The Gilded Rage Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Alexander Zaitchik

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1428-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1430-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction: “Who Are These People?”

  Chapter One: Arizona

  Chapter Two: Wisconsin

  Chapter Three: Pennsylvania

  Chapter Four: West Virginia

  Chapter Five: New Mexico

  Chapter Six: California

  For Haydée, Fabiola, and Juanita

  The more those elitist eggheads shouted, “The Dead Are Walking,” the more most real Americans tuned them out.

  — Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

  Do you know so much that you call the slave or the dullfaced ignorant?

  Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight … and he or she has no right to a sight?

  Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffused float, and the soil is on the surface and water runs and vegetation sprouts for you … and not for him and her?

  — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

  Foreword

  The opinion class in this country has been so wrong for so long—blowing it badly on the Iraq War, the crash of 2008, the growing crisis in race relations, the “inevitable wisdom” of the new global economic order, and nearly every other major issue—that it came as no surprise when these experts also failed to get the significance of the Trump uprising. The media elite initially greeted Trump with glee, as an uproarious ratings and circulation boon, a showman who would soon give way to the next circus act. When instead he pulled off an unfriendly takeover of the Republican Party, the media giddiness turned to fear and loathing. But as the mood of the media elite shifted suddenly from merriment to panic, little light was actually shed on the meaning of Trump. By focusing almost exclusively on the strangely hued candidate himself—and exposing his manifold flaws and eccentricities—the media establishment clearly hoped to restore reason in the land. But our professional explainers have once again failed to understand the popular bitterness and rage underlying the Trump phenomenon—a fury that is directed in no small part at elites like them, and that will continue to burn long after Trump has disappeared from the spotlight.

  So it comes as a relief to read independent journalist Alexander Zaitchik’s report from Trumpland. As he crisscrossed America, going to the political rallies, bars, and diners where Trump supporters gathered—and sometimes being invited into their homes—Zaitchik was not setting out to explain these men and women who so confound the political commentators but to listen to them. The Gilded Rage gives these voters a chance not just to spit out a sound bite or two but to express themselves at length. These are the discarded veterans of the endless wars in the Middle East, the blue-collar workers who will never again match the money they made when they were young, the residents of rural hamlets and suburban outposts that are always overlooked by the media radar. They emerge in this book not as bigoted and ignorant caricatures but as people with deeply legitimate grievances and with riveting stories about the underside of the American Dream.

  This is the kind of probing and surprising journalism that Hot Books was intended to showcase. Launched in 2015 in partnership with Skyhorse Publishing, Hot Books offers an ongoing series of short, powerful titles on the most burning topics: the fragility of black lives in America (The Beast Side), the campus rape crisis (The Hunting Ground), the moral and legal challenges presented by post 9/11 US war crimes (American Nuremberg), the untold story behind the Edward Snowden case (Bravehearts), the dangerous rise of Islamophobia (Scapegoats), and the CIA’s subversion of the media (Spooked), among others. We see Hot Books as part of the great revival that is now starting to spread across America and the world, as long sluggish democracies begin to rouse themselves. These books are meant to provoke and to spark debate. Please spread the word—use them in your book clubs, classes, and social media forums.

  It’s time to light a fire under this slumbering giant, American democracy. It’s time to think new and dangerous thoughts. Welcome to Hot Books.

  David Talbot

  Hot Books Editorial Director

  Introduction

  “Who Are These People?”

  Twenty-sixteen has been a disorienting political year for us all. Insurgents stormed both party establishments in primary-season offensives that few saw coming. The Democratic fortress held, but just. The Republican castle burned, and how. A real estate warrior king in orange face paint arose from the east and sacked it, backed by a long-simmering internal revolt. Nobody knows yet what this sacking portends. The party could absorb Donald Trump or deflect him; it could disappear altogether in the rubble of a high-Richter realignment. We do know there’s no going back. Months before completing his GOP body count on a May evening in Indiana, Trump had blown the old order and its stale wisdoms sky-high. Bits and globs still rain down across the land, nowhere harder than greater Miami, where they splatter on the political headstones of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.

  This book is not directly about any of that. It’s not about how Donald Trump humiliated the Republican establishment, turned presidential debates into high-stakes roasts, or represents the deathbed gasp of American democracy. Trump is the looming and unifying presence, but this book is not really about him. It is about the everyday Americans who love, support, and believe in Donald Trump, who see him as a savvy patriotic businessman and tough-talking savior, the last hope for reviving the blue-collar middle class and getting America back to being “great,” a Rorschach-blot adjective many Trump critics read as “white,” and which many fans read as “a place with decent jobs, tight borders, and please stop calling me a fucking racist.”

