I MADE MY LAST FORAY into Trump’s America in early March 2020. My plan was to spend two weeks traveling through Erie, Macomb, and Trempealeau Counties. I had chosen these three Obama-Trump counties for my final trip because they are located in the three states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin—that had provided Trump with the margin of his electoral college victory in 2016 and that forecasters have predicted will be equally decisive in 2020. By this point, I had developed dozens of reliable contacts in each county. I was eager to get their thoughts one last time on President Trump, the 2020 race, and the state of politics generally. As always, I’d be on the lookout for switchers.
On a sunny Saturday morning, I drove from my home in Northern Virginia and met Jim Wertz at the Erie County Democratic Party headquarters on State Street in Erie. Wertz had been elected county chairman in 2018. He’s young and smart, and, as a former Bernie Sanders supporter, he understands the importance of uniting the often-feuding progressive and establishment wings of the party. As Wertz had said after winning the chairmanship, “The first thing we have to do is unify the voters that we have.”1
I joined Wertz as he canvassed the homes of registered Democrats in a middle-class Erie neighborhood. He wanted to make sure voters were aware of the upcoming primary on April 28 (later postponed to June 2) and a new law allowing mail-in voting. Most of the doors Wertz knocked went unanswered, but a few people responded. At one door, a middle-aged woman appeared and said, “I really don’t have time to talk, but I can tell you I’m not voting for Trump,” before slamming the door.
At another door, a middle-age man said he was fond of Cory Booker and Barack Obama but unsure about Biden. He also said that while he hates the way Trump uses Twitter, he approved of how the president had handled the economy.
Wertz said something to the effect, “We still have you, right?” speaking of the Democratic Party.
“Yeah, I guess,” the guy responded.
At another door, a scruffy millennial answered and informed Wertz that he was enthusiastic about Bernie. Why? Because Bernie was promising “free health care and free tuition,” he said. “Well, not free, but you know what I mean.”
As we walked, I asked Wertz whether he was concerned that Sanders voters would refuse to turn out on election day if Biden won the Democratic nomination, which the former vice president was on the cusp of doing. Wertz said he was concerned, but he also said that the rift between progressive and establishment Democrats that developed in 2016 had narrowed somewhat: At least Bernie supporters weren’t protesting outside the county party headquarters, as they had done in 2016.
Wertz’s bigger concern was that national Democrats still seemed to take Erie for granted. He said that Rep. Tim Ryan and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke had visited Erie during the primary season, and that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign had at least returned his phone calls. But none of the other campaigns had visited or engaged. This reminded me of what then-Erie Mayor Joe Sinnott, a Democrat, had told me early in 2017: “Hillary did not come here. And it was noticed and it was talked about within the party and the voters. And as history now shows, a lot of the folks that you would have expected should have been Hillary voters went the Trump route.”
“You keep telling us we’re important, you keep saying Erie is important,” Wertz said with frustration of the Biden and Sanders campaigns and the national party. “But where are you?”
After knocking on a few more doors, Wertz and I drove out to the Erie suburbs. He had been told that Trump flags and banners had started popping up and wanted to check it out for himself. It’s easy to dismiss campaign yard signs and flags as measures of enthusiasm for a candidate. Academic researchers have tried to measure the effect; one study calculated that lawn signs are 98.3 percent useless.2 But many people I talked to across the country said that the sheer volume of Trump signs they saw in 2016—and the scarcity of Hillary Clinton signs—was their first clue that the polling was wrong and that Trump would have more success than the pundits had predicted.
It was early March—still early for most voters to start paying attention to the election. The only Democratic signs I spotted during my trip to Erie were “Tulsi 2020” signs in support of Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who hadn’t yet ended her long-shot bid. Wertz knew that the Democratic nominee would likely perform well in the city of Erie (where Clinton won every precinct in 2016)3 but that the two-thirds of the county’s population that lives outside the city proper would be decisive. So that’s where we went.
