I ask Vlach about Milwaukee’s foreclosure crisis and his own rental business.
“Being a landlord—there are clogged toilets, broken heaters. People don’t understand. I currently have over $100,000 in judgments against tenants. I’ll never get it. It’s worthless paper. I have this attorney, he’s a retired judge, right down the street here, he does my evictions. He enjoys evicting these tenants. It’s what he does in his pastime. That’s probably a good attorney to have. The judges are part of the good-old-boy network. They know what they’re doing.”
After a mental double-take, I realize that Vlach is using “the good-old-boy network” in a positive sense. For him, Trump resonates with a yearning for when the “good-old-boy network” was national and taken for granted—providing a kind of club-member-level protection known today as privilege and supremacy. Maintaining these networks, even at the municipal level, is harder than it used to be. But Vlach is no doubt correct in suggesting they thrive still in Milwaukee. Like he said, these judges know what they’re doing.
Chapter Three
Pennsylvania
I was pulling into the crowded parking lot of the Harrisburg Farm Show Expo Center when the Corolla rolled into earshot. Out of its open windows thundered a song at full volume, straining the speakers to the edge of noise mud. There was no mistaking the tune. The hook broke through all the shaking, boomy bass like a star-spangled monster truck breaks through a wall of fire doing a wheelie. Before I could rummage up the song’s name, its lyrics commanded that I scream along—“FUCK YEAH!”—or be raghead-commie-pussy road stain.
I know this song, “America (Fuck Yeah),” the way most people do, as satire, as the steroidal-jingoist theme song to Team America, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s puppet-performed 2004 war-on-terror spoof. Not that long ago, I would have marveled at the sight of kids in American flag gear blasting it as a pump-up party song. But this is a year when not that long ago can feel like a long time ago. At a rally to make America great again, in the middle of Pennsylvania, the song made perfect sense. What else but “America (Fuck Yeah)” could be the unofficial anthem of Trump tailgating? Why didn’t the campaign have it blaring inside the rallies, instead of that unsettling mix featuring movie-mob-restaurant Puccini and white-boy party rap like House of Pain’s “Jump Around”? On second thought, maybe Trump’s rally music is already a pretty good fit.
I exchanged devil’s horns with the five college-aged guys in the Corolla, who were passing around what looked like a plastic bottle filled with cranberry and vodka. I did my best to sing the words I knew:
America, FUCK YEAH!
McDonalds, FUCK YEAH!
Walmart, FUCK YEAH!
NFL, FUCK YEAH!
Rock and roll, FUCK YEAH!
The Internet, FUCK YEAH!
Slavery, FUCK YEAH!
Slavery? I’d never noticed that in the lyrics before. Maybe this millennial conservative appropriation was more layered than it looked, involving levels of irony I was born a little too late to appreciate. Or maybe there was no self-awareness happening at all, and I was witnessing the truth of the old state saw that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle. I took a good look at the kids, who by now were alongside me. Drunkenly screaming “Fuck Yeah!” in Trump hats and American flag shirts, they looked earnest and knew all the words by heart. They were probably five years old when Team America came out during the 2004 presidential campaign. Had they even seen the movie?
After parking, I found them standing around the beer-filled trunk of their Corolla. They took turns shotgunning cans of Coors Light, whooping each other on and filming every chug for posting on Snapchat. I introduced myself and they passed me the bottle of cranberry and vodka. They were fraternity brothers at a local Christian college, but declined to name it. I was with a cameraman, and they suspected I was a mole from a local chapter of campus Democrats. “Wait a second,” said a kid in an Abbie Hoffman–style American flag shirt, “this is like one of those videos on Facebook where you attack us.” But they were wasted, and couldn’t resist the camera. The drunkest and most belligerent of the bunch stepped up in sunglasses and said, “Bernie Sanders—not a fan. Fuck that community college bullshit. Trump all the way, dude. We’re gonna build that wall, we’re gonna take the immigrants out of our country. That’s what we’re gonna do. That’s what the rally’s about, baby.”
More of their friends arrived, more beers were crushed to “America (Fuck Yeah)”, and they left as a pack to join the thousands-strong rally line, holding aloft an oversized Trump flag like Brazilians at the World Cup. They were gone before I could ask them if they’d ever seen Team America.
