American Politics Right Now Are A Horror Story

This morning I read a guest essay in the New York Times by Eric Hagen entitled "I Grew Up in Bucks County, Pa. I Went Back to Try to Make Sense of the Election." 

It recounts what the author learned talking to sixty voters in an evenly split small town in rural Pennsylvania (in 2020, Trump got 276 votes and Biden 274), about 40 miles away from Philadelphia: precisely the sort of place where this year's Presidential election will be decided. The model at the FiveThirtyEight blog puts Pennsylvania's odds of being the marginal state that decides this year's Presidential election is 20.4% which is higher than any other state, with Harris's odds of winning currently at 53% as I write, nineteen days before the election.

Every single person he interviewed who backed Biden in 2020 backs Harris this year. Every single person he interviewed who backed Trump in 2024 backs Trump this year.

The justifications that Harris supporters have for backing their candidate are unexceptional, unsurprising, and mirror my own. A Harris supporter notes that: 

We were sitting at an outdoor table, overlooking the river. Riegelsville is in the far north of Bucks County, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, and only about 10 miles closer to Philadelphia than to New York City. “You see it’s so nice here,” he said. “It’s an amazing town. But politics has kept people a little separated. It has broken up some friendships.”

The horror comes from the Trump supporters, who make up about 47% of Americans, and about 49% of voters in the marginal swing states that are necessary for the winner to capture the electoral college in the latest polling averages. 

They utterly confound me and make me wonder how American politics became so broken, and how it can be fixed. In a better system, it would be the popular vote and not the electoral vote that would matter, but it would still be very close. I'll recount their side of the story in depth from this essay, in the hope of understanding it.

In Riegelsville, I was curious to know if the two-vote margin in 2020 was a signal that the town’s residents might be open-minded as they consider the candidates running this year — or if they are cleaved into two tribes like much of the rest of the nation. Would the fact that they live in proximity and actually mix with one another make any difference?

Over the course of five days, in two visits, I talked with 60 voters. All of them were white, reflecting the nearly all-white town. Riegelsville is, however, economically diverse: Among those I talked to were small-business owners, teachers, an architect, a retired stone mason and a couple of retirees from a now-shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant in nearby Easton, Pa. . . .

The more time I spent reporting, the more I realized I was not really writing about the numbers — or even the candidates. This election, more so than any I can remember, is about us, and how we think about our presidents. The people I talked to in this friendly little town expressed two starkly different visions of what a president should be — and what he or she represents in American society. . . .

Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.

“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”

“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.

The Trump supporters had a more complicated story to tell. They did not express fears that Ms. Harris would take away their guns — or, for that matter, even mention if they owned guns. None of them were QAnon-level conspiracy theorists who claimed that Democrats were pedophiles. In other words, they did not seem insane.

But in their defense of Mr. Trump — of his serial lying; his misogyny; his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.

“I think it was a crowd that just got out of hand,” Gary Chase, 72, said when I asked him about Jan. 6. “Some of it was set up. There were feds in the crowd who whipped it all into a frenzy.”

Mr. Chase is one of five members of the Borough Council in Riegelsville, an elected but unpaid position. He is a Republican, though the party affiliation is not, as he put it, “a nametag you wear here.” Like most of the Trump supporters I talked with, he gets his information from Fox News.

He viewed Jan. 6 not as a national tragedy but as a partisan event. “It was a political show, a distraction from the whole Hunter Biden scandal,” he said.

Those sentiments were echoed by others. Jon Libasci, 62, an architect, said, “How was it different from the police headquarters burned down during the B.L.M. protests?”

I first talked with Mr. Libasci and his wife, Yeyi, at the post office and then again one evening over drinks at their home. They had moved to Riegelsville several years ago from upstate New York, and live in the John L. Riegel House, built by a son of the town’s founder.

Mr. Libasci commutes by car to his office in Manhattan, a drive of about an hour and 15 minutes. “Gas was $2.25 a gallon when Trump left office,” he said. “I just paid $4 for mid-grade. You hear what Trump says: ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I’m OK with that.”

