“From then on, I was in excruciating pain. The field medic can help with broken limbs and shit, but all they tell you is take two Tylenol. It sucked, but you’re working off pure adrenaline. For eight months, I was a mechanic extraordinaire, did anything that needed to be done. I think our battery had the fastest motor-swap time in the battalion. We could replace a motor in like twelve minutes. When you’re getting shot at, it seems like an eternity. The pain kept getting worse. I’d tell the hospital, ‘Tylenol is not cutting it. I can’t run. You’re not looking at the problem here.’ It’s been that way ever since. Nobody wants to do anything about it. It got so bad I had to find a way out. I got fat. Gained a bunch of weight until I couldn’t do anything. I got a Chapter 13 [disability discharge].
“All that shit over there, it brings you to here, and four marriages [trails off, pauses]. Coming home, I was scared shitless. My family was in Vietnam, Korea, WWI, WWII. They came back womanizers and killers. I said, ‘I don’t want that shit.’ I started having nightmares everyday. I see the kids…. There were things over there we did that were … unexplainable. When you get told to … seven-year-old kids. Do or die, you gotta do what you’re told, if an NCO tells you to do it, guess what? Don’t do it, and you get in more trouble, or you die. I look at my kids…. They’re the same age as some of the kids over there.
“When my brother got back, he got messed up in the head, ended up committing suicide. There was like eight guys in his unit that were threatening to commit suicide, and my brother talked them down. He grew up to be a real good guy. I’m a little bit more stubborn than he was. My brother was the pushover, lawyer type. I’m more of the rough-and-tough type. I will do what is necessary to survive.
“I got to be a really bad drunk. Real bad. After my third wife walked out on Christmas morning, I turned myself into the VA. For being psychotic. I spent five days trying to kill myself in my backyard by running my head into a block wall. I’d pass out and my dog would wake me up. Roxie. An old English bulldog. She is pretty much the only reason I stayed alive. She’d lick me and clean up the wounds on my forehead and I’d go back to drinking again and getting stupid again.
“They put me in a padded room for twenty-four hours. Put me on pills. I started going through counseling. Then the counselor left, and I was right back at square one. You finally get to a point where you can talk to somebody, and they leave. I don’t trust a whole lotta people. I let things go for a while. My ex got custody of the kids and moved to Canada. That tore me up and I realized I had to fight for my kids. Now I’ve got two of them full time. I try not to … get stupid until after they are asleep and I can have my issues in my room.
“For a long time, I didn’t know it was possible to get help. You try to Google anything about the VA—it’s a runaround. You end up getting even more pissed off, more of an angry vet [laughs]. I finally started filing paperwork at the VA in September of 2010. It took almost three years for me to get anywhere with them, to get a disability rating, to get any kind of help. It took three years. Now, once a year, they test me for anything under the sun, chemical related.
At this point, Holston’s girlfriend, Jessica Garcia, entered the bar and sat down next to Holston. She had short-cropped hair and wore a leather biker vest with a patch that read, “I support my veteran.” Holston explained who I am and why there was a recorder on the bar. “Cool,” she said. “I’m a Trump girl, you can talk to me, too.”
“The first time I had to call the psych help line, he was in the tub trying to drown himself. They said, ‘Oh, well what’s his primary doctor?’ I don’t know anything. I said, ‘His name is Anthony Holston. He is in the system, can’t you look him up?’ There was no help at the VA. Like, four times the past year, he comes out more pissed off because they’re not doing anything, just giving him stupid pills.”
I brought up some experimental drugs that I knew were being used with success to treat veterans for PTSD, including ketamine and MDMA. Holston was upset that he’d never heard about the trials.
“If something is working, why aren’t we trying that? Why aren’t we doing something? I’m going to ask them about that. If John McCain was forced to use the VA for his medical care, shit would change. But guys like him go to the Mayo Clinic and have private doctors. There is a song by System of a Down. It goes, ‘Why do we always send the poor?’ When I was in Iraq, some politician was in the news saying he would never send his sons over. What are we? Little pawns in your fucking game? Your son is important, but nobody else is? Bullshit. People with money get away with murder. You don’t got money? You’re fucked. An $8 minimum wage? Are you serious? What are you going to get for $8 hour out here? What do you actually take home a week?
