Welcome to America’s most pro-Trump town
In Texas cattle country, Donald Trump supporters believe nothing can now stop his White House return.
Every Wednesday evening in the American town that casts the greatest proportion of votes for Donald Trump, Pastor Michael Davis leads his Bible study class in prayers for President Joe Biden. Sometimes there are a few grumbles. God’s work isn’t always easy.
“We pray for our leaders, we pray for our country,” Davis says after a sermon at the First Baptist Church in Miami, Texas. “If I hear ‘I can’t stand to pray for our president’, well, you’re being directly disobedient to God’s work because Peter tells us to pray for those in authority over us. I just remind them of that and it’s up to them if they want to do it.”
Nestled in a shallow valley in the plains of the Texas panhandle, Miami, pronounced My-am-muh, is a town in Roberts County, pop 803, where only 17 votes were cast for Biden in 2020. That made it the reddest area in the United States, with a 96.18 per cent share for Trump. In 2016 there were 20 votes for Hillary Clinton and a 94.58 per cent majority for her successful rival.
Davis’s church is one of three catering to the anti-abortion, creationist beliefs of at least 50 worshippers every Sunday. He has his own view on why conservatism runs so deep in one of the last dry counties in Texas, a status going back to the Prohibition.
“I think a lot of it has to do with the gospel-believing churches like this one,” he says. “Because everything that I believe, that informs me the way I vote, is driven by God’s word.”
Faith in the former president has not been shaken by his recent trial and tribulations. If anything it seems to have strengthened, but anyone expecting Make America Great Again idolatry here would be sorely mistaken. There is not a Trump flag or sign in sight.
“We definitely do not worship Trump at all,” says Diane Wheeler, 57, who helps part-time at the church and is also a first responder. Like most people in Miami, she has at least two roles in a community that prides itself on self-sufficiency because the nearest big city is Amarillo, 76 miles southwest. “We know the ones that voted, probably, for Biden, but we don’t dislike them - they’re our neighbours,” she says.
Her husband, Monty, 57, who manages a feed station for 35,000 cattle, agrees. “I don’t worship Trump. He’s a man, he’s not perfect. But what I think people like is, he is a leader who seems to put America first in the sense of jobs, security, trade and the dollar,” he says.
The Wheelers say that opinion hardened against the Democrats when Clinton disparaged Trump supporters in America’s flyover states. “Hillary’s ‘basket of deplorables’ – those out there in the centre of America, they can’t understand these complex issues. It was condescending,” Monty says.
He admits that Trump has flaws but plans to vote for him for a third time in November. “When he used to be on The Apprentice, I thought he was terrible. But he’s a New Yorker, he’s a fighter, I think people like the toughness. I think people, when they put their kids to bed, when Trump’s there they feel safe. With China, he doesn’t get pushed around. We feel like China Joe [Biden] has been bought and paid for.”
Trump dominates the rural vote in America: he received 6.3 million more votes than Clinton in rural counties in 2016 and increased this margin in 2020 to 7.1 million votes. A surge in urban votes clinched victory for Biden, increasing the sense of disconnect between two Americas. A study of the past two elections for the Journal of Rural Studies concluded that “as counties become progressively more rural and isolated, the greater the proportion of votes for Trump”.
Nowhere is this felt more acutely than in the panhandle, making up 10 per cent of the state’s land mass but only 1.7 per cent of the population.
The chief concerns of politicians in Washington and the media – Ukraine, Israel, funding the government and culture wars – seem far away from a largely homogeneous, white area where many are struggling to get by while producing some of the main raw materials for American life.
“I don’t know how these cities are so left-leaning,’ says Billy Hall, 54, a cowboy on a 30,000-acre (12,140ha) anch overlooking Miami. The former US Marine is disturbed by attitudes in Democrat-run cities, giving the example of shoplifters simply being allowed to take armfuls of goods off the shelves.
“To me, it’s wicked and evil, and everything they stand for, it’s horrible. It’s going to crash the country, you just watch and see if that ain’t true,” he says. “I think maybe a lot of them city people, they want the government to take care of them. They want stuff for free.”
Hall’s days are spent on horseback moving cattle around, branding, calving or feeding them, depending on the season. He says his values were grounded in his faith as a born-again Christian. “I love to read the Bible. I love it more than anything.”
Not everyone is for Trump, however. At the Roberts County Museum, housed in a former Miami railway building, Susan Bowers, the curator, admits that she was one of those 17 Biden voters.
“I’m proud to be from here because everyone looks out for one another,” she says. “If I’m on the side of the street with a broke-down car, I may be that girl that talked all that crap on Trump but they’re still going to pull over and help me out.”
Although she will not vote for Trump, whom she describes as a criminal, her vote for Biden is not in the bag.
“I’m torn because I know I won’t vote for Trump, but I mean, I’m not super-crazy about how things are going right now,” she says. “I think he [Biden] is a little geriatric. You know, I think they both are. It’s difficult.”
The Times
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