On the morning of 20 January 2017, the 938 citizens of Roberts county awoke to a new era.
In this flat, rural expanse in northern Texas, routine remained mostly the same. Ranchers tended to their cattle. Children went to school. The oil pump jacks continued to rotate.
But 1,540 miles away, on the steps of the capitol building in Washington DC, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
Though he did not thank the voters here in the Texas panhandle – his shock election victory was mostly down to swinging the vote in communities throughout America’s rust belt – Roberts county had already become synonymous with Trump’s outsider triumph. Here, 95% of voters backed the Republican, the highest margin of any county in America.
Broadcast vans from throughout the US arrived shortly after the result, as television crews and international newspapers sought to understand the answer to one question: why? Two years later, residents recall the influx of media outsiders with disdain.
“People overgeneralized who we are,” says Lindy Thompson, owner of the Sage Matt cafe, the county’s only diner, on its only high street, in Miami, its only town. “They assume we’re a bunch of uneducated hillbillies, without actually learning who we are and what our community is about.”
Some here, Thompson included, now refuse to discuss politics in any real depth after the onslaught of coverage. In truth, the answer to the question is simple. Roberts county, in the heart of America’s Bible belt, has voted Republican with giant margins for decades. No Democrat since Harry Truman in 1948 has even come close to taking this area, which swung red years before the racist politics of the Southern Strategy secured Republican control of America’s south.
But at the midpoint of the Trump presidency, the Texas panhandle goes some way to show the extent of unwavering loyalty that remains among his base.
“It’s like a big family here, everybody knows everybody and they’d give each other the shirt off their backs if they needed to,” Thompson, 38, says as she prepares ribeyes for the lunch crowd. “We needed Trump to help us survive.”
Tax cuts, deregulation and national security are the core mantras in Miami. And the president is deemed a success on all three.
This is an affluent part of the state that has long reaped the rewards of big oil mining in the area. Only 7% of residents live below the poverty line, over 80% of high school graduates go on to further education. The county is 96% white.
Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, a sweeping new federal tax bill that cuts taxes across the board, most for the super wealthy, was cited almost universally as the most important work the president has done since taking office.
“I love the tax plan he has,” said the county’s top official, Judge Rick Tennant. “Everyone I’ve talked to says they’re making more money now.”
Tennant reels off a list of attributes he admires in Trump.
“I like that he gets involved in everything [on foreign policy]. That he tells you right out front what he likes, what he doesn’t like,” he says. “But I don’t like everything he’s done. I don’t like him getting on Twitter and all that other stuff.”
As the county’s top jurist, perhaps Tennant is referring to the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia?
“No. To me they need to end that deal. What if he was talking to the Russians? You tell me where the United States hasn’t been involved in Russia’s politics, Britain’s politics, I mean they all do the same things. Move on. If there was something really bad, they’d have found it out by now.”
The current president has not always been the county’s preferred candidate. In the 2016 Republican primary, Senator Ted Cruz beat Trump by 30%.
In the 2018 midterm elections, the Texas panhandle rejected an extreme rightwing insurgency that bore similarity to the brand of Republicanism embodied by the Trump presidency with its nods to white nationalism and racist politics. The region voted overwhelmingly to re-elect state senator Kel Seliger, deemed the most centrist Republican in the Texas state senate, against two primary opponents pushing an extremist platform.
“This was a very conservative and Republican part of the state while Trump was still a Democrat,” Seliger said. “So did he affect things here? Yeah, he might have increased turnout among Republicans but other than that …”
There are signs that Republicans are relying more heavily on this region to maintain a grasp on Texas as a whole. Cruz canvassed in the panhandle twice during his campaign for re-election in November. The region rarely attracts national politicians as the vote is so reliably red, and Cruz’s appearance was seen as testament to how close he came to losing.
When you ask people in Roberts county what they expect from the Trump presidency in the next two years the answer is not really about policy but values.
“I would love to see people being more accepting of people’s views and thoughts,” says Lindy Thompson. “Just agree to disagree. And that applies to both sides.”
“I think term limit would be a great thing,” says Tennant. “You have some politicians in Washington – on both sides – that’s been in there 30-something years. You need new blood in there.”
In a move that might appear at odds with the celebrations over Trump’s federal tax cuts, Roberts county voted for a local tax increase in 2014 to fund the construction of a modern school building.
Public education is central to the county’s continued prosperity. “If we lose the school, we’d lose the town,” says Tennant.
So what do educators make of the administration’s attempts to slash the federal education budget and installing Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor and ardent supporter of charter schooling, as education secretary?
“I didn’t support that particular decision,” says Mark Driscoll, principal of Miami independent school district, the county’s only school. “But I’ll be honest with you it hasn’t really impacted us.”
Driscoll, 56, has never voted for a Democrat in his life, despite acknowledging that “Democrats give you raises, makes sure the schools are funded properly, all that kind of stuff.
“I’m just conservative in my values and views and a lot of the things Mr Trump believes, I agree with.”
It is game night at the school’s impressive new basketball court.
Celie Locke watches her 14-year-old daughter on the court and cheers with pride. Locke comes from a long line of cattle ranchers in this region and is keen to celebrate significant roll backs of environmental protection regulations that Trump instigated through his first two years.
“The country needs to be run as a business not by a politician,” says Locke who backed Trump almost as soon as he announced his candidacy. “The border wall is very important. Being a Texan, we need border security. Why do you allow illegal immigrants in? The word ‘illegal’ should be a red flag.”
Trump has suggested he will keep the ongoing federal government shutdown for years if he is not given funds to build what became the banner promise in his campaign (albeit with the kicker that Mexico would pay for it). For Locke, despite the president saying he would “own” the shutdown last year, the blame for stasis in Washington lies squarely with Democrats.
“He [Trump] is staying in there and holding on to what he believes,” she says. “They [Democrats] are just holding out because they don’t like Trump. And it’s not what’s best for the country.”
And yet, there are signs that the protracted shutdown, which Trump has the power to end, is having an effect on the community here. Dozens of local farmers in Roberts county and the neighboring Gray county have taken millions of dollars in federal loans for seed and grain over the past 10 years, according to public records.
Due to the shutdown, these loans are no longer being processed as crop sowing season fast approaches. Calls to the region’s 10 largest recipients of federal money were either not returned or met with a refusal to comment.
“They both just need to get their houses in order,” said one farmer who hung up the phone straight after.
There is, of course, little to no chance of Roberts county swinging the other way in 2020 – irrespective of how long this shutdown continues. But, that says little about Trump’s prospects at the next election.
Locke already had a message for her Democratic opponents in 2020: “We lived through Obama’s administration for eight years and we didn’t like any minute of it. But we survived it. You can survive it for the next [two] years and do it with grace and dignity and common sense.
“And then, you know, it’s the turning of the tide.”
