Terry Prone: Visiting the States now puts you in line for a test of your forbearance

Trump supporters, without provocation, will forcefully share their beliefs with you; on the other side are people who passionately disagree, but take refuge in safe silence, writes Terry Prone

Scientific studies 'will not likely change the mind of a Trump supporter'. 

To walk through the current affairs section of Barnes & Noble, the major bookstore, in any Floridian city, this week, is to see a preponderance of books about the Trump era. 

Seven out of 10 of them are accounts of the man’s style, mental capacity, and mismanagement of the pandemic and the nation, written by precisely the people you’d expect to be anti-Trump and hostile to what he stands for. The kind of people who point out that fact-checking has revealed the former president lied at least 10,000 times during his presidency. 

A smaller number of the books devoted to the man come from people who once approved of him, went to work for him, and now claim to have seen the light.

At the checkout, if you buy any of them, the cashier is likely to pat the cover and silently indicate they’ve read it and liked it. I’m convinced, without any statistical evidence, that 90% of people who choose to work in American bookshops are Democrats.

But what is significant is the silence. 

Walking among Floridians for the past 10 days, I have been struck by the one-sided silence. On the one side are Trump supporters who, without provocation, will forcefully share their beliefs with you. On the other side are people who passionately disagree, but take refuge in safe silence. 

You don’t hear discussion or debate in the locations where it might have happened just a few years ago. And media has become so siloed that it’s no longer characterised by debate and discussion, but by singular streams of articulated opinion.

I don’t ever remember an America where people felt safer in silence. 

This week, on my way to get a Covid test to permit me to fly home, I joined them when I found myself being driven by a taxi man who believes the American education system is destroying his nation.

Once I was safely strapped into his vehicle and he had assured me, through his mask, that he was fully vaccinated, he told me that America is now raising a third and fourth generation of kids “that don’t feel comfortable being proud of being American. Monuments, part of our history, gettin’ taken down by protesters”.

As he said this, oddly, we were passing a small version of the Iwo Jima statue of the troops raising the Stars and Stripes with a real flag flapping in the early morning breeze over the bronze figures. The contradiction went unnoticed by him. 

He told me that everything has been coarsened in recent years — this before adding that President Biden “should be swinging from a gallows on Pennsylvania Avenue”.

I sat two rows of seats behind him in his bus, filled with self-contempt because I had stayed silent. Ranting in this way would, I knew, simply empower him, its very repetition just reinforcing what he believes.

Of course, I could easily have challenged him, not least by pointing out that the argument he’s making about leaving Iran makes no sense because the country out of which the US has recently pulled is actually Afghanistan, but correction didn’t hold much promise of being productive. 

Being proven wrong doesn’t tend to be. He had already told me how the election was stolen from Donald Trump using technology that couldn’t put date stamps on a piece of paper, even though any cash register in Public or Winn Dixie can put a date stamp on a piece of paper, right?

Having spent my professional career believing that truth and data will persuade any reasonable human being of anything, I come reluctantly towards accepting this is not true of what psychology professor Bob Altemeyer calls right-wing authoritarians, or RWAs for short.

Two years ago, Altemeyer got together with John Dean, the former Nixon adviser, to examine what it was that led guys like my taxi driver to have such certitude around the factually insupportable. Altemeyer’s research proves right-wing authoritarianism is a psychological variable, a trait, a permanent aspect of a person’s personality. They didn’t get to those convictions by logic or evidence.

Coherent arguments, even scientific studies, will not likely change the mind of a Trump supporter,” write Dean and Altemeyer. 

Having just re-read their thesis, I sit in the taxi in a silent confusion the driver never notices. When we arrive at the test centre and he spins his vehicle and disappears, I’m sure things are going to improve. I know getting tested back home is a problem, right now, but this is a giant US Federal service. 

The test centre turns out to be a one-room shack on stilts with a little staircase leading to it and a sign saying it starts at 9am, which is the time. A line of cars trails off into the middle distance. Twenty-five minutes later, a nurse appears and tells the handful of us standing there that we must go stand behind that white van — see the one behind the red pick-up? Yeah. That one. We try to negotiate with her, but she says the cars at the front of the line have been queuing since six.

We walk the long walk to the back of the white van and stand as instructed. Which turns the woman driving the pick-up directly behind us into a raging virago. The nurse couldn’t see, from her standpoint, that 50 more cars were behind the white van, says the pick-up driver, and we are to go to the end of that line or we might get hurt.

By her and her vehicle, is the clear threat. It is now almost 10am, and six cars have been processed because swabs are being taken and then lab-tested right there. Counting the cars ahead of me suggests it would be three hours, minimum, before I’d be seen, even if I brave heatstroke, dehydration, and the virago by staying where I am. A friend texts that a testing venue two miles away seems to be getting speedily through their queue.

An Uber takes me there. My friend was accurate, but the reason for the speedy processing is that everybody present has appointments. Except me. One website after another — including the pharmacy chains — indicates no appointments will be available for 24 or 36 hours, and further delays will follow thereafter in processing.

My travel agent helpfully points out that I don’t need a PCR to get on United, just an antigen. I explain in an email that it doesn’t matter which kind of test you want, the entire Florida US testing system is overwhelmed, with people in queues talking about losing their jobs as a result. He changes the airline ticket.

That night’s local TV news carries a report that includes a feverish, breathless woman who speaks between coughs. Only in America, she says, would sick people have to queue from dawn to prove they’re sick.