.15 When trust vanishes, tribalism flourishes.
And there’s one other reason for pessimism. It’s hard to come to any agreement when the values by which different tribes live are so strikingly at odds. In a 2018 Pew survey, a majority of respondents said that those who disagreed with them about President Trump also probably do not share their values.16 Only a year earlier, a minority of the public had felt that their political opponents probably did not share many of their values and goals. There are two crucial questions going forward. First, can Americans agree on at least some shared values? And if not, can we live together as a nation of people who embrace values that are at odds with one another?
I met up with Cathy again when I returned to Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, in 2019. As we sat at a picnic table at Perot State Park along the banks of the Mississippi River, I asked her whether she felt forced to pick a political tribe.
“Well, yeah because you’re not going to get anywhere if you’re not in numbers,” she said. “If you have certain values, you’re not going to influence anything if you don’t have people on your side, especially when you have people that are competing against your values grouping together.”
I asked Cathy to identify the people whose values compete against her own. She mentioned people who support gun control and abortion and those who exploit the welfare system.
“If it’s going to be tribal, I know the tribe I would stick with because the other one has nothing to offer me,” she said. “I guess it’s part of survival. I feel like if I’m going to retain my freedom to do what I want, I’m going to have to find other people with the same values, and I’m going to have to stay with them. What choice do I have?”
