Opinion
We were about to spend five days walking through the Cotswolds and had just met our two guides. The weather was glorious, every garden and meadow in the south of England seemed to have burst into flower, and there were no clouds on the horizon as far as we could see. However, like most travellers embarking on a tour, our biggest potential niggle was about those who would be joining us.
βWho else is on the tour?β I asked one of the guides.
βFour Americans,β came the reply.
The niggle of doubt got a little more niggly: βAs long as theyβre not Trump supporters.β
βOh no,β said our guide, βThey donβt travel.β
Famous last words. It turns out some do, including the four we were about to spend almost a week with.
At first, the married couple, her sister and their friend seemed perfectly nice, even kind. It wasnβt until dinner the first night, after a 10-kilometre hike through breathtaking scenery and quaint honey-stone villages, that we realised our charming travel companions had another side to them.
My husband and I were restrained, I promise you, as no doubt our travelling companions were with us. None of us wanted to ruin the next few days. After our differences became apparent, we all stuck to safer subjects. I could feel our guides relax.
That night, I wondered how weβd keep it up for nearly a week. I loathe Trump and find it hard to understand how anyone supports him. Mind you, I have only come across one other Trumpist, so I decided I should approach this as an opportunity to understand why seemingly decent people could support such a man.
I was surprised by the level of vitriol directed at the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris by our companions, including falsely claiming she had slept her way to the top. Iβd heard this before from my only other Trumpist acquaintance, who followed it up with the claim that Harris wasnβt black. What was Orwellβs warning? That weβd have to deny the evidence of our own eyes and ears? Even more puzzling was that one of our party had a trans daughter who, to her credit, she supported.
Over the next few days, we discovered our companions were lifelong Republicans, so there was something tribal about their political loyalties. I wondered if the rather odd American habit (to this Australian, anyway) of being a registered Republican, Democrat or Independent leads to a my-party-right-or-wrong mentality that I donβt think we see as much of here.
The Americans were also wealthy, and Trumpβs economic policies had not affected them. In fact, his bullish sharemarket had made them money.
Two women in our party then revealed that they too had lost adult sons; the grief the little plaque unleashed was real.
JANE CARO
There was some self-delusion, in my eyes anyway. They compared Trump to Churchill (theyβd just been to the War Cabinet rooms in London), saying both mavericks and unpopular outsiders. There is some truth in that but, despite my good intentions, I couldnβt help point out that Churchill, for all his faults, had won a real Nobel Prize β for literature. I doubt A History of the English-Speaking Peoples can be compared with The Art of the Deal, but maybe thatβs just me.
But it was something we came across on the last day of our walk that stopped me, literally, in my tracks. As we climbed a stile in a meadow, we saw a bench which carried a plaque saying it had been gifted to ramblers by a woman in memory of her son, who had been killed by thieves in Africa. Two women in our party then revealed that they too had lost adult sons; the grief the little plaque unleashed was real.
It also reminded me of something β the only other Trump supporter I knew had also lost an adult son. Iβm not saying all Trump supporters have lost sons, obviously. But the coincidence did make me think that the Right has proved brilliant at weaponising pain. Not hate, exactly, but pain.
Maybe when life does not go according to plan, when bad things happen to good people who have tried hard to follow the rules, when even God has let them down, grief unleashes an inchoate rage in some. After all, why should other people, especially people who are worse-behaved, who donβt fit the mould of βgood, law-abiding citizenβ β poor people, drug pushers, immigrants, βillegalsβ etc β keep their sons (or job, or business, or marriage), when they lost theirs? Why shouldnβt they suffer, too?
Maybe there is some of that in Trumpism, because even among ordinarily kind people, the cruelty does sometimes seem to be the point. The only thing I know for sure is that while we may have shared five days admiring the same views, our world views remain oceans apart.
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Jane Caro AM is a Walkley-winning columnist, author, novelist and socialcommentator. She appears regularly on Today Extra, and ABC radio Western Plains.
She writes a regular column for Sunday Life and her work often appears in The
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