The umpteenth Republican debate was being held in my hometown, so naturally, I was going to be there even if my Trump ban was still in full effect. The networks couldn’t get enough of these dung tosses. The ratings were yuuuuge! The final four contestants in the reality show of all reality shows were: Big Don, Little Marco Rubio, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, and Doddering John Kasich.
The attendees were party insiders, corpulent white men whose bottom shirt buttons wouldn’t keep buttoned, along with their skeleton spouses decorated in pearls and hairspray, and an outlaw biker gang. There went Bill O’Reilly. Papa Bear! Christ, he looked like hell without makeup—pallid, the color of a fish’s underbelly.
Outside in the blistering cold were a thousand protesters, the New Black Panther Party, New Era Detroit, Black Lives Matter, white hipsters, anarchists. Cops stood with their arms folded, creating a human barricade for the well-dressed white people to scamper inside.
The protesters were loud. Really loud. You could hear their chants and the beating of buckets echoing through the baroque foyer of the Fox Theatre.
Racist clown get out of town!
Dump Trump!
Black people seemed to universally despise him. Trump had not offended them, not directly anyhow, not as I remembered, but he had offended everybody else from Mexicans to Muslims to those with handicaps, so as far as black people were concerned, he hadn’t left much to the imagination.
Still, he was going to need some black people to vote for him if he was going to win the White House. Otherwise the numbers didn’t add up.
Trump boldly predicted that he would win the black vote. I’m not sure what he meant. Win 51 percent of all blacks who were going to vote? Or win the vote of one single, lonesome, solitary black person? After all, Trump was polling at 0 percent among blacks in some Rust Belt states. To put that in some perspective . . . you can’t get lower than 0 percent.
I shouted the question to the Orange Whip after the debate in the ornate hall where the media goat fuck had commenced.
Hey, what are you going to do to get working-class black people into your tent?
He looked at me askance, frowned, and then held his hand up for the entertainment correspondent from Extra to inspect. Little Marco had been suggesting that Trump had smaller-than-average fingers, which meant he probably had smaller-than-average genitalia.
See? Look! Ha! My hands are fine, Big Don crowed. And another thing, I can tell you, it’s fine. No problems down there.
So I put the race question to his advance guy, George Gigicos, a balding, dumpling-shaped man who served simultaneously as Trump’s microphone adjuster, pillow fluffer, and bullet catcher.
You know, Gigicos said, I was thinking the same thing about black people, and I have an idea. I want to pitch him a town hall–style meeting at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
Really?
Yes, think about it. It’s New York, his hometown. And black people there understand him.
Man oh man, I said, handing him my card for the third time that campaign season. That’s really gonna work or that’s really not going to work. Either way, give me a call. I gotta be there.
He promised he would. And then broke his promise.
The Apollo mission never got off the ground. Maybe Chicago had something to do with it. A week after the Detroit debate, Trump’s rally at the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago was called off after a near riot erupted between Trump supporters and protesters. Among the fists and slurs and spitting, a black man bum-rushed the stage, ducking and dodging two beefy white men attempting to detain him. The black man was my old pal Jedidiah Brown, the South Side antiviolence activist now in the middle of the violence, flailing around like Muhammad Ali. I don’t blame Brown. Trump was siphoning off all the media attention, and an activist had to do what an activist had to do to get some face time. In any event, Brown had more energy and was more nimble than the Clinton campaign.
FLINT, MICHIGAN (MARCH)—
Bernie and Hillary debated in Flint three days before the Michigan Democratic primary. She had a commanding lead, some pollsters giving her a 99 percent chance of victory. Bernie was an old dishrag as far as the media was concerned: sturdy, useful, but hardly a cocktail conversation piece. Hillary was their woman.
From the outset of the debate, it was obvious that Clinton was taking her talking points from Michael Moore, the left-wing filmmaker and long-gone Flint native son who rediscovered his hometown two long years after it had been poisoned. Flint was a race crime, Clinton insisted, and the ringleader was the Republican governor who had poisoned the black children. And that white governor needed to resign.
I sat watching the debate pregame show in the White Horse Tavern, a local Flint watering hole near the courthouse. I drank beer from the bottle, not wanting to risk dishwater or ice cubes.
Why don’t we blame the governor for the horse too, I shouted. I was referring to the giant plastic steed that used to stand on a thirty-foot stanchion out front of the establishment and had blown over the month before.
No doubt, sneered a white woman tending bar.