We visited a trailer park in Summit Township, just south of the city. There we saw two or three Trump yard signs, a “Keep America Great” banner, and a couple of “Trump for America” flags.
In nearby Waterford Township, we saw an elderly man wearing a red MAGA hat ambling into a restaurant. Outside one home, we saw a Trump flag with an eagle on it, though it was so tattered that it took us a minute to confirm what the flag said. And just down the road, we saw an enormous Trump flag waving outside a plumbing and excavation business.
Then Wertz, a journalist, had a question for me. He was truly baffled by the continuing support that Trump enjoyed among churchgoing whites and wanted to know whether I had any insight into why. I explained that Trump’s character deficiencies ultimately didn’t matter to most of them because he was delivering on the issues they care about most—abortion, religious liberty, gun rights, immigration, and so forth. Wertz still seemed perplexed. It reminded me of the conversation I had had with him the summer before when he said that many blue-collar workers had voted for Trump because “they’re caught up in what I like to call the ‘non-issues.’”
I asked him what those “non-issues” were.
“The guns and the abortion thing,” he said. “It’s a heavily Catholic area.”
“But are those really non-issues?” I asked. “They’re obviously important to those people.”
“Well not for those guys they’re not non-issues,” Wertz said. “I call them ‘non-issues’ because it’s not healthcare, it’s not the economy. It’s not the things that we really need to be talking about right now.”
Wertz’s casual dismissal of issues such as guns and abortion spoke volumes. It made me think that Democrats will have a very difficult time winning over rural and working-class white voters unless they come to understand that these “non-issues” matter most to these voters, and that it’s pointless to try to convince them otherwise.
That evening, I drove to LongHorn Steakhouse on Peach Street to have dinner with Dale and Darlene Thompson, the progressive couple I had interviewed on several previous trips. In each of our previous chats, Dale had said he strongly suspected that many of the Trump-voting co-workers at the tool shop where he is employed were beginning to turn on Trump. “I’m seeing a lot of regret at work,” he said this time, “a lot of people saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Every time Dale had mentioned his coworkers’ regret, I’d asked him if he would be willing to put me in touch with any of them. He had always demurred. This time, however, Dale said he’d immediately call his friend Dave, whom Dale told me was “as far right as I am left.” Dale said Dave had told him that he’d had enough of “Trump’s lying” and seemed ready to vote against Trump.
So as we waited for our dinner, Dale called Dave and spent several minutes explaining who I was and assuring him that I could be trusted. This reinforced to me how important it is to spend time with people to understand them—to cultivate trust and goodwill with my contacts.
I interviewed Dave the following day. Dave said he had voted for Trump more out of aversion to Hillary Clinton than out of enthusiasm for Trump. Even so, Dave felt Trump had “done a lot of good things that are helping people in need.… If he could just keep his mouth shut and let his record speak for itself.” Dave said abortion, religious freedom, and the Supreme Court were his most important issues—the very “non-issues” with which Wertz felt blue-collar voters were unduly preoccupied. Dave didn’t have anything good to say about either of the Democratic frontrunners. Bernie Sanders is too “socialistic,” he said. “I have worked too hard for what I have to give it away to someone who refuses to work.” And Joe Biden, he said, “doesn’t seem to be mentally all there.”
Though Dave said he was still undecided about how he’d vote in November, he thought the Democrats were too politically correct and appreciated what he called Trump’s “no-nonsense” style. “(Trump) is what the country needs,” he said. In short, he didn’t quite sound like someone who was about to abandon Trump. In fact, this Dave reminded me a lot of another Dave—Dave Neubauer, the Iowa corn farmer and registered Democrat. In both cases, I had been made aware of a Trump voter who had been complaining about Trump’s performance and told that it sure sounded like they were prepared to vote another way. Instead, both Daves turned out to have a lot of positive things to say about Trump and nothing good to say about the Democrats.
