Seated on a folding chair next to a phone charging station in Quicken Loans arena, Kathryn Gardner pointed to her new t-shirt.
“It’s sort of goofy,” she said, smiling and rolling her eyes. Only after accepting it from the nice young man schlepping around a box labeled “official -t-shirts” had she noticed the design: A stately image of Ronald Reagan against a Soviet red background and the words “Mr. Trumpbachev, Put Up This Wall.”
Turned out it was a stunt by a crew from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (we heard it will air Wednesday night). The shirts were free if the recipients would put them on for the camera.
Gardner and her friend, Lynette White, exceedingly sweet delegates from Tennessee, were the first to play along. Many others followed, including longtime GOP consultant Frank Luntz. Who says Republicans have no sense of humor? Just don’t try to parse whether their amusement stemmed from the fact that all the t-shirt jokes were at Donald Trump’s expense.
Gardner and White say they’ve been ardent Trump supporters from the start. “Since 2012,” adds White. Gardner describes her husband’s conversion from his initial preference for Ted Cruz: “It was at our first [Trump] rally. The thing that got to him was when we got in the rope line, and Mr Trump said, ‘You’re going to be very proud of me.’ My husband said, ‘No politician has ever said that to me.’ And that was it.”
For White, it’s about immigration, and it’s deeply personal. When she was a young girl growing up in the Philippines, her mother left her with grandparents and emigrated to the U.S. “I waited five years,” she says. “I didn’t have my mother for five years because that’s how long it took for her to bring me over legally. And when she did she told me, ‘If anyone ever asks for our papers we’ll have them.’ She was very proud of that.”
“So it’s about fairness.”
White and Gardner also lament the attitudes of many immigrants, who seem to want to “tear down our country.”
“If I moved to China or Mexico or the Middle East,” Gardner says, “no one’s going to offer me free language classes, like we do. No one’s going to offer me free assistance.”
Or even a free t-shirt.
This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2016.
