Inside America’s most loyal Trump town – where people still think he’s ‘a good man’
Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
Gas prices may be on the rise in Grant County, Nebraska, but the people living there still love Donald Trump.
“Trump is doing the most wonderful job any president has done since Ronald Reagan,” says Ellen White, a 78-year-old retiree, who has spent much of her life in the county dubbed the “Trumpiest” in America.
Last November, the President won 95.9 per cent of the vote in the rural, ranching community, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the country.
“We will have to get through this war and gas prices are up,” says White, who used to run a cattle feed business. “But the economy is getting better. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a shame Trump doesn’t have several more terms. He’s a tremendous person and I think where we live, we’re in good shape.”
Grant County is miles from anywhere, and that’s just how the people who live there like it. It is located in the Sandhills of Western Nebraska, sitting atop vast, ancient dunes blanketed by native prairie grasses.
The remote community – home to coyotes, deer and the venomous prairie rattlesnake – is 270 miles (434km) from Denver, the nearest big city – which is in the next state over, Colorado.
As of the 2020 census, the population was 561 in a community known for the high quality of its cattle grazing land, which fuels the local livestock economy. There is just one restaurant, which is open from Wednesday to Sunday, and the nearest doctor is 70 miles away. The handful of local shops are mostly in nearby Hyannis, the county seat.
Heidi Merrihew, 64 and a curator at Grant County museum, believes that Trump is a “good family man and a good Christian man”.
“That’s what has helped out with people believing in him,” she says. “People want to know he’s a good person behind all of it. He looks out for the American family and his own family, that’s what’s important.”
Merrihew says she still supports the President despite the fact that since he started the war in Iran in February, gas prices have gone up from under $3 a gallon to between $3.50 and $4.25. It now costs more than $100 to fill up her Ford F-150 pick-up truck, compared with between $50 and $75 before.
The curator and registered nurse adds: “I don’t know who to blame for that. I think it’s just our economy and it’s really sad because we have to pay those high prices. I feel he’s doing a good job, part of the war is not totally blamed on him, he needs other people to work with, different leaders, and that’s got to be complicated.”
It is a sign of Trump’s personal connection to voters like these that he still has their support. The 79-year-old’s straight-talking style and his espousal of conservative, Christian values – in spite of his messy personal life – rings true there.
One local man told The i Paper that the President had his “full respect”, saying he had voted for Trump three times and would do so again. “He isn’t afraid to shake things up and say what’s on his mind. If some people don’t like that, too bad,” says the man, who asked to remain anonymous. “He’s doing what he said he would. Trump has shut the border, he’s doing something about immigration. I think he’s great.”
Brad Ford, who runs the Ranchlands Motel in Hyannis, said that he was still “Trump all the way”.
“I got no complaints,” he says. “What is there not to like?”
Ford, 63, says he is glad that Trump is finally taking on Iran, even if it means a higher cost of living in the US as fuel prices rise with the Strait of Hormuz shipping route blockaded.
Ford joined the US Marine Corps in 1980, the year of the Iran hostage crisis, so the threat from Tehran resonated with him. He says: “If somebody would have done something about Iran a long time ago we wouldn’t be dealing with this. They have been holding the whole world hostage for years.
“I’m big on the immigration, big on [Trump on] the world stage as far as geopolitics goes. Germany can’t sit out there and bad-mouth America. If so, let’s pull the troops out.
“It’s all left over from World War II, the whole idea was that we needed to be so generous. Things have changed a lot since then.”
Ford says he spends half the year in Thailand, where he often speaks to British tourists. “It’s surprising as during his [Trump’s] first term, when I was in Thailand, I got a lot of negative feedback. Today it’s kind of changed, a lot of the guys from the UK are saying they wish they had somebody like Trump instead of Keir Starmer.”
White was just as effusive about the President and blamed oil companies, rather than the war, for driving up gas prices. “A lot of people like to blame the President for everything but he doesn’t control our country,” she says.
“He’s trying to make our country a better, safer place to live. Our country got into a real bad situation over the last several administrations and he’s trying to bring us out.”
White says that people in Grant County, which is almost 800 square miles – or a third larger than Greater London – shared the same values as the President. She recalls growing up milking cows and riding horseback to school in the same community, and says you “won’t find any more honest, hardworking people in this United States”.
She adds: “Trump is a hell of a businessman and he’s smart, not afraid to stick his nose out and get things done. He’s doing it because he’s a patriotic American, and that’s what I am too.”
المصدر: iNews