Faithful predict Trump landslide
‘God wants’ GOP victory, supporters say
THIS IS ABOUT AMERICA. BLACKS ARE WITH THE DEMOCRATS AND WAITING FOR HANDOUTS. IT IS SO OBVIOUS. BUT I’M NOT WORRIED. THEY DON’T VOTE ANYWAY. — KATIE JEAN HARRISON, TRUMP SUPPORTER
T he most remarkable thing about Donald Trump’s rally in this faded Southern U.S. city was that although the local population is two-thirds black, it appeared that nearly everyone in the crowd of perhaps 5,000 was white.
One exception was a young African-American heckler. The moment the man interrupted Trump, the Republican candidate for the presidency pointed him out from the dais. To loud applause, the Secret Service immediately hustled the protester out of the Kinston Jetport.
Of all the divisions that have been revealed in this bizarre, dyspeptic presidential election campaign, none was more obvious this week than in a city where cotton was once king: Trump will get almost all of his votes on Nov. 8 from whites across the country who have become immensely frustrated over what they regard as their diminished place in the union.
“This country has been divided every day that I have been on the face of the Earth, and that is 71 years,” said Peggy Schumacher as she waited in her red “Proud to be a Deplorable” T-shirt for the mandatory security patdown before entering the rally venue.
Like everyone else who waited for hours at this former U.S. air force base for Trump’s theatrical, floodlit entrance in his black and red Boeing 757, the former cotton-mill worker was acutely aware that this was, de facto, a whites-only event. But she was untroubled by it.
African-Americans, she claimed, are “promised everything in the world for free. They get free college, free medical and food stamps.
“My daddy did not raise me like that. What divides us more than anything, is our way of thinking.”
“This is about America,” said 28-year-old Katie Jean Harrison, who with her mother runs a company that hires out maids.
“Blacks are with the Democrats and waiting for handouts. It is so obvious. But I’m not worried. They don’t vote anyway.”
Ironically, most of the people hawking the candidate’s “Let’s Make America Great Again” ball caps and shirts outside the rally venue were black. Asked about this paradox, an elderly black man offering free “Trump for President” buttons with every $20 purchase, quietly said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Primed by other speakers who praised God, Trump and the U.S. armed forces and who denounced Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s support for gay marriage and abortion rights, as well as her dubious handling as secretary of state of what should have been classified emails, the controversial real estate developer dropped out of the sky to speak for 75 minutes in Kinston.
There was nothing new in what the man with the unique orange hair had to say, but the worshipful crowd had come to cheer him, and they did as he good-naturedly riffed on the themes that polls suggest will garner him about 45 per cent of the vote next month. There were multiple references to “Crooked Hillary,” the elections being rigged, hostility to ObamaCare, support for the Second Amendment, and opposition to NAFTA, although only Mexico’s part in the seminal trade deal was mentioned, not Canada’s.
Trump’s blistering attacks on Clinton’s character were like manna from heaven to those gathered on the tarmac. Even before the candidate spoke, special education teacher Angie Howard remarked that while she was a registered Democrat, such was her contempt for that party’s candidate, she would “vote for a chimpanzee before I’d vote for Hillary.”
Praising Trump as “a good businessman,” 28-year-old Randy Carter said he admired him because he had “backbone. We’ve had a spineless president for eight years and we have had no respect in the world. I don’t care what you think of me for saying it. I want to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He doesn’t feel like an American to me. I think he is Islamic.”
Trump’s highly chauvinistic comments about women and the stream of accusations that he has sexually harassed or sexually assaulted women, got absolutely no traction with this crowd.
“There is no man over 30 who has not made such a remark. It’s a fact of life, darling,” drawled Peggy Schumacher.
Dismissing her own generation as “a bunch of wusses and wimps who love everything and accept all that weird crap about transgenders and how anyone can marry anyone else,” Katie Jean Harrison said. “Thank God there are still some of us left who have common sense and hold to religious values.”
Summing up why she and so many others in the Bible Belt were going to vote Republican, Harrison’s mother, 53-year-old Kathy Sullivan, said: “I believe that Donald Trump is a Christian and that he believes in God.
“I feel in my heart it will be a landslide for Trump. I think God wants this.”