Today’s dispatch from Trumplandia
by digby
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| They’re ok. They still love him. |
I know you were worried that maybe nobody’s checked in with the Trumpies today. How are they doing? Are they ok? Are they unhappy or depressed or in any way concerned about the fact that their man told all his rich friends down in Mar-a-lago that they “all just got a lot richer” now that he passed his tax plan?
You can breathe easier. The AP is on it and they’ve got good news. The Trumpies are happy. And that’s all that matters in this whole big country:
The regulars amble in before dawn and claim their usual table, the one next to an old box television playing the news on mute.
Steven Whitt fires up the coffee pot and flips on the fluorescent sign in the window of the Frosty Freeze, his diner that looks and sounds and smells about the same as it did when it opened a half-century ago. Coffee is 50 cents a cup, refills 25 cents. The pot sits on the counter, and payment is based on the honor system.
People like it that way, he thinks. It reminds them of a time before the world seemed to stray away from them, when coal was king and the values of the nation seemed the same as the values here, in God’s Country, in this small county isolated in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
Everyone in town comes to his diner for nostalgia and homestyle cooking. And, recently, news reporters come from all over the world to puzzle over politics — because Elliott County, a blue-collar union stronghold, voted for the Democrat in each and every presidential election for its 147-year existence.
Until Donald Trump came along and promised to wind back the clock.
“He was the hope we were all waiting on, the guy riding up on the white horse. There was a new energy about everybody here,” says Whitt.
“I still see it.”
Despite the president’s dismal approval ratings and lethargic legislative achievements, he remains profoundly popular here in these mountains, a region so badly battered by the collapse of the coal industry it became the symbolic heart of Trump’s white working-class base.
Do you ever get the feeling that they’ve got some Russian bots churning out this drivel from somewhere in St. Petersburg? It sounds like a parody at this point.
But hey, as long as we can all be reassured that the Real Americans are happy we can all relax. They will decide the fate of the world for us.
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