Garcia jumped in: “When all the Mexicans and everybody were fighting for $15, I was working at McDonald’s. That one right there, right across the street. I’m kind of on the fence about that. I’m thirty-two. I’ve done McDonald’s since I was sixteen. I’ve worked at fifteen different McDonalds all over Phoenix. In a sense, it would be nice if McDonald’s workers could make $15 an hour, but there has to be stipulations on it. If you’re making $15 an hour, you should be with McDonald’s for more than five years. You should have the training. You don’t have to be a manager. Just be there for five years.”
I asked Holston what he thinks of Trump’s foreign policy views and the ban on Muslims. “We gotta stop going to war with countries and paying them billions and trillions of dollars. Let’s fix our own. What country out there would blow our shit up, and then pay us? ‘I know we just blew up like trillions of dollars worth of your buildings and everything, but let me pay you back.’ Who does that? [laughs] We’re the only ones.
“I don’t think the ban [on Muslims] should be permanent. Let’s put a ban on certain things that we know are happening. No international flights right now, sorry for you, but they want to fight in Belgium, they’re wanting to fight over here. Sorry, none. Get on a fucking boat. Trump wants to build a border wall. Let’s do it. Let’s stop spending all the money on all the people [entering the US illegally]. We’re not a melting pot anymore. Look where that got us. But illegals are going to be illegals, you’re going to have them no matter what you do. They find a way in. And they’re the ones willing to walk behind elephants picking up elephant ass. I respect that. I also respect how they’re family oriented. Mess with one, you mess with the whole burrito. That’s how I was raised.
“Since we’re never going to get rid of all of the illegals, why focus on it? If you don’t make it an issue, then it is not an issue. If you focus on the bad, that’s all you have is bad. Start focusing on some good: let’s get big business back, more work, higher wages, lower unemployment, and if you’ve got a higher minimum wage, we’re not going to have so many people on welfare eating up our taxes.”
This got Garcia’s blood up. “My ex-husband has a girlfriend. She’s had thirteen goddam kids, and the only reason why she makes it every month is because she has DES [Arizona’s Department of Economic Security]. And she’s a fucking Mexican.”
“Well, she’s a single mother with thirteen kids who are all under the age of eighteen,” interjected Holston.
“She’s a single fucking mother with thirteen fucking kids because she can’t keep her goddamn legs closed,” Garcia shot back. “I had one child. I get $62 a month in food stamps. That’s it. I put more than that in gas in my truck. Instead of spending a trillion dollars on a wall, put it into DES. I can’t afford health insurance for myself, then I get fined when I pay my taxes. Obamacare is bullshit.”
“Obamacare hurt everybody,” agreed Holston. “I honestly think we should adopt Canada’s fucking type of health care system. Everybody pays $130 a month, you’ve got healthcare no matter if you’re rich or poor. Age, race, nothing, it doesn’t matter, everybody pays the same $130, that way there is no discrimination, clear across the board. Everybody gets the same kind of coverage. Everybody gets taken care of. This system sucks. My mom and dad paid $4,900 a mont
h for insurance. My dad’s been in the hospital for weeks. They treat him like he’s an underprivileged, illegitimate fucking nothing.
“People also need places to live,” continued Holston. “There’s halfway houses for vets all over the fucking place. Up in Flagstaff, my buddy’s uncle started a tent farm. It’s like a big tent farm for vets. If they’ve got nowhere to go, no food, no shelter, they can go up there, they’ve got tents already set up with fucking sleeping beds. It’s all volunteer. They go up there and they can crash out in tents and enjoy the good weather and get fed. They’ve got food and everything out there. It’s a hella cool thing, man.
“There was a guy downtown that was trying to do it on a piece of property, further downtown by, like, the central Phoenix area. He got fuckin’ ix’nayed by the Council. The City Council just shut him down. He had tents and everything up, and was like, ‘It’s my property. I will do what I want.’ And they were like, ‘No, you won’t. It’s unsanitary.’ It wasn’t. He hosed everything out, cleaned it well.
