I joined the line and fell into conversation with a local couple and their teenage daughter. Kathy, the mother, was a friendly woman with bright red hair. When I mentioned I was a reporter, she told me to turn on my recorder. “I’ll tell you exactly what I think,” she said.
“I was born in 1956 in Brookfield, Wisconsin. It was easy for my parents. They were both working people, but as a middle-class family we could go out every Friday night if we wanted to for a fish fry. We never had to worry about how to pay our bills. We all had jobs with decent benefits. My mother was a nurse and my father was a salesman. My sisters and me all went to college. Our parents could pay for it. It just isn’t like that anymore. I’m a recruiter that places engineers. But we don’t know how we’re going to make the payment if the car breaks down. I’m sixty and I’m done with it. I just can’t do this anymore.
“I am a person of middle income and it has been very tough for my family. Manufacturing has been hit hard. A lot of jobs have left because China and Mexico can get away with emissions because they don’t have regulations. I think free trade has been misrepresented. I’m disappointed. I want to see this country go back to what it used to be.
“The country is more racist than ever. I can speak from experience. I have a special-needs son and I have minority people in my house every day. Have for eleven years. I go to work, and they help me take care of my son. The problem is, they’re working three or four jobs. And if they earn ‘X’ amount of dollars, they lose every benefit they have. I think that that’s something that needs to be looked at. These are hard-working women. The fathers are not in the homes. They want to earn a decent income but the policies say, if you earn $20,000 or $25,000, you’re going to be completely cut off from food stamps if you need them, heating assistance if you need it, daycare assistance if you need it.”
I tell her she sounds like a bleeding heart liberal.
“It’s not liberal. It’s smart and moderate. These women want to work and earn a decent income, but the policies and their communities are holding them back. I’m a conservative and have been a Republican all of my life. I’m tired of the Republican Party telling me they’ll do something about the budget or immigration and not get it done. Everyone has to balance their budgets and they need to as well. We have to protect our borders and not let illegal immigrants come in and get benefits that legal immigrants can’t have. Trump can get it done. He is so great at listening and brings in so many brilliant people around him.”
As Kathy spoke, a thirty-something Milwaukee man named John Lusz lurked nearby, murmuring an occasional dissent. When I asked him what he cared about, he said, “Muslims and Mexicans.” But his resentment of undocumented migrants didn’t stop him from employing them in his small packaging business.
“I’m guilty,” he said. “I employ illegals. Pay them cash. It’s tough when it’s there. I feel very guilty about it. It’s just wrong. They don’t pay in, but they want the stuff. Collecting social services, with a cash-hustle on the side. They should learn English. I won’t go anywhere that has bilingual signs. Don’t mind Braille. Braille is fine.”
The line started to move. At the entrance, I found myself behind an enormous fellow in a camo jacket explaining to security, “I have rods in my body. That’s why the alarm is gonna go off.”
The man’s name was Danny Kapalczynski. I knew all about the metal rods in his body because we’d both arrived at the rally early and spent a couple of hours together in the high school parking lot. Like Anthony Holston in Phoenix, Kapalczynski depended on social services to get him through, a mix of veterans’ benefits and Medicaid. He wasn’t proud of this, but he wasn’t ashamed, either, even if he preferred to call Medicaid by its local euphemism, BadgerCare. A native of West Allis, Kapalczynski remembered the smell of industry that defined the community he grew up in during the 1970s. He said he was hopeful Trump could bring back some smokestacks, and maybe sprinkle a few nuclear bombs over the Middle East.
“The name Kapalczynski is Polish-German. Jewish, actually. My mother is a full-blooded Jew. We moved to Wisconsin after my dad got out of the military in ’73. I was four years old. I graduated from Eisenhower High School in New Berlin, Waukesha County, just outside Milwaukee. After school, I moved to West Allis, because I couldn’t afford nothing in New Berlin.