The line outside the Harrisburg Farm Show Center was enormous even by the sold-out standards of Trump campaign events. It looped around the entire lot and back into itself, forming a kind of messy seashell spiral. Thousands chose to stay in line even after word rippled through that Trump was already speaking, and it was obvious they wouldn’t make it to the door in time. Those who did make it to the entrance found a police line around a few dozen protestors chanting “Black Lives Matter!” at attendees who responded, “Blue Lives Matter!” Meanwhile, on stage, Trump struggled to express the concept of altruism without him at the center, still “taking” things. After a lifetime of “taking”—“That’s what I do, I take, I take, I take”—he promised to “take for you, the country.”
The Trump parking-lot scene is different from the others. At its liveliest, it is part NFL, part political circus. The Harrisburg lot was thick with vendors selling everything but Trump-branded cotton candy. The most popular item, sold by several members of a local black family, was a T-shirt with “Hillary Sucks, but not like Monica!” on the front, and “Trump That Bitch!” on the back. Then there are the characters, guys like Mark Spence whom I met in Wisconsin, who joyfully bounce around in face paint reciting the gospel of Paul Harvey.
Then there are the boozers. They’re usually middle-aged men with bodies that no longer respond well to standing in long lines. So they show their support at rallies by drinking with friends, pouring cups for strangers, cheering on the crowd, maybe scaring away a reporter or two. This was pretty much the exact profile of Jay Brandt, the fifty-four-year-old construction contractor who held court over the loudest tailgate in Harrisburg. I heard his laugh from 100 yards away, and followed it until I found a goateed bear of a man in a camo Trump cap sitting on the back of a shiny black Ford pickup. As I walked up, he was wiping a splash of vodka and Sprite from his crisp denim Carhart overalls. Next to Brandt cackled a much smaller man, Ben Calhoun, his best buddy from childhood and obviously the submissive sidekick in the friendship. “Make me another drink,” said Brandt, handing his friend a plastic cup emblazoned with a bald eagle.
They gave me a drink and we chatted about the line. When I told Brandt I was a reporter, he tilted his head back and pointed at me. “Are you for real? Look in my eyes. Are you a bomber? You need a shave. Are you a bomber? Are you with Hillary?” The inquisition made Calhoun double over in laughter. When he recovered, he said, “This chick from NPR came by, like, two hours ago. She said, ‘Can I interview you?’ And we were, like, “Uh, no. You’re from NPR!”
A third man who’d been listening in, said, “How many people tailgate at a political rally? Only Trump—this is a whole different campaign.” This was Ron Tamecki, a sales manager for a bow company who’d come to the rally alone and gravitated to Brandt’s truck.
I agreed the Trump campaign was different. I explained that that was the reason I was traveling the country talking to its supporters. I asked Brandt about the central Pennsylvania he grew up in, how it’s changed, and how Trump might make the country great again. He asked me again if I was “for real,” and told me to put my recorder down on the truck bed and let it roll.
“I was born and raised in Mechanicsburg. That’s fifteen miles from here, on the other side of the river. My family all came into the port of Philadelphia in the 1700s. Ther
e was no Ellis Island. We weren’t immigrants. We were settlers. Germans like us all moved to Central Pennsylvania. For generations, we were orchard farmers. This was farming country. It’s suburban now. I left. Now I live out towards Shippensburg in the middle of fifty-two acres of woodland.
“I’ve known this guy since sixth grade—I’d be a veterinarian right now if it wouldn’t be for that fucking jackass,” he said, jerking a thumb at Calhoun, who cracked up. “The Pennsylvania we grew up in, in Mechanicsburg, it was lily white. The only time we had color in our school was during apple picking season. The kids of the black folks would be in our school. They were traveling migrant workers, here ‘cause of the apple industry in Adams and Cumberland Counties. You had two or three, and they’d vamos after picking season. Our senior year, a black fella came into our class and started dating an upper-class white girl. In those days, you’d be ashamed to have an interracial child. But we didn’t say anything. We are not hateful. We didn’t give a shit. We’re white crackers, but we’re not prejudiced. This campaign is not a race thing.