“There are programs for homeless vets, but most homeless vets are old. They don’t have smart phones to get on the Internet and find it. Vets aren’t getting taken care of. How many suicides a day? It’s ridiculous. All it takes is somebody to talk to.”
When I left the bar later that afternoon, Holston and Garcia were holding hands with one arm and lifting a fresh round with their other. Holston didn’t look like a grizzled vet with demons so much as a teenager over the moon with his first girlfriend. He looked at the floor and blushed when Garcia told me in parting how proud she was of him for speaking with me. “He never talks about this stuff,” she said. Later that night, Trump won Arizona by twenty-two points.
Chapter Two
Wisconsin
“This awesome awakening—the shifting and—sifting and—the exposing of—this rabid—bite for them to—hang on to—any kind of relevancy—and to hang on to their—gravy train …”
Some found refuge in wadding napkins. Others fiddled with their forks, swirling scraps of fried fish and mashed potatoes. A few covered their faces with their hands. Those with eyes open traded furtive, knowing looks with strangers. A gray-haired woman at my table squeezed her husband’s arm and quietly said, “She’s hurting him more than she’s helping him.” Less quietly, someone else said, “Oh, my God.”
At the front of Milwaukee’s Serb Hall, framed by a Patton-sized American flag, Sarah Palin stood talking to a couple of thousand Wisconsin Republicans. She was speaking on behalf of Donald Trump, who’d declined an invitation to join his rivals and address the fish fry. His snub didn’t surprise anyone. The night’s line-up was thick with the same local officials and talk radio hosts who for months had been tag teaming a concerted statewide Trump beat-down. With Ted Cruz way up in the Wisconsin polls, Trump dispatched Palin to this hostile den of GOP badgers, the state mascot that looks cute in pictures but is really a vicious, razor-clawed predator. In this way the animal is a lot like the façade “Wisconsin nice.” The same polite, Fargo-accented Republican Party the national media said was “turned off” by Trump’s brusque demeanor was one of the leanest and meanest in the country.
Speaker after speaker at Serb Hall reminded the audience of their knife-cold accomplishments: theirs was the party that cut benefits and neutered public sector unions, passed a voter ID law to reduce minority and student turnout, and beat back a historic recall attempt aimed at the leader of this miserly movement, Governor Scott Walker. In the words of Vicki McKenna, the local talk radio host who emceed the Serb Hall event, “We’re different. We’re a beacon on how to do government.”
As Palin crashed around the stage on verbal stilts, it seemed possible that she was Trump’s revenge on his Wisconsin tormenters, the easiest way to ruin their fish fry. If so, it worked, at least a little. Next-day press accounts noted the lack of applause during Palin’s speech, but none captured the variety of tortured expressions that blossomed as Palin spoke in a cadence that sounded less like a stump speech than a testimonial presentation on the dangers of long-term methamphetamine and alcohol abuse.
Palin’s shuttle disaster at Serb Hall was of a piece with the Trump caravan’s Wisconsin arrival in the state. In Arizona, a desert state on the Mexican border, Trump strutted to victory on an official red carpet. Wisconsin was all windswept contrast, a gray and snow-dusted planet of fish fries and shitty poll numbers, populated by disciplined and austere conservatives living on a moose-patrolled Canadian border. Governor Walker, the battle-scarred Koch Brothers yes-man, endorsed Ted Cruz just as Trump Force One touched down in Milwaukee, but only after making cryptic comments suggesting that he enjoyed private fantasies about a contested convention, a white horse, and a smoky hotel suite in Cleveland. Pundits promised it all added up to the firewall they’d been hallucinating since Iowa. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne assured readers, “This time it really is the end of Trump. Really.”
Trump would lose Wisconsin as expected. But even among the middle-class, suburban party leaders who populated the Serb Hall fish fry, the after-dinner conversation at my table suggested there was more Trump support than was indicated by the wall-of-silence response to his surrogate from Alaska. Seated to my right, a twenty-something salesman named Mike Reynolds announced the evening had only deepened his loathing of Ted Cruz. He was voting Trump. This admission caused less of a stir than his praise of the outgoing Democratic president. “Is Obama really so bad?” he asked the table. “I mean, my 401K doubled. The stock market has doubled. The only thing I really don’t understand, is why is he so easy on Islam?”