Ms. Libasci, who emigrated to the United States from Panama as a teenager, is an interior decorator who has been spending her time painstakingly restoring their home. I asked her about Mr. Trump’s long history of using language that denigrates women. “I have no concerns about his rhetoric,” she said. “I’m a big believer in you get the treatment you allow people to give you. I won’t let you cross that line with me. But I’m not a fool. I know that when men get together, they speak like men.”

I asked Trump supporters about his performance in the debate with Ms. Harris. None argued that the result for him had been anything other than a sound defeat. Several, though, observed that Ms. Harris had clearly spent more time rehearsing — as if preparing for an important event were not a quality you’d want in a president.

“I think she practiced very well,” John Shoemaker, 78, said. “Trump didn’t. And you could tell the moderators were out to get him.” 

. . .

I sat with this group two mornings. They reflected the town’s somewhat eccentric nature. Mr. Schaffer is a dressage trainer. Another man at the table had owned a tavern, which he referred to as a gin mill.

I asked them about Mr. Trump’s business history, which includes six bankruptcies, numerous instances of cheating his vendors and years of paying minimal or no federal taxes. Their responses were similar to what I heard from other Trump supporters: They accept that the rich play by different rules. Rather than resentment, they expressed admiration. “Every rich businessman goes bankrupt,” Mr. Shoemaker said.

A retired car dealer at the table, who asked that his name not be used, said he believed that Mr. Trump, as president, “took care of big business, and that’s smart because it’s good for all of us.”

On one issue — women’s reproductive rights — there was agreement at the table that Mr. Trump’s positions were hurting him and might cost him the election.

“It was a mistake,” the retired car dealer said of Mr. Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He said his wife, daughters and granddaughters were all voting for Ms. Harris, and some had contributed to her campaign.

“Trump puts his foot in his mouth just about every time he speaks, but on abortion it’s the worst,” the man said and added that “the abortion thing is going to kill him.”

In Riegelsville, several Trump supporters brought up former President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office, which may have caused more damage to the institution of the presidency than many Democrats are willing to acknowledge.

I ended up talking to a pretty good chunk of the town’s voters. As I made my way around, what struck me was the difference in expectations. Ms. Harris’s supporters expressed a sense of hope that she might lead us into an era that feels sunnier. It wasn’t quite blind optimism, but they were willing to let her fill in the details.

Mr. Trump has activated darker impulses. His followers were unbothered by his constant denigration of women, of immigrants, of political opponents and even, if he loses, of Jews he says will be at fault for not having proper gratitude for how much he’s done for them.

A president is called on to lead, especially in times of crisis. But if Mr. Trump’s supporters remembered that his response to the Covid epidemic was an exercise in chaos, disinformation and divisiveness, that did not bother them, either. They were not looking to be led or inspired. They said they want him to lower gas and food prices and close the southern border.

The relationship seemed purely transactional — even if the specific things they expect him to deliver would be largely beyond Mr. Trump’s control. Presidents don’t set food and gas prices, and to truly solve the problems at the border would require an act from Congress — like the one Mr. Trump quashed in the spring for his own political benefit.

Character flaws in a national leader are not just about an individual — they speak to the character of a nation, its aspirations and ideals, and the type of government we want. Mr. Trump often isn’t campaigning on a recognizable version of recent Republican policies. He is not bound by any party-coalition give-and-take. He is the party, and whatever he says, those are its positions. His product, solely, is himself.

What if what his supporters really want, and do not express, is the Trump vibe? All the name-calling, coarseness and bullying? The hypermasculine, authoritarian rhetoric? Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack, and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare. . . .

When I began to explore Riegelsville, I’m sure I had some of this in mind. As I walked its pleasant residential streets, Riegelsville really did, at times, feel like a Hallmark town. 

I figured that if there was a place that former Trump supporters might have grown sick of him — weary enough of all the ugliness and constant sense of grievance to cast him aside — this might be it. I was wrong. 

One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”

I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.