Black and MAGA: The identity politics inside a pro-Trump store

Christiansburg, Virginia (CNN) — Jo Anne Price wears a button that says, “You find it offensive. I find it funny. That’s why I’m happier than you.” Price is a Black woman who runs a store selling pro-Trump merchandise in Christiansburg, Virginia. She’s 72, wears black-rimmed glasses and her gray hair swept back, and has been lifting weights for 20 years. She says, “racism is a made-up word,” and “I don’t know what it is, because it doesn’t exist,” and “if I don’t accept it, it doesn’t apply to me.” By the register, she sells credit card-like objects, one of which says, “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD.”

“When you give it to a state trooper, he’ll let you go. Won’t write you a ticket,” Sebriam Vannoy said of the cards, with a laugh. Vannoy, an older Black gentleman, wore a head-to-toe camo print outfit with “Trump was right” and three Christian crosses printed on the chest. He said the card had worked for him. “He laughed at it and did not write me a ticket,” he said of a law enforcement officer who stopped him. (There has been at least one similar incident: in Alaska in 2022, a woman showed a police officer a “white privilege card” instead of her driver’s license, and she said he let her go.)

Vannoy and Price are all in for former President Donald Trump and his reelection bid. They know it’s unusual to be Black and a supporter of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, though both the Republican and Democratic campaigns are trying to shore up or gain support in communities of color.

“I hear from some Black ladies that will say, ‘Well, he never did anything for Black people,’” Vannoy said. He says he responds: “No, he’s not a president for Black people. He’s a president for all Americans.”

Price, a former chairperson of the Montgomery County GOP, said she didn’t mind the Trump campaign’s assertion that Black people would relate to him because he was a convicted felon. “I did prison ministries for five years. If you’re a convicted felon and then somebody else is a convicted felon, there’s a camaraderie there,” she said. She blames the mass incarceration of Black men in the 90s on “Biden’s laws,” the controversial 1994 crime bill of which President Joe Biden was a key supporter.

Despite the merchandise that was an explicit rebuke of the way liberals talk about race, gender and social justice, beneath the surface, identity still mattered to those inside the Trump store on a rainy August afternoon.

Vannoy’s support for Trump did not waver once Biden said he would not seek reelection. It wasn’t about race, but sex. “Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden, there will never be an elected woman – whether she’s Black or White – that would occupy the White House that God would ever stand behind,” he said.

Rev. Merrie Turner overheard those comments. “I’m not sure America is ready for female leadership,” said Turner, who is White, explaining she’d seen that resistance up close. “It’s not easy to be a woman that’s ordained in the ministry, either. There’s a mindset of male leadership in the church, and so I’ve experienced some rejection over the last 20 years.” She said she believed in women’s equal rights to run for public office, even if others did not. “It would be wonderful to have a female president, if and when one arises that has conservative values,” she said. But Harris was not that person.

Dawson Ladd, a younger White guy wearing a Carhartt T-shirt while he shopped, said Harris wasn’t for him. “She’s more for the in-city, office job, you know, ‘let’s starve everybody to death.’ And I’m more of a blue-collar type of person. … She don’t support our kind of people,” Ladd said, explaining he worked in construction. “Trump is for the working class, and to help the needy people, and the people we’ve got in there now are not.”

Another customer, Joe Shannon, said he’d voted for Barack Obama twice and then Trump twice, but was not impressed by Harris. “I just don’t think she has the experience. I think she was only chosen because she was a woman,” said Shannon, an older White gentleman with a neatly trimmed beard. He was waiting for a shirt he’d ordered, a button-down with stars on one side and red stripes on the other, and “TRUMP” down the middle.

As for Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance, Shannon said, “It’s young blood, young fresh blood for the Republican Party. I think we need that. And I think the Democratic Party needs young blood too. I think a lot of people are getting fed up with some of us older people.”

One of the most striking things about interviewing strong supporters of Trump is how many defend his most controversial statements. Price said she didn’t have a problem with Trump questioning whether Harris was really Black. “The point he’s making simply is that she is not a Black-Black person,” Price argued, because Harris’ dad was Jamaican and her mom was Indian, making her background different from people whose parents were born here. Price said there were mixed-race families in her own family, but “I’m not so disturbed by” Trump’s comments. Finally, she said, “He has every right for free speech to make a point, if he wants to make that point.”

Price also defended some of Trump’s other inflammatory racial comments, such as immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of America. She said she did not see racial animus in the remark, but that it referred to undocumented immigrants breaking the law. “That’s poisoning our communities for our children, because it’s less safe. And I interpret that as anytime you poison something, you make it useless. Or you make it dangerous,” she said.

Price said she was once a Democrat because her parents had been. But she began questioning her party loyalty in the 80s over abortion. “I’m not going to be in a Democrat plantation. I’m not going to be on a Republican plantation. And this is what I love about President Trump, OK? He’s pulling us from both of those plantations, and he’s pulling us into this one big area, which is Americanism,” Price said. Trump was unifying, she said.

Price says she’s a forward-looking person, and “there’s such positive things that we are going to experience once we get through this little rough period.” That’s why, she says, most of her merchandise is pro-Trump rather than anti-Harris. But there are still anti-Harris items nestled in with the images of Trump’s mugshot and his defiant call to “Fight!” as he rose bloodied after the attempted assassination.

“That’s for those people who like a little bit of rum in their Coke,” Price said.

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