This is Part 3 of a 3-part series on the Nevada Caucuses. Here is the Previous episode, Part 2
3.0 – I enter the nest of the Republicans
I approached the high school where the Republican Caucus was going to take place as if I were scrambling over rocks to approach Mordor. I hadn’t even told that many people where I was going. I calculated the odds in my head… 50-1, I would die here today. Not bad odds, but still. 75-1, sold into slavery. 14-1, gang raped with a plunger like Amadou DialloAbner Louima. Fistfight? Even money.
I got out of my car and started following a woman who seemed to know where she was going. No yoga pants, but it was not unpleasant using her ass as a lighthouse, guiding me to the hive of crazy. I could hear them all chanting some mysterious incantation. Would there be a cross burning? It was goddamned freezing, so if there was, would I just run away? Or would I go warm up by the fire for a bit?
It was like wasp’s nest (heh, see what I did there?). There were a lot of them gathered around the entrance, and then a mysterious series of passageways… I took a deep breath… I went in.
People streamed in as if it were a sporting event or a concert. While the Democrats looked like a homogenous group of rummage-sale clothed drones, resigned to lives in the salt mines of life, the Republicans were actually a lot more diverse. There were guys non-ironically wearing cowboy hats, a guy with that helmet where you put beer cans, just with soda cans in it. Mexicans. There was even a black guy — although he was blind. Lots of fat guys in MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats. Clearly, the Trump crowd was the dominant gang.
All of the “precincts” were tables in a high school cafeteria, but it felt like each table was supposed to be a place where someone would try and sell you Amway products or give you a 1 minute speed networking session. I sat down at my precinct, and still no Yoga pants moms, but there were a few of those Republican women who don’t blink. The conversation was scintillating — it was as if someone had put on an episode of “stereotype theater” for me. The woman next to me was SO EXCITED to meet a neighbor, and she immediately asked me “what in the hell is going on with all the break ins around here?” I just looked at her blankly. “Probably because of the new mall,” she said. I wondered if that was her code word for “Mexicans.” I don’t think it was. But, I was inside the Trump hive mind. Anything could happen.
Knowing that this scene could break out into violence, torture, horror at any moment, I chose my words carefully. I tried not to make too much eye contact.
I then explained that the homes on the perimeter of the neighborhood, where the wall to the “outside world” was, well they were getting broken into. But, those of us on the interior, we were all relatively safe. Everyone nodded. She said, “Yup, just too much temptation with that wall there and they see the nice homes, hop over, steal something, someone is going to get hurt.”
I decided to conduct an experiment…
I said “yeah, we gotta do something about that… you know what I think? We need to all go to the next Homeowners Association Meeting and demand that they increase our HOA dues to pay for a higher wall around the neighborhood.” Everyone nodded with approval. “It isn’t our homes being broken into, but if our neighbors’ homes get broken into, that’s not ok, we gotta stick together!” Everyone was loving the idea. I was making friends.
“They could raise our HOA dues by $100 a month and get us some real security! We can afford it!”
I was very popular at the table by now — what calling for “law and order” and a nice big wall.
I had just called for raising our “taxes” to pay to help other people out… surrounded by MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats and Cruz buttons.
I laughed inside. I am in you, Republican devils. Ha! Live Republican trolling!
“Don’t get cocky,” I said to myself. That was really fucking stupid. If they figured out that I had just suggested a tax increase for the common good, they would have torn me apart like salt water taffy, except with bile and the sound of snapping bones and ligaments. I wondered how long the tendons would hold my joints together as they ripped me to shreds.
I realized that unless I actually told them, they wouldn’t be able to figure out that I had voted for Obama in 2008, and that I was really rooting for Bernie Sanders.
Then, the unthinkable happened… Out of nowhere comes a friend of mine, Chris. He is a hard core Republican Mormon guy, and he KNOWS that I’m a pro-gay-marriage, Bernie Sanders loving, porn guy.
“MARC, HOW THE HECK ARE YA?” He gives me that “Mormon smile.” If you don’t know, Mormons can actually make much larger smiles than other humans. That magic seer stone smile filled face of his, and all of a sudden I freeze… “Chris! How the… hi… hey, fancy seeing you here!” As if he would be anywhere else…
He introduces me to his wife, who hugs me like I’m her long lost brother. I hold on just a little longer than I ought to when hugging a friend’s wife that I never met before. Not anything creepy, I just knew that I was going to be killed within 10 minutes, and I just wanted one last embrace from a woman. I took a deep whiff of her hair. Not in like a sexy way… I just wanted the smell of a clean Mormon woman’s shampooed hair in my lungs as they filled with blood as the Trump supporters took one of many steps toward “Making America Great Again,” by stomping on my face screaming “TAKE THAT YOU LASAGNA EATING PIECE OF SHIT!”
Any second now, and Chris was going to out me. Not on purpose. I imagined he would just say “so, what he HECK are YOU doing here! Hey, everyone, my buddy here, he’s a Socialist porn lawyer!”
And that would be how I would die.
