The local impact of Donald Trump: “They reshaped government in the MAGA image — and it caused chaos”

From the presidential election to the insurrection at the Capitol, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are usually portrayed as a national news story. But the impact it’s had on local politics is just as serious — and often quite devastating. Taking advantage of the low turnout at local elections, QAnoners, election deniers, and anti-vaccination extremists have been able to gain power on city councils and school boards, where they often proceed to wreak havoc on the local community. 

In “Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America,” journalist Sasha Abramsky documents how two rural communities in the Pacific Northwest were overwhelmed by far-right radicals. It’s a sobering story, but also one that offers hope. Concerned citizens in Clallam County, Washington, beat back the MAGA menace, offering a model for others looking to protect their communities, whether their immediate town or the nation. Abramsky spoke with Salon about his work and why it matters for the future. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

What communities did you decide to follow for this book, and why?

The book is focused mainly on two communities in the Northwest. One is in the far north of California, called Shasta County. The other one is on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington and the county is Clallam, where I focused on a small town called Sequim. They both had an extraordinary lurch rightward that gathered pace during the pandemic. Shasta County had long been right-wing, with a militia presence and the idea of seceding from the rest of California. Then the pandemic debates over social distancing and school closures and then the vaccines turbocharged everything. There was this purge, where moderate Republicans who had been in charge of the county beforehand lost out to the hard-right: Republicans who were aligned with the militia movement, who were spouting QAnon theories and who were very involved in the MAGA movement.

Sequim was historically a fairly liberal place but had low voter participation for local elections. So an organized hard-right seized power, simply because people weren’t paying attention. In the pandemic era, the city government was taken over by somebody who was using city time and city resources to promote QAnon. It triggered a good governance backlash, where locals organized and pushed back successfully against QAnon and MAGA.

If you look at what happened in Shasta and you look at what happened in Clallam County, they provide a study of contrast, which has huge implications for our national story. A we going to be able to organize nationally, to push back against the MAGA movement? Or is the MAGA movement ascendant? It was a window into a much bigger story that was occurring nationally.

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Even though these stories go in different directions, I was struck by a similarity: the dramatic emotional impact on the people these stories, because of their community tearing itself apart.

What happens when local communities get into this kind of political battle is neighbors turning against neighbors. It gets very bitter, very quickly. People on the left get embittered by people on the right. People on the right get embittered by people on the left. The room for a conversation disappears.

I was interviewing people on the left. I was interviewing people on the right. I was interviewing militia members. I have voices from across the community. And what I wanted to do was tell their stories in a complex way. I didn’t want to reduce anyone to a caricature, because that defeats the objective. With what happened around the pandemic with the schools closing, with businesses shuttering, with the economic and social dislocation, I have sympathy with people on all sides, even those I disagree with. This was one of those issues that tore the country apart. It injected both irrational and rational anger into our politics. And it’s still playing out today.

You can’t understand the story I’m trying to tell without understanding three things. One of them was the rise of social media, which turbocharged the politics of rumor. The second thing was the rise of Donald Trump, which was intimately linked with the rise of social media. He injected a vast amount of anger into the politics of the country. The third thing was the pandemic, which just tore everybody apart, tore communities apart. I want people to understand the dislocation that was occurring and that still is occurring, not just at the national level, but on Main Street. Unless you understand that, it’s impossible to navigate a way forward. And there has to be a way forward because the current moment is so dysfunctional. No democracy can survive that much anger over a prolonged period. For the sake of survival, we have to work out a more civil discourse.

A lot of us experience Trumpism and the MAGA movement as a national story. In these particular communities, it was felt on this granular local level. Why has this national story become such a localized phenomenon in some places?

Pragmatism used to define local politics: getting roads built, filling in potholes, making sure kids had safe spaces on the way to school. All of that local pragmatic politics got swamped by the sheer rage of the national discourse. But it goes the other way, too. The more local politics came to be defined by these increasingly angry battles, the more it played into a national narrative.  A local story would be picked up by someone like Tucker Carlson, who would use it to whip up rage. Not just nationally, but because of social media, it would be picked up internationally.

One of the public health doctors that I focus on is a young woman named Alison Berry who was the public health officer for Clallam County. She was effective and smart. She came to grips with the local pandemic. When the state reopened for business, she noticed that there were these huge spikes in infections and that the spikes in infections were concentrated around bars and restaurants. And so she came up with this idea to impose a temporary vaccine mandate to sit indoors at a restaurant or a bar. Very rapidly the infection rates went down. It was a public health success, but it aroused a tremendous local backlash. Because of social media, the opponents were able to coordinate with people all over the world. And so Alison Berry, this anonymous, local public health official, suddenly was getting death threats from 10,000 miles away. You had the local anger. And then you had it amplified on bigger channels like Fox News. And then you had it amplified even more on social media. This is a toxic environment. Unless we get a handle on these technologies, unless we learn to use social media more responsibly, we’re heading into a dark period where rumor replaces fact and that makes democracy extremely hard to function.