Politicians of any stripe had few fans among the beleaguered citizens of Flint. Clinton, among the most privileged of white people in America, was making Flint a case of race. Days before the debate had commenced, she had commercials running with her in the pulpit of a local black church.
It’s a civil rights issue, she lectured from the blue debate stage. We would be outraged if this happened to white kids, and we should be outraged that it’s happening right now to black kids.
Never mind that more than one-third of Flint was white. The bartender’s children were white. Clinton was peddling identity politics, stitching together a quilt of minority interests, forgetting that everybody has an identity and grievances. White people had babies too. And they noticed they’d been left out of her talking points.
Bernie the dishrag, who was down 25 percent in some polls, won the Great Lakes State three days later. He even took a third of the Flint vote. It was an upset of stunning and historic proportions. Clearly, there was something wrong with the pollsters, their methodologies, the people they were talking to.
Michigan, a state heavily populated by working people of all colors, was clearly in play. Class was an all-encompassing cloak. Hillary had gotten blown up, but nobody was asking what was up with the polls that had her winning.
FLORIDA (FEBRUARY/MARCH)—
We were on the I-4 corridor in central Florida, heading toward Daytona. Trump would arrive a week later with the media right behind him. He was getting all the press. Five billion dollars’ worth of free airtime. The media was loving him. Before him, nobody was reading or watching a thing. Besides, their gal Hillary had it in the bag. All the polls said so.
Say something stupid, Don!
Back in the real world, Danny and Becky were cleaning the infield outhouses the morning after the Daytona 500. Garbage was strewn everywhere. The stench was godawful and turkey buzzards had arrived in the wake.
Becky and Danny, a white couple, did this job every year. They did it without rubber gloves or smocks, earning minimum wage, except Becky didn’t know what minimum wage was exactly.
I think it’s nine dollars. Innit nine?
No, Danny corrected. It’s seven-sixty-seven.
Seven-sixty-seven? Wow, I didn’t know that.
Right there, Becky realized she’d taken a 30 percent pay cut.
They were economic refugees, white, undereducated, and there were millions of people like them all over the country feeling like their lives were circling the drain. Danny said he hated both candidates, figuring that nobody was really for people like him anyway. Screw it, he was going for Trump because Hillary wanted to take his health care away, his Obamacare. In short, his pills.
No, you got that wrong, I said. It’s Trump who wants to do away with Obamacare.
Oh yeah? Well . . . I still don’t like her.
Standing at the threshold of a reeking racetrack shithouse in the mother of all swing states, I wondered. With enough confusion mixed in with the disgust, maybe Trump had a shot in Florida.
Down the highway, in Sanford, nobody was commemorating the fourth anniversary of the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood patrol wannabe cop. The boy’s death would expose to the world the quiet work done by the NRA. Stand-your-ground laws were now the rule in half the United States, expanding the traditional notion that you could use lethal force to defend yourself inside your house. With the advent of the new laws, you could now kill someone in public in the name of self-defense. The person who usually won these arguments was the one with the gun. It’s doubtful that Trayvon knew this. As a consequence of Zimmerman’s acquittal, the country was now in the throes of cop versus black.
The entryway to the Retreat at Twin Lakes, the gated community where Martin was slain, was broken, and we drove in without harassment. At the spot where he died, there was no commemorative marker, no flowers, no teddy bear, no news crews. It was quiet and eerie.
The Retreat was an integrated development: whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics pulling into their garages, the automatic doors closing behind them, the neighbors perfect strangers to one another.
My wife says I can’t talk to you, an older black man whom I had shouted out to whispered from an upstairs window, his figure made murky by the screen, his town house the same design as every other town house, the garage door the most prominent feature.
We really don’t talk about it around here, he said. It’s taboo. Everybody’s just trying to get along. We just trying to let it go. Best thing to do, really. For the sake of everybody.
I told him out there in the real world, the silence wasn’t working.
TEXAS (APRIL)—
We headed back to Texas, to the border towns of Brownsville, McAllen, and Laredo. Trump would follow us a few weeks later, pimping his Great Wall. In the meantime, the Central American women and children were back, but in greater numbers now than two years ago, when they were an international spectacle. Now Trump was the international spectacle and the scene on the border was getting little press.
In Laredo, a half dozen Border Patrol agents, all Latinos, were inspecting a narrow drain that led to the banks of the Rio Grande. The sewer was filled with shoes and shirts and other detritus of human movement, and the agents radioed in to HQ to suggest that somebody come out and weld the sewer cap shut. They suspected smugglers may have been ferrying people through the narrow pipe that leads to the riverbank.
