How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And the Israeli prime minister has reaped the benefit of uncommon support from President Trump, who faces his own tough re-election campaign ahead. The once-buoyant U.S. economy, his main pitch to voters is currently crashing towards recession. How will this affect his chances in November? “The New Yorker’s” Evan Osnos says one answer lies in what he calls a persistent mystery at the ballot box. For his latest piece, he returns to his childhood home of Greenwich, Connecticut, to explore how unlikely Trump voters came to support him. He talks to our Michel Martin about it.

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Evan Osnos, thanks so much for joining us.

EVAN OSNOS, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: One of the things you do in this piece, how Greenwich Republicans learn to love Trump, which is in “The New Yorker,” is that you upend a stereotype that a lot of people may have had, which is that, you know, President Trump supporters are primarily people who have been left out or who think they have been left out. What’s the reality that you discover that’s different from what a lot of people might have expected?

OSNOS: Yes. The surprise for me was that Greenwich Connecticut, which I should say, the place where I grew up, was a place where Donald Trump won the Republican primary. It’s worth reminding ourselves that we don’t know much about Greenwich. It’s one of the wealthiest places in America. 2016, the year of the election, it was the wealthiest metropolitan area ahead of San Francisco, with technology money or ahead of Midland, Texas, where there’s a lot of oil well. And it’s also a place that has a very long tradition in Republican politics. In some ways, it’s kind of the cradle of what Republican politics is, going all the way back. It’s the literally childhood home of George H.W. Bush. His father, Prescott Bush, he was the moderator of the local town council. And Prescott Bush was — in many ways, he defined what the Republican Party was in the 1950’s book. Eisenhower called modern Republican. He was a little bit left of his own party. He was sort of liberal on civil rights, things like that. He was liberal on welfare and on birth control, which was a big issue at the time. And for a long time, that was the dominant strain of Republican thinking in Greenwich, Connecticut. And what I found fascinating was that when you — by the time he got to 2016, so much had changed what it meant to be a Republican in American and to some degree, it changed in Greenwich, that he was able to defy all the predictions, which was that somebody like John Kasich, the Ohia moderate governor who is going to prevail there. And in fact, no, Donald Trump prevailed in that Republican primary and he prevailed in 20 out of 23 of the municipalities in that area, Fairfield County, which has traditionally been the home of moderate Republicans.

MARTIN: One of the things that you say in that piece is that people like to think of President Trump’s relationship with the Republican Party as a hostile takeover. What you say it’s actually a joint venture. Talk a little bit more about that.

OSNOS: When I say joint venture, what I mean is that this was not as if Donald Trump and his politics came upon the Republican Party and seized it away from a reluctant body of leaders and ideas. In fact, it was something else. It was that over the course of a generation, the current leadership of the Republican Party, people who previously had stood for things like free trade, internationalism, you know, immigration reform to allow people to come in from overseas and to get documentation here, that they made a choice to accommodate themselves tops what Donald Trump represented. And it was not as if they couldn’t control the party and they lost control of it. No, they made a choice to say, this is our standard-bearer now. This is the person who speaks for our party now. And if you sort of think of it as a hostile takeover, it doesn’t help you understand how it is that they’ve stayed with him through impeachment. They’ve stayed with him through these low approval ratings over the course of the last three and a half years. You only begin to understand how it is that he’s going into the 2020 reelection with the kind of Republican support he has, which is very high, by understanding it as something that is much more of a marriage of convenience than it was an invasion from outside the party.

MARTIN: Well, I think a lot of people who might be surprised by this, you know, have this kind of sense that the good people of Greenwich were clutching their pearls at his, you know, vulgarity, at his ostentation. Some of them are sort of ostensibly people in the Prescott Bush mold, who were ostensibly supporters of civil rights. But you are saying that really that’s style, but the reality of it for them, the substance for these people is money, really. It comes down to money. Would you talk about that?

OSNOS: What’s so interesting, Michel, is that there’s sort of two ideas happen at the same time. One idea is important to keep in our minds, which is that Greenwich, like so much of the coast of the United States, has turned blue over the course of the last generation. So, Hillary Clinton, no surprise, everybody expected it, she won the town in the general election. But what’s fascinating is what happened within the Republican Party in town. That’s where the heart of the story is. That’s where it becomes this question of, well, how did Republicans think about Donald Trump? Because we sometimes get — one of the reasons why I think it sort of can puzzle us how it is that Donald Trump maintains this level of Republican support at such high levels in the party well above where you might imagine him to be, you have to understand how Republicans, outside of those cliches, think about him. And that’s how you get to the Greenwich Republican.

