You might find them abhorrent. You might think them stupid for having fallen for such a charlatan. You might be right on those counts. But you can’t pretend that Donald Trump voters are all vicious fascists, because they aren’t. Indeed, the most shocking aspect of the Trump fans I’ve met is their decency.
For all the doom peddling by people in my profession this week, there was no violence to speak of at the Cleveland Republican Convention this week — from either pro or anti Trump gangs.
Thousands of journalists roamed the city, desperate for trouble to report. Protestors burned an American flag, and people shouted at each other. But nothing bad happened. That I am sure was down to the huge 5,500 police presence in central Cleveland all week. But it was also because almost nobody wanted aggro.
Even the real nasties on the fringes, the white nationalists and black panthers, behaved themselves. In fact, the most nasty looking elements of the so-called ‘alt-right’ seem to be feeling fairly sanguine; Trump’s success has made them feel enfranchised, and so they are not feeling the need to agitate against democracy.
The national socialist Traditionalist Worker’s Party, for instance, is here, a bunch of white supremacist boys in black T-shirts, trying to establish links with Donald Trump’s Republican delegates. Matthew Heinbach, the party’s founder and president, is pleased that Trump has created ‘a new legion’ of followers. ‘He’s been able to mobilise voters by being edgy,’ he says. ‘They are all white; they are all young. If the Republicans are able to vote increase their share of the vote by three per cent of the population it would be more effective than winning 30 per cent of the black vote. They need to revert to white principles.’
But Heinbach is a long way from representative of the average Trump voter. The overwhelming majority of Trumpists I spoke were good, albeit slightly paranoid, people, lacking in cynicism and keen to talk about what they think. Partly that’s because the folks of the Great Lakes are like that — polite, engaging and chivalrous. But Trump fans from across the country were there too, and they were equally cheerful and open.
There is a coarseness about much of the Trumpist political discourse — the cheering when speakers called Hillary a witch, a bitch, and a representative of the anti-Christ, and the general Muslim bashing. But that’s a cultural point: angry right-wing Brits tend to keep schtum in public, and issue their more bitter remarks at home or in the pub. Perhaps Americans do things the other way round.
Trump voters are angry, we all know that. They feel that their country is failing. A growing minority of Trump fans have bought into Donald Trump’s strange reality TV-style cult of personality, which is a bit distressing for civilised people everywhere. But most thought him an imperfect candidate, yet were keen to find the best in him. ‘I find he is too nasty a lot of times,’ said a young boy wearing a Trump hat, ‘But he says what he thinks.’
On Wednesday, I met a kindly Republican lady who didn’t like Trump but thought he could do a great job. When asked if she worried about his lack of values she said, ‘if you came home, and your house was overrun with squirrels, so you had to call an exterminator. You don’t care about the exterminator’s values.’ That analogy sounded dangerously fascist; Trump as vermin destroyer. But the lady didn’t mean anything racial: she was talking about fixing roads.
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