In the aftermath of the shootings at a Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, news reporters looked for Trump supporters to give eyewitness accounts. The interviews should put to rest the ugly stereotype of the MAGA voter that has fermented during the Trump years.
This stereotype was most memorably defined by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign when she said that half of Trump supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables,” a remark for which she later apologized. But many thought Clinton was just saying the quiet part out loud, as there has long been a whiff of disdain in the culture toward Trump supporters, in the media and elsewhere. Fans of Trump and his slogan — Make America Great Again — are often depicted in cartoons and news coverage as jowly, ignorant, gun-totin’ Q-Anon supporters, who, if they had any education at all, would be Democrats or at least Never Trumpers.
To some Trump opponents, Trump supporters are as bad as the candidate they loathe. Just a week ago, one person with a large social media following wrote on X, “Just so we’re clear: If you vote for Trump, you’re just as terrible a person as he is.”
To that person I present Dr. Jim Sweetland, the ER physician who was performing CPR on Corey Comperatore within minutes after he was shot. Even MSNBC, no fan of MAGA, was respectful to Sweetland in an interview the day after the shooting, conducted when the doctor was at home wearing a navy Polo shirt instead of the USA T-shirt and MAGA hat he was wearing at the rally.
Sweetland has given multiple interviews since Saturday, but his remarks on MSNBC were particularly poignant, when he recounted a U.S. Army combat veteran coming up to him and offering him a water bottle to wash the blood off his face. Sweetland chokes up when talking about the man saying, “Are you OK, brother?” to him, and the moment he locked eyes with Comperatore’s family, and it’s hard to watch him tell the story without similarly becoming overcome with emotion.
His is the face of MAGA, just as much as any of the oft-quoted Q-Anon supporters are.
Then there is the man in a red shirt interviewed by CNN just after the shooting who spoke thoughtfully about the tragedy he had just witnessed and why it solidified his support for Donald Trump.
“I understand people believe — well, they know — Trump’s bombastic, they don’t really like him, he is a very polarizing figure, he has an abrasive personality. But I truly believe he has the best interests of the country at heart,” he said.
The man went on to add that Trump, with all his money, could be sitting on a yacht in the Mediterranean enjoying his life instead of running for president again. “It puts in perspective that there’s a real cost for that. There are some people that want him dead,” the man said.
Yes, you can find people at the Pennsylvania rally who play into the MAGA stereotype perpetuated by Trump haters — both in appearance and behavior — as well as people who are, let’s just say, a bit quirky, like Trump superfan Blake Marnell, a delegate to this week’s Republican convention who was at the Butler rally wearing his trademark “build the wall” suit.
But you also find people like JonDavid Longo, interviewed by Fox News, a veteran of the U.S. Marines who was at the rally with his wife, a state police officer. Longo, the mayor of a Pennsylvania town about 30 minutes away, said he was elated to have spoken to Trump before the speech started and called the reporter questioning him “Ma’am.”
“I just hope the world sees what happened here today and is inspired to action, and when I say ‘to action,’ I mean to prayer, to vote, of course, to bring God back into our society, because this is the act of a godless society that we saw today,” Longo said.
Watching Longo politely respond to the reporter’s questions, I recalled Joe Biden’s 2022 speech in Philadelphia where he said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
(Longo was also interviewed by NBC News.)
In an Oval Office address on Sunday, Biden employed a different tone, calling on Americans “to lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re friends, coworkers, citizens. And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans.”
While political extremism can, in fact, lead to horrific events like what we witnessed Saturday night, the weekend’s news coverage should remind us all that wearing a MAGA cap and supporting Donald Trump does not make someone a “terrible person” and people who think that should probably get out more.
A few months ago, former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet spoke at Yale University and warned students about how the internet can lead us to believe “almost cartoonish stereotypes of people we don’t have experience with.” He described talking to a Times reporter who had been sent to cover a Trump rally in 2016 and later said she was surprised by how nice everyone was. The same thing seemed to transpire on Saturday with the eyewitness interviews.
A visibly upset Lindsey Graham said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that the country needs to “do some soul-searching as a nation.” As we evaluate the consequences of our increasingly vitriolic rhetoric, let’s also retire the MAGA stereotype.