***
One day, near Perry Square in downtown Erie, I spotted a food truck called Curry Point. I walked over and saw a sign advertising “EXOTIC INDIAN CUISINE” and South Indian specialties, including, kara dosas, shrimp masala, chicken curry, and badam milk. I was a little surprised to see this truck in Erie. Most Indian restaurants in America serve versions of northern Indian cuisine, which tends to be milder. I wondered how this spicy and exotic cuisine was being received in this medium-sized industrial city.
Another food truck on the same block, selling typical American fare, had a long line. There was hardly anyone waiting at Curry Point, which gave me a chance to chat with the proprietor, a man named Sam. Sam told me that his wife, Rijani, actually owned the truck. Rijani, who was studying to become a registered nurse, was at home caring for the couple’s four-month old.
“She saved my life,” Sam said of Rijani. “She gave me new life after I lost a lot of money (in California during the 2008 financial crisis). “This is all hers,” he said of the food truck and business. “I want to succeed for her.” Sam said it was a challenge to introduce real Indian food to locals. But he still preferred Erie to New York City, his former home, where there was too much competition and too many regulations to succeed in the food truck business.
I told Sam what I was doing in Erie, and he volunteered his opinion. “Trump is a very good guy,” Sam said. “He’s fixing America.” Sam told me he voted for Obama twice but didn’t vote in 2016. In 2020, he added, he was prepared to vote for Trump.
As Sam and I were chatting, Erie Mayor Joe Schember walked by. I had interviewed Schember, a former PNC Bank vice president and a Democrat, twice before. He is regarded by many as much more engaged and responsive than his predecessor. Schember has been a constant presence at cultural events in Erie, such as Bosnian Iftar dinners, Nepali gatherings, and naturalization ceremonies. Schember and his staff were always willing to meet with me to share the city’s most recent plan to increase cultural diversity, develop the city’s downtown and bayfront, and attract more jobs and people to the area. And he was always visible. Once in 2019, I had attended a multicultural arts festival in downtown Erie and spotted Schember dancing along the parade path with an all-female Afro-Brazilian percussion ensemble.
Erie Mayor Joe Schember. (Daniel Allott)
But there is a tension in Erie between the desire to attract more college-educated young people and to incorporate thousands of “new Americans” and the need to address the concerns and challenges of long-time Erie residents. Many of these residents are stuck in a multi-generational cycle of poverty and sometimes feel overlooked or pushed out. Most Erie residents I spoke with had good things to say about Schember. But others worried that he and other city leaders were forgetting those left behind—including the jobless men I would always see roaming around downtown Erie. Schember believes bringing a community college to the city would help immensely, the nearest one being 100 miles south in Pittsburgh.
At the food truck, I asked Schember whether he had tried Sam’s South Indian cuisine and whether he liked it. “Yeah,” he replied hesitantly. “It was good—but a little spicy.”
***
I spoke with several progressive activists on this trip to Erie. At that point, Joe Biden was close to winning enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, and I wanted to get a sense for whether the activists thought Sanders supporters would vote for Biden against Trump.
The Cooperative Congressional Election Study estimated that 10 percent of 2016 Sanders primary voters turned to Trump in the general election against Hillary Clinton.4 A poll in March 2020 found that an even higher share of Sanders supporters—15 percent—said they would back Trump against Biden.5
Most of the Erie progressives I spoke with said they would vote for Biden, albeit reluctantly. One activist I interviewed at length was Jasmine Flores, a twenty-six-year-old Sanders supporter who had just been chosen to head the county party’s progressive caucus. Half-Mexican and half-Puerto Rican, Flores said that when she graduated from high school a few years ago, she “already knew” that the area colleges and universities were “off limits” to her. And as the oldest of her mother’s thirteen children, she seemed to think moving away for school was not an option either. Flores is one of the many Erie residents who could probably benefit from having a community college close to home. Instead of going to college, Flores had spent the last several years working and taking care of her grandmother. Then Flores ran for city council in 2019, an experience she found invigorating, even in defeat.