The shit’s out of control, bro, one of the agents told me. If people out there really knew what was going on. But a wall’s not gonna work. You can’t build a wall on the river.
In Lynden, Washington, the border with Canada is little more than a ditch. In fact, it is less than a ditch. It is a three-foot culvert bisecting four lanes of country highway. Easy enough to traverse for all Americans threatening to move to Canada should Trump be elected.
But nobody was moving to Canada. It’s cold there. Its biggest cities are full of junkies. The health-care system is teetering and the money is made out of plastic; you can actually see right through it. Maybe that’s why it lost a quarter of its value.
And what about the eighty thousand Canadians working in the United States illegally? Obviously, the northern border was out of control. Justin Bieber and Ted Cruz—how’d they get in here? Maybe we needed a wall with Canada too.
Inexplicably, a week after we filed this story from the Great White North, Trump showed up to the one-horse town on the western edge of the 49th parallel for a rally, touting his Great Mexican Wall.
Weird. We were starting to think his campaign had a mole in our office.
DETROIT (MAY)—
Detroit mayor Mike Duggan was at it again. I tweeted the following 108 characters on my personal account.
One thing I learned today. The FBI has an open and ongoing investigation into the Detroit demolition program.
The following day, it was the above-the-fold headline of both of the city’s daily newspapers. The poor newspapers. Nobody even bought them for birdcage lining anymore. As for TV, it never ran the story.
CLEVELAND (JULY)—
The morning news on July 18 was awful: cops ambushed in Baton Rouge, three dead and three wounded. Add to that the five officers killed by an Army veteran in Dallas earlier in the month. The headlines came instantaneously: Baton Rouge Shootings Could Cast a Pall over the Republican National Convention.
Hardly.
The Big Bubble machine was in town, fifteen thousand media types nearly doubling the police and military personnel brought to Cleveland, Ohio, to protect them in their made-for-TV cocoon. The parabolic dishes, high-definition cameras, shotgun mics, and the oppressive heat gave the feeling of hot gas being cranked through a giant calliope.
The gentry media seemed blissfully unaware of the depths of the discord in American life bubbling outside the protective envelope. Inside the perimeter, they wandered aimlessly in their expensive suits. Brown shoes seem to be the style of the moment for the male political media.
A couple of agents from the Secret Service and I stood at the bottom of the escalator of the media center, admiring the footwear. The colors ranged from saddle tan to walnut, khaki, camel, cappuccino, cognac, caramel, burnished brown, dark burgundy brown, tobacco, tan, café, and beach sand.
The leather styles included high sheen, flat, gloss, grainy, antique, vintage, and the prefab distressed look. There was a little something for every man: the lace-up loafer, the cap toe oxford, the bike toe oxford, and, not to be outdone, the snub toe oxford. There went the classic wingtip (both dimpled and smooth), the extra-long wingtip, the monk strap buckle, the Piccadilly loafer and its lower-class cousin, the penny loafer. Hey look, buddy, there’s the perforated cap toe lace-up! Imported from Italy. Made in India.
I guess they must get paid pretty well in TV, one agent surmised.
They’re not getting paid for originality, said the other.
The discussions in the media hall were not intellectual ones about the base of malcontent in America or the reasons for the rise of Trump, but rather over who got the last bagel at the breakfast buffet or who was up next at the makeup mirror. Women waddled around in curlers and bathrobes, readying themselves for their segments on the gigantic blue homecoming float that served as the network set. The lesser lights of local TV news were assigned table space off to the side and on the floor.
In the hallway, members of the neocon cabal that brought you the Iraq War were whispering and laughing among themselves. How bad is this thing with Roger Ailes? They were older, redder, chubbier, and brown-shoed now, but they were still hanging around, posing on TV as men who had answers. How the fuck were they still hanging around? I wondered. Who let them in?
There was the black sheriff of Milwaukee who was fond of denying the existence of police brutality in America, walking around in beads and jeans and a straw cowboy hat curled at the brim. Jesus, at least he wasn’t wearing the brown shoes.
This was nowhere, man. Looking to get outside the bubble, Matt and I drove to the west side of town, where Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old black boy who had been brandishing a pellet gun, was shot dead by police two days before Ferguson would burn for the second time.
It wasn’t a particularly deep idea, and I’d expected dozens of news crews to be out there, the makeshift picnic-table memorial under a gazebo in the park where he died, with its votive candles and helium balloons providing a somber and natural backdrop to the riot barricades and klieg lights at the convention’s perimeter. Thankfully there was not one other reporter there. Not one camera. Just a solitary, slightly built black man sitting on a bench, smoking a menthol.