  For Trump voters, too, this has been a disorienting year. But theirs is a giddy disorientation. After decades of mounting disaffection with both parties, they can’t believe they scaled the castle walls and now have a chance to hang the last Clinton with the guts of the last Bush. Even better, they get to follow a brash celebrity who talks like Andrew Dice Clay and says exactly what they feel and (they hope) means every politically incorrect word: about trade, the vets, Social Security, Mexicans, Muslims, busty broads—about so many things.

  The disorientation that hatched this book was not the giddy kind. Last winter, I watched with anxiety as Trump racked up victories and packed rallies modeled on the politics and spectacle of monster truck shows. There was plenty to fear in the rest of the GOP field, but Trump alone built his political profile by hawking Birther theories on Fox & Friends. He alone called for a Muslim travel-ban and spoke wistfully of General Pershing’s apocryphal fondness for shooting Muslim combatants with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. Only Trump wrote rec
ipes for national greatness in horror fonts, such as his call to harness America’s medieval ingenuity behind a torture program targeting the wives and children of suspected terrorists. Then there was the Great Wall, Trump’s signature policy idea and defining campaign metaphor, promoted with racist insults.

  Like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Trump entered the race having completed a dangerous experimental mutation, from gossip-page guppy and playboy developer, to a new breed of rightwing populist, equal parts Howard Stern and Michael Savage, Tony Robbins and Father Coughlin, Kim Kardashian and Benito Mussolini. The pundits and pollsters assured us the experiment would fail, that this 200-pound insect-man bioengineered by Joe McCarthy’s old lawyer would be dead within weeks. According to their calculations using the laws of Beltway physics, Donald Trump was not possible. In a Republican primary, a candidate could not attack John McCain for his war record and survive, any more than an orange floats to the ceiling after rolling off a table. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Bush-Kasich ticket. Trump’s mutant organs not only functioned, they grew stronger, feeding off the energy of millions of Republicans and conservative Democrats. Where many saw a monster, these voters saw a lovable superhero. They loved him for his braggart wealth, his dramatic renderings of browbeating the CEO of Carrier Air Conditioners, for his merciless taunting of media and political elites, for telling the Bushes where they can stick their land wars and trade deals, for defending Social Security and Medicare, for packaging a hopeful story of industrial decline and renewal in the language of a realtor-turned-infomercial pitch man (“Unbelievable people, terrific people, used to work in these factories”).

  Trump’s breaks with Republican orthodoxy gave some of his enemies on the left pause, but never overrode the loathing and confusion. In the cities and neighborhoods where I spend most of my time, Trump hatred is a given, as is the belief that his supporters deserve the same, whether it’s expressed in media ridicule or eggs thrown at their faces as they enter Trump rallies. The sentiments expressed about these Trump voters might be boiled down to the rhetorical question, “Who are these people?”

  Stripped of condescension, this is a good question. A more difficult, more interesting, and more important one than, “Who is Donald Trump?”

  It was with this question—“Who are these people?”—scribbled atop an empty notebook that I joined the campaign trail midway through primary season, in Phoenix. My plan was simple, inspired by the late Studs Terkel: sit down and talk to Trump voters. Or, as Terkel would say, listen to them. For the next three months, I traveled six primary states conducting long-form biographical interviews with Trump supporters. A fraction of those interviews make up most of the following pages. They have been edited for length and clarity, and mortared with scene reporting for context.

  I met my subjects in different places, mostly in bars and the parking lots of Trump events. With some people, I spent several hours, with others, several days. Some invited me to their homes. Our conversations always got around to politics, but rarely started there. Mostly we talked about their lives, their formative experiences, what it was like growing up in their corner of the country. These things are also the stuff of politics, just not the kind that can be easily quantified.

  The long-form interviews that make up the heart of this book are as far as you can get from the stat-and-poll driven journalism that failed so spectacularly this year, and that has never felt more insufficient or unsatisfying. It’s also the far side of the room from punditry and “hot takes” written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects. In April, New York Times columnist David Brooks, the consummate Beltway-creature bore, confessed a flash of self-awareness by promising to make occasional excursions from his northern Virginia suburb “out into the pain” to meet some of the seventy-five percent of Trump voters who say their lives have steadily gotten worse over the last five decades. Brooks didn’t mention the roles he and his fellow pundits have played in this pain, but shaking its hand and looking it in the eye is a good place to start.