“Seeing how supportive the community was, and seeing how people were just so willing to write me a check for my campaign made me see how much people want change,” she said. Flores said that white residents would sometimes ask her where she was born. They wanted to make sure, not that she had been born in the United States, but that she had been born in Erie. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s nothing like Erieites, they love other Erieites,” she said with a laugh. “And they were like … ‘Where were you born? Here in Erie? Okay, so, you’re one of us.’”
Flores seemed resigned to Biden winning the Democratic nomination—and losing to Trump in the general election. “I feel like it was all part of the master scheme to begin with. … I feel like if we do Biden, we are going to lose to Trump again just because the younger generations don’t have anything positive to say about Joe Biden.” Flores may have been on to something. An April analysis of polls found Biden leading Trump among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds by 14 points—that’s 10 points worse than Hillary Clinton performed in an average of polls in the closing days of the 2016 election.6 I asked Flores whether she would vote for Biden in the general election. “When it comes to November, I guess I will have to step in line and vote blue no matter who, like every other person is force-fed to do,” she said. “But how is Biden going to be the best candidate if he can’t even do a seven-minute rally without (committing a gaffe)? We have a problem.”
“I still feel like a lot of Sanders voters who are not loyal to the Democratic Party will not vote,” she continued. “And I feel like you might see some of them even vote for Trump, which is sad to say.”
***
A couple of days later, I found myself at Key Note Guitar, a guitar shop in a lonely strip mall on Erie’s south side. The thing that I found most daunting during my three years on the road was entering places where I didn’t know a soul and trying to build relationships, trust, and goodwill. What I found most gratifying was to see some of those relationships turn into friendships. That’s what happened with Ricki Leigh and Trent Mason. I met Ricki, a sixty-something transgender woman who owns Key Note Guitar, at a harmonica concert Trent had invited me to in Upstate New York in 2018. We spent several afternoons and evenings listening to music at Ricki’s store, or listening to Ricki play guitar and Trent the harmonica and drinking Aberlour single malt Scotch, Ricki’s favorite brand of whisky.
Ricki was born in Erie, a decade younger than the next youngest of seven siblings. Ricki’s father was an alcoholic who left the family before Ricki was born, leaving Ricki’s mom, a nurse, to raise eight kids. “She worked her tail off just putting food on the table,” Ricki once said. “Cared for us all as best she could.” As a teenager, Ricki fell in love with the guitar and eventually started performing some local gigs. Eschewing college and the military, Ricki moved to California to play and teach for a couple of years before returning to Erie and buying a house about ten miles south of the city. It was a place where Ricki could get high and jam with friends in the peace and privacy of the countryside. After years of doing various jobs—cutting produce for local restaurants, working at a department store, selling cars and motorcycles—Ricki returned to music, started teaching guitar lessons, and opened the store.
“Every time in life, no matter how bad it got, it always turned around and got better because of music,” Ricki once told me. “I’d find a way to make money teaching or working in a music store somewhere.” A tattoo on Ricki’s left forearm reads, “Music is my religion.”
Ricki was very proud of Key Note Guitar and would sometimes send me photos of a new guitar or other musical equipment that had just come in.
I had met Trent at a Memorial Day BBQ hosted by Ali and Jasmine, the Trump-supporting Iraqi couple I featured in Chapter 8. In 2020, Trent began traveling the country, marketing and selling dog toys and seemed to enjoy it. He happened to be back in Erie while I was visiting, so we agreed to meet up.
When I arrived at Key Note, I asked about how business had been. Ricki started complaining about having gone through six employees in the last year-and-a-half. Most were either lazy or addicted to drugs, or both; the promising employees would stay a little while before moving on—a perfect example of Erie’s challenges. Trent and his friend Julie soon arrived, carrying a bucket full of mini Fireball bottles and Chinese takeout.
Julie, a lifelong Erie resident, is a local bartender in her thirties. She’s a registered independent who said she “dabbles in all the (political) boxes … almost to a fault.” Julie was mostly critical of President Trump but allowed that at least his election had shaken up the political system, which she seemed to regard as a good thing. She said her Irish Catholic family had been upset with her after the 2016 election for even suggesting that Trump might do some good. Julie felt that Trump couldn’t be trusted because he’d lived such a self-serving life. “How can we trust someone who’s always thinking about ‘How can I get mine?’” she said.
