'People felt really empowered by him to be ugly': The Irish in US prepare for Donald Trump
As he heads back to the White House on January 20, Americans — and the Irish among them — are considering Donald Trump's shocking political resurrection with a mixture of hope and fear. File photo: AP/Yuki Iwamura
Claire Foley-O’Connor was in a Florida drugstore queue recently when she overheard a conversation between a young woman with a baby in front of her and the sales assistant.
“The poor girl had the whooping cough and needed antibiotics. Her prescription bill came to $65. She only had $17. The technician started looking for another generic medicine for her and she started crying. I walked up to the counter and said 'I’m paying for it and anything else she needs',” said the Sligo native.
“I never saw anyone so grateful in my whole life, I felt like Santa Claus. She was just a young girl of maybe 19. She was so poor, a white American,” she tells the at her home in Tavares, a small town nestled among sloping lemon groves and vineyards in central Florida. This is modern-day America, where the wealthy top 10% mostly ignores the grinding poverty and despair of the other 90%.
A country in which over half the population trust Trump to ‘Make Great Again’. As he heads back to the White House on January 20, Americans — and the Irish among them — are considering his shocking political resurrection with a mixture of hope and fear.
Foley-O’Connor, who arrived alone in New York 50 years ago, now lives in a gated community of fountains in artificial lakes, carefully tended lawns bordered by palm trees that glitter gently under the eternal sunshine.
An older man in pristine white shorts glides past in a golf buggy, a Trump flag proudly fluttering behind him. Facilities include an Olympic size swimming pool, libraries and jacuzzi, crafts and plays, even a fake lighthouse.
Yet for all this, the septuagenarian wants out. “It’s a good place to live, but not for me. I’m just sick of it, I want to get out of it, too many memories of Matt, I see him everywhere,” she says, referring to her late husband Martin (Matt) O’Connor who was originally from Mitchelstown, Co Cork, and died in 2022.
Florida is a Republican ‘red state’ and Foley-O’Connor, who is a US citizen for over 20 years, knows she is firmly in Trump territory. Politics has become so toxic there most neighbours will not talk openly about the election.
“You can’t say a word. You gotta shut up and say nothing. I stayed away from them, that’s the only way I could handle it. I didn’t even watch the television,” she said.
Her encounter in the drugstore is just one example of the commodified US healthcare system. The bureaucratic trauma inflicted on health insurance customers is extraordinarily profitable and rewarding for the company shareholders. The killing of UnitedHealthcare health insurance CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel on December 4 has convulsed the nation and triggered a long overdue soul-searching about how America treats its sick and elderly.
“That’s not going to be the only one. Blue Shield is actually fighting with the doctors, people are dying, mostly of cancer,” says Foley-O’Connor.
The number one source of bankruptcies in America is medical debt. Before he died, her husband was in hospital for three weeks — the bill came to $2.5m. Their insurance covered it, luckily, but more recently Foley-O’Connor was hospitalised herself and brought in by ambulance for which she was charged $1,000 for the 15-minute journey. This time their insurance company denied her cover and refused to pay.
“I had to pay it. They said I could have driven myself — I couldn’t. The pain was that bad. Everything is about the money here,” she said.
Dublin musician Johnny ‘Snags’ Norton, who’s lived in Orlando for 20 years, agrees the healthcare system is “terrible” in the US: “The healthcare is a disaster. If you need anything done at all, surgery or whatever, it costs a fortune. Trump will have to address it.”
His biggest hope for Trump’s second presidency is that he will deal “with the health insurance situation and bring down the price of food and living for your average normal person.”
Finnegan’s, the Irish bar in Universal Studios theme park where Norton sings, charges $12 a pint. His biggest fear? “That he’ll make things worse. I’m surprised he hasn’t been shot to be honest with you.”
The US central bank cut interest rates on December 18, but is warning of challenging times ahead amid uncertainty over the incoming Trump administration. Tighter Federal Reserve policy is likely to keep interest rates on home mortgages elevated, and stubbornly high inflation of 2.7% has already forced Trump to back track on his election pledge to lower food prices.
Foley-O’Connor believes the empty shelves she sees in her local Publix supermarket are not being refilled because customers are opting to shop in cheaper discount stores. High prices are not confined to Florida — her sister in Wisconsin went out the other night to a restaurant and was about to order a glass of wine until she saw the price — $16.
“A decent-sized steak is $60. Everybody has two or three jobs. And you have to have two people working in a household,” she says.
Along with Trump’s promises of higher tariffs and tax cuts, he’s vowed to get tough on unauthorised immigrants living in the US, who are the working core of the service industries. Taxi and Uber drivers this reporter met came from Yemen, Haiti, Venezuela and Brazil.
