Poverty in the US is a near-death experience – I understand Trump's appeal
Software expert Chris von Simson travels all over the country and says Donald Trump finds his appeal with those who have no social safety net.
It has been almost a quarter of a century since software expert Chris von Simson made a decision to move from his London job, dealing with European clients, to a role with his company's US headquarters. In June 2001, aged 35, he boarded a flight to Washington DC to start his new life.
But when he first arrived, the city was unsettled. “I came over and everybody was very happy for me and it was exciting. But in September we had 9/11, and then in the DC area that was swiftly followed by the anthrax attacks [where letters laced with the poison began appearing in the US mail system] and there was a prolonged period of a man and a teenage boy going out in a white van and shooting people randomly. Those three things happened quite quickly so it was a pretty strange introduction to the United States,” he says.
“But the US is gigantic and, compared to Europe, fairly wild – and you get used to these things quite quickly.”
Over two decades later, he is married with a child, and calls nearby northern Virginia his home. But Von Simson’s work still involves a lot of travel, and he regularly meets voters from all across the US. In a nation that is dealing with extremes of wealth and of poverty, he understands the appeal of Donald Trump.
“Who are undecided voters? They are mostly people who are struggling to get by,” he says. “The scale of rich and poor is totally different [from the UK]. Poverty in the US is a near-death experience, particularly if you’re not anywhere near a city. It is incredibly hard. There is not much of a social safety net, and the summers are extremely hot and the winters are terrifyingly cold. People who live in poverty, if they can live, live very hard lives.”
Indeed, the 2023 study Novel Estimates of Mortality Associated With Poverty in the US, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that poverty is the fourth highest risk factor for death in the US after heart disease, cancer and smoking.
Von Simson says he has witnessed first hand how dealing with poverty means people have little time to consider the finer details of politics. If Trump promises a better life, that is enough to be convincing to many, regardless of how realistic those promises are.
“You can make no assumptions about how those people navigate that difficulty, so I’m very sympathetic to those people that I meet even if they’ve been entranced by [former president Donald] Trump, because that’s only a small part of their life. The big part of their life is getting through every day, and that’s a much more absorbing task than anything to do with politics.”
The great vastness of the country means that many people are significantly more disconnected from the state than they are in the UK, von Simson says.
“There are places where you could hike on a well-known trail and you wouldn’t see people for days. To experience something similar in Europe you’d need to travel to the most remote places in the Urals or somewhere like that,” von Simson reflects.
“The US prides itself on coping with adversity because it pretty much has to. If a single administration or even the US government failed, or had terrible policies for 10 years… well those parts of the country would still struggle through their existence. They would tell you, 'it doesn’t matter what happens in DC'.”
But though politics in the US may be a luxury, living near Washington DC means that von Simson has a ringside seat for the most crucial presidential election in his period as a British expat. He isn’t feeling that tension in the city yet; people are still going about their daily lives in a normal way.
But he describes the events of 6 January 2021 – when rioters descended on Capitol Hill in support of Trump, who'd lost the election to Joe Biden – were “a major inflection point, a punctuation mark for the country”. It is, he says, “probably a top five issue for most voters I encounter now”.
Von Simson considers Kamala Harris, and her campaign, as a “revelation”, given that her talents had previously been obscured by the role of vice president – a job even many Americans don’t understand. There were question marks over whether Harris would be a suitable replacement for Biden, but she entered the race as a highly capable and effective campaigner.
“The speechwriting was a lot better; the campaign management was a lot better,” von Simson says – a reflection, he believes, of the party’s improvements in its own organisation since the rise of Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.
It is hoped that this organisation will pay off in electoral success. For von Simson, a vote for Harris is not necessarily a vote in support of the Democratic Party but that, in this election, “everything defers to the unfitness of Trump to be in command of any aspect of public administration”.
It won’t be his choice to make, however. Von Simson doesn’t have the right to vote, and can’t even vote in state elections despite being a long-term local resident.
Nevertheless, he is very worried about the future of his adopted country under Trump, a man who he describes as “choosing who he wants to be every few minutes”. So what would a future presidency look like in practice?
“Given prior experience it will be largely chaotic. Trump says, ‘We’re going to deport 12 million people, we’re going to prosecute our adversaries including journalists, we’re going to weaponise the department of justice’. You may say that’s not going to happen, and that’s true, they’re meaningless statements - until they’re not."
If 6 January was an attack on the physical structure of government, then Trump’s comments represent an “absolute threat to the constitution”. “These are not idle threats. There’s no such thing as an idle threat, it’s just a threat that hasn’t been realised. When this person is a nominee for president you have to take it seriously,” von Simson says.
For most US voters, he believes, the final election result will come down to the question of whether their personal difficulties are resolvable by “a known shiny bad person, or a less tested but potentially decent person”. And that, he concludes, “is the calculus that we have to hope for”.
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