The first year of Donald Trump's presidency, I interviewed a 78-year-old man who regularly patrolled his border-adjacent property in the rural California town of Boulevard, wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an AR-10. "It is my duty to protect my country from people invading it," Bob Maupin told me.
The retired mechanic and self-described "vigilante" was grieving his wife, who had died the previous summer. He choked up remembering her. "She was my life," he said. He told me that if Trump hadn't won in 2016, he was planning to take part in an insurrection. He wouldn't share details except to say he'd risk everything. "I'm gonna die, and I don't care how," he said. "Except I'm not going to die a slobbering old man in a rest home pushing a walker. I'm going out in a firefight."
He died (not in a firefight, but of cancer) a year before hundreds of insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But I remembered him that day. I remembered how, after the videographer stopped recording him, Maupin's eyes had locked on mine as he deadpanned: "I might have to kill you." I couldn't reconcile his danger with my empathy for him: a man desperate for purpose in a conspiratorial underworld, not entirely unlike my father, a Mexican immigrant whose story I've documented.
