The Hillary-for-prison sign outside Mine Lifeline on Main Street was so enormous that it attracted attention, even though its message was so ordinary in Logan County, West Virginia, that the sign seemed festive rather than threatening. People driving by often stopped and took selfies in front of its photograph of a peeved-looking Clinton behind bars. Rick Abraham, who founded the mine-safety company, and had put up the sign, was delighted by the response. He thought he might construct a three-dimensional prison with Hillary in it, if he could find the time. He would put it on the roof of his building, which would be nicely theatrical, although bad for selfies. “The Clinton Foundation pay for play—it’s obvious!” he said. “She’s a criminal, she should be in jail! If I had done that, I would be in jail. She knowingly put all that information on a private server to shield it from FOIA. Deleting those e-mails—how can that not be obstruction? And using her BlackBerry in the Kremlin? She just has a total disregard for everybody. They’re the Clintons! They’re crooks!”

Abraham had also planted a Trump billboard outside his business—this, although even larger than the Hillary sign, was so common a sight that it barely registered—and he was in some ways an emblematic Trump voter: a white Protestant man in the dying coal industry in southern West Virginia, which is one of the parts of the country most deeply and unshakably loyal to Trump, and most deeply and unshakably hostile to Clinton and President Obama. In Logan County’s Democratic primary in 2012, Obama was soundly defeated by Keith Judd, a Texas felon serving a seventeen-and-a-half-year sentence for extortion. The mayor of the city of Logan (pop. 1,649) recently made it known to Clinton’s campaign that she was not welcome and should not come. Like most West Virginians, Rick Abraham was angry with the President for hastening the decline of the coal industry with what he regarded as excessive environmental regulation. Like most Trump voters, he considered Obamacare a scourge, and since he selects insurance policies for Mine Lifeline’s forty-odd employees he could argue in detail that nearly everyone in his company was worse off than before.

And yet in other ways he is not the Appalachian Trump voter as many people elsewhere imagine him—ignorant, racist, appalled by the idea of a female President or a black President, suspicious and frightened of immigrants and Muslims, with a threatened job or no job at all, addicted to OxyContin. Those voters exist, but the political thinking of many others in Trump country is more ambivalent and complicated and non-inevitable than is apparent from signs hung on Main Street or carried at rallies. The perception that people in West Virginia are voting for Trump because they are racist or ignorant is significant, though, since it’s one of the reasons they’re voting for Trump in the first place. “When people talk about Trump, they talk about how they don’t like the establishment or the élites,” Charles Keeney, a history professor at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College, in Logan County, says. “When they say that, they mean who they see on television—they envision people in New York City making fun of them and calling them stupid. Every time you leave the state, you get it—someone will say, Oh, you’re from West Virginia, do you date your cousin? Wow, you have shoes, wow you have teeth, are you sure you’re from West Virginia? So when they see that the media élite is driven out of their mind at the success of Donald Trump it makes them want to root for him. It’s like giving the middle finger to the rest of the country.”

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Another important factor is immigration, but not for economic reasons. In West Virginia, there are practically no immigrants. But Trump has promoted the idea that someone who cares about the fate of people new to the country must care less about those who have been here longer—and this idea resonates among people who believe that the rest of the country doesn’t care about them at all, and doesn’t see them as kin. When Clinton talks about Trump voters, she tends to divide them into two categories: bigots (her “basket of deplorables”) and people suffering from economic hardship. What’s missing from Clinton’s two categories is a third sort of person, who doesn’t want to think of himself as racist, but who feels that strong borders describe a home. There are many such people, and not just in West Virginia.

Trump was not Rick Abraham’s first choice among the Republican candidates. His first choice was Carly Fiorina: he thought she sounded like a better businessperson than Trump, and he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t doing better in the polls. But after a while he acknowledged that it seemed he was the only one who liked her, so he started donating to his second choice, Ben Carson. He liked Carson because he thought he was smart and honest, although he was worried by how little Carson seemed to know about foreign policy. During the primary season, Abraham and his wife would watch the Republican debates on television, and his wife would get up and leave the room because she couldn’t stand watching Trump. Abraham sometimes couldn’t stand him, either—he found him pompous and arrogant. But he thought that was a strategy, and it worked, after all: he eliminated sixteen other candidates and won the nomination.

Abraham saw Trump’s more extreme pronouncements as bargaining positions. Trump was a negotiator: if he wanted to buy a building for twenty million dollars, he wouldn’t go to the table offering twenty—he would offer ten, or five. So when he talked about building a wall and throwing eleven million people out of the country, Abraham figured he was just making an aggressive first offer, and after some negotiating he would end up with something reasonable. Abraham didn’t think it was possible or desirable to throw out immigrants who were already here (except felons), but he did think it was necessary to establish an effective border.

He agreed with Trump that you had to vet Muslims carefully in order to keep out terrorists, and he thought that America should not accept Muslims who didn’t want to learn English and become a part of American life. “Political correctness is destroying the country, because we’re not assimilating into a common society,” he says. “I was in Union Station in Chicago a while back, and I saw someone, I didn’t know if it was a man or a woman. It was shaped like a Christmas tree. It was a black robe that did not expose the arms or feet, it touched the ground and it came to a point up top and it had the screen and it was leaned against a wall. I don’t know if that’s some guy with an AK-47—I don’t know what it is! Now, if you say to her, ‘In this country, you have to be seen so we can tell who you are,’ she’ll say, ‘You’re violating my religion, my culture wears a veil.’ Where does it stop?”

Abraham describes himself as an American of Arab descent—both his grandfathers were born in Sultan Yacoub, a town that is now in Lebanon but was then part of Ottoman Syria. His paternal grandfather immigrated to America as a child; his name when he arrived was Abraham Dewud, but the immigration officers told him that his name was now Joe Abraham. He hadn’t been in West Virginia long before he signed up to fight for America during the First World War. He was a Muslim who never smoked or drank or ate pork. He married a local Christian woman and then, after she died, a Muslim. There were no mosques anywhere nearby, but he practiced his faith as best he could for the rest of his life.

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Abraham’s maternal grandfather came from a family of Syrian Bedouins. When he was eleven, in 1907, his parents put him on a ship headed for New York by way of Marseilles. He picked sugar beets in Michigan for a while, and then, in the nineteen-twenties, when the coal fields in West Virginia were booming, he moved down there and started peddling in the coal camps, selling pots and pans out of a wagon. In time, he opened up a grocery store. He married a Christian girl from Gilbert Creek whose family had lived in the area since before the Civil War. He didn’t convert and neither did she, although shortly after they married he brought her home to Sultan Yacoub for a year so that she could learn Syrian customs and cooking. “My grandmother smoked, drank liquor, bowled three nights a week—he couldn’t do anything with her,” Abraham says. “Mamaw ran the house.”