“I think he’s deficient in the qualities needed to be in charge of a group of people and to work for their greater good,” she said, adding that it frightened her that such a man was in charge during the emerging COVID-19 crisis. Even so, Julie was undecided about how she would vote in 2020.
Trent Mason, Ricki Leigh, and Daniel Allott at KeyNote Guitar in 2020. (Author’s personal collection)
Trent despised Trump but considers himself politically conservative. Like other Mormons, he seemed most bothered by Trump’s mendacity and casual cruelty. “I guess I’m ridin’ with Biden,” he said with resignation at one point in our discussion.
Ricki, a Bernie Sanders supporter, regularly railed against Trump and in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. According to several polls, most small business owners support this. Ricki, Trent, and Julie all appreciated Sanders’s willingness to take on the big corporations. Over the two years that I knew Ricki, Key Note Guitar always seemed to be doing fairly well financially. In 2019, Ricki said, “I just bought a second motorcycle because business was so good last year.” But whenever I suggested that it was due to a strong economy, Ricki would complain that many Erie residents weren’t benefiting and that real wages hadn’t increased in a long time. Ricki was certain that a recession was about to hit. This turned out to be prescient because a week or so later the Dow Jones Industrial Average would fall almost 3,000 points. It was the biggest one-day decline in the index’s history, as the economy started to shut down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
***
Looking back, it probably wasn’t prudent for me to continue on from Erie to Macomb County. At this point, the first case of the coronavirus had just been confirmed in Michigan, and more than 1,000 cases had been reported across the country. States were beginning to order residents to shelter-in-place. But I wanted to get a few more interviews in, not knowing whether I’d have another chance to travel if the country shut down. So I continued.
I visited Laurie and Rob Rasch at their Detroit-themed memorabilia store near Anchor Bay in New Baltimore. I had written a story about the Rasches and their store the year before. Laurie informed me that after the story was published, they had received several large orders for a ball cap featured in the article. The hat’s inscription read “Trump 2020: Elect that MF’er again!” Laurie also told me that their business had grown and that they were in the process of moving into a larger building across the street. I walked over there and met Rob, who told me how much of a hit those Trump hats had become. Some of the memorabilia shows were held in elementary schools, so Rob was reluctant to take the “MF’er” hats in.
But these parents are coming up to us saying, “Hey, where’s the hat, man? My uncle loved that hat for Christmas! My dad loved them!” We just did a show two weeks ago and (the Trump merchandise) out-sold our Detroit Pride hats by 35 percent. People were buying more Trump hats. When Trump outsells our product, that’s pretty cool.
Rob assured me that he was willing to produce hats for any candidate—Republican or Democrat—but that there just wasn’t anywhere near the demand for anyone but Trump. Rob informed me that he didn’t know anyone who had supported but since abandoned Trump. In fact, “I’ve met more people changing to jump on the train, especially after seeing him come to Michigan,” he said, referring to a campaign rally that Trump had held in nearby Warren a month earlier.
I asked Rob, who had never voted for president before voting for Trump in 2016, whether there was anything that could happen before election day to make him not vote for Trump.
“No,” Rob said flatly. “I’m so happy.”
I also met up with Catherine Bolder, the Obama voter-turned-Sanders-voter-turned-Trump supporter, at Parker’s Hilltop Brewery in Clarkston, where we had met for two previous interviews. The restaurant was sparse because social distancing measures were starting to be instituted. Catherine floated a conspiracy theory that the Chinese had spread the coronavirus deliberately in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. She predicted that the crisis would be over by mid-April and that Trump would “wipe the floor with” Joe Biden in November.
“Everybody’s in love with (the economy),” she said. “Everybody’s doing really well.”
