The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017

by Sarah Vowell

  The speeches themselves are nearly all empty assertion. Assertion and bragging. Assertion, bragging, and defensiveness. He is always boasting about the size of this crowd or that crowd, refuting some slight from someone who has treated him “very unfairly,” underscoring his sincerity via adjectival pile-on (he’s “going to appoint beautiful, incredible, unbelievable Supreme Court Justices”). He lies, bullies, menaces, dishes it out but can’t seem to take it, exhibits such a muddy understanding of certain American principles (the press is free, torture illegal, criticism and libel two different things) that he might be a seventeenth-century Austrian prince time-transported here to mess with us. Sometimes it seems that he truly does not give a shit, and you imagine his minders cringing backstage. Other times you imagine them bored, checking their phones, convinced that nothing will ever touch him. Increasingly, his wild veering seems to occur against his will, as if he were not the great, sly strategist we have taken him for but, rather, someone compelled by an inner music that sometimes produces good dancing and sometimes causes him to bring a bookshelf crashing down on an old Mexican lady. Get more, that inner music seems to be telling him. Get, finally, enough. Refute a lifetime of critics. Create a pile of unprecedented testimonials, attendance receipts, polling numbers, and pundit gasps that will, once and for all, prove—what?

  Apply Occam’s razor: if someone brags this much, bending every ray of light back to himself, what’s the simplest explanation?

  “We’re on the cover of every newspaper, every magazine,” he says in San Jose in early June. “Time magazine many times. I just learned they’re doing yet another cover on Trump—I love that. You know, Time magazine’s a good magazine. You grow up reading Time magazine—who ever thought you’d be on the cover of Time magazine? Especially so much?”

  It’s considered an indication of authenticity that he doesn’t generally speak from a teleprompter but just wings it. (In fact, he brings to the podium a few pages of handwritten bullet points, to which he periodically refers as he, mostly, wings it.) He wings it because winging it serves his purpose. He is not trying to persuade, detail, or prove: he is trying to thrill, agitate, be liked, be loved, here and now. He is trying to make energy. (At one point in his San Jose speech, he endearingly fumbles with a sheaf of “statistics,” reads a few, fondly but slightingly mentions the loyal, hapless statistician who compiled them, then seems unable to go on, afraid he might be boring us.)

  And make energy he does. It flows out of him, as if channeled in thousands of micro wires, enters the minds of his followers: their cheers go ragged and hoarse, chanting erupts, a look of religious zeal may flash across the face of some non-chanter, who is finally getting, in response to a question long nursed in private, exactly the answer he’s been craving. One such person stays in my memory from a rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, in March: a solidly built man in his midforties, wearing, in the crazy heat, a long-sleeved black shirt, who, as Trump spoke, worked himself into a state of riveted, silent concentration-fury, the rally equivalent of someone at church gazing fixedly down at the pew before him, nodding, Yes, yes, yes.

  A Tiny Pissed Voice Rings Out

  “Wow, what a crowd this is,” he begins at Fountain Hills. “What a great honor! . . . You have some sheriff—there’s no games with your sheriff, that’s for sure . . . We have a movement going on, folks . . . I will never let you down! Remember. And I want to tell you, you know, it’s so much about illegal immigration and so much has been mentioned about it and talked about it, and these politicians are all talk, no action. They’re never going to do anything—they only picked it up because when I went, and when I announced, that I’m running for President, I said, ‘You know, this country has a big, big problem with illegal immigration,’ and all of a sudden we started talking about it . . . And there was crime and you had so many killings and so much crime, drugs were pouring through the border.” (“STOP IT!” someone pleads from the crowd.) “People are now seeing it. And you know what? We’re going to build a wall and we are going to stop it!”

  Mayhem. The Wall is their favorite. (Earlier in the afternoon, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona and legislative mother of that state’s Draconian immigration policies, nearly undoes all the good right-wing work of her career by affirming that, yes, Trump is “going to build the Fence.” Like new Americans who have just been told that Hulk Hogan was the first president, the crowd rises up in happy outrage to correct her.)