You retell a story from Forks, Washington, where rumors that “antifa” was coming to town got whipped up in 2020. An innocent family was threatened. What were people thinking, that they were ready to believe antifa was invading their small town?

You have to put yourself back in the mindset of the summer of 2020. We’re in the depths of the pandemic. People have been socially isolating for months. People are dying every day by the thousands. So there was this terror of outsiders anyway. On top of that, you had the George Floyd protests, where all of this pent-up anger and frustration poured out onto the streets. And in small towns, there was a barrier mindset. People felt, “We’ve got to stop outsiders from coming in because we don’t know who they are or where they’re coming from or what their motives are.”

In small towns around the country, these rumors took off that the big city anarchists were coming into the small communities to burn them down. Racial rumors started that people were coming to attack white folk. On the Olympic Peninsula, a few days into the protests, a rumor starts that a white school bus is going to come into town filled with people who are “antifa.” And they’re going to burn the local communities down. Unfortunately, this mixed-race family comes in looking only to camp and to escape from the pandemic a little bit in the woods. They get stopped by locals who are terrified that they are “antifa.” They’re followed into the woods by dozens of mainly young men on all-terrain vehicles with guns, in an incredibly remote part of the country. There’s all the potential for a complete tragedy. There’s all the potential for a lynching. Now it does get diffused in the end, after the sheriffs come in and convince the young guys to go home. But this family was at risk of serious physical harm because of this uncontrolled rumor mill. 

It’s tempting for many to believe this stuff is in the past, especially after the pandemic. But Donald Trump is seeding the idea that Democrats are gonna steal the 2024 election. He’s signaling to local election officials that they need to interfere in the November election. 

Donald Trump has fashioned a cultist political movement entirely around his personality and his rhetoric. Much of the Republican Party has been reduced to a one-man political cult. There’s a warping of the idea of truth. There’s a collapse of the idea that there is such a thing as an objective reality. Whatever Trump says goes. He can say one thing on Monday, he can say the exact opposite thing on Tuesday. In the minds of his followers, both things hold so. Trump’s priming his followers for another election lie when he loses in November. 

The case in point at the moment is Georgia, where the board of elections has been completely hijacked by a MAGA majority. Members of the board of elections are attending Donald Trump rallies, and Trump personally calls them out as heroes. They’re already putting in place Election Day machinery where they can allow local counties and to avoid or delay certification. As far as I can tell, the idea Trump and his acolytes can sow enough chaos and enough distrust in the political system, and then just completely lock up the process. The Hail Mary is to throw it to the House of Representatives, which could produce a Republican president.

Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen. If Trump continues on the self-destructive path he’s gone down over the last few weeks, there’s a pretty good chance that he will lose so comprehensively that even the MAGA acolytes can’t sow chaos to delay that. But it’s hugely worrying that four years after the January 6 insurrection, the same man who prompted that insurrection is willing to try the same trick again in 2025 if he loses. I hope that people read the book and they realize that this is a story of our moment. This isn’t a story of distant history. It’s very much an ongoing story of our moment.

These two communities you write about had very different trajectories. What did you learn from this? How can we use this lesson to heal our larger national dysfunction? 

In Clallam County, they set up what they called the Sequim Good Government League. They made sure it included a lot of Democrats, Republicans and independents. They fielded candidates who took on local figures who had embraced QAnon, including the mayor. They explained to the public just how dangerous this kind of ideology was. Over the course of two election cycles, they basically recaptured all of those spots in city government, on the council, and on school boards. There were some pretty conservative Republicans, and there were pretty liberal Democrats. But they agreed about the necessity of restoring local democracy. That worked very effectively. There wasn’t the equivalent in Shasta County. Over the last few months, it’s gotten better, but for years the vacuum was filled by the hard-right. The right gained control over the border county supervisors, they gained control over local school boards and they pushed this increasingly fringe agenda. They fired the public health officer. They fired the people who were in charge of county health services. They reshaped government in the MAGA image, and it caused chaos. It caused budgeting dysfunction. It caused tremendous upheavals in the provision of services.

Whatever one thought of the MAGA identity, it didn’t work as a way to govern locally. The lesson here is when a community starts lurching far to the right, the most important thing is to organize and push back against that. Educate people. Knock on doors. Explain to people at community meetings just why this is a bad idea to let a local community slide into far-right chaos.

In Shasta, it’s taken a long time, but belatedly, there is now pushback. The epicenter of this hard right revolt was a man named Patrick Jones. And Patrick Jones was recently defeated in this spring’s primary election. Even in a place as right-wing as Shasta County, a critical mass of people did ultimately realize that this just isn’t a good road to go down. The ultimate lesson here is that when people pay attention, most Americans just do not want to go down this road. It’s ugly and it’s dysfunctional and it promises nothing but chaos and upheaval.