He was wearing his uniform from the morning shift at the fast-food joint where he worked the griddle for $8.15 an hour. After the government extracted its taxes from his biweekly check, it took him an hour to earn breakfast where he worked. So he stole his breakfast. His ball cap was creased and frayed at the brim, his black battered tennis shoes stained with sugar and syrup drippings from doughnuts and flavored coffees.
You can’t say them cops in Louisiana deserved it, he said. That was a straight-up ambush. But what about the boy here? Tamir? A toy gun? Cop didn’t say nothing to him. Just jumps outta the car and starts blasting. What side, whose side, you supposed to be on with shit like that happening every day?
What side are you on? I asked.
He pointed toward the road. Two hundred feet away stood an obelisk to fallen Cleveland police officer Jonathan Schroeder, a white man shot and killed ten years earlier attempting to arrest the rapist of a black woman he had never met.
What side you want me to be on? he asked.
I didn’t know there had to be a side, I said.
Oh, you always got to pick a side. Sometimes, you just change the side you pick.
DETROIT (JULY)—
I picked the side of never again attending a political convention. I canceled my trip to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia and returned to Detroit to catch final arguments and jury deliberation for Barry Ellentuck, the demolition whistleblower.
What was to be gained in Philly? Leaked emails from top Democratic National Committee officials revealed what we already knew: The game was fixed and played in a tub of filth. The party belonged to the Clintons. One top official had gone so far as to suggest that the party ought to weaponize Sanders’s Jewish heritage against him.
Bernie had no one to blame for his close loss but himself, really. His campaign lacked specificity and detail. He refused to pound Clinton as a conniving, dishonest establishment power grubber, a side switcher who would cynically alter her worldview to fit the latest polling data on things like globalism, Wall Street, world trade, and law and order in the urban cores. In the end, Bernie chose courtesy and capitulation while thousands of his supporters were outside the convention center as President Obama spoke. They were shouting: Fuck Hillary Clinton!
Back in Detroit, Ellentuck was another man being ground to pulp in the gearbox of the Clinton machine. The man had been virtually destroyed by the charges of attempting to defraud the city a few thousand dollars of federal demolition funds. No one in the construction industry would touch a man at war with the sitting Democratic mayor of Detroit who had close ties to Hillary Clinton. If convicted of anything, Ellentuck was done forever.
The jury came back in three hours, which included lunch. Ellentuck was found not guilty of attempting to defraud the government of $6,000. Despite the verdict, his wife stewed in the gallery. The whole ordeal could have been avoided had the prosecutor bothered to interview Ellentuck, who, suspecting a setup, secretly recorded the government’s key witnesses contradicting their sworn testimony. It was an embarrassment for the young prosecutor, who left the courtroom without comment. But not for long. He was appointed by the governor three months later to the bench of the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan, his courtroom directly above the judge who served strawberry danish.
Two days after Ellentuck’s acquittal, Mayor Duggan was onstage at the Philadelphia convention extolling the virtues of Crooked Hillary. He was said to be in line for a position in her cabinet, perhaps as secretary of Housing and Urban Development or Veterans Affairs. No media, local or national, asked why Clinton had invited a figure of a federal corruption probe to speak on her behalf. To me, it went to the root of everything wrong.
All I could do was tweet it.
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN (AUGUST)—
Just a few days after the convention, a corner of black Milwaukee went up in flames. This time it was a black cop killing a black suspect carrying a stolen handgun and five hundred rounds of ammunition in his rental car. The suspect, Sylville Smith, ran with the weapon and the official story at the time was that the cop feared for his life.
The dead man’s father apologized to TV for not being a better role model. At the scene of Smith’s death, his adopted mother told me Smith and the cop knew each other, that the killing was the result, perhaps, of a beef over a baby mama.
Probably not a baby mama. On the second night of disorder, the officer, Dominique Heaggan-Brown, allegedly sat in a bar with a man he met on Facebook watching live TV footage of the burning corner, bragging that he could do whatever he wanted without repercussion. Heaggan-Brown was later charged with taking the man home and raping him.
And he was also charged with homicide in Smith’s shooting death after body-cam footage showed that Heaggan-Brown shot Smith as he pursued him between two houses. Heaggan-Brown put a second bullet in Smith’s chest a second and a half later, after Smith had thrown his gun over a fence and had his hands over his head on the ground. Prosecutors called the first bullet justified; the second, murder. The jury disagreed. Haeggan-Brown was acquitted.