The crowd was so dense they could just form a circle around me and kick me to death. The sheer number of concealed hand guns in the place was enough to start a genuine revolution, not that hippie Sanders crap. The encounter took all of 25 seconds… but it felt like being on the run for three years behind enemy lines. Everything slowed down. I breathed.
I remembered how MacDonald gets caught by replying in English to a Gestapo agent who wishes him “Good luck”. Don’t be McDonald. Don’t be McDonald… Don’t say anything… stupid…
And then he just swirled past, waving over his shoulder. His Marco Rubio pin shining in the light almost as bright as his white white white Mormon teeth. “Mormons are great at dental hygiene,” I thought.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Can I borrow a pen?”
I screamed: “BERNIE SANDERS, I WANT BERNIE SANDERS TO WIN, OKAY? HE’S FUCKING AWESOME!”
Everything froze for me…, as I say about 5 or 6 times a day, I wondered “did I just say that out loud?” I really wasn’t sure… FUCK.
I half expected the entire room to go quiet. Maybe the sound of a record scratching. Then, some big black guys to come up and say “mind if we dance wit’ yo’ dates?” But who was I kidding? This was the Republican caucus… there was only one black guy here, and he was blind.
The woman just looked at me and smiled… not even a “this guy is crazy” smile, but just a “hi, have you found our lord and savior Jesus Christ” smile. I handed her a pen. “I like him too,” she said. “He’s honest. But, I just think that Donald Trump has the best chance of making us safe from all that this Muslim traitor has tried to do to destroy our country.”
She didn’t even skip a beat.
“Did you hear? Today he said he wants to give Guantanamo Bay back to the Castro brothers!”
I said, “well, that was one of his campaign promises, and one of the reasons I voted for him was that I didn’t want to have this ‘constitution-free zone’ in Cuba.”
Everyone at the table was interested in what I had to say. I explained why I thought Guantanamo Bay was an awful thing. And they asked questions. And nodded. And… jesus christ… I was now proselytizing total Leftist shit in the middle of a crowd of Trump supporters. I looked around for my Mormon friend. At least he was wearing a Rubio button… and I had given $50 to the Rubio campaign. Maybe he could save me before the Trump-ites held me down and did the Louima thing to me.
“That makes sense,” one of them said. “I guess it just feels like surrender. And you have to admit, if you voted for him cuz he said he was gonna do that, and he’s just getting around to it, he’s sort of a shit, wouldn’t you say?”
“yeah…” I shrugged. “You got a point.”
We talked for a while. Them all explaining why they liked Trump. Yeah, about half of them had overdosed on Fox News and believed that Obama was a Muslim, and terrorists were hiding under every rock, and Obama had ruined the country. I couldn’t quite get what “ruined” meant. But, they were so damned civil. Here I was talking about how I really wanted Bernie Sanders to win, and how we should close Guantanamo Bay, and raise our HOA dues to pay for better security patrols… and the most negative thing anyone said was “oh, that’s nice” in a non sarcastic way.
Nobody was arguing with anybody.
I noticed that Jeb Bush and Carly Florina were still listed on the ballots. People started handing their ballots in. The caucus went on until 9:00 PM, giving people four hours in which to come in, shoot the shit about how much they hated Obama, hug each other, talk about getting together some time. Drop off their ballots and be home in time to catch whatever they catch on Fox News.
I won’t say these were the smartest people I had ever met, but they sure as hell weren’t the sub-humans the press seems to find to represent the “average Trump voter.” In fact, as misguided as some might think they are, they weren’t any less brilliant than the morons at the Democratic caucuses. The average intelligence level seemed about the same. But, the Republicans were all smiling. They were a group of genuinely happy people. It was totally weird. Their views were angry, but they were not.
That was one big difference. The Democrats were all scared. They were all pissed off. Pissed off at the banks. Pissed off at (and scared of) Trump. The Democrats were fuming about Obamacare being taken away by Sanders (yes really). The Sanders people were pissed off at Hillary for selling us out to the Banks. Everyone was just miserable.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party felt… well… like a party. I all but expected someone to spark up a joint, or at least hand me a flask.
There was no coercion. No union reps walking around watching who was where. The ballots were secret, and you could just vote without sitting in a segregated pen. People discussed the issues, but nobody got bussed in, and nobody seemed to have been told who to vote for by any bow-tied preachers.
There were a few MILFs in yoga pants.
It was weird. I’ve never voted Republican before, and I don’t think I agreed with my neighbors about anything except the need for a wall — around our neighborhood — not on the border. They knew I was a Socialist in their midst, and that I didn’t agree with them about anything, except that I didn’t want Hillary Clinton to be president.
I think they were nice to me in part because they thought I might be mentally disabled myself, especially given how nervous I was… and what with the outburst about Bernie Sanders. I think they may have actually thought I yelled out FRANKS AND BEANS!
But, all in all, I have to say that while I want the guy on the Left to win, I will be looking up the Trump supporters to have cocktails with.
This post originally appeared on Popehat. View it here.