  “THANK YOU, TRUMP!” bellows a kid in front of me, who, later in the speech, will briefly turn his back on Trump to take a Trump-including selfie, his smile taut, braces-revealing, grimacelike yet celebratory, evoking that circa-1950 photograph of a man in a high-velocity wind tunnel.

  “I only wish these cameras—because there’s nothing as dishonest as the media, that I can tell you.” (“THEY SUCK!”) “I only wish these cameramen would spin around and show the kind of people that we have, the numbers of people that we have here. I just wish they’d for once do it, because you know what?” (“PAN THE CAMERAS!”) “We have a silent majority that’s no longer so silent. It’s now the loud, noisy majority, and we’re going to be heard . . . They’re chipping away at the Second Amendment, they’re chipping away at Christianity . . . We’re not going to have it anymore. It comes Christmas time, we’re going to see signs up that say ‘Merry Merry Merry Christmas!’ Okay? Remember it, remember it. We have become so politically correct that we’re totally impotent as a country—”

  Somewhere in the crowd, a woman is shouting “Fuck you, Trump!” in a voice so thin it seems to be emanating from some distant neighborhood, where a girl is calling home her brother, Fuck-hugh Trump.

  The shouter is Esperanza Matamoros, tiny, seventeen years old. The crowd now halts her forward progress, so she judiciously spins and, still shouting, heads toward the exit. As she passes a tall, whitehaired, professorial-looking old man, he gives her a little shove. He towers over her, the top of her head falling below his armpit. She could be his daughter, his granddaughter, his favorite student. Another man steps in front of her to deliver an impromptu manners lesson; apparently, she bumped him on her way up. “Excuse me,” he says heatedly. “Around here, we say excuse me.”

  An ungentleness gets into the air when Trump speaks, prompting the abandonment of certain social norms (e.g., an old man should show forbearance and physical respect for a young woman, even—especially—an angry young woman, and might even think to wonder what is making her so angry), norms that, to fired-up Trump supporters, must feel antiquated in this brave new moment of ideological foment. They have thought and thought, in projective terms, about theoretical protesters, and now here are some real ones.

  This ungentleness ripples out through the crowd and into the area beyond the fence where the protesters have set up shop. One of them, Sandra Borchers, tells me that out there all was calm (she was “actually having dialogues” with Trump supporters, “back-and-forth conversations, at about this talking level”) until Trump started speaking. Then things got “violent and aggressive.” Someone threw a rock at her head. A female Trump supporter “in a pink-peachy-color T-shirt” attacked a protester, kicking and punching him. Rebecca LaStrap, an African American woman, twenty years old, wearing a “FUCK TRUMP” T-shirt, was grabbed by the breast, thrown to the ground, slapped in the face. (She was also told to “go back on the boat,” a perplexing instruction, given that she was born and raised in Mesa.) Later that day, in Tucson, two young Hispanic women, quietly watching the rally there, are thrown out of the venue, and one (as a member of Trump’s security staff bellows, “Out! Out! Out!”) is roughly shoved through a revolving door by a Trump supporter who looks to be in his seventies and who then performs a strange little quasikarate move, as if he expects her to fly back in and counterattack. A pro-immigration protester named George Clifton, who is wearing a sign that says “VETERAN: U.S.M.C. and C.I.A.,” tells me that two Trump supporters came up to him separately after the Fountain Hills rally and whispered
“almost verbatim the same thing, not quite, but in a nutshell”: that they’d like to shoot him in the back of the head.

  I’m Here for an Argument

  In Tucson, Trump supporters flow out of the Convention Center like a red-white-and-blue river, along hostile riverbanks made of protesters, who have situated themselves so as to be maximally irritating. When a confrontation occurs, people rush toward it, to film it and stoke it, in the hope that someone on the other side will fly off the handle and do something extreme, and thereby incontrovertibly discredit his side of the argument. This river-and-shore arrangement advantages the Trump supporters: they can walk coolly past, playing the offended party, refusing to engage.

