The Gilded Rage is Alexander Zaitchik’s journalistic tour of Donald Trump’s America. A man of the Left, Zaitchik wanted to understand what drove people to back the eventual GOP nominee. He hit the road looking for answers. The sketch he presents is far different from the caricature that many pundits and politicians have drawn of these voters. Zaitchik corresponded with the Washington Examiner Saturday about his time on the road, the Amazon rainforest and Hillary Clinton’s instantly infamous “basket of deplorables.”
WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Why did you decide to write a story not about Donald Trump but his supporters?
ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK: When I proposed the idea to my publisher in February, the entire national press corps was focused on Trump and his campaign. But there wasn’t much good reporting on the 13 million people who voted for the guy, which I think is the more interesting and more important story.
I found many of the “Meet the Trump Voters”-type pieces to be superficial or reductive. And the punditry on the subject was unreadable, epitomized by Nicholas Kristof inventing an imaginary Trump voter rather than talking to one.
So I hit the road to meet everyday Trump supporters and let them speak for themselves, to tell their stories. My hope was these stories would make good reading and maybe help illuminate what was going on. The idea was to paint some profile portraits in economically depressed counties where Trump was drawing his highest numbers, in areas symbolically resonant with his campaign: the Rust Belt, Appalachia, the southern Borderlands.
I grew up reading Studs Terkel, and read Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of Chernobyl during the early primaries, so they inspired the idea of an oral history approach. Much of the book is lightly edited transcript from long-form biographical interviews.
EXAMINER: Are his supporters portrayed accurately in the press?
ZAITCHIK: I think there’s a general temptation to shoehorn 13 million people into a false dichotomy: Are they motivated by racial grievances, or economic ones? I think everybody understands it’s more complex.
With Trump voters I met, a valid and rational rage at elites and the establishments of both parties was often streaked through or marbleized with racial/ethnic/cultural issues of various kinds, which Trump played on and stoked. But I don’t think Trump’s support is reducible to racism, any more than racism is always reducible to racism. It exists within a larger social context and system, one Americans have struggled to understand and confront.
Still, most of the Trump supporters I met — not all, but most — directed their anger up, not down, and understand that the cratering they experience around them — the loss of good jobs, growing insecurity and inequality, maybe rampant opioid addiction — is not the fault of migrant workers or the black guy down the street.
Trump voters are angry about a lot of things, and some of them are blunt-force racists. But give them a chance to talk about what matters most, and they’ll usually start talking about the factories and industries they knew as kids, and how they’ve been replaced by low-pay service jobs with no security. The conversation can bleed into all sorts of directions, but it usually starts there.
EXAMINER: Who was the most surprising Trump diehard you encountered?
ZAITCHIK: Reporting the book, I had long conversations with maybe 100 Trump supporters in six states, and I found surprises everywhere. In West Virginia, there was a grassroots anti-coal activist. In Arizona, a disabled vet who supported universal healthcare and often sounded like a Bernie [Sanders] fan (not that uncommon in my experience). In New Mexico, an old hippie living in the desert whose passion was green energy tech — he was building a prototype for a micro windmill. In a California border town, I met a very nice white man whose best friends included immigrant-rights activists and members of the Mexicali mafia. All Trump supporters you meet in the book.
Yes, I also met a handful of red-faced dudes in sexist T-shirts muttering about “Mexicans and Muslims.” I don’t deny or downplay that significant segment of Trump’s base. But very often in my admittedly limited and un-scientific experience, once people start talking, they muddy the caricature, if not undermine it.
I do not think half of the people I met belong in Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”, which could be read as another way of saying “white-trash bin,” a term with a long and tortured history in this country that Nancy Isenberg explores in her excellent book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. (Which makes a good two-fer with The Gilded Rage.)
EXAMINER: What has Trump accomplished with his rallies?
ZAITCHIK: There’s a lot to say about the rallies. I attended a bunch, but one observation that struck me was the way some people seemed to regain their self-awareness and critical thinking skills once they got away from the call-response groupthink, and often gladiatorial environment, of a rally. They definitely are not the best place to conduct an interview, especially if protestors are throwing eggs and screaming obscenities at your subject.
EXAMINER: What impression did the anti-Trump protesters leave?
ZAITCHIK: I had more in common politically with the protestors I encountered along the way than my subjects. I supported Bernie Sanders in the primary, and come from a place to the left of the Democratic Party. But some of the protest tactics I saw up close — hurling objects and abuse at people, trying to obstruct them — is counterproductive if the goal is to build a broad and inclusive populist movement, one that offers Trump supporters a bridge to a politics consisting of more than demagoguery. And I do think that has to be the goal.
EXAMINER: You observe that Trump backers don’t take a lot of what he has to say at face value, understanding that he uses hyperbole. What do they think he would actually do as president?
ZAITCHIK: It won’t shock anyone to hear that a lot of people support Trump for reasons that have nothing to do with fine points of policy. They’re really responding to the fundamental energy and message of his candidacy — his anger, his perceived Robin Hood outsider-dom, his humor, his not-giving-a-s**t.
Even the wall, his central campaign promise, is seen by a lot of people as a dramatic stand-in for getting serious about border security. The closer you get to the border, the more Trump supporters laugh out loud at the wall, or wave it off.
But again, the whole point of the book was to get away from generalizing too much about millions of people. Sometimes the best thing is to give up trying to figure people out as part of a group, or a political wave, and just have a beer with them as a fellow American. With the tape recorder rolling.
EXAMINER: You’re headed to South America tonight on a mission. Can you tell us about that?
ZAITCHIK: A number of indigenous tribes are gathering for a congress in Colombia’s southern Amazon region next week. The idea is to devise a strategy for resisting the land grab and penetration by industry that’s sure to follow the recent peace settlement.
One of my beats is the intersection of indigenous rights and rainforest preservation, one of the great underreported stories of our time. Mining and oil development is rampant throughout the western Amazon, and it threatens the entire rainforest if it continues. These tribes are down there fighting incredibly brave, dangerous, and lonely battles. Instead of spending money on “Avatar” sequels, we’d do well to support the real-world version taking place in our hemisphere.