“I’ve been in politics since I was ten. My first campaign, my dad’s buddy was running for alderman in New Berlin. I helped stuff mailboxes. Waking up at five in the morning, rolling flyers in rubber bands, putting them in the newspaper box. Stan Smith—thank God he won. The alderman in his district, you’d call the office and never get hold of him. The neighborhood lawns would have seven or eight beat-up cars in the front yard. Nobody ever did nothing about it. Nothing would ever get fixed. The local politicians, the aldermen, they’re still lining their pockets. Maybe they work one or two days a week. If you’re lucky, you can catch them on a Wednesday. Thursday and Friday they’re all out golfing together. I’d love to go on seven vacations a year. Maybe I should run for office. I should spend six months a year golfing with my buddies, watching the sunrise somewhere down in the Bahamas. That would be great. Never have done it. Been working. I’ve been a machinist and automotive-finish painter most of my life. I’ve also built homes. Different kinds of seasonal work.
“When I was growing up, the economy was good. We had Pelton Steel. Got the ore from Iron Mountain, Michigan. All the big iron industries were here. We had foundries. We had machining companies. It was all done right here. Now it’s all done overseas. My dad worked in the foundries and was a foundry teacher at Milwaukee Area Technical College, the downtown campus. When he retired fifteen years ago, he said it was because there were no apprenticeships anymore. Pelton Steel had closed. Everybody was downsizing. Now there are only two foundries left, Star in Waukesha, and Maynard’s in Milwaukee. They can do the same job in China for $2.30 [an hour] that costs $28 here. That’s what killed us. Now our biggest industry is shipping scrap metal. Nothing is made here. If you look at the small American flags, they’re all made in China. We don’t even make pencils. Pencils!
“I’m not a union breaker. I believe in the unions. They were good at the time. But today, if you’re paying the American guy $20, and the guy in China will do it for $3, and shipping is free, what are you gonna do? You gotta figure out a happy medium. Everybody’s gotta have a fair wage, gotta make a living. But it’s not happening anymore. McDonald’s isn’t a stepping-stone job. It’s a career. Because they can’t find nothing else. When big industry does come, the job line looks like a food line.
“People here are working at Walmart, they’re working at Kmart. They’re working at a sub shop. McDonald’s. Target. You go downtown, where Pelton and Nordberg and all [the manufacturing plants] used to be, it’s parking lots. Here in West Allis, the old Allis-Chalmers factory was seven miles long, two miles wide. They used to make tractors and tractor parts, all sorts of stuff. They shut down in the ’80s. Now it’s a giant parking lot, there’s a shoe store. I’ve been there when they close the doors. I was there in the late ’90s when AutoTech pulled out of Waukesha. We built plating machines. I worked for $19 an hour. They moved to Brazil where they can build that equipment for four or six dollars a day.
“That’s why so many people are here waiting hours [to hear Trump]. You could just go down this line and ask people: ‘How many of your dads are still working? How many are unemployed? How many took early retirement just so they wouldn’t lose their benefits? How many took early retirement, and still got screwed out of their benefits anyways?’ Look at Pabst. Pabst Brewing Company. Right here in Milwaukee, one of the biggest breweries we had. Miller bought it and closed the shop. The employees who retired got screwed. The buildings were vacant for years. Now some of them are condos.
“It all happened so slowly the American people didn’t see it going down. I’ve voted Democrat a couple of times. Ninety-eight percent of the time, I vote Republican, because they aren’t politically correct.
But I blame both parties equally. Everyone had hands in their pockets, greasing the wheel. ‘Give me a couple million and I’ll sign this into law.’
“To bring back big industry, you’d have to close the borders and say, ‘Start making it here, or we’re not having it here.’ Build the wall. My great-grandparents came here legally. They did the [immigration] paperwork. But jumping a fence and then getting free health care, free college—are you kidding me? I took on two jobs to help my son go to college. I didn’t want him being in the same position I was. Now he’s the head supervisor at Maynard’s for shipping and receiving. He’s already ahead of the game. That’s what it’s all about. The next generation doing a little better. But he’s got more taxes coming out of his pocket to pay for all the bullshit. Free services for illegal immigrants? I had to fight six months to get food stamps after my back injury. Had to fight to get $126 a month because I’m not working. I’m from here, my whole life. I come from middle-class, working people, my whole life. And this is the way we get treated. It’s gotta stop. I’m sick of people saying, ‘Oh, you can’t say this because they’re black or they’re Mexican.’ It doesn’t matter. We all bleed the same color of blood. I’ve learned this because my mom’s Jewish. Ethnicity means nothing to me. [Trump’s campaign] isn’t about race. It’s about people having enough. Putting their foot down and saying, ‘Hey, this guy’s speaking the truth.’