MARTIN: So get to the brass tacks here. What is it that they find so appealing about him?

OSNOS: What they do is that they have changed their definition of how politics matter and why government matters to focus overwhelmingly on economic policy. I talked to people, for instance, who would say to me — Thomas Peterffy, who used to own the largest estate in Greenwich, he said, look, this in 2016 was not a choice between two candidates based on their personality. This was about a single issue for him. It was about regulation. Which party, which candidate is going to increase more regulation or scale back regulation? And I heard that over and over and over again from people, that, in a way, this — the notion of politics that Prescott Bush believed in, which was that it was this whole system of ideas that had to do with how do you help the most vulnerable people in society get a fair shot, how do you think about all of the interlocking pieces, how do you decide what’s a reasonable level of taxation, that really none of that matters as much anymore to the Republican voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump in Greenwich. What they cared about above all was, what is he going to do for the economy, what is he going to do for regulation, what is he going to do for taxes? And that has caused, to be blunt, a kind of soul-searching among some people who say, how can you do that? Look, that’s not what we represented historically as a town. We like to think of ourselves as being the kinds of people who are blessed with tremendous advantages, and are then using those advantages to try to help other people who don’t have such good fortune. And so that’s the kind of core of the matter. And that’s where the Donald Trump support becomes such a controversial fact in town.

MARTIN: I mean, one of the things — points you make in your piece is that, as early as May 2016, exit polls and other data showed that Trump supporters earned an average of $72,000 a year, while supporters of Hillary Clinton earned $11,000 less, and that you said that two-thirds of Trump supporters had incomes higher than the national median, sometimes, as in Greenwich, much higher. So you made that point in your piece. But if you just focus on what people think of as the stereotypical Trump voters, somebody who feels threatened by racial minorities, threatened by immigration, somebody who is going to take their jobs or compromise their sense of status and their sense of — their place in the world, none of that applies to these people. So what is the thing that is so overriding to them that they feel they have to go all in or want to go on in?

OSNOS: I think one of the things that comes to the fore when you have these kinds of long interviews with people on that subject is that, over the course of a generation or two, that the idea that the economy needs to be, as they would put it, unencumbered, that it needs to be liberated from any of the kinds of things that others would think of as the normal elements of democratic function, like a reasonable level of social welfare protection, or regulations that prevent abuses in the workplace or environmental destruction. That those are, in some ways, a litmus test, that those are, by just in their own — just in themselves, have — are an encumbrance on the economy that ultimately harm the United States, in their view, and then harm themselves, harm their bottom line. And I think that they would put it in larger terms than saying, look, this is just about me trying to help my bottom line. They would say, this is me trying to adopt an ideological position that is going to ultimately benefit the United States. And I think that — and I heard it — somebody who heads the town’s finance board, which sounds like that kind of not particularly interesting position, but is a hugely powerful position. It’s the person who casts the deciding vote in how much you spend on public education in town, how much you spend on poverty programs. And what he said to me was, look, we don’t have the luxury, particularly now, during this pandemic, of being able to spend the kind of money that perhaps people might want to spend ideally without these pressures. We have to be conservative. We have to be protective. We have to protect ourselves and our people. And I think that a lot of people respond to that, a lot of people in town respond to that and say, but hold on. This is literally one of the most prosperous places on the planet. How is it that we don’t have enough money to be able to spend? Maybe it means we have to pay a little more in taxes, but shouldn’t we be able to do that? We have been able to do it historically. How do we draw that balance? This is really about this constant seesaw battle between, how much do we serve ourselves and how much do we try to serve a broader society? And at the moment, Donald Trump has become the fulcrum on which that seesawing battle has tilted in favor of people wanting to say, I’m going to have to look out for myself before I look out for everybody else.

MARTIN: Can I ask you about race, though, what role you think race plays in this?

OSNOS: Yes.

MARTIN: Because you don’t talk much about it in the piece.

OSNOS: I think it plays a large role. I think it’s one that people tend to wrap in the language of economic anxiety, but at the core of it is a kind of racial anxiety about it. I mean, I Chris Shays, who was the congressman from that area for years and years and years, and, in many ways, he’s now too liberal for that area. He gets called a RINO, a Republican in a moment. He says to me in this piece that he thinks like a lot of people in the area and, broadly, Republicans actually share Donald Trump’s views on immigration, which is to say that they are on unnerved by the idea of people coming into the country who don’t look like them. And they don’t like to say it, because it’s an ugly thing to say, and they don’t want to be associated with it. And so they prefer to use other language or they don’t say anything publicly. But that’s his — and I think he has a pretty astute sense of it. I would find that, when I talk to people about it, people would recoil from the idea that they were acting out of a racist idea. They would say that, that’s not me. That’s not who I am. And they would put it in other terms. But, in the end, it’s the vote. It’s how you vote. If you vote for somebody who is enacting a policy that is explicitly, demonstrably, measurably harming people of color and people who are coming in from outside the country, well, then you’re signaling your support for that person, whether or not you describe yourself that way at the dinner table. And so I think it’s actually a version of what we see in a lot of the country, which is that sometimes people will put it into economic terms, but the issues run to race below that.

