IN JUNE OF 2020 I was trapped for a month in an eight-by-ten truck cab on a 30,000-mile road trip with a hardcore Forever-Trumpin’ truck driver named Ray.
How I survived the trip may become useful to you in the years ahead as you cope with friends, relatives, and associates who appear to have lost their minds. When they smile at you with that “I told you so” grin, you’ll need to be able to say things back which make sense to them.
I had to learn how to talk to the other side out of necessity. You still have a choice, and maybe you’d prefer not. But if we are to survive this long, dark night, I believe we must find some way to learn the art of conversing with those who’ve defeated us at the polls. If we can pull this off, we may save not just the United States of America, but democracy in the free world.
I know many of you don’t have the stomach right now for reconciliation. This is not a call for surrender. But if you agree that civil war or secession are terrible ideas, if you have a few drops of optimism left, I implore you to read on, because what I found under the MAGA hood was an engine not so different from my own.
I learned in my travels with Ray Nichel how to be tolerant, more receptive to uncomfortable ideas, how to ask questions without judgment or assuming I already knew the answer. No, I have not converted, nor will I. But I know, in my heart of hearts, I don’t have to cut the loved ones who voted for Trump out of my life. The truth is, we need some of their crazy ideas and they need ours. Without opposing opinions there is no dialectic, no hope of a spontaneous, workable idea emerging that would not have emerged without the argument. We have communal ailments aplenty which need to be treated.
I would be like Jane Goodall living among the apes, observing, transparent, taking notes. I would mine Ray’s twisted logic, exhume his tortured misconceptions.
Ray was true to his word, donning his red MAGA hat at the Swift terminal where we would depart together into the great unknown. He was hardly the only Trump supporter in the lounge that afternoon.
We were the same age, 64, a little more rotund around the middle than we would have liked. He was a bit on the short side, still had his hair. He had a Seahawks t-shirt on. I was wearing my 49er hoodie.
Now, full disclosure, I‘m a lifelong Democrat who’s never voted Republican. I worked for 30 years in the entertainment industry and had recently been put to pasture due to age. I was broke and pissed. I’d just come through two-and-a-half months of trucking school hell due to the COVID closure of the DMV, and I was unhappy to learn Ray would garner half my paycheck as long as he was evaluating me. Ray was my mentor, the final eyes of the company to determine if I should be hired. It was Ray’s truck, Ray’s home. I was Ray’s guest. Ray had worked off and on for 30 years as a truck driver and knew everything. I knew nothing. There was an obvious and unsettling power imbalance inherent to our relationship from the start. Ray never said anything, but he probably thought I was just some white-collar schmuck slumming it.
Ray had not seen my appearance on CNN, 10 days earlier, when I was arrested during a George Floyd protest. He had not read my damning article of the LAPD in TheWrap. He did not know I was the enemy and I made a solemn pact to keep it that way. I would not bring up politics. I would sit and observe, keep my mouth shut. Under no circumstance could I reveal my true liberal nature. But I also concluded that fate had handed me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn the Trump weltanschauung. I would be like Jane Goodall living among the apes, observing, transparent, taking notes. I would mine Ray’s twisted logic, exhume his tortured misconceptions. If I could figure him out, I’d have an advantage in future conversations with other Trumpers. My arguments against their insanity would become surgical. I would painlessly cut the Trump cancer from their hearts and minds without them knowing it. All I needed to do to gain the edge was ask Ray questions, like a potential disciple.
My initial assumptions about Ray were all wrong. Despite no college education he was bright, reasonably well informed. He’d once traveled around the country competing in disco-dance contests. Years earlier he’d owned a nightclub that catered exclusively to Black folks – a kind of Cotton Club of Puyallup. He’d made a decent life for himself despite being raised in poverty and surrounded by mental illness. He was a ladies’ man who’d recently married wife #4, a Chinese immigrant who would dress up their dog in costumes, post videos on TikTok. He was moving out of Seattle because he was tired of the homeless. He spent hours on the phone with a real estate broker in Jacksonville, Florida. He took me to his house outside Tacoma a couple times, where he owned two boats, the house, a pickup truck and a Harley. Ray was more affluent than me despite his unfortunate beginnings and limited opportunities. In retrospect maybe he thought he was Jane Goodall, and I the ape.
He was not a brainless cult-zombie, infected by the Fox parasite. He had the Fox nipple in his mouth, to be sure, but he’d come by his conservative ideology honestly, long before Trump. Many of his political opinions had emerged through personal experience. Yes, he was influenced by right-wing propaganda, prejudiced; more than a few conspiracy theories had wormed their way into his head, but he was not a man of straw. Some of his early conversations with me actually made sense.
This is not to say Ray was completely sane. He saw solar and wind farms as killing fields for birds. He still believed Obama had lied about his birth certificate. He thought OJ was innocent. He was convinced Nancy Pelosi was running a grifter operation from her office. He believed the entire city of Portland was under control of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) and Antifa. He would not mentor a Nigerian, but he had a Black friend he spoke with frequently who called him “redneck.” He was outraged by the removal of Confederate statues in the South that year and firmly believed the Democrats really did want to completely defund the police.