“My last job was making drive shafts for the big windmills. When everybody caught on that was a big scam, we started downsizing. They let eight of us go, out of thirty-two. That winter, I hurt my back shoveling ice. Three vertebrae. I lost two and a half inches. Now I can’t lift anything over ten pounds. When it’s nice out, I sit in the back yard with my dog. I watch the grass grow.
“The health care system sucks. I could barely afford it when my company was paying for half. Then it was out of my own pocket and I had to pay a $15,000 deductible. I had to hit fifteen grand, the cost of a nice used car, before they start paying anything out. Most of the hospitals that I went to wouldn’t take Obamacare. Finally, my friend was like, ‘Hey man, you’re not making a dime, you’ve paid in your whole life, there’s no reason you can’t get on BadgerCare.’ So I got on BadgerCare. It’s Medicaid, basically. But it’s BadgerCare. Now I pay $69 a year.
“Bernie Sanders wants universal health care for everybody. It’s ‘free,’ right? What is ‘free’? It means [someone’s] going to be paying more because I’m hurt and can’t work? Nothing is free. That’s a sham. My dad taught me, when I was a little kid, if it’s free, it’s bullshit. Ain’t nothing in this world free. Everybody pays taxes and dies. You might get it for free, but then there’s five other people paying for it. Let’s be real. That’s why I like Trump. He’s real.
“I believe in a nice minimum wage, maybe $10. But the more you go up, the more you’re shooting yourself in your foot. Watch what happens in California. And Billy’s making $15 at McDonald’s, but G.I. Joe’s only making $9? If you join the service right now, you’re making $9.25 an hour. He’s defending our country wearing a helmet and a gun, but Billy who never graduated high school is making $15 flipping a burger.
“I served in Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. We shouldn’t have been there. Same with Iraq in ‘03. Trump is right. Now Obama wants to close Guantanamo and put them on a plane and send them back so they can go kill more Americans. How stupid is that? Waterboard ‘em to death. Make ‘em talk. Eye for an eye. It’s in the Bible. I say drop the [nuclear] bomb on ISIS. Scare the shit out of all of them, the countries around them. It’ll stop. We haven’t had this much trouble since Japan. We dropped the bombs on Japan and that shit all stopped, too. Let them cool off for 20, 30 years. I’ve lost friends over there. I have cousins that I worry about now every day. Why are we sending them into harm’s way?
“They come back, and there’s a wait-list at the VA. People are living in their cars outside the VA. And it’s getting worse. Guys are coming back with PTSD. About twenty-seven a day are committing suicide. The military teaches you to kill, it doesn’t teach you how to live with killing. Nobody wants to say, ‘I’m at the lowest point in my life, and I need help.’ Nobody wants to say that. And nobody’s saying, ‘Hey, buddy, you fought for us, lemme help you.’ We’re forgetting them. Trump doesn’t.
“As soon as I get my disability settlement, I’m out of here. Like my dad. He lives in a cabin upstate. He’s been up there almost 15 years. I got some land up there. I’m gonna put a trailer on it, or something cheap. If shit ever really does hit the fan, the city is the last place you wanna be. We got people who already don’t give a shit. Imagine when the truckers aren’t trucking food and the gasoline is gone. When the preppers [people who prepare for imminent collapse of civilization] first came out, people laughed at them. Now they’re scratching their head, saying, ‘Maybe they know something we don’t.’
“My family up north grows their own food. My aunts and uncles take care of a three-and-a-half acre garden. My dad and my uncle split a cow every year. So, I’ll be going in on that. It’s cheaper. Buy half a cow and that meat will last you the whole year. It works out to around $1.89 a pound. There’s tons of prepper communities up north now. They’ll say ‘Hi,’ but they don’t invite you over until you’ve been there awhile. That’ll change once I get up there and they know I’m not just a ‘shacker’ from the city, just visiting for a weekend. Up north, everybody takes care of each other. When Joe the Neighbor’s wife is in the hospital, you go over and feed his cows.
“If things don’t change, something’s gotta give. The people up north are getting ready. You can tell the prepper communities because they’re fenced in. For years, you’d drive up there and just see a house, set back in the woods a little bit. Now, that house has a nine-foot barbed wire fence. Common sense.”