Catherine and her two sisters had just bought a new house. She also informed me that one of her sisters, Clara, also a two-time Obama voter, was considering a vote for Trump after sitting out 2016. At dinner at Catherine and Clara’s home a few nights later, Clara told me that she voted for Obama because she felt it was time for America to have a black president. Clara had a hard time articulating exactly which of Trump’s policies she supported, eventually settling on immigration. But she liked that Trump wasn’t a typical politician. Although she wasn’t 100 percent committed to voting for Trump, she said she was strongly leaning that way. (Later, in May after the pandemic had been raging for two months, I texted Clara and asked whether she might be tempted to vote for Biden. “Not one iota,” she replied. “Mr T has my vote!”)
Rob and Laurie Rasch outside their new store in New Baltimore in 2020. (Daniel Allott)
The most illuminating part of my discussion with the Bolders wasn’t about politics, but about race and how their family grappled with it. I asked Clara whether Catherine’s marriage to her late husband, who was black, had changed her views on race.
“After a while it did,” Clara said.
At first it was, you know, “That’s not the way it should be. She’s supposed to marry someone of our race, ethnicity.” But then I saw how another family member married someone of our race and treated her like a piece of shit. And I saw how (Catherine’s husband) treated her like a queen, and I thought, I cannot judge this man’s character by his color.
“I was afraid to tell anyone in my family because I thought they’d reject me,” Catherine said.
But then I just got to the point where I didn’t care. I remember my mom calling me up and saying, “What will people think?” Well, I said, “When people pay my bills, they can tell me what to do.” I think my marriage changed all of my family’s view. I was willing to give up my family. I think they ended up loving him more than me because he was a good person. He made me a better person, really.
I also talked to George Martin, the young black Obama-Trump voter I had met earlier in Detroit. George didn’t believe Biden would come close to replicating President Obama’s success among black voters in southeast Michigan. Black voters he knew had noticed Biden trying to ride Obama’s coattails once again, name-dropping Obama at convenient times, especially when talking before black audiences, then distancing himself from his former boss when it suited him, such as on the Obama administration’s deportation policy.
Catherine and Clara Bolder. (Author’s personal collection)
“Let me put it bluntly,” George said:
In the city of Detroit, voting for the first black president is more important than getting Donald Trump out of office. To see Obama in office, that’s to see the black man at the highest. We made it. We can actually do anything in this country. You don’t get that by voting Donald Trump out of office. You just don’t.
***
On March 12, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shuttered all K–12 schools in Michigan in an effort to slow the spread of Covid-19.7 On the same day, I joined a group of about 100 Republicans at Enchantment Catering & Banquet in Shelby Township for the Macomb County Republicans’ monthly meeting.
In the last chapter on tribalism, I wrote that I knew where just about everybody would come down on any issue of the Trump presidency simply by asking them how they felt about Trump. Even a pandemic, it turned out, was not immune to this tribalism. Revealingly, all of the Democratic meetings I had planned to attend in Michigan had been cancelled. But most of the Republican meetings were still on. At the time, Trump was minimizing the danger from the virus, insisting that it would simply “disappear.”8 Conservative media were largely following Trump’s lead, using words like hoax and hysteria to describe the virus and the attention surrounding it.9
It was clear from the moment I walked into the banquet room for that monthly meeting that no social distancing was going on, even though most of the attendees fell into the over-sixty demographic most vulnerable to the virus’s effects. People eagerly shook hands, embraced, and stood and sat close to one another, seemingly unconcerned that a once-in-a-century pandemic was spreading across the world. Some people even joked about it. “You don’t have coronavirus, do you?” attendees asked one another with a chuckle before shaking hands or embracing.
I spotted a table at the back of the room, empty except for an older man in a MAGA hat. I sat down, scanned the room, and saw a few familiar faces from meetings I’d attended in previous years. I didn’t want them to notice me because, at a meeting the year before, I had mentioned that I was a journalist and they’d nearly forced me to leave. So I tried to keep a low profile. I struck up a conversation with the man in the MAGA hat. He immediately began talking about an incident that had made news two days earlier. Joe Biden had visited a Fiat-Chrysler auto plant in Detroit and gotten into a heated exchange with one of the workers. The worker had accused Biden of wanting to take away his Second Amendment rights.10
“You’re full of shit. I support the Second Amendment,” Biden had responded. Don’t be “such a horse’s ass.” Biden had also mistakenly referred to AR-15 rifles as AR-14s.