“In the late ’70s, man, we lived life. We used to get these Colombian ounces of weed, four fingers deep, thirty-five bucks. We’d roll bones, have a great fuckin’ time. I can’t smoke the new shit. It knocks your dick up into your shirt pocket. After school, we’d go shoot groundhogs, possums, shoot doves. At school, we all had guns in our trucks, guns in our cars. Try that now. It’s a ‘gun-free zone.’ Everything is becoming so fucking soft. Trump is a first step to getting back to that old school thinking.
Calhoun pretended to cower in fear at the mention of guns: “Help! I need a safe space!”
Brandt screamed for help. “Ben needs a safe space!”
The friends laughed for a long minute before Brandt got back to his story.
“I started working in construction at thirteen. My old man was a drywall contractor. I worked on stilts, sanding drywall, stocking drywall, cleaning drywall. It paid for school. I went to Temple University, class of ’85. Got a degree in finance and business management. I would have been a ‘84 graduate, however—you see these holes in my head?” He pointed to his temples.“They’re from two big screws I had in the sides of my head after Jimmy Carter broke my motherfuckin’ neck.”
I bit. “How did Jimmy Carter break your neck?”
“In 1980, interest rates were—” he stopped to observe me. “I don’t know how old you are, fella.”
I told him forty-one, but he didn’t believe me. I handed him my driver’s license and he shared it with Calhoun, whispering, “Ben, I can’t even read his last name. I think this guy’s a Unabomber.”
The men laughed, causing Brandt to spill his drink again. He sent Calhoun to the front of the truck to fix him another.
“So this is how Carter broke my neck. After my first year at Temple in ‘81, interest rates were like twenty-two percent. For the first time, my father had no work for me. So my mother got me a job with Miller & Norford Construction, carrying cement, pans, tying steel. I was a frickin’ mule. It was an hour-and-a-half commute to the site. One day during the ride, a ‘75 Thunderbird rear-ended my foreman’s ‘73 VW Bug. Broke my neck. A hangman’s fracture. It’s all fused together now, my C2 and C3. If that son of a bitch Carter wouldn’t have run the goddamned country into the shitter, my old man would have been home building, and we would have had work. That’s how Jimmy Carter broke my fuckin’ neck. My folks were Democrats. Back then, that’s what working folk were. When I turned eighteen in 1980, my first election, I voted for Ronald Wilson Reagan.
“When I was at Temple, I was a teamster. I worked evenings and weekends for United Parcel Service. After the graveyard shift, we’d shave and go to class, all huffed up on fuckin’ meth. For holiday season, they wanted you to do a double shift. I would go right from working doubles to [Temple’s suburban] Ambler Campus, all pumped up on frickin’ meth. I’d have these 300-level classes like operations management, with lots of statistics. I’d meth up and go to the library. Nobody would see me for days. They called me ‘Rosie’ because I could fall in a pile of shit and come up smelling like a rose.
“I became a contractor in 1999. Now people work for me. My dad was against it. He told me the human element would destroy me, and he was right. I pass his grave every single day, and every time I say, ‘Dad, you were right.’ Undocumented workers aren’t really an issue in Pennsylvania. Once I did hire a Mexican crew. They piled out of a Dodge Dakota like it was a clown car. They all had green cards. I registered them, did all that shit. The first job they did fuckin’ great. The next job was tough, a tear-off job, and two days into it, they fuckin’ vamos’d. I’m ashamed to say it, but I deal with white boys on drugs, and drunken white boys. My best crew is a great crew, but they have demons. I mean, who’s being a roofer? You want to be a roofer? It’s tough work. Nobody wants to do it. A lot of the guys do heroin. They snort it. I don’t know what the fuck they do with it.”
I asked Brandt about Trump’s plans to tear up trade deals and slap tariffs on U.S. companies that move factories abroad. He said, “The American worker has gotten a raw deal, like Trump says. We’re selling ourselves down the river with these trade agreements.”
Tamecki, the third wheel, exclaimed, “Bethlehem Steel! My God, it’s gone. It’s ArcelorMittal [an Indian-owned multinational steel company headquartered in Luxembourg] now. It’s barely there.”