  Most do, but some don’t.

  “Trump is racist, so are YOU!” the protesters chant, maximizing the provocation. A South Asian-looking youth of uncertain political affiliation does a crazy Borat dance in front of the line as a friend films him. An aging blond bombshell strolls by in a low-cut blouse, giving the protesters a leisurely finger, blowing them kisses, patting one of her large breasts. A matronly Hispanic protester says that the woman has a right to do what she likes with her breasts since, after all, “she paid for them.” A grandmotherly white woman tucks a strand of graying hair behind her ear, walks resolutely over, and delicately lifts a Mexican flag from where it lies shawl-like across the shoulders of a young, distractedly dancing Hispanic girl, as if the flag had fallen across the girl’s shoulders from some imaginary shelf and the grandmother were considerately removing it before it got too heavy. The girl, offended, pulls away. But wait: the woman shows her anti-Trump sign: they’re on the same side. The girl remains unconvinced; she’ll keep the flag to herself, thanks. “So sorry,” the white woman says and rejoins a friend, to commiserate over the girl’s response, which strikes her, maybe, as a form of racial profiling.

  Two tall Trump supporters tower over a small liberal in a green T-shirt.

  “Stupid! Uneducated!” Trumpie A shouts. “Do you know anything that goes on in the world?”

  “Articulate a little more,” the guy in the green shirt says.

  “I don’t want to live in a fascist country!” Trumpie B says.

  “You don’t know what fascism is,” Green Shirt says.

  “Oh, I’m getting there, man!” Trumpie B says. “Obama’s teaching me!”

  “Go back to California,” Trumpie A shouts at Green Shirt. “Bitch!”

  The four of us stand in a tight little circle, Trumpie A shouting insults at Green Shirt while filming Green Shirt’s reaction, me filming Trumpie A filming Green Shirt. The bulk and intensity of the Trumpies, plus the fact that Green Shirt seems to be serving as designated spokesperson for a group of protesters now gathering around, appears to be making Green Shirt nervous.

  “Obama’s teaching you what fascism is?” he sputters. “Obama’s a fascist? The left is the fascists? This is so rich! So, like, the people who are being oppressed are the oppressors?”

  “Do you know what’s going on in the world, man?” Trumpie A says. “You’re not fucking educated.”

  This stings.

  “I am very educated,” Green Shirt says.

  “You have no idea what’s going on,” Trumpie B says.

  “I am very educated,” Green Shirt says.

  “You’ve got no idea, bro,” Trumpie A says sadly.

  “Ask me a question, ask me a question,” Green Shirt says.

  The Tall Trumpies, bored, wander away.

  Green Shirt turns to one of his friends. “Am I educated?”

  “You’re fucking educated,” the friend says.

  Green Shirt shouts at the Tall Trumpies (who, fortunately for him, are now safely out of earshot), “And I’ll stomp the fucking shit out of you!”

  Spotting a round-faced, brown-skinned youth in a “Make America Great Again” T-shirt, who’s been quietly listening nearby, Green Shirt snarls, “And you can get your fat fucking Chinese face out of here.”

  The kid seems more quizzical than hurt.

  I ask Green Shirt for clarification: did he just tell that guy to get his Chinese face out of here?

  “No, I was calling his shirt Chinese,” he clarifies. “I told him to get his Chinese shirt out of here. The Trump campaign gets those shirts from China.”

  I’m relieved. My liberal comrade did not commit a racial slur.

  “I did call him fat, though,” he admits, then dashes back over to the kid, hisses, “Why don’t you make your waistline great again?,” and slips away into the crowd.