Across from Reynolds, a straight-backed middle-aged man in rimless glasses and a sharp nose sprang to life. “Obama—not so bad? Ha! He destroyed the economy,” he said. “Business confidence, the real estate market—they collapsed after his election. Overnight. His policies—retarded. Just retarded.” The man introduced himself as Dennis Vlach, an area landlord and award-winning realtor for RE/MAX. He declared his own fierce allegiance to Trump, the Wisconsin GOP be damned. “I’m disappointed in them,” he said.
I made plans to meet Vlach for breakfast later in the week. But first there were Trump events to attend, including a rally in West Allis, home of one of Wisconsin’s most iconic economic ghosts, the old Allis-Chalmers industrial plant, which once employed twenty thousand workers building tractors and turbines for the world, and is now a parking lot.
* * *
Talk to locals over forty, and they’ll tell you stories about when Milwaukee—today the fourth-poorest city in the country and one of the worst hit by the foreclosure crisis—was a manufacturing boomtown. Trump’s bare-knuckled talk of “smart trade”, tariffs, and bringing back the old days was tailor-made to appeal to those on the losing end of the state’s decline. Not that he had any competition. At Serb Hall, his rivals made only brief rote gestures toward the area’s cratered industrial economy. Ohio Governor John Kasich said he understood Trump’s gut appeal to many blue-collar workers. “You’re angry,” he said. “You’re upset about this or that agreement.” But he did not criticize these agreements, which he had backed, shifting instead into a paean to Reaganomics. Likewise, Ted Cruz made an emotional appeal for the votes of “the men with calloused hands.” But it too was an appeal without mention of outsourcing, declining wages, or job-killing trade policies—global capital developments beloved by Cruz’s friends at Goldman Sachs.
The next morning, many of these “men with calloused hands” packed a hall to see Trump in Racine, an old redbrick industrial city midway to Chicago along the shore of Lake Michigan. I arrived early to find the auditorium already filled to capacity. The downtown streets were busy with disappointed Trump supporters walking back to their cars. Opposite the venue, a couple dozen protestors chanted, “Trump is hate!” behind a police line. They shivered against biting winds whipping off of the lake, which seemed to change color by the minute: flat and sleet under cloud cover, to tropical aqua under the sun. One protestor bemoaned, “This is a pa
thetic showing. We should be ashamed.”
On Main Street, I joined a bearded older man in a Trump cap who was handing out Trump stickers and little handmade cards to passing cars and pedestrians. One side of the card listed the people and organizations that opposed Trump—Soros, the UN, Black Lives Matter. The other side featured a YouTube logo and a website address beneath the words, “Paul Harvey: Our Lives, Our Fortunes, Our Sacred Honor.” The man, a retired Texas veteran named Mark Spence, was on a mission. He’d been following Trump through several states, getting to know fellow Trump supporters and trying to revive an audience for Paul Harvey, a folksy radio personality beloved by generations of conservatives before his death in 2009.
“I haven’t felt a fellowship like this in a long time,” Spence told me. “It’s something special. I’m having the time of my life.” Behind him was the white Ford pickup he’d been living in during his travels through Florida, Texas, Utah, and now Wisconsin. Spence wasn’t worried about the American people, he said. They would elect Trump as the GOP nominee, and then as president. What worried him was a counterattack by elites to shut down the democratic process. “I keep waiting to turn on the radio and hear that they’ve suspended welfare payments,” he said. “That will start a crisis in the cities. There won’t be any election then.”
Later that afternoon, I met Spence a second time in the parking lot of West Allis High School, not far from the old Allis-Chalmers plant. As in Racine, thousands were already in line several hours before doors opened. It was a target-rich afternoon for the vendors who trawled the queue barking their wares like hot dog vendors at a baseball game: “T-shirts, hats, buttons!” A half dozen of them were on the trail full-time, living off a political merch version of the old Grateful Dead parking-lot drug-and-tie-dye economy. Several worked both Trump and Bernie rallies. “They buy the most stuff,” said one traveling vendor. His top-selling Trump items were two buttons: “Bomb ISIS” and “Hillary For Prison 2016.”
The Gilded Rage Page 3