It took flames to get the public’s attention, said James Flippin, a barber at the Sho’Nuff shop just down the way from the gas station rubble on Burleigh Street. But the flames didn’t come until TV came, he said.
It’s a script in America now, he went on. Now it’s like okay, come on, dog, come up here. Lights, camera, action. We on the news. Wanna be seen. Wanna be heard.
But nobody was really listening. Not a single elected official showed up to the corner. Not the white Democratic mayor, not the tough-talking suburban cowboy sheriff, not the white Republican governor. Not Hillary Clinton. It was obvious they were afraid of their own people.
As for Donald Trump, the Republican nominee came into town while the embers on the north side were still warm. Well, he didn’t actually come into town. Not even into Milwaukee County. He showed up twenty-five miles away in suburban West Bend, finally making his pitch to black America in front of a nearly unanimously white, if confused, audience.
His pitch was simple, one I tried to tell him months ago: Why not vote for me? What have you got to lose?
FLINT, MICHIGAN (SEPTEMBER)—
Trump tried this for a month or so, addressing black America in front of white America, TV’s airwaves serving as a stand-in for his lack of courage.
Then he arrived in Flint for a tour of the water treatment plant and what I believe was his first address to an actual real-life group of black people at a local church.
Coincidentally, I too was in Flint. It was like we were running mates or something. New York, Florida, Washington, Wisconsin, and now Michigan. Just weird. I had come to town with a stall of showers and a chromium gasoline tanker full of fresh water from Ann Arbor, filming a bit with a filmmaker friend about the lack of progress on the water-poisoning situation. The mayor’s office had granted me a permit to set up the showers in front of city hall, but realizing the optics of that, they rescinded their permission. Angry, I barged into city hall demanding a refund of my $25 permit fee.
I was informed by a telephone call from the mayor’s staff that the police had been notified about my refusal to leave city hall and that my water tanker was occupying parking spaces illegally. I was also informed in a second telephone call that Trump had landed at the airport and was on his way to the water plant. Imagine the scene: the cops chasing me in a chromium water tanker while I chased Trump in my chromium water tanker around the city.
We dodged the police, missed Trump’s motorcade, but got to the church in time to see Trump drive away. His talk had been cut short by the pastor because Big Don was talking smack about Crooked Hillary.
In the parking lot, I ran into Sam Riddle, my favorite ex-con political operator, who had gone to prison for his role in the Detroit corruption scandal a few years earlier.
Why not? Riddle said of Trump. Why not? Hillary came and pimped us and all we got was some bottled water. So why not let Trump come pimp us too? Why not?
DETROIT (SEPTEMBER)—
While I was in Flint, Detroit police sergeant Ken Steil was shot and wounded attempting to arrest a madman who had carjacked multiple people, shot his own father, and threatened to kill his own mother.
Five days later Sergeant Steil was dead from a blood clot, making him the fortieth police officer in America in 2016 to die in the line of duty. I knew Steil, first introduced to him when we tailed his special operations unit on the streets of Detroit for a bankruptcy story about the city and its effect on police.
Let me say that if bad cops were truly the problem in urban America, then men like Ken Steil were certainly the solution. He was the squad leader of an elite unit that hunted the worst of humanity: rapists, murderers of children, the criminally insane. His crew often found themselves in dark alleyways and abandoned houses, the only light yielded by shards of moonlight through shattered rooftops.
In his twenty years on the job, Steil had never discharged his firearm and had no discipline or misconduct complaints of any kind in his file. He died trying to catch a man who had tried to murder his own father and was rampaging across the city with a shotgun. Someone called the police and Sergeant Steil answered. No questions asked. And now he was dead.
I called his men to offer my condolences, but decided to stay away from his widow, JoAnn. That is the proper thing for a newsperson to do. I had learned a long time ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, that a reporter knocking on the door of a grieving family was nothing more than emotional acetone, which will erode what little glue is left holding it together.
But I got a call from JoAnn, through one of her husband’s colleagues. She wished to see me. There was something she wanted to tell the world, I was told. So Matt and I pulled up and parked a few houses down from hers, a respectable distance so the family and friends might have a few moments to see us and adjust to our presence. The police department had a ceremonial car parked out front of her home, the hood peeling, an oversized dartboard of rust located where the decal used to be. A fucking joke.
The mood in the house was somber, the two little boys taken to school by Steil’s brothers in blue. Against the far wall was a saltwater fish tank he had built. JoAnn laughed softly, saying she had no idea how to care for it, but she’d try.