MARTIN: I just want to draw on your long history of reporting from China. And I want to — and the U.S.-China relationship. So, if the focus of support for the president is economic policy, how do the people whom you interview feel about the president’s approach toward China, I mean, first the trade war, now blaming China for the virus? Does this change their thinking in any way that you have observed?

OSNOS: Yes, I have watched this really sort of rapid inversion of what the consensus is among the American business leaders on China. For the last 25 years, the default position has been, we want more engagement with China. That’s the future of our market. That’s where we are. And in many ways, that was the default position for the Republican Party pre-Donald Trump. That was certainly what George W. Bush believed. George H.W. Bush had been the U.S. ambassador in China. There was a — yes, there was a sort of sense that that was a core part of America’s future, was having this productive economic relationship with China. Donald Trump gave permission to a different idea, which is he said, no, China is our opponent now. China is — is obviously — we’re going to engage them in a trade war. We’re going to now make them the primary focus of our national security strategy. And so you have seen in general, I think, business leaders have said, OK, we will take a more confrontational approach with China, because maybe it’ll actually help us get more market share in China. It might help us improve our business terms, our trade terms there. But there’s also wariness, because they say, we can’t afford to cut China out of our future. It’s actually going to be part of our economic future, and we want it to be.

MARTIN: I know you worked on this piece over a long period of time. You certainly started reporting it well before the current moment. But do you have any sense of whether the coronavirus pandemic and everything it has wrought has changed these people’s calculation in any way?

OSNOS: I think you might be surprised how little it has actually changed people’s attitudes. I think, in a lot of ways, how they evaluate Donald Trump’s performance is largely based on, what is he going to do to try to repair the economic meltdown? And I heard this from people involved in Greenwich who would say, look — I say involved meaning involved in the Republican politics. They would say, we think he’s going to put the economy first. And I heard people making the argument, which we have now heard from others, that don’t let the cure be worse than the disease, which is, in effect, an expression of an economy-first view of thinking of, how do you make policy choices? How do you balance the risk of suffering for vulnerable people vs. the need to get the economy moving again? And I — this is where it goes back to what I think is the sort of taproot of so much of what we’re talking about today, which is that it became the triumph of economic rationale over other political considerations. So, yes, the idea that there — clearly, the virus goes beyond borders, it goes beyond town borders, county borders, state borders. But what you see is the instinct to say, I’m going to — it actually — I think, in some ways, it reinforces some people’s existing attitudes, which is to say, well, under those circumstances, I’m going to look out for myself and my family, and I’m going to put that — in some ways it becomes a justification for that instinct, rather than a reason to challenge it.

MARTIN: And what are the implications, in your view, for the upcoming election? I mean, it sounds to me like what you’re saying is, these folks are all in.

OSNOS: Yes, I think the implications are that Donald Trump is — maintains this level of support that surprises his critics, because a lot of people look at his performance and think that this performance on the virus has been an abject failure, and how can people maintain their support for him, just on a pure sort of performance basis. But I think, by this point, so much of people’s political identity has become wrapped up in being a Trump supporter. They have spent the last three-and-a-half years essentially saying at dinner parties, here’s why I’m right and why I was right to vote for this president. It’s very hard for them to relinquish that position casually. I think some of them — in the same way that some of them in the privacy of the voting booth pulled the lever for Donald Trump in ways they didn’t talk about at the time,maybe talked about it afterwards, after he won, I think there are some of them who still say that they vote for Donald Trump, but, when the moment comes, they might not. So, in some ways, that — this is — but I don’t — I think the core of the matter is, is that he is a stronger candidate than some people like to think. I think, in Greenwich, he’s going to lose. He’s going to lose to — if Joe Biden is the nominee, that’s what’s going to happen, the same way that he lost to Hillary Clinton. Will his Republican support be substantial? Yes, it will be substantial. And I think that’s a reflection of how baked in our party identities are right now, and that people are — people are not willing to leave that tribe, even under a lot of pressure.

MARTIN: Evan Osnos, thanks so much for talking to us.

OSNOS: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.