Donald Trump is broken and no one can put Humpty Trumpty back together again.
This thought occurred to me at a truck stop in rural Nevada. Less than two weeks away from the presidential election which could determine the survival of our species, I decided to visit as many swing, red and blue states as possible. I wanted to talk to people, one-on-one, as many as possible and without the blinding glare of a television camera by my side. I visited 15 states in 21 days; Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California. The bulk of the trip found me in 12 states in 14 days.
On the seventh day, I rested and visited with the seventh son of a seventh son, sipping 7-Up and eating a seven-layered bean dip on a front porch in rural Pennsylvania. “You’re an idiot,” my host told me.
“I don’t disagree, but what makes you say so?” I asked.
“That’s a lot of places to travel to in order to find out an answer you should already know,” he said as I explained my travel plans. “And it’s easy enough. Trump’s going to win. All politicians are crazy crooks, but he’s crazy in the right way.”
“I didn’t know there was a right way to be crazy, but I agree with you,” I said.
“You do?” He asked.
“Yes,” I said. “He is definitely crazy.”
In suburban Maryland, I found few who were buying Trump’s brand of b.s. In Gaithersburg, I saw one yard sign for Trump and it was surrounded by eight signs declaring allegiance to Harris/Walz in the yards of the nearest neighbors.
“Trump is insane and is becoming more so every day,” I was told as I sat for a drink at Hershey's, a local Gaithersburg watering hole famous for great fried chicken and good rock n’ roll. (Full disclosure, my band has played there.)
On my trek west from there, I stopped in West Virginia where at a grocery store I ran across a large man working behind the counter who said, “Even a tweaker knows better than to vote for Trump.” But, he explained, “The economy was better when he was in office, so you know he’s going to win West Virginia real easy. No one around here is for Harris.”
I had a hard time getting around the fact that, according to this grocery store sales clerk, meth addicts know better than to vote for Trump, but according to that same West Virginia native, apparently, no one living in West Virginia knows better than a meth addict.
By the time I reached the Blue Grass state, I was tired. While everyone I spoke with in Kentucky had come down with the presidential sweepstakes fever, I couldn’t find anyone making sense. I had a Harris supporter tell me, “I have to vote for her, or my family won’t speak to me again.”
What did that mean?
I found that behavior prevalent in Trump families, but not usually among Democrats. Still, Kentucky was a divided state in the Civil War and remains one to this day. It says something that the first rude driver I ran into on the interstate was from Kentucky. You know the type — the kind you want to torture with a rusty butter knife for camping out in the fast lane, then passing you, only to slow down after they’ve gotten in front of you.
In Louisville, I asked a waitress, “If I’m an undecided voter, who would you recommend I vote for?” She smiled. “I want the candidate who will allow tips to be tax-exempt,” she answered.
“Both of them favor that,” I replied. She sighed and admitted she did not know that.
“So where do you get your news?” I asked.
“Oh, I quit watching mainstream media,” she said. “I count on my friends.” Her friends, she told me, get their news from Fox News and OAN.
Indiana was a mixed bag of people too polite to explain who they supported, or too scared to do so. One woman explained that she wouldn’t even tell her husband, who owns “At least six Trump hats and wasted money on golden sneakers he never got”, who she would vote for — but told me that “If you think I’d vote against women’s rights, you’re as dumb as my husband.”
Missouri was probably the most Trump-happy state I visited. Just 20 miles outside of St. Louis, a huge billboard proclaimed, “Welcome to Trump Land.” That billboard was sandwiched in between a billboard advertising a strip club and one that read, “Do you really know what happened in the Garden of Eden?” advocating a visit to a nearby church. The billboard advertising marijuana came right after the church billboard. So it went, strip club, Trump, church and weed. They can really show you something in the Show Me state.
Drivers there raced across I-70 as if they were fleeing the apocalypse. Dead animals littered the side of the road; deer, raccoons, something that looked like a purple jackal, a Chupacabra or two, what looked like a werewolf, and at least one low-flying turkey vulture. I saw one guy in a pickup had stopped and was sawing off the head of a dead stag — presumably for the antlers, but maybe he was just hungry.
A portly gentleman celebrating the University of Missouri’s homecoming victory that weekend informed me “Everybody in America wants Trump. He’s good for the economy, hates immigrants and won’t let people like me get replaced.” I hesitated to inform him that I don’t know anyone that would want to “replace” him and the economy isn’t . . . oh never mind. The “hating immigrants” part was speaking the quiet part out loud though.