But the worker wasn’t having it. Standing inches from Biden, he told the former vice president that he’d seen an online video claiming that Biden didn’t support the Second Amendment. It was an interaction that surely would have made Jim Wertz shake his head. Biden was there to talk about the economy and his record as vice president. “You made me a hero when I was getting a lot of heat for the (auto) bailout, the rescue,” he had told the workers a few minutes earlier. But this worker wanted to talk about guns, not about how Biden had supposedly saved his job.
Reinforcing gun enthusiasts’ anxiety about Biden, a few days earlier Biden had appeared to pledge to name former Rep. Beto O’Rourke to, in Biden’s words, “lead (the) effort” to “take care of the gun problem.” O’Rourke, who had just endorsed Biden for president, had become infamous among gun-rights supporters during the presidential debates for pledging to confiscate certain types of guns. “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke had said on the campaign trail.11
Almost everyone I spoke with in Michigan mentioned Biden’s confrontation with the autoworker. Many shook their heads at Biden’s response. The guy in the MAGA hat at my table was certain that Trump would win reelection because he had done exactly what he promised. “First president since Reagan to do that,” he said.
A couple of minutes later, everyone was asked to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer, “the most important part of the evening,” the emcee said. The woman who said the prayer asked people to pray for President Trump, Vice President Pence, and their advisers. Then she prayed about the coronavirus, asking God to help the country overcome not the virus itself, but rather the “hysteria” surrounding it. I looked around the room and saw people solemnly bowing their heads and a few nodding in approval. Nobody seemed struck at this unusual invocation. Hysteria seemed to be the word of the evening: It was uttered at least a dozen times to describe the virus and the atmosphere surrounding it.
Mark Forton, a MAGA-hat-wearing county party chairman, got up to speak next. “Let me first make a few comments about this disaster,” Forton, started.
“Hysteria!” someone cried out.
“I’m seventy-three,” Forton said, “and I’m not afraid of this thing.” Forton claimed that the virus was part of a conspiracy between “communist red China,” the Democrats and “half the Republicans and even Wall Street” to “totally disrupt the economy” and “take down Trump.”
“That’s about it for my chairman’s report,” Forton said, before assuring people that their Trump yard signs were in the mail.
A series of other club officers, local elected officials, and candidates each got a few minutes at the podium. One of them mentioned Michael Taylor, the Republican mayor of Sterling Heights, who had just endorsed Joe Biden for president. The mention of Taylor’s name was like throwing chum into shark-infested waters.
“This guy has got to be excoriated by the party,” someone yelled of Taylor.
“He was never a Republican!”
“Get rid of RINOs (Republicans In Name Only)!”
“They gotta go!”
“There are people who come to this meeting who I know are RINOs,” someone stood up and yelled. “Get out!”
Then another party leader named Stan Grot got up to talk. He took the vitriol to another level. “Please don’t give in to the hysteria by the media,” he said. “Panic! Panic!—That’s their goal.” Then Grot excoriated Fox News contributor and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who two days earlier had told Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel to “go to hell” during an on-air exchange. Romney McDaniel had alleged the Democratic primary process would be “rigged” against Bernie Sanders.12
“Donna Brazile, that lying filthy skunk!” Grot yelled. Grot also seemed scandalized that Biden had referred to the autoworker as being “full of shit.”
“This guy’s running for president with that language?!” Grot said without irony. “Joe Biden is full of shit!” After all that talk of filthy skunks, liars, and shit, Grot urged everyone to go home and say a prayer with their families.
