Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Campaign Stops

Donald Trump Takes Aim

A supporter of open carry gun laws, wears a pistol at a rally in Austin, Texas in 2015.Credit...Eric Gay/Associated Press

LEXINGTON, Ky. — “The Second Amendment people have tremendous power because they are so united.” So said Donald J. Trump in North Carolina on Aug. 9, in an interview that followed controversial comments he’d made earlier that day. Warning his audience of the danger of Hillary Clinton’s choosing new Supreme Court justices, he seemed to suggest that gun rights activists could take action to stop her.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he said. “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

It was another provocative reminder that the New York real estate tycoon and Republican presidential candidate has made himself the most pro-gun-rights nominee in modern G.O.P. history. He has harnessed the power of the Second Amendment people — a strength that comes less from unity than desperation.

I grew up among Second Amendment people and I’m a Second Amendment person myself. My father and grandfather taught me at age 6 how to fire a Ruger single-action .22 revolver off a sandbag rest. My father and I went shooting every weekend we could in Middlesboro, Ky., and I spent hours with my grandfather at the Kentucky Fish and Wildlife shooting range near Ashland.

Back then, in the late ’80s, being a proponent of gun rights was far less of a party position. But a dozen years later, as communities like the one I grew up in lost industry and jobs, and finally dignity and hope, guns became more political.

Voters in towns like mine have come to view themselves as the men on the wall guarding the last outpost of a disappearing way of life. The recent Gallup analysis of how economic anxiety translates to support for Mr. Trump suggests that his message resonates with these voters not because they themselves necessarily have lost their livelihood to what he calls the forces of “globalism,” but because they see no future for the next generation, their kids. But it’s also true that Mr. Trump does pick up support from the bottom of the scale: The four poorest counties in the country by median income, all rural, voted for him in the Republican primaries.

In the heartland, these are people who feel they’ve been the victims of sustained economic violence at the hands of tyrannical governments of both parties. In 2008, Barack Obama’s notorious misstep got one thing right: Rural people will “cling” to guns. Not because they are sad or misguided, but because it is the last right they feel they still have: a liberty at least, in place of opportunity.

Yet once, there had been opportunity. Middlesboro, nestled in an ancient crater near the Cumberland Gap, was a thriving Appalachian city. There were thousands of jobs in coal, but not just coal.

My mother worked at The Middlesboro Daily News, a local newspaper that published seven days a week and did in-depth reporting. The city attracted young couples from around the region who were eager to start their lives. We even had a food co-op.

Then came Nafta. Democrats more than anyone were against it because they believed it would hurt American workers and industry. Economists may differ, but in Middlesboro, the trade deal opponents’ fears came to seem justified.

By the time my generation was leaving high school, stores were shutting down all over town — the locally owned shoe store, the grocer, the downtown department store, the women’s clothing store, all owned by people my family knew and spoke to, all gone and replaced first by a mall and then, a decade later, by a Walmart, sitting like a company store at the edge of town.

In 2000, when I was 23, Charlie Burchfield, a close family friend who had been variously a miner, a sheriff’s deputy and a detective in eastern Kentucky for decades, told me, “There’s nothing here for a young person, Daniel.”

Rural white voters feel abandoned to their own devices, while America’s cities continue to swell with countryside emigrants. Bell County, Ky., where Middlesboro is, has seen a population decrease of 11 percent since 1994.

By contrast, Fayette County, which includes the city of Lexington, where I now live, has seen an increase of around 67,000 in the same period. Although population loss outside the cities slowed considerably in 2015, the four years before saw population losses averaging 33,000 a year. These losses came mostly from the young.

Among the young who stay, there is an even more tragic kind of loss. Rural suicide rates among 10- to 24-year-olds nearly doubled from 1996 to 2010, matching the time frame when globalization destroyed so many American industries. This is a culture so despondent and at such a loss for what to do that it has become increasingly self-destructive. Witness the influx of heroin, the devastation of prescription opiates.

On July 4, I was driving home to Middlesboro for the holiday weekend on Highway 25. The radio was playing, and when it broke for a station identification, a monster truck rally voice said, “No outsourcing here,” and a man with a stereotypical Indian accent asked, “How can I help you?” The monster truck voice came back on and said, “Just 100 percent made in America rock classic.”

Startled, I thought to myself, “When did outsourcing become the subject of station IDs?”

But, of course, it would be. I’ve lived in big cities, including New York, for long enough that I’ve forgotten the things you hear on rural radio. Progressive views about diversity and the benefits of immigration are not among them. Instead, the monster truck voice says that even though all else is slipping away, at least we still have our music. These touchstones are important. They tell us who we are.

Outsourcing and guns: These are the twin issues animating Trump voters in rural Kentucky. The two are linked and feed off each other; the only difference between them is that white rural voters see outsourcing as a losing battle, whereas protecting and expanding Second Amendment rights is the only policy they’ve been able to get politicians to move on. For that reason alone, it is totemic.

Mr. Trump has nurtured this conception of defending constitutional rights under threat: “It’s been said that the Second Amendment is America’s first freedom,” says his campaign site, paraphrasing a 1997 speech by the N.R.A.’s first vice president, Charlton Heston. “That’s because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms protects all our other rights.”

What gun owners hear when Mr. Trump echoes N.R.A. talking points against certain kinds of gun control is that they can be trusted, that they are responsible citizens. No politician since Ronald Reagan has affirmed them the way Donald Trump has. And he feeds their just sense of grievance. His message on trade is that rural white voters — and anyone who has lost a job because of outsourcing and globalization — has been wronged. He calls Nafta “a disaster” — and who would disagree among the dozens of people I went to high school with who left their hometown because they couldn’t make a living? Who would disagree in Detroit, for that matter?

Mr. Trump says more. In a June speech in Monessen, Pa., he leveled an indictment: “Hillary Clinton unleashed a trade war against the American worker when she supported one terrible trade deal after another — from Nafta to China to South Korea.” We are at war, he says, a war he promises to win. “The era of economic surrender will finally be over.” This is where his Second Amendment rhetoric and his economic rhetoric conjoin: guns and butter.

If Nafta, signed into law in 1993, was tied to the Clinton era, it is not lost on rural voters that the last major legislative effort on gun control was, too. The following year, President Bill Clinton put his signature on the assault weapons ban. Mr. Trump reassures them that the bans have always failed, and he reassures them that when bad things happen with guns, it is assuredly not their fault. “Violent crime in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and many others is out of control,” he proclaims, and yet law-abiding gun owners are “the ones who anti-gun politicians and the media blame when criminals misuse guns.”

This is how it’s seen by rural people — and they’re not wrong, even if they’re not all the way right either.

After all, why should residents in the heartland give up their perceived rights so that, maybe, a problem somewhere else can be solved? Why give up rights when gun murders fell by half nationally between 1993 and 2013 — despite the expiration of the assault weapons ban 12 years ago?

Only Bernie Sanders, who notably has a record of supporting the rights of gun owners in his home state of Vermont, has made anything like the connection with the people of Appalachia that Donald Trump has. The rural people who actually have the guns are also the ones who feel they’re being left behind on purpose, in exchange for cheaper labor at home and overseas.

The parties and politicians have to give rural white voters a reason to come down off their guard wall. Otherwise, why would they ever give up their guns when they can keep tormenting their supposed tormentors with their “assault” rifles, Second Amendment rights and the lobbying power of the N.R.A.? It’s the only power they have.

Daniel Hayes is a writer for the online magazine Thought Catalog and the editor of the essay collection “Guns.”

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Donald Trump Takes Aim. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT