Wrestling With Snobbery: Day One at the Republican National Convention
Our writer finds himself in a strange land with strange people
Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty
CLEVELAND – OK, full disclosure: There is not a single person I know well who has, to my knowledge, declared themselves a Donald Trump supporter. In the county where I have spent most of my life, the Republican candidate has taken less than 30 percent of the vote over the last two presidential elections, and that does not represent a big shift from where the local electorate has been since Ronald Reagan left office. All positive comments about Trump’s presidential campaign I have overheard in person can be counted on two hands, or maybe one. The Trump Train exists in my life the exact same way a television series does: On electronic monitors that can be turned on and off at will.
So color this bubble boy unprepared for what for the marvels to be seen, touched and heard once I arrived in Cleveland to witness Trump’s coronation at the Republican National Convention. When you like to think of yourself as a humanist, you want to treat the Trump supporters you meet, like everyone else, with dignity. The circle jerk of negative commentary about right-winged America had begun to bore me. Surely there was something more to what made these people tick than their racist sense of otherness, right?
Well, after a full day of interaction and witnessing the way delegates and guests reacted to the RNC rhetoric in person, I still have no clue to determining what flag these folks are saluting if racism isn’t at the crux of their values.
If I may treat Trump Republicans as a giant monolith for a moment (and they’re not; the mix of faces at Quicken Loans Arena last night – like most GOP conventions, I’d imagine – was pretty evenly divided between what you’d expect to see at a posh country club and a dive honky tonk bar), the pitfalls of white supremacy are never going to be honestly explored because Trumpites aren’t even close to the first step – acknowledging that it MIGHT be an actual thing. Like most social concerns, it’s thrown in the bin of “political correctness,” a catch-all dismissal that covers seemingly all bases. Even discussing issues based on objective data seems fruitless. Before entering the arena, a Trump-supporting tee shirt vendor and I engaged in what felt like a civil conversation about Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter when he told me that whites are being killed by police at a higher clip than blacks.
“Google it!” he pled. I did, and recited the recent Washington Post findings that 50 percent of victims in 2015 fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The only retort needed, of course, is that for every black American, there are more than five white Americans. Not only did the vendor openly dismiss this but left the discussion insisting he had a full grasp on how statistics were researched. Observing slightly less pleasant debates on the streets of Cleveland this week, this was no stark exception from the norm.