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FOX NEWS WAS CONSTANTLY on the radio. Whenever we stepped outside the truck for food or fuel, I found the Fox narrative intricately woven into the rural heartland psyche. Fox was aways on, every TV. No hint any other network existed. Listening to people converse was sometimes hard to follow, as conversations were built on shared points of reference, agreed realities, of which I was ignorant. There seemed to be a whole host of historical events I was not aware had happened. The “news stories” which shaped the opinions of people in rural areas were layers deep, complex sagas years in the making. I was not privy to the voluminous history of Hunter Biden, for example, as it required an almost encyclopedic knowledge on the Biden “crime family.” Frankly, some of the discussions I overheard sounded preposterous, paranoid and confused.
Now, as long as politics didn’t come up, I found the people in Trumpland were very pleasant, polite, helpful, generous, reasonably sane and happy. But to risk entering their political world was dangerous. I knocked on the door a couple times and had it hit me in the face. To talk to Trumpers directly about politics would require an almost superhuman ability to be genuinely curious and also to have the ability to memorize and juggle bundles of new information as it came in. And it came in daily.
Debate with Ray, I realized, was impossible. I had neither the means nor the intelligence. This helped me resolve to remain camouflaged. But I was also a long way from home, and I missed talking with people who agreed with me. I was standing in a world upside-down, where their roof was our floor and vice versa. No matter how clearly or sincerely I might try to convince Ray that Chuck Schumer was not coming for his concealed carry permit or his guns, I knew he would only feel sorry for me. The right had stolen our yippie playbook. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” had become “Don’t trust the fake news” or anyone like me who watches it.
What I found under the MAGA hood was an engine not so different from my own.
I quickly realized, that first week on the road, that I’d been living in a different country, with a shared language but where the words had different meanings. Assumptions I‘d held about the stability of my liberal world were shaken. The progressive advances I thought permanent were neither permanent nor making everyone happy. In my life I’d watched and participated in a series of victorious battles and thought we’d won the larger war. But the drums of a new war were beating in the hinterlands. While the left had been playing politics as usual, the right was marshaling a revolution. The liberal walls had not yet been breached, but many, many Americans wanted to do away with the post Clinton-post-Obama universe. Everything was on the table and would have to be refought if Trump regained a second term. This possibility was exhausting.
My confidence in the future dissolved with each passing mile as I took in the wide, open spaces along the highways. In terms of geographic square miles, they have us. When you compare the near-endless open lands of U.S. territory against the puny handful of urban oases, it’s just no contest. Cities are like tiny splotches of disease on an otherwise vast white canvas. Urbanites are an affront to nature, an embarrassment to God. Every hundred-person hamlet seemed to have five or six churches. No one I knew went to church or temple or a mosque. Some of my friends found a little God after yoga class. Those in AA had a higher power. Huh. Maybe we were Godless communists after all.
But something else was happening to me, as I began to appreciate the power and force and perhaps even the inevitability of these political headwinds. Something remarkable lay in the vast wilderness beyond my windshield. This country is vast, bountiful, diverse and beautiful. The roads we’ve built, the bridges and tunnels are astonishing. Every American should feel gifted to have been born here. Yet there’s so much unseen poverty. Ghandi called poverty the most violent form of oppression and here oppression was kicking ass, and not just in the hundreds of run-down indigenous nations our states and cities are named after, but gaining the upper hand in tens of thousands of small towns, farms and villages being torn apart and abandoned in the pandemic. I drove through more than a few recent ghost towns. It’s one thing to know there’s an immigration problem, but to see it being played out along the roads and fields of El Paso is something else.
I was passing through places you don’t see unless you drive a thousand miles from home, and even then these are not featured places on the map, on your way to the expensive seaside resort or the idyllic lakeside campground. Unless you’re transporting freight in a straight line to a destination, these off-interstate places are invisible. There’s a country song that says, Next time you’re out in the middle of nowhere, remember that’s somewhere someone calls home. I knew my tribe had the same blind spots I did.
I feared my fellow urban-liberals had written off millions of people essential to our lives, our wellbeing. I’d passed the Swift Academy many times on my way to Palm Springs, never realizing it was there, never appreciating that everything I owned had passed through the Jarupa Valley or been housed at one time or another there. My life was impossible without the people who lived and worked there, and I was unaware of their existence. And everywhere beyond there were more and more of these unappreciated, unseen places. And though we were unaware of their existence, they had the false sense they had looked into ours. They saw representations of us on TV and in the movies. I wanted to tell them we’re not just selfish, neurotic assholes, above the suffering. We suffer too. We have stress and failure. I wanted to say they had not seen us yet. We were invisible to them too. We’d never traded our points of view.
We are a nation of disparate, separated people, set apart by magnificent mountains and rivers, valleys and deserts. We do not understand one another. How could we? The deeper and longer I drove, the less omniscient I became, the less interested I was in talking football and the weather. And the more certain that I had to find a way to talk to Ray.
But how was I to start a civil conversation with someone who shared Ray’s outlook? The Trump view is pretty damned hostile, frankly, pretty dark. What if we wanted to kill each other? It was not to my advantage to kill Ray. Certainly not to my advantage if he were to kill me. Or to fail me as a driver. So the more I felt hamstrung in this unfamiliar world, the more I doubled down on my theory that I should keep my opinions to myself.
But I couldn’t.
Tomorrow: Read Part 2 of Zeke’s journey exclusively on TheWrap
Zeke Richardson is a retired member of the WGAW and MPEG. During Covid he spent two and half years on the nation’s highways as a truck driver. He recently posted a new album “Blue Skies” on music streaming services and is currently working on a non-fiction book about his trucking experience. His “Election Song’ is the musical version of this essay.