  “This is America!” a Trump supporter rages desperately into the line of protesters, after one of them forces his phone camera down. “I’m American! I’m Mexican American! Are you a marine?” he demands of an elderly protester in a floppy fatigue hat. “I’m a veteran. I’m a veteran. You’re idiots. You’re idiots. I’m a Navy corpsman! I saved marines’ asses. Mexican, white, and black. We’re red, white, and blue!” The guy in the floppy hat answers, in heavily accented English, that, yes, he was a marine. This conflict rapidly devolves into a bitter veteran-off: two old guys, who’ve presumably seen some things in their time, barking hatefully at each other. I know (or feel I know) that, on another day, these two guys might have grabbed a beer together, jump-started each other’s cars, whatever—but they’re not doing that today.

  “What are you doing here?” a girl shouts at the Trump-supporting Mexican American former corpsman. “You should be ashamed!”

  “What am I doing?” he shouts back. “I’m supporting a man who’s going to clean up Mexico, build a wall, fix the economy!”

  “Puto!” a protester snaps, as the corpsman storms off, to go home and, I’m guessing, feel like crap the rest of the day.

  If you are, as I am, a sentimental middle-aged person who cherishes certain Coplandian notions about the essential goodness of the nation, seeing this kind of thing in person—adults shouting wrathfully at one another with no intention of persuasion, invested only in escalating spite—will inject a palpable sadness into your thinning, under-exercised legs, and you may find yourself collapsing, post-rally, against a tree in a public park, feeling hopeless. Craving something positive (no more fighting, no more invective, please, please), forcing yourself to your feet, you may cross a busy avenue and find, in a minimall themed like Old Mexico, a wedding about to begin. Up will walk the bridesmaids, each leading, surprisingly, a dog on a leash, and each dog is wearing a tutu, and one, a puppy too small to be trusted in a procession, is being carried, in its tutu, in the arms of its bridesmaid.

  And this will somehow come as an unbelievable relief.

  Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

  Where is all this anger coming from? It’s viral, and Trump is Typhoid Mary. Intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse, we are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different mythological systems. You and I approach a castle. One of us has watched only Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the other only Game of Thrones. What is the meaning, to the collective “we,” of yon castle? We have no common basis from which to discuss it. You, the other knight, strike me as bafflingly ignorant, a little unmoored. In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, preimprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional. (As a proud knight of LeftLand, I was interested to find that, in RightLand, Vince Foster has still been murdered, Dick Morris is a r
eliable source, kids are brainwashed “way to the left” by going to college, and Obama may yet be Muslim. I expect that my interviewees found some of my core beliefs equally jaw-dropping.)

  A Trump supporter in Fountain Hills asks me, “If you’re a liberal, do you believe in the government controlling everything? Because that’s what Barry wants to do, and what he’s pretty much accomplished.” She then makes the (to me, irrational and irritating) claim that more people are on welfare under Obama than ever were under Bush.

  “Almost 50 million people,” her husband says. “Up 30 percent.”

  I make a certain sound I make when I disagree with something but have no facts at my disposal.

  Back at the hotel, I Google it.

  Damn it, they’re right. Rightish.

  What I find over the next hour or so, from a collection of web sites, left, right, and fact-based:

  Yes, true: there are approximately 7 million more Americans in poverty now than when Obama was elected. On the other hand, the economy under Obama has gained about seven times as many jobs as it did under Bush; even given the financial meltdown, the unemployment rate has dropped to just below the historical average. But, yes: the poverty rate is up by 1.6 percentage points since 2008. Then again the number of Americans in poverty fell by nearly 1.2 million between 2012 and 2013. However, true: the proportion of people who depend on welfare for the majority of their income has increased (although it was also increasing under Bush). And under Obama unemployment has dropped, GDP growth has been “robust,” and there have been close to seventy straight months of job growth. But, okay: there has indeed been a “skyrocketing” in the number of Americans needing some form of means-tested federal aid, although Obama’s initiatives kept some 6 million people out of poverty in 2009, including more than 2 million children.