There’s a boy in an upperclass dorm with a Trump poster on his wall. It is visible from his window, I am told, by friends who live in the same complex, who have walked past it on the way to classes and dates and midterms and wondered, Does someone at my school support Trump?

Going to Stanford — or perhaps a college on the West Coast, or an almost-Ivy — isn’t just about place. It’s a set of orthodoxies and language that we imbibe and dispense with our friends, acquaintances, professors. It’s as intimate as laundry. And the idea that one among our number might support Trump is a fundamental violation, about as inconceivable and fascinating as the concept of Trump himself.

So I went in search of one.

The person I spoke to goes by “Mary Lee” on Facebook. She graduated with a computer science degree from Stanford in 2010. She’s also a Trump supporter.

I found Mary through a Medium article she wrote, also anonymously. She agreed to add me on her secondary Facebook account, created specifically to dodge the tempest that comes with attaching Trump to your name. Our first two-hour conversation was conducted in Messenger verse, and one of the first questions I asked Mary was if she liked him as a person.

Her answer was yes.

he’s funny, bold, unfiltered

loves the country

But her first impression of him was unexceptional.

in general i just knew he was a billionaire businessman

didnt watch the apprentice, but knew of it
and have played at his golf course in socal

Like many others, Mary simply made the gradual transition from Trump the celebrity to Trump the disfavored Internet candidate to Trump the possible President of the United States. Unlike most at Stanford, Mary beholds that last figure with hope rather than horror. And most of my questions were a roundabout way of asking why.

What should people read from Trump? I asked her.

read trump’s gettysburg speech

On my distaste for his immigration spiel, she says:

i’d say just look up the original source to get the whole context regarding his stance on immigration

he’s not particularly well-spoken or eloquent, so his words are kinda ripe for intentional misinterpretation by those who don’t want him to succeed

And I was reminded of an aside in her own piece on Medium:

“(I was a Computer Science major so excuse the writing.)”

There’s something appealing, I thought, about a politician who’s like us. Not of the same race, not in the same clothes, but with our bluster and folly, our gruff sincerity, our ordinary people’s tricks for getting what we want. Someone who shares our best interests, not just has them at heart.

At the same time, there’s something very particular and Trumplike about the Gettysburg gesture that spoke to Mary. He’s the grand gesture, the guy who takes up two seats on the bus. And for Mary, it speaks of integrity.

he has never been a politician before
and he disregards political correctness

When The Atlantic called the speech “an attack on the integrity of American democracy,” they were missing the point. The sheer audacity was an integral part of the icon of Trump, who panders by refusing to pander, whose political exhibitionism derides the political theatre of the establishment. I asked if his disregard for political correctness was good or bad.

good

she said. No hesitation.

political correctness keeps us from talking honestly and openly about issues

The issues she brought up were well-trodden.

illegal immigration is bad for the country and securing the border is a priority

those who enter illegally have no right to citizenship

inner cities have crime problems because they need stricter policing

education is the solution to raising people out of poverty, not welfare growing the national debt like crazy

And, surprisingly,

yeah, republicans have sucked too

She argued that Republicans failed to solve illegal immigration, spent too much money abroad, and, damningly, had “a nutty tax code.” All fair reasons to support an alternative political candidate. But if these explanations satisfied her, they did not satisfy me.

We have been conditioned to think of this as a moral election. Either voting for Trump is an indictment or voting for Clinton is “crooked.” Backing Johnson or Stein is a cop-out from the existential threat posed by either of the mainstream political candidates — unless, of course, you happen to be an Independent.

Put another way, this is an election fought in terms of the different ideals that people hold as a proxy for their values. When I ask why, I know I am in search of something beyond policy — I seek something personal, an article of faith.

And Mary had said that Trump was good.

I asked Mary about her family’s politics as an indicator of her background. Did she talk to her family about politics?

my parents, yes

my liberal siblings don’t want to engage

And again, later,

no, my siblings dont want to talk politics

The premise is familiar, though I’ve heard it more from the other side of the table: Mary blamed her siblings for skirting the issues that mattered, even as they indicted her for refusing to listen. Neither wants to preach without the eventual prospect of conversion.

I asked Mary for specific incidences in her life or her home that converted her to support Trump and was disappointed by the answer. Not much, she said. Just stuff she read online. She never “fell for identity politics,” she added — not the feminism, not the white guilt.

I wondered what I was really expecting. Certainly something sad at its core, something picturesque. An image of decay, some modern pastoral wasteland. Everyday tragedy. No doubt some people who support Trump have that. Some are poor, disenfranchised and deeply distrustful of every system that has taken them and ground them under its feet. People in similar circumstances but with different names for their hope look to Clinton, Johnson, Stein.

But this girl was none of those things. If I was looking for her creed, I would have to look further.

From the influence of home, we returned to the love of country.

Mary told me that her parents moved to the United States to attend college before settling down and raising the family in the suburbs of L.A., where she grew up. She’s a first- or second- generation immigrant, she said, depending on the terminology, and my question was: do you love your country?

yeah

it’s a country built on good ideals

gives people freedom and opportunity

i love the culture

food, movies, music

and it’s my home

And of these things — family, culture, friends, California — she identifies most with country. I asked her what the government has done to make her proud to be American. The answer came quickly.

lol, trump’s campaign makes me proud

though it’s not technically the govt

people rising up to challenge the establishment

And what’s the establishment Trump stands against?

the political elites

mainstream media

it’s a grassroots movement that has stood up against the powerful

a movement of people who are patriotic and want the country to be great

A grassroots movement that has stood up against the powerful; the establishment loosely defined as the incompetent, the unprincipled, the unsympathetic — wealth doesn’t even have to enter into it. Where have we heard that before?

Editor’s note:

Talking to Mary, I believed I was nobly opening myself to the possibility that my orthodoxies, images, beliefs could be wrong. But beyond that, I was looking for a conversation I couldn’t have elsewhere, a true thing. I was waiting to be told that there was something to know at the root of all that I saw without comprehending.

Mary told me something about her conversations at Stanford.

just in conversation, belittling ideas and those who hold them

it’s assumed that your friends you’re talking to are liberal

so belittling in the general 3rd person, not to someone directly

making it so a conservative wouldnt want to speak up

it’s the same general conversation that would happen in the dining hall or wherever

openly mocking republicans is just the norm

It came to me that we shouldn’t have been having this conversation. It should be happening in dining halls, on Facebook, in the world beyond our walls. At the same time, when we post on our Facebook feeds, ‘like’ our op-eds and unleash our offline laments, at once sincere and impossibly inflamed, whom are we trying to convert?

And beyond that, who, at this moment, is becoming less real to us? Trump and Clinton and Obama, yes. But also the person sitting at the table.

In one of our last exchanges, I asked Mary about her friends.

all are anti-trump
i’ve had some good conversations with 2 friends who have been open to hearing a different side
several others have had no interest in having a conversation about politics
most are liberal, a few consider themselves moderate

In my two-hour conversation with Mary the Trump supporter, neither of us convinced the other. That didn’t mean she didn’t try, or that I didn’t coax. As strangers we negotiated the shape of our brief encounter between the pull of exploitation and conversation, conversion and subversion. We dealt with each other. The chasm between our ideas of the world left us inevitably open to error. It also opened us to a possibility that was starkly personal.

And then I went back to my ordinary life.

— Fangzhou Liu ’19

 

Contact Fangzhou Liu at fzliu96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.