South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Trump voters face stages of grief
Biden’s victory stirs emotions of shock, disbelief and anger
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — When JoanMartin heard that Joe Biden had been declared the winner of the presidential election, the retired nurse and avowed supporter of President Donald Trump was deeply unsettled. To steel herself, she thought about how her household weathered Hurricane Katrina when it battered her hometown of Picayune, Mississippi, in 2005.
Asthe stormblewtoward the town, Martin rushed out into her yard to carry her 85 show chickens to safety. Outside, howling winds lashed her family’s barn, lifting the edges of the roof off itsmoorings.
“The next day they (the chickens) were very concerned about the changes in the yard — we had trees down,” said Martin, 79. “Theywere very eyes-wide. But within two days, they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can deal with this,’ and they did. So I have to followtheir lead.”
Across the country, many of the 71.9 million people who voted for Trump — especially his loyal, passionate base — are working through turbulent emotions in thewake of his loss. Grief, anger and shock are among the feelings expressed by supporterswhoassumedhe would score a rock-solid victory — by a slim margin, maybe easily, perhaps even by a landslide.
There is also denial. Many are skeptical of the results, saying they don’t trust the media’s race call for Biden, the way election officials counted the ballots, the entire voting system in America. Their views echo the unsupported claims Trump has made since ElectionDay.
This despite the fact that
state officials and election experts say the 2020 election unfolded smoothly across the country and without widespread irregularities. Trump and other Republicans have pointed to isolated problems, but many are explained by human error. Many of the Trump campaign’s legal challenges have been dismissed in court. And with Biden leading Trump by solid margins in key battleground states, none of those issues would have any impact on the outcome of the election.
Still, any fragment of possibility is enough for some Trump supporters to reject reality, feel aggrieved and rebuff Biden’s calls for unity. Their comments lay out the political challenge ahead for the presidentelect: The longer Trump casts doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s win, the harder it will be for the new president to unite a riven country, as he has said he
wants todo.
“I’m really not in a live and let live mood,” said Daniel Echebarria, 39, a teacher who lives in Sparks, Nevada.
Echebarria said he was surprised by the election results, questioned some of the numbers andwould like to see the president continue with his legal challenges. But he also said he doesn’t consider the result “a big rig job” and doesn’twant to see Trump deny the results into January. Still, he’s not feeling particularly united, either.
Echebarria said he believes Democrats never gave Trump a chance to govern and cites the Russia investigation and the impeachment trial as examples.
“I think that the president was prohibited from getting a lot of his agenda done because somuch time and effort had to be put against defending against these,” he said.
Several Trump supporters interviewed in recent days were rankled by widespread celebrations of Biden’s win in liberal cities. They saw hypocrisy in the public, outdoor gatherings after Democrats condemned Trump supporters for attending big rallies — some were held indoors — during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Sad” is how Lori Piotrowski sums up her mood. The president of the Boulder City Republican Women club in Nevada at first sounds much like any other deflated supporter.
“You always want your candidate to win. You’re a little let down. You worked hard,” she said.
But Piotrowski also described herself as “extremely” surprised by the result of the election. She’s struggling to reconcile her version of the campaign with the results. She says she saw so many images of large Trump rallies in the
final days. On a recent drive from Las Vegas to Reno — through rural, GOP-leaning Nevada — she saw only Trump signs and banners, she said.
“The votes didn’t reflect that amount of enthusiasm. I just find that very surprising,” she said. “It makes me wonder.”
Biden won Nevada by racking up votes in the state’s urban areas.
Piotrowski, like many Trump supporters, wants to see Trump’s legal challenges continue. A massive surge in mail voting and the slower tally of those votes made the vote count look unfamiliar and strange. Piotrowski said it concerns her that races were called with so many ballots outstanding, although that is often the case.
“It just seems to me that there’s a lot of things that can be improved in the system so that people felt more confident,” she said.
She said she hasn’t listened to any of Biden’s speeches since Election Day.
Za Awng, of Aurora, Colorado, is also suspicious of the vote count.
Awng, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Myanmar, has embraced Trump as a politician who echoes his conviction that China’s influence in the world must be sharply curtailed, and as one who Awng says shares his Christian values.
Last spring, Awnglost his job as a chef for twomonths when the pandemic forced the closure of the restaurant where he works. Back at work now, he credits Trump with working hard over the last four years to improve the economy. It was hard for him to grasp how the president could lose.
“I believe there is somethingwrong,” he said, pointing to what appear to be Democratic shifts in the tally but were a result of mail-in votes being counted later. Democratswere more likely than Republicans to cast mail-in ballots after Trump baselessly declared mail voting fraudulent.
“I hope there will be counting again andmaybe it will change,” he said.
Even in less tense times, Jim Czebiniak seeks solace in hours of evening prayer. So when Czebiniak, an avid Trump supporter who lives in the upstate community of Knox, New York, heard that Biden had been declared the winner, he turned once again toworship in a search for answers.
“First of all, I went to the Lord and I asked him why, why is it going like this? The Lord said, ‘Because I’m working on stuff. Just relax and let things work themselves out,’ ” saidCzebiniak, 72, who is semiretired from a career writing custom software.
“To quote what’s-hisname from the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger: ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ ” Czebiniak said.