Matt readied the camera and she took a deep, quaking breath:
I forgive the person who did this to him, she said, because I know in my heart, if he knew what he took from us, he wouldn’t have done this. We need more love in this country right now.
My heart ached as it had not in many years. A widow forgives her husband’s murderer. She then asks us all to love one another. And yet who showed her and her children love? At the funeral, Steil was given a posthumous promotion to captain. It was good for the cameras, but it came with no increase in pension benefits for his wife and children. Financially, he would still be a sergeant. And because of the city’s bankruptcy, his family would no longer receive health coverage. Through the power of the woman’s grace projected into the living rooms of lawmakers, however, the state of Michigan granted Joann and her children health-care benefits . . . for five years. When the oldest boy turned ten, he’d have to fend for himself.
Most insulting was the matter of the funeral bill. Despite its pomp and circumstance, and the mayor in attendance spouting crime statistics over his casket, the funeral of Steil would not be paid for by the city he died serving, but rather by the family he left behind.
If there was a war on police in America, it felt like the snipers were on every side: criminals, activists, double-talking politicians, commentators. But instead of war, a widow called for love. And all I could do for her with the power of TV was scrounge together five measly years of pediatrician visits.
Her words—her situation, the faces of her small boys—emotionally cracked me. Her husband kept his end of the bargain, to serve. The politicians, the lawyers and the bankers did not, they took. And it was too late for Steil to break the contract. Another crushing example of the giant gulf between a government and its people, between races, between classes. It was all so tantalizingly clear: the white man in Garbutt and a cop’s widow in Detroit, the black man in the streets of Ferguson and the Latina woman polishing the Gipper’s marble in Simi Valley had so much in common but could not find a common ground. And this thing called TV only served to spin confusion. I’d absorbed the disorder as if it were gasoline vapors. It was corrosive. I needed air. I needed to get out.
SOUTHFIELD, MICHIGAN (NOVEMBER)—
I may have been the national correspondent, the man on the American street for the giant media company, but election night was for men in brown shoes on a blue set. Housecats, we called them. There was nothing for me to do, really, but I came to the Detroit station anyway, should someone want my perspective.
Not that they would need any. Hillary Clinton had this in the bag. All the polls and media outlets had been saying it for months. I wasn’t so sure.
A colleague of mine was doing a Facebook live bit from the newsroom, ostensibly to show the station’s followers the goings-on of a harried journalistic barnyard on election night. He wandered over and asked me how I thought the evening would shake out, what with me having been out there.
From my perspective, having crisscrossed this great land, black people had their man in Obama. He was something aspirational, uplifting, hopeful, but in that eight years, their lives had not improved appreciably. And now that he was gone, there was little incentive for them to show up in the same numbers for Clinton. As for Latinos, I remembered my time in California. Even if an illegal immigrant looks like you, has a similar-sounding name, he’s still going to look different if you have to compete with him for a livelihood. Working-class white people? Some thought they finally had a guy in Trump. He was not the reflection of hate in white people, he was a reaction to the state of distress inflicted upon them by an establishment that either manipulated them, took them for granted, or ignored them altogether.
There was too much They and not enough Us. We were all saying the same thing—we were all worried for our children, and yet we couldn’t hear each other above the shouting and the shattering glass and the ambulance horns. Nobody expected anything to change regardless of the evening’s outcome. But yes, I told my colleague. You’re going to be surprised at the vote. Michigan and the Rust Belt were in play. Self-interest never seems to be quite what the media thinks it is.
I didn’t predict Trump would win—only a backstretch rummy trying to win it all back on the long shot would consider putting his money down on the star of a “pussy grabber” video. It’s worth remembering, women are not a minority.
But I did think the vote would be razor close. The polls, I believed, had it wrong. It wasn’t that people were afraid to say they were voting for Trump. I just think they hated pollsters and reporters. And pollsters, like too many reporters, work the phones instead of the streets.
I went back to my office in the back of the building, separated from the blue news set by a cinder-block wall. I turned on the TV. Then I took out the bottle of vodka from my desk drawer that had been given to me by a guest from one of the many cooking segments the station produces, got some stale ice from the staff refrigerator, and put my feet up.
The anchors’ and pundits’ faces grew longer with horror as each hour of the evening unfolded. It was obvious to everyone that they had been reporting on the country not as it was, but as they imagined it to be.
Around two in the morning, it was done. I rinsed my glass, swept the photographs from my desk into my satchel, and went home. I had a daughter to get off to school in the morning.