By November 2018, Donald Trump was already well into his presidency. Everything many Americans feared had come true, and there was a copper-bottomed combovered nincompoop running their country. That month, I took my elder daughter to Marfa, in Texas, to see the extraordinary arts hub there: the Donald Judd Foundation, the funny Prada pop-up shop (which was by then world-famous), and all the bohemian galleries and shops. She was an art student, and it was a treat for her, and for me.
This art-filled, far-flung oasis in the West Texas desert is a town of the past but much talked about as a temple of the future, an art enclave that has attracted an eclectic, seemingly unlikely pack of creatives who have helped transform it into a thriving minimalist arts mecca.
It’s actually rather fabulous and has probably retained its eclectic nature because it is so inaccessible. It really is in the middle of nowhere. Unless you live in West Texas, of course.
After two days in Marfa, I was encouraged to drive south, towards the West Texas border, through the Big Bend National Park, where the night skies are as dark as coal and rivers carve temple-like canyons in ancient limestone. It is one of the most remote parts of the US. When you eventually reach the border, you find another kind of disaster, the old mining town of Terlingua, which offers a glimpse of how poverty remains terminal in the South. Here, you understand why so many people voted for Trump.
A few hours later, driving back north, we checked into a hotel not far from our starting point in Marfa. As we were shown to our rooms, our effusive host told us that they had family-style dining, which meant everyone ate together, whether they liked it or not. Obviously we would have preferred to eat by ourselves but by 7.30pm that night we were sitting around a table for 10 with a bunch of what I will politely call smug, ill-informed reactionary wack-jobs (a term that Trump seems to like to use on a daily basis).
They were just the most awful people. Conceited. Rude. And over-friendly in that American way that means they aren’t really being friendly at all. As Edie and I made our way through the country-style cooking (I seem to remember there was lots of corn, lots of steak, and lots of sickly-sweet drinks), one by one they started to espouse their president’s virtues.
Now of course I’m used to nodding non-committedly while people talk utter rubbish, but these guys were taking it to a totally new level. It wasn’t their exuberance that I found fascinating; it was their repetition of things which we all knew not to be true.
In fact, they all spoke as though they were in church, expressing complete and utter blind loyalty in a way that I’m not sure I’d ever seen before. I certainly haven’t seen anything like it since.
This is the thing that’s difficult to grasp unless you’ve seen it up close: the Trump supporter’s ability to repeat his falsehoods and inventions as though they come straight from the Gideon Bible. They just don’t think he is making any of this stuff up.
Sure, they admit he’s a bit loosey-goosey and a bit lairy, but that doesn’t seem to move the dial. I’m not exaggerating when I say that if Trump had suggested that not all flat-earthers were total nut-jobs (another favourite), this would have been repeated verbatim over dinner. Upstanding, rational, socialised people, who I’m sure are nice to their children and pets, and probably pay their taxes on time: educated imbeciles one and all.
I’m not unaware of the tribal nature of party politics in the US, but the thing that made my mouth slacken was the way in which any criticism of their short-fingered vulgarian (copyright Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter) was immediately interpreted as heresy. Trump’s great trick hasn’t been projection, it’s been reflection, bouncing any criticism straight onto his opponent of choice, delivered in such a way as to render the target completely immobile. It’s not Trump who is mad and stupid, you see, it’s everyone (and anyone) else.
At 8.15pm, as they started ordering beers, I carefully kicked Edie under the table and told our new friends — who we would forever call the El Paso Crazies — that we had to hit the hay as we had a ridiculously long drive ahead of us in the morning.
They were perfectly charming as we made our excuses and left — but the next day we were gone by dawn.