  What did I find in Trump country? Most of the people I met seemed to me fundamentally decent people. Some were decent, but with slightly enlarged spleens. Others were just plain nasty. Still others, well, people are complicated. I don’t dismiss the studies showing higher than average “authoritarianism” and racism among Trump voters, but I didn’t observe very much of it. (The raging sexism around Hillary Clinton is another story.) However much I disagreed with them, or winced at their Archie Bunker diction, or mourned the telltale signs of Chronic Talk Radio Syndrome, I could almost always find seams of empathy under the bluster. Many working-class Trump supporters are dependent on some kind of government program or subsidy, or know somebody who is. Yet they’ve generally worked hard in their lives, and they don’t like being denigrated as “takers.” I was often surprised by how easily their pride blended into a (sometimes grudging) generosity toward the very downtrodden groups Trump is famous for attacking. It’s possible they were dissembling. There’s no accepted margin of error for honesty, especially with a recorder on the table. But I believe the average Trump voter resents condescending elites many times more than he even thinks about brown people, and cares more about the local unemployment rate much more than national demographic trends.

  Among the Trump supporters I got to know well—dozens during three months on the road—few of them took Trump’s most outlandish ideas literally. When asked about the Wall or mass deportation, most shrugged them off as metaphors for getting serious about the border. Not a few have a fine appreciation for the spectacle of it all. They know Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame; they made popcorn for The Apprentice as well as his GOP debate smackdowns of “Lyin’ Ted” and “Low-Energy Jeb.” Often their cynicism runs deep enough to suspect the whole thing is just another giant set-up: they cheer and jeer, their opponents seethe, and somewhere out over the horizon, Les Moonves and Joe Scarborough are clinking Arnold Palmers on a private beach in the Hamptons.

  Even if Trump exits stage right in November, the widespread disaffection and anger he’s harnessed and inflamed will continue as the star of the show. At the start of the second George W. Bush administration, the big question on the left, formulated by Thomas Frank, was why conservatives couldn’t snap out of the GOP’s culture war trance. Now Trump voters have answered it, but in a way that reminds us to be careful what we wish for. Frank sees Trump as the “the crude and ugly reflection” of the Democrats’ failure to answer his question first. I’m not sure that a populist Democratic platform could provide a bridge over some very deep cultural rifts, but there’s no option but to try. The alternative is a future where something else is the matter with Kansas, something we’ve just begun to glimpse, but still feels like a specter. Not for nothing does media around the world put Trump in the same frame as the ethno-nationalist, far-right parties surging across the model welfare states of Europe.

  No group of interviews can divine the meaning or gauge the threat of Trump’s rise. The answers will unfold with time, delivered by the three hundred million citizens of a diverse and troubled continental empire. Who are these people? Here are some of them, presented as a small group self-portrait, composed during a moment of national disorientation. Take from it what you will.

  Oakland, California

  June 2016

  Chapter One

  Arizona

  Trudging the sidewalks of Fountain Hills, it was easy to fall in emotionally with the parade of Trump supporters. No one was happy about walking three miles in the sun. Wearing weather-inappropriate jeans and socks, I was maybe unhappiest of all. I knew my near future involved chafed thighs and ointments, and this knowledge put me in tune with the chorus of conservative complaint: Liberals don’t have any arguments, so they block traffic. … This is what welfare people do—make chaos and ruin the weekends of people who work for a living…. I heard it was mostly Latinos that blocked the road—why didn’t the police stop them when they drove in?
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  It was a fair question: What’s the point of passing the nation’s gold standard in Nurembergian racial-profiling legislation if you can’t prevent a caravan of activists from wreaking havoc in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s own damn suburb?

  On Saturday morning, four days before the March 22 Arizona primary, protestors formed a blockade of parked cars on the road leading to an outdoor Trump rally co-starring Arpaio and former governor Jan Brewer, the state’s twin icons of the immigration hardline. Arpaio’s deputies towed the cars and arrested three anti-Trump protestors. They then blockaded both entrances to the adobe-themed Scottsdale suburb of Fountain Hills, turning back cars and directing everyone to park along the sandy blacktop shoulders of Highway 87. The resulting migration looked like the parking lot trek to a desert music festival, maybe one that culminated in the symbolic burning of a giant wooden Mexican.

  Early into the walk I met Danny Riggs, an affable Scottsdale native, Trump supporter, and recent Georgetown University graduate. Riggs was twice angry: about having to walk in the heat to hear his candidate speak, but more about his mother, a Fountain Hills resident whose home had been enclosed by protestors and police blockades all morning. The inconvenience, he said, had accomplished something the team efforts of her son and husband could not. It had pushed Mrs. Riggs into Trump’s camp. “My mom wasn’t sure about him before all this, but now she’s into it,” he told me. “She’s getting a T-shirt and everything.”

  I told him there was debate on the left about the ethics and strategy of trying to shut down Trump events. Some veteran activists said roadblocks and shout-downs were right and necessary expressions of dissent against nascent fascism; others found them contrary to principle and ultimately counterproductive. “Oh, guaranteed,” said Riggs, the protests would only bring in more recruits like his mother.