“It’s not just steel,” added Calhoun. “Textiles. Gone. They went down south. Then they went further south. People do whatever’s left. A lot of service industry, some warehousing jobs. Amazon has a distribution center close by. If you make $12.50 an hour, you’re lucky. I’ll tell you a story. In 1981, when I was in college, I worked as a casual dockworker, a teamster job. I made $13.13 an hour. My mom knew the terminal manager. I could call him up and get two-day weekend shifts. You know, favored. I went back there five years ago. You know what they started me at? Ten-fifty. Thirty ‘effin years later! It’s bullshit.”
Temecki, who grew up in a mining community, described the fate of the old coal towns: “All my family worked the mines. When I was a kid, I used to go and help pick coal. You’d go in at dark, come out at dark, go to the bar, clean your lungs out with some beers and whiskey, go to sleep for a couple hours, get up, and do it again. Everything was black. Your shirt right there, black. You’re whole house was black, your hands were black, your nails were black, your eyes would be just … .” He trailed off.
“The towns are still there. They’re tight towns. You have Polacks, Slovaks, Italians. Everyone still lives in a little townhouse, ‘half a double,’ it was called. If you did good or moved up in the mines, you could buy the other half, and you’d have a whole house. All those people never recovered. It’s all gone now. The jobs. The smart ones escaped. Lots of welfare, welfare, welfare.
“There’s lots of Trump support in these towns. They are just tired of everything. I promise you, it’s a fifty- or sixty-year-old guy who’s seen everything, like us. And he’s, like, ‘We don’t see change. We don’t see it. We tried. We voted Democrat. We voted Tea Party.’ Nothing’s working. Maybe they were Ross Perot voters, and now, it’s like, ‘Here is our last chance. If we don’t do it now, we’re going to go to our grave and it’s never going to happen.’ That’s what I think is driving this. It is the last chance.”
* * *
From Harrisburg, I drove east, to Greene and Fayette Counties, the twin capitals of Pennsylvania coal. Until the last few elections, the area was a reliable Democratic stronghold, where most breadwinners held United Mine Workers union cards. But the old allegiances have been weakening in recent cycles with the local economy. There were reports of fifth-generation Democrats switching parties to vote for Trump. A once-thriving regional economy had been hollowed out to what Jim Davis, the Democratic Party chairman of Fayette County, described in a radio interview as “a landscape of little towns in different levels of decay.”
Driving south from Pittsburgh, it didn’t take long to st
art hitting these towns in decay. On a gray and drizzly afternoon, much of Clairton, population seven thousand, resembled the abandoned industrial town at the beginning of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The main drag is a museum of shuttered businesses under faded signs from another age. The window of the town’s gas station mini-mart is covered with “Wanted” stills from the surveillance camera, with nicknames scrawled beneath blurry images of petty criminals: “cheese danish thief,” “medicine thief,” “5 hour energy thief,” “hamburger thief,” “dumbest candy thief.” And Clairton is one of the luckier towns, where the old industry survives in the scaled-down production of the local coke plant, still the country’s biggest, whose belching skyline of piping and smokestacks still produces the forgotten sibling in the triad of coal-coke-steel.
The coal trains still arrive in Clairton from places like Carmichaels, Greene County, one of the state’s better-known coal towns. For a century, coal defined most aspects of life in places like Carmichaels. Politics tracked with the union, which grew strong under the forty-year reign of New Dealer John L. Lewis. The King Coal Association, meanwhile, has for the better part of a century thrown the biggest social event of the calendar, an annual Coal Festival presided over by a local teenage beauty anointed Coal Queen.
I parked in Carmichaels on a Saturday afternoon and walked through the center of town. Though more bucolic than Clairton, it felt as empty. I followed a street past the sole stoplight until I came to a sign announcing Pappy’s Lounge. Inside, a handful of people sat around the windowless bar. The female bartender, a forty-something firecracker with auburn hair, sized me up and told me I was welcome at Pappy’s. She said, “Some bars here don’t like outsiders coming in. I like it. You hear interesting stories.” When I said I was a reporter here for the election, she laughed, “Oh, no. We don’t talk religion or politics here. It never ends well.”
The Gilded Rage Page 5