“You have to testify why you believe what you believe”
DiAnna Schenkel is a law school graduate who once ran on the Democratic ticket for her city council. She voted twice for Barack Obama. A 59-year-old suburbanite in North Carolina, she worries about her Black son-inlaw being racially profiled by the police, pulled over and beaten or worse.
The portrait of a Biden voter? No, Schenkel, who is white, is a confirmed supporter of Donald Trump. She voted for him enthusiastically four years ago after becoming disillusioned with the Obama presidency, and plans to vote for his re-election. At the same time, she is wary of expressing her politics openly because she believes that stereotypes of what she calls “Trumpers” such as herself, as portrayed on social media and in conversations, are smug and spiteful.
“There’s so many people throwing down really inflammatory words: Racist. Xenophobic,” she said of the way people regard Trump supporters. “And these inflammatory words carry emotions. It just pivots people to where they’re not going to even tolerate someone for supporting that person. You’re automatically put on trial and you have to testify why you believe what you believe.”
As Trump takes center stage at the Republican National Convention this week, he maintains a core of rock-solid supporters such as Schenkel who believe he is fighting in America’s best interests and has achieved many of his goals — which are their goals too. He has aggressively cultivated these voters over the last few months with scathing criticism of vandalism that has occasionally arisen from mostly peaceful protests calling for racial justice, and by boasting that, pre-coronavirus, he had built an economy second to none.
For Democrats and many independents, Trump has shattered the norms of presidential behavior with racist tweets and divisive policies; his use of federal agencies to advance his personal interests; and his detachment from managing the pandemic, which has killed about 178,000 Americans.
The revulsion toward the president that his opponents feel has colored how many regard Trump’s supporters. Portrayals of his base, these supporters say, are often distilled into a caricature: that they are all white bigots, in thrall to an authoritarian leader and lost in a fog of fact-denial.
In lengthy interviews over the last several weeks, a cross section of Trump voters said they believed he had succeeded on issues such as hardening the southern border, appointing conservative judges, taking on China and putting “America first.” Many said the president’s grievances were their grievances, too. They believed kneeling during the national anthem was un-American, and they were appalled at what they viewed as liberals’ minimizing of violence that at times grew out of the protests over the killing of George Floyd.
At the same time, Trump voters dismissed as irrelevant aspects of the president’s behavior that critics say make him historically unfit for office. All politicians lie, many said; as for the president’s suggestion that he might not accept the election results, supporters said voters should judge his actions, not his loose talk or tweets.
“I didn’t vote for Trump because I wanted him to be my best friend,” Schenkel said. “I wanted to make a change and a difference.”
“If he thinks it’s the right thing, he doesn’t care who’s going to get mad at him,” she added. “I think he’s very misunderstood.”
Other Trump supporters outlined myriad reasons for wanting to re-elect him, ranging from the pragmatic, such as a new job made possible by the administration’s policies, to a gut-level attraction to his hard-nosed personality. His supporters related “aha” moments in their upbringing when they realized they were conservatives, which they spoke of as nonnegotiable beliefs woven into their identity, such as opposition to abortion.
When Shelley Taylor was 17 in rural Ohio, she crossed a teachers’ picket line at her high school and told the school board the teachers were selfishly depriving seniors of credits they needed to graduate. Supporters of the teachers boycotted her parents’ hardware store, she recalled. The episode shaped her political identity as a conservative.
Now a resident of Deltona, Fla., Taylor, 59, still considers herself outspoken, and she was drawn in four years ago by that same quality in Trump.
“I liked how he was very straight up,” she said. “I laughed at his demeanor. I thought, all right, we got a guy here who’s going to whoop some butt on these politicians.”
Taylor believes the president’s enemies, including Democrats who she says behave like “spoiled little kids,” have tried to undermine him from day one. Among the developments she said were being manipulated to damage the president are the coronavirus outbreak and the protests after the death of Floyd, a Black man killed in the custody of white police officers in Minneapolis.
Kathleen O’Boyle, who sells real estate in the Pittsburgh suburbs, said she did not believe Trump had soft-pedaled the virus at all.
On the contrary, the coronavirus turned out to be “a lot less severe” than initially feared, with fatalities concentrated among older people but barely touching young ones, said O’Boyle, a law school graduate and former litigator.
Trump, she said, had “overreacted based on the information he had available.” She added, “I would have been opposed to an economic shutdown.”