Donald Trump’s people and policies have ferociously divided communities

Trying to prove a point to someone who deals in ‘alternative facts’ is like trying to knit an Aran sweater out of overcooked spaghetti, writes Terry Prone.

It started when one of the firefighters was called in to her captain’s office.

“Need you to clean out the three bedrooms,” he told her. She told him he had to be kidding. She cleaned the bedroom she used every time she used it. But clean out the bedrooms used by those other filthy colleagues? No. Not a chance.

“Vice President Pence is coming,” the Captain whispered. “To inspect firefighters’ bedrooms?” she asked, confused. “No, but the Secret Service will inspect in advance of his arrival.”

She asked when Pence would arrive. He shrugged. Could be today, tomorrow, whenever. But she mustn’t tell anybody. State secret.

OK, she nodded, but he needed to find someone else to clean up the other guys’ bedrooms, because sure as shootin’, you should pardon the expression, no way was she doing it. Anyway, she was at the end of her shift. Byeee.

She took her car to the nearby She Sells Sea Shells store, shells being the key souvenirs millions of tourists visiting the Seashell Islands take away with them. Her friend Liz was finishing up her day there and the two of them would travel together.

“Guess what?” one of the other girls in the shop called out to her. “Vice President Pence is coming in a few hours. They’re closing down the causeway. THAT’S gonna be popular.”

It didn’t seem to be much of a state secret. Tourists were able to tell her the Veep had rented three adjoining houses and where.

What was interesting, she thought as she and her friend drove away, was how little anybody said about Pence himself. Back in the Obama and Biden days, it would have been flat out excitement if Obama had come, and amused warmth if Biden had been the one to arrive.

Lots of gossip, lots of interest, groups coming out for a gawk, perhaps even begging for a window view in one of the houses the motorcade would pass. Not that Sanibel and its linked island, Captiva, aren’t used to celebs.

They’ve grown used to encountering Eric Clapton in the local seafood grill, Johnny Depp coming out of Tween Waters Hotel and national TV stars wandering around in shorts so long, they look like skateboarding bedouins. The islanders are cool with fame.

What they’re not cool with is their tiny community being divided so ferociously by politics. The ones who voted for the first time in the previous Presidential election remember the non-partisan excitement and joy of it.

It wasn’t that they were all Democrat. Some of those who voted for Obama were Republican by inclination, and had a high regard for the war hero their party put up against him.

But they were not sorry to see Obama win, and they laughed when one of the shop owners, who wouldn’t have supported the new President, shoved a life-sized cardboard cutout of him just inside the door of his shop to attract people who wanted to have their photograph snapped with their arm around the “President”. No great division, back then.

Just the normal lines in the sand drawn by background, ethnicity, religion, education and age. Easy lines to step across with civility and humour. Lines replaced now, in this one little community, by electrified barriers.

Many people talked to me this week about how political loyalties have gone underground. The rule that used to apply to gay people in the defence forces: Don’t ask, Don’t tell, has new application. Even in the Barnes and Noble bookshop on the mainland, you see people choosing, for example, the UTNE Reader or another liberal publication with a story hostile to Donal Trump on the cover, and glancing around, almost as if they expected the get an argument from other browsers for choosing it.

Even the Trump advocates don’t offer their loyalties for discussion, and, if asked, automatically introduce their comments with a phrase like “No offence, but…,” such is their expectation of condemnation if they tell the truth as they see it, which is that Trump’s doing fine, was right to bomb Syria after they used chemicals on the kids, and is doin’ good for the most part.

Sure, he’s made a few mistakes, but a lot fewer than Obama, am I right?

For the first time in my experience of America, and I’ve been here at least once a year for most of the last 50 years, division and mutual caricature are total and neither side knows how to begin to talk to the other side.

Yesterday, the local newspaper, the News-Press, said: “Many business people were afraid to share feelings abut the visit because of sharp political divisions being felt across the country; even more so on a small island.”

Afraid to share feelings, those people who did talk about the Vice President visiting the islands talked only about the inconvenience — rich people may like the Trump administration, but they’re not impressed with a ban on small aircraft coming into the area while Pence stays.

The people who most opt for political silence, almost until they’re sure they’re with fellow travellers, are the liberals, the Democrat supporters.

For the first time in their lives, they find themselves in an argument they can win and lose simultaneously. Trying to prove a point to someone who deals in “alternative facts” is like trying to knit an Aran sweater out of overcooked spaghetti.

They watch Trump’s nominees fall, one after another. They sneak-view Saturday Night Live’s devastating satires of the administration. They concentrate on the data, knowing the data to be useless for the first time in their experience. Cognitive dissonance? You better believe it.

Trump supporters didn’t line the single tree-lined road through the island as Pence’s motorcade came through. It’s as if the impact on them of the change in administration is personal. One to one.

Them and Trump against all the Obama types pushing climate change, transgender toilets, and eating broccoli. Them against all the intellectuals who have patronised them for decades. The clever clogs.

Or, as a writer in 1944 put it, “the pure technician, the classless bright young man without background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world, and no other means than his technical and managerial ability.”

That description stuck like glue to one of the most admired figures of a previous administration — Robert McNamara — who would have personified everything Trump followers hate.

Trump supporters like it simple, short, visual and emotional. McNamara liked it complicated, evidenced, stats-driven and emotion-free. That’s the way to get good decisions.

Except it was McNamara who provided the rationale that kept America in the Vietnam War for years after the US should have quit, with hundreds of thousands of needless deaths.

On a fragile island vulnerable to the climate change half the Trump administration deny is happening, people have no way to work out if the intellectual inferiors to McNamara represented in the new Cabinet will do more or less harm to the world.

And even if hey had a way, they wouldn’t talk about it. Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

Trying to prove a point to someone who deals in ‘alternative facts’ is like trying to knit an Aran sweater out of overcooked spaghetti