Not a single man uttered a word against Trump. Not even the Haitian man who, when reminded of Trump’s baseless comments about Haitian immigrants eating the dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, just waved a dismissive hand: “Trump is all talk.”
“America today is not the country I came to 50 years ago,” Foley-O’Connor continues. “Trump said ‘their doors will be knocked on’ at night time. He’ll go anywhere to get them. That new guy in charge of immigration, he said ‘Get ready, we’re coming’.”
Waterford native Brendan Barry, living in Florida since 2009 and now a US citizen, isn’t unduly concerned. His wife Susan however, who is also a naturalized US citizen from the Caribbean, fears Trump could stir up deep-rooted racism: “I think it's more talk. But my wife has a lot of fears for a few different reasons than I have.
"She's from Trinidad. So she's brown-skinned and her kids are the same. So, she has fears. Do I see it happening or not? I think it's just one of these things that he throws out there to get attention. And it worked.”
Cork native and Montessori primary public school principal Cathy Tobin finds Trump’s anti-immigration promises troubling. “He's talking about removing birthright citizenship from the dreamers — people who've been born and raised in this country who could suddenly find themselves sent off to the country they've never been to before, maybe speaking the language they don't know how to speak. It's terrifying,” she tells this newspaper.
“In our school we have the Tesla SUVs coming through the car line but also the cars stuck together with sellotape. So, we have a very diverse population at the school and I know there has to be undocumented members of that community. I would hate to lose any of them. I think it's just it feels very unstable right now. And I do actually have a lot of trepidation,” she says.
Tobin and her husband Tom, from Douglas, left Cork in 1993 and raised three children in a “tiny blue Democrat pocket” in Orlando. Since the election on November 5 people have been drawn to her school, traditionally a safe place of diversity and inclusion.
“I’ve been hugging sobbing staff in my office and talking to families and same sex families who are actually making plans to move out just to another state that's more welcoming. We actually stand to lose students, we stand to lose staff, and we're losing friends.
"Even my kids’ friends have moved, my kids moved and their college friends who are gay moved because they just can't (stay). When the legislation is written to marginalize you, your average Joe on the street feels fully empowered.”
The bar in which we meet is less than a mile from Pulse nightclub, where 49 members of the LGBTQ+ community were shot dead by a lone gunman in 2016, the deadliest incident of violence against gay people in American history. Tobin passes it on her drive to work every day and as the mother of three queer adult children “it was impactful.”
She recalls a moment after one of the solidarity pride marches held in the aftermath of the atrocity. She and her then teenage daughter were standing at traffic lights and her daughter was wearing a ‘Make America Gay Again’ T-shirt. “Two middle-aged couples in leathers on motorbikes pulled up at the lights and they were looking and reading. They shouted ‘Trump’s your president now, b****.’ It was very ugly. People felt really empowered by him to be ugly.”
Tobin’s hope for Trump 2.0 “would be that we survive it.” Her fears are “the reduction of freedoms for women and LGBTQ+ people. It felt like we were trucking along in a good direction towards inclusion and a kinder world. For me there’s a frustration that we’ve taken a backslide.”
Tobin has to accept that she’ll have to assume that 50% of the people she encounters are “racist, homophobic and misogynist. And that’s a very hard way to go through life.”
Trump supporters include the rich who want stay rich and the desperately poor, who want to get rich. Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, wondered on CNN recently if America was “about serving the people or about serving shareholders…who are wagging the entire dog of the nation.”
He believes the bottom 90% which optimize the top 10% supports the wealth inequality “because they believe that at some point they might be in the top 10%.”
Foley-O’Connor believes people voted for Trump because “he’s a millionaire so he’s going to run the country right.”
Barry, who also lives in a gated community, was still shocked by some neighbours. “I have very, very educated, sensible, mature friends that I would not expect would believe in some of the stuff.
Barry believes Trump’s resounding victory was down to voters struggling to survive and desperate for a leg up. If he turns right out his front gate, the overcrowded Disney and Universal theme parks are just 35 minutes away.
Few homeless are visible because they stay mainly in the underground parking lots where it’s cooler, living off free meals from Protestant churches and donations from tourists. Ten miles in the other direction leads to what Barry calls “the hidden Florida” and others call “hillbilly country”.
“There's a lot of hardworking people out there struggling to feed the kids or themselves, but people don't see America like that. People are living in what we would have seen in Ireland 50 years ago, with tin roofs, some of them don't have air conditioning and others have their little box on the window.
"That's the hidden Florida that you don't really see. And it’s not just Florida. It's every part of North Carolina and South Carolina. These people just don't see anyone doing anything for them. And maybe Trump's a chance and he talks a good talk and they’re desperate,” he adds.
“It's worrying to an extent. But I don't think he'll do 10% of some of the stuff he says he's going to do. Time will tell whether we're right or wrong.”
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