* * *
A few days before the primary, I met up with Dennis Vlach, the realtor from Serb Hall, for breakfast at an A&M chain restaurant. Sitting in a corner booth, Vlach explained that the financial and real estate crises were caused by poor people and the Community Reinvestment Act, which helped many low-income earners buy homes. Vlach’s animus toward Obama sounded oddly personal, and it soon became clear why. Vlach had gone through a nasty and expensive divorce during Obama’s 2008 campaign and election. “Nothing was good enough for my ex-wife,” he explained during one of several asides on the subject. He was still bitter about it. Vlach was bitter about a lot of things, which he explained over waffles and a dozen cups of weak Wisconsin diner coffee.
“My grandparents immigrated to Milwaukee from Czechoslovakia. My father was a welder, solder, and worked on five acres in the country town of Raymond, just south of here. He died the weekend before I started first grade. My mom was too proud to go on welfare. She worked as a janitor across the street and grew food. I was number five out of six: three sisters, two brothers. When I was eleven, I went with my mother to drop off my older brother at the cabbage farms. They grabbed me, too. You had to be twelve for a work permit, so they withheld my wages until my birthday. Farm labor paid less than a dishwasher. It was a dollar an hour. I saved up money. Brought food home. My mom kept most of my paychecks. After five years, I was foreman at the farm making $1.50 an hour, supervising kids older and younger than me. There was planting season, then you worked in the pulling patches. I also worked as a dishwasher and went to school. I’ve never been without a job since I was eleven years old. Ever.
“Back then in Racine County, Johnson’s Wax was the number one industry. Cabbage production was number two. I remember, one day, our company sent out forty-two semi loads of cabbage. In one day. Some bigger shippers maybe sent out one hundred. That’s a lot of cabbage. I learned early on pulling cabbage how stupid the media is. One picture in a paper showed me planting cabbage, with the caption, ‘Picking cabbage.’ Are you that stupid? My mother ended up being a reporter. She had seven years of education, up in Stetson. Her father didn’t let her go to high school. Big family. She had to milk the c
ows.
“This was farm labor. What they can’t get people to do today. Get up early, go in. It’s dirty work. Hard work. I did not enjoy it. You come home, take a shower, darn near clog the drain, but you’re tired. Just went to bed. You didn’t have the aggravation of knowing that, say, Obama is president and screwing up our country terribly. Even Jimmy Carter is a distant second as terrible.
“I was in college at UW-Milwaukee when Carter was there. It was tough. I was pumping gas and changing tires. My brother had a machine shop making valve stems. OSHA closed him down for not using the proper cutting fluids, and so forth, fluids that were, let’s say, better. Government regulation. I also worked in hotel security at the Red Carpet Hotel. I remember Ted Kennedy was there when I applied. It would have been 1980. When I left in 1985, I was already working as a realtor. I made Salesman of the Year while working at the hotel full-time. So you see my work ethic, compared to Bernie Sanders and the party of ‘Give me free stuff’? Risk, reward. Democrats don’t understand that free is not free.
“I’m meeting a man later this afternoon, a very wealthy gentleman, who owns a lot of rentals. He worked and saved. He has that bumper sticker of Calvin peeing on Obama. He’s sick of the corruption, the taxation. These are the people that keep the economy going. He’s for Trump. Talking to people I know, I’d say two-thirds of small businessmen around here are supporting Trump. We need a businessman, not more unions.
“The UAW [United Auto Workers] screwed things up around here, royal. We used to have American Motors in Kenosha. We used to have Allis-Chalmers in West Allis, a big international company. They made the turbines for the Hoover Dam. Too much unions, too much government. High taxes. Now they’re replaced by Kmart, things like that. Now the average person living on entitlements is better off than the average person working. That can’t be. Who’s gonna pay for it? Bernie Sanders? He’s a deadbeat. He didn’t get his first job until he was forty. He thinks big business is evil. But we need them to prosper. If we tax them too much, they hide their money instead of reinvesting it here. Trump is the only one who’ll crack down on that. Only he can do that. That’s what separates him from Cruz and Kasich. Any normal American president can handle ISIS. Only Trump understands business. Anybody who’s worth over $10 billion is a smart guy.”
The Gilded Rage Page 4