DAVID MARCUS: Liberal Asheville's hippies warm to Trump after cold shoulder from Biden
To call this city of 95,000 a progressive bastion in a purple state is a significant understatement. This is the kind of place that would elect Che Guevera mayor if not for the fact that he was a cisgender male.
So how does a town full of raging lefties react when newly minted President Donald Trump not only shows up in the region devastated by Hurricane Helene, but brings with him millions in federal aid? Well, it's complicated.
Josh was a good example. At 41, he works at a brewery that has three locations. The one atop the hill in Asheville survived, the one near the river took two feet of water and is salvageable, and the one closest to the river took 20 feet of water, and its future is uncertain.
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Josh is no fan of Trump, but he also realizes just how much help this area needs, and did offer a somewhat begrudging appreciation of the bad orange man’s visit.
"We weren’t going to protest him," he told me. "In times like these, you have to look past politics."
That might strike Trump supporters as ingratitude, but believe me when I say this represents a shift. It's not that Josh doesn’t still believe Trump is a fascist, or an existential threat to the Republic, but the sheer magnitude of the need in western North Carolina takes precedent.
It was a similar story with Corey, a self-described anarchist who moved from Maine to North Carolina just weeks before the storm. Now his truck is totaled. But as a welder, after a month of volunteer work, the rebuilding is keeping him busy and employed.
"He makes me miss George W. Bush, and I f--ckin' hated George W. Bush," Corey told me when the subject of Trump came up.
When I pressed Corey on why he has such disdain for Trump I heard a familiar answer. "He’s arrogant, he’s a bully, I just don’t like him." Yet, he went on to say, "We need the help."
This was the general attitude around town. The harshest criticism I heard of Trump and his visit was that it might be divisive, or politicize a situation where people had put politics aside. But even that critique seemed halfhearted.
Make no mistake, the hippies in Asheville won’t be trading in their ethically sourced Grateful Dead T-shirts for MAGA hats anytime soon. But they also aren’t setting their purple hair on fire over Trump, and that is new and welcome.
"I never thought it could be this way," Josh told me. "I have family that just doesn’t even talk anymore because of politics. It never used to be like that."
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I asked if he thought that could be changing. After all, I pointed out, Trump can’t run again, to which he quipped, "for now." But he took my point, and even acknowledged that the Democrats are backing off some of their more excessive positions and moving to the center.
It is too soon to say that the temperature of the country is cooling down when it comes to politics. For almost a decade, hating Donald Trump has literally been a defining personality trait for many people. That won’t change on a dime, but in time, it could.
Trump was certainly not heralded as a hero here in Asheville, as he was just 25 minutes away in rural and red Swannanoa on Friday, but neither was there much evidence of him being held as a villain.
Trump supporters have been rightly overjoyed and enthralled by the president’s hyperactive first week, with its deluge of executive orders and almost overwhelming transparency from the talker-in-chief after four years of sleepy and silent Joe Biden.
But maybe the bigger story, quiet though it is, is that this time around, Trump will not face the headwinds of The Resistance, as he did in the past. Instead, many Trump haters, though Trump haters still, seem willing to give him a chance.
Is this a turn of a corner for our country? Can we go back to a time when we judged people based on their words and actions, not who they voted for? I hope so. Because that would be an America that is, frankly, unstoppable.