And of course, as I left Missouri, just west of Independence (Home of Harry S. Truman) there was a 150 x 200-foot flag hoisted between two earth movers that stated: “Trump/Vance Take America Back.”
“Yeah, back to the 1850s,” my wife — a native Missourian — said with distaste.
Oddly enough, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley isn’t doing so well in the very Trumpian state. “He’s a coward,” I heard from more than one person. “He’s not brave like Trump,” I was also told. I just shook my head at that one.
By the time we got to Kansas, the Trump fever, indeed the presidential race fever began to subside. While I saw Harris and Trump billboards and people had definitive opinions about the race, I saw Trump and Harris supporters calling each other friends – and they were far more worried about college football than the presidential race. One Trump supporter told me he expected the former president to declare victory “before the polls close in California,” to furious nods of agreement from his Harris-supporting friend.
By the time I got to Grand Junction, Colorado, there was no one talking politics, and no signs on the road and few at homes proclaiming allegiance to either candidate. At the local Denny’s the conversation was about the movie “A League of Their Own,” with no one remembering the title as a family sat there quoting Tom Hanks, “There’s no crying in baseball,” line to varying degrees of success. The young waitress who waited on us there looked like she had been attacked by a barbed-wire fence and was wearing more hardware than a Borg in Star Trek. When I asked her who she favored, she was blunt. “Anyone that supports Trump is an idiot – voting for an idiot. He doesn’t care about women. He doesn’t care about health care, and he doesn’t care about students. I’m already broke and at least Biden cares about student debt. I think Harris will too.”
I found on this trip that when asked, the opinions were definitive. There was a passion in the Trump and the Harris voters. And while the presidential fever broke the farther west I traveled, of the more than 200 people I spoke with, not one of them said they were going to abstain from voting. “It’s too important,” I was told. A few said they wouldn’t vote for the top of the ticket, but everyone was voting “down ballot”. Those who were previously avowed Trump supporters who were now sour on him said they might not vote at all, or “Hold their nose and vote for Harris,” though if anyone asked – they were still voting for Trump.
Harris may own the “hold your nose” vote this year. No one is holding their nose and voting for Trump. His supporters are all in.
That brings me to the truck stop in Nevada.
Earlier I had been looking for any signs of Trump support. Yard signs, half-eaten dogs or cats, maybe an Arnold Palmer poster – you know anything. I found little. But when I walked into the Nevada truck stop I saw a man mopping the floor who had a “Trump” tattoo on his right bicep.
“So, Trump’s your man?” I asked as I caught his attention and pointed to his tattoo.
“Hell No,” he said.
“Your tattoo says otherwise,” I said.
“I voted for him twice. Never again.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“He’s insane. Maybe he always was. But he is now. Did you see him dancing like he was j**cking off two giraffes? Or how about what he said about Arnold Palmer?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “That’s what did it?”
“I’m a veteran. I don’t like what he’s said about Kelly (General John Kelly) and I was pissed off that he claims he’s so damn healthy now but was too unhealthy to serve. He’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
I sighed. “I would think that tattoo would be.”
He actually laughed. “I can get that removed. It’s going to be painful, but not as painful as Trump has been. Screw him. And screw Elon Musk. And all those other rich people who don’t give a shit about us.”
“So, who are you voting for?” I asked.
“I’m holding my nose and voting for Harris. At least she’s not insane.” He said.
And that my friends is where I leave you with two weeks left in the campaign, the polls as close as they can be, people losing their minds and others just trying to survive. The race may boil down to Nevada, and voters like the man I met who is holding his nose and voting for Harris — because she’s not insane.
The only conclusion I draw from my trek is that we in the media have long misunderstood and woefully underreported the sense of frustration in this country about a democracy that has been usurped by a donor class. It has left people who do the actual work that makes this country run fearful they will no longer be able to do so for fear that roving bands of immigrants will both replace them and steal from them.
That’s America.
But, I also saw hope. Most women I spoke with got it, though they didn’t want their fathers, husbands or boyfriends to know it. And not one single person under the age of 25 that I spoke with had any desire to vote for Trump. “He needs to be put in a home,” I was told.
If the vote goes right in two weeks, maybe he will. But if not, then there may not be a home to put him in.