Later, there were candidate speeches and more discussion about the virus hysteria and the evils of socialism. One guy railed against college “being forced down our throats;” another thanked the group for “coming out in the middle of this coronavirus hoax;” a third said, “By the way, this coronavirus, it was made in China—it ain’t gonna last.”
The whole thing was quite surreal, and also quite sad. These were some of the most vulnerable people. But they didn’t seem to care. At this point, whether you took the virus seriously or not was treated as a political act—as a way of signaling which side you were on, which tribe you were in. Whether you felt that the virus was an international pandemic that exposed Trump’s unfitness for office or part of a media-created hysteria to weaken Trump ahead of the election depended on where you stood on Trump. And of course there seemed to be no room in between those two extreme views. Part of me understood where these Republicans were coming from. Many Democrats and journalists no doubt did see the pandemic as a chance—perhaps their last chance—to deny Trump a second term in office.
Later on, the wearing of medical masks became a symbol of the political divide over the coronavirus, with liberals wearing masks to signal how seriously they took the pandemic and to demonstrate they were willing to sacrifice personal liberties and convenience to save lives. Some conservatives, meanwhile, refused to wear masks to show that they would not give in to the hysteria surrounding the pandemic or the creeping authoritarianism of the nanny state. The conservative reaction to the virus underscored how little credibility the media has in America. Polling has found that public trust in the media has reached an all-time low and that Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to trust the media.
There’s a boy-who-cried-wolf effect that’s developed between the media and the public. Conservatives and other Trump supporters have no trust in the media to be neutral arbiters of what is and what is not newsworthy. Virtually every media outlet has an almost comically anti-Trump bias. As Alan Taylor, a Baptist preacher in Robeson County, North Carolina, had put it to me about Trump and the media in 2017:
I think any time that, with present company excluded, the media comes after him, it makes him stronger. It’s like a Godzilla movie. The more he’s attacked by the media, the more powerful he becomes because no one believes the mainstream media in flyover country. Everyone can spot it from a mile away. So, whenever they attack him, that makes him stronger.
According to one analysis of Trump’s first two years in office, 90 percent of network news coverage of Trump was negative.13 Late-night comedians and shows such as Saturday Night Live heap mounds of abuse on Trump on a daily basis, treatment that is made even more glaring given how sycophantic most of the media were toward Obama. The problem is that if everything Trump does is so terrible, then when Trump does something truly terrible, nobody will notice because the media has no credibility left. Nobody believes a congenital liar, even when he’s telling the truth.
Democrats certainly weren’t immune from the coronavirus tribalism. A couple of weeks earlier, I had attended a house party with a group of seven or eight Bernie Sanders-supporting progressives in Salt Lake City. It was an enjoyable evening spent with people whom I’d interviewed and become friends with. But my hosts spent part of the evening blaming Trump for his slow response to the pandemic, singling out his naming of Vice President Pence to head up the White House Coronavirus Task Force. They suggested that Pence’s religiosity disqualified him from leading the government’s response to the public health crisis. They also slammed Trump for closing off travel from China, a move they, like most of the anti-Trump tribe, called bigoted and racist. Joe Biden criticized the president’s “xenophobia” and “fear-mongering” in making the decision.
Later, the consensus became that this was one of Trump’s better decisions in the early days of the government’s response to the pandemic. Biden would later criticize Trump for moving “awfully slow” to close off travel from China.
I don’t know whether anyone from that Republican meeting subsequently tested positive for coronavirus or if anyone died from it. But the virus had already been spreading in the area for at least a week. According to a Washington Post story, at a bar a few miles south in Detroit the weekend before, at least seven people had been infected and several died.14 A month later, southeast Michigan would become an epicenter of the virus, with more than 3,100 confirmed cases and more than 200 deaths.
But back at Enchantment Catering & Banquet in Shelby Township, nobody seemed at all concerned. Perhaps the attendees felt that their herd mentality granted them herd immunity from the virus. Near the end of the meeting, an elderly man stood up. “I had coronavirus,” he announced solemnly before pausing, for effect. “But I had chicken soup for lunch, so I feel fine!”
