Like an intrepid National Geographic explorer venturing into uncharted territory, Elle magazine has set out to encounter an esoteric species: the female Trump voter.
In the May issue Elle journalist Linda Tirado reports from the field: “I’m checking in with a small group of women in America—from rural Oregonians to suburban Atlantans—all of them intelligent beings who seriously considered the world as they understand it and voted accordingly—for Donald J. Trump. I'd expected to find anger and status anxiety driving their votes. What I found instead was fear and misinformation, and I had trouble finding women who'd go on the record for this series. Many were afraid of backlash at work or on social media; some worried that I'd mock them in these mainstream-media pages.”
To her credit, Tirado doesn’t mock the women she interviews. Of course Tirado, a liberal whose work has been questioned, can’t stand President Trump and openly says so. But she does do what so many other members of the liberal media won’t: honestly talk to conservatives and use quotes that don’t make them sound like fanatics or idiots. The “fear and misinformation” Tirado warns about is evident - but it comes from Tirado and other journalists, not their subjects.
One of the women Tirado interviews, Brittany Feiwell, is a married mother of three who lives in Henderson, Nevada. Feiwell voted for Trump, writes Tirado, “on largely economic grounds.” Feiwell tells Tirado, "People are angry and afraid when they're struggling. "We'd do better making sure everyone has enough.”
Feiwell also voted Republican due to concerns about Islamic terrorism. She lived in New York City and worked near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Tirado: “She slept in a bit that morning, and that's why she wasn't at her office on Wall Street when the planes hit. When she woke, she could see the smoking Twin Towers out her bedroom window, and all these years later during anniversary remembrances, she can still smell that terrible acrid smell. When Trump talked about Islamic terrorism, it resonated with her; it didn't seem unreasonable to have a 90-day restriction on a few countries, she says, while the government checks people out. ‘My understanding is that it's temporary—as a way to reset.’”
Tirado observes that Feiwell “gets her news online, mostly from social media, but she also watches the Today show and The View religiously, as well as Meet the Press.”
However, Feiwell missed a major story - she “didn't know about the fascists supporting Trump or the alt-right conference in late November in DC where people sieg-heiled. Her right-wing Facebook feeds, of course, hadn't mentioned them; the soft-focus TV shows don't talk about those kinds of things, either; and her liberal friends have gotten so enraged that when they started screaming about Nazis, Feiwell thought it was hyperbole.”
Feiwell replies, "I'm Jewish, and I'm the daughter of an immigrant, and I'm a woman—and I wish people could get themselves away from that polarizing view.”
To sum up: Brittany Feiwell is an intelligent, informed woman who offers intellectually sound reasons for voting for Donald Trump. Furthermore, she sees a minuscule gaggle of Nazis - barely enough to fill a hotel ballroom - as not representative of conservatives or Republicans. In other words, Brittany Feiwell is sane.
“We aren't all starting with the same facts,” Tirado observes in her piece, “and if there is any one thing that will kill this nation, it's refusing to recognize and remedy that.”
Indeed.
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