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bogarde73
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Stories on the campaign trail:
Molly Ball, the Atlantic
You meet all kinds of people at Trump rallies, and they do not hesitate to speak their minds. “It’s about the white middle class—we have not been represented, and the only way we are going to get representation is if Donald Trump is our next president,” Ginger Barbee, a retired criminal-defense attorney from Trussville, Alabama, told me. Not being afraid to say such things—being heard—is the whole point of Trump, whose flouting of “political correctness” resonates deeply with people who feel they’ve been silenced.
“We’re treated like the minority, even though there are more of us,” Barbee complained. A descendant of Confederate soldiers, she lamented the recent removal of Confederate flags and monuments. “I do not want any more Republican establishment people running the country any more than I want the Marxist Democrats,” she added. “Write that down.”
Tootsie Cobb, an elegantly dressed 72-year-old retired nurse, had not yet heard about the Klan controversy when I spoke to her, and it gave her momentary pause. “Oh, that’s bad,” she said. Cobb could vividly recall the Klan in her hometown of Arab, Alabama, when she was younger. They gathered on a mountaintop just outside of town in their robes and hoods; they would put up a cross “as tall as those pillars,” she said, indicating the uprights of the football field we were standing on.
She always felt frightened of them, and she did not like the idea of Trump associating with them. “I will still vote for him, but I am very disappointed,” she said. “But what else is there? I do wish he had more empathy. His ego is very fragile. But we have to build the wall.”
Until 2003, there was a tire plant in Madison, Alabama, owned first by Dunlop and then by Goodyear. At one time it employed 1,200 people, including Brad Chittam, who began working there, alongside his father, as soon as he graduated from high school. He built tires and changed molds. But when the plant closed, Chittam was out of work.
He got a government grant to go back to school and get a two-year degree. Truthfully, he cherished the extra time he got to spend with his then-7-year-old son. When he finished school, he got a job building rocket engines used by the NASA facility in Huntsville. It is the best job he has ever had. The scourge of unrestricted trade had not worked out so badly for Chittam, yet he was moved by Trump’s denunciations of job displacement. “I’m not only looking out for myself,” said the 47-year-old, whose red hair curled beneath a University of Alabama visor. “We should be doing something to prevent that from happening and make the jobs stay here.” Things had to be built somewhere—why shouldn’t it be here in America, rather than somewhere else?
In Valdosta, I met Brandy Gillis, a stay-at-home mother whose husband owns a timber company. “I’m 41 with five children and I can’t understand my 9-year-old son’s math homework because of Common Core,” she said. “My son has ADHD, but he doesn’t get any one-on-one help because we live in a rural area and there are 15 or 20 immigrants in his school who can’t speak a lick of English. So they get the one-on-one help and we have to hire a tutor.”
“The social world has changed so much,” fretted 83-year-old Maxine Chaney, who wore a blue velvet tracksuit and punctuated her sentences with gentle smiles. “Things that we felt were not appropriate are accepted now,” like people living together before they’re married and women having babies outside of wedlock. “A girl can make a mistake one time, but two times, that’s a want-to,” she said. She wished Trump wouldn’t swear so much.
“I consider myself an independent—a moderate,” said Brock Garvis, a 29-year-old truck driver with tattooed calves and a Make America Great Again cap. Garvis’s brother died in Afghanistan in 2007, leaving behind three young children. He wanted to tighten the borders and keep out the Muslims to prevent another 9/11, which he feared was imminent. . . .
So many people came to see Trump in Valdosta, in southern Georgia on the Florida border, that at least 1,000 couldn’t get in and had to listen to his speech on loudspeakers, standing on the tennis court outside the basketball arena that was packed to the rafters. (Trump claimed there were actually 12,000 people stranded outside, but a policeman I asked afterward gave me a lower estimate.) Before the speech, a group of African Americans said they were quietly escorted out; the Trump campaign denied it was behind the ejection.
Bill Griffin was one of those who didn’t make it in, because he had to drive to the rally after work. He is a social worker in Florida; from 1998 to 2002, he worked in the state legislature in Tallahassee, where he knew Jeb Bush. Griffin had already voted early for Trump. “I’m a moderate Republican,” he said. “Who else is there? You know, Trump really is a moderate. He used to be a Democrat, for God’s sake! He’ll get smart people in there who know what they’re doing.”
cont . . .
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