Film-maker James Lantz, a Sanders supporter in Vermont, speaks with his parents, former factory owners in rural Virginia, about why they support Trump

When my father saw that his homemade “Trump 4 President” sign had been run over for the second time, he muttered “hot dammit,” jerked the car door open, then marched across the yard to his twice-flattened sign.

Dad was mad.

Truth be told, my 76-year-old, cigar-smoking, cowboy hat-wearing father has been angry for a long time – like years.

And his black and white, stencil and spray-painted sign that used the number “4” because he ran out of letters, was proudly displayed in the front yard of his and my mom’s home in rural Virginia.

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But when somebody ran over it the second time, leaving two long clay-colored ruts in the yard, he was beyond angry and moved to action.

Not long afterward, I found dad at his tool bench in the garage making a spike strip – about a dozen screws drilled through an old piece of plywood, sticking point-up. His plan was to hide the board in the grass to “blow the tires out of somebody” who kept running over his homemade Trump sign.



Just above his work bench next to some cans of hornet spray, hung a little US flag. As he drilled, Dad mused on what his vandalized sign said about the state of the country and world.



“I mean, what the hell is happening!?” he said.



Now I don’t live near my folks any more, but it’s where I was born. Winchester is a small town in the northern Shenandoah valley of Virginia.



Back when I was a kid, it was a blue-collar farm and factory town. My dad was plant manager for a plastics factory called O’Sullivan, and he and about 500 other workers made parts for American-made cars. It’s a source of pride in my family that my father worked on the first injection molding machine to come to our town.



He and my mom raised four kids on a factory manager’s salary.

When I was young, we’d sometimes jump in the family station wagon and drive to local car dealerships to look at the new models. We’d get out and Dad would point to something on a new car and say, “We made this part.”

My siblings and I would run our fingers along some plastic thing like it was holy.

More than once, I’ve heard Dad wax eloquent about plastic parts he made that most people wouldn’t even think about, much less care about – like a 1974 Chevy Vega headlamp housing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Made in the USA. Photograph: James Lantz

My hometown of Winchester was also the hometown of the country music legend Patsy Cline. She was long gone by the time I came around, but it’s part of our town’s lore that before she became famous, she’d sing in smoky bars for workers getting off long shifts at local factories.

Like much of the country, Winchester has changed dramatically since then –looking less like itself and more like the featureless strip malls, national brands and fast-food chains you’d see in many other parts of the US.

Within a 10-mile radius of Winchester, there are three Walmart Supercenters and 10 McDonald’s restaurants. A short access road named to memorialize our local legend, Patsy Cline Boulevard, runs past a Lowe’s, a Kohl’s, a Chick-fil-A and not much else.

These days, I live in Burlington, Vermont. My wife and I moved here 15 years ago and it’s been a great place to live and raise our family. For the past year, Burlington has been best known as the home of Bernie Sanders who is a fast-walking, generous presence around town.



Even though I can easily drive back home to Winchester in one day, in many ways, Burlington is far away from my home town. And the socioeconomic forces that have shaped Winchester and my dad’s sign-making passions, are vastly different from those that are shaping Burlington today.



Burlington is a college town, where non-profits and the tech industry thrive. Its collegiate-fueled economy protects it from many of the issues that are agitating much of the rest of the country.



Some years ago, when one of the few factories in Burlington shut down, it was quickly refurbished and grew into a billion-dollar dotcom. A local artist painted the silos like stained glass.



Meanwhile in Winchester, a 400,000 sq ft factory that has been empty for years, sits in the middle of town across from one of the three Walmarts. A security guard slowly drives round the grounds past a leaning For Sale sign, a rusty water tower and cracked windows the color of cataracts.



Since 2000, nearly five million American manufacturing jobs have disappeared– a third of the entire manufacturing workforce. Using government statistics, one group estimated that over 60,000 US factories have closed in the last 15 years.

One of those factories belonged to my mom and dad.

This was a long-held dream of my father, to build a plastics factory that he could call his own. And I watched as he and my mom worked hard to make it a reality.



They called it Valley Industrial Plastics and for 15 years they, and a peak workforce of about 100 employees, made automotive parts and household goods. But when their American clients started moving jobs to Mexico and China, it left my parents with little choice.



“We sold the building, we sold the machines, and it was just a heart-breakening [sic] thing to see it all gone,” my dad said.



This, more than anything else, fuels my father’s anger and his passion for Donald J Trump.



“I always took pride in Made in America,” Dad tells me, “and I told you, manufacturing is it – you need to get into manufacturing. Well, as it turns out, all the work is going to China, and all the work is going to Mexico and it fell apart.”



Even though I sympathize deeply with my parents, I don’t agree with their choice for president – not even a little bit. And while my Bernie 2016 T-shirt is folded and put away in the closet, I don’t think I could ever see myself voting for Mr Trump.

In Burlington it’s easy to dismiss the Republican nominee, his “Trumpiness” and talk about walls, immigrants and Mexico. To many of my neighbors and friends here, the sentiment about a possible Trump presidency is simple.

“It’ll never happen,” a friend said. “Period.”

Only, I wonder about that.

My mom recently told me the story of a General Electric plant in Winchester that closed and moved its lamp production to Mexico. But before leaving, GE did something that particularly galled her.

“There was a lot of people who worked there who lost their jobs,” she said, “and the people up here trained the people from Mexico who were taking their jobs!”

My dad just shakes his head and says again in his country-talk kind of way, “It’s just heart-breakening.”

To my folks and many people across the country, what’s been happening to them is not only “heartbreaking” – it’s humiliating. And like a love affair gone bad, it’s messy and ugly. Nobody knows where it might lead.

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Talking to my father is like talking to somebody who’s been jilted: anger mixed with regret and a deep romantic hope, that maybe – just maybe – things can go back the way they were.

Meanwhile, my dad’s homemade “Trump 4 President” sign still stands in front of my parents’ house in Virginia. He checks on it twice a day, every day.

“I’m checking for vandalism,” he says. “I’m afraid somebody’ll take spray paint and paint over it or vandalize it. That’s my fear.”

As he says this, I think about that somebody who ran over his sign and all the emotions it dredged up in my dad. What the sign really is, I think, is my father’s half of a tense conversation with that somebody that continues to this day.

Which makes me think of the lyrics to a Patsy Cline song.

“Strange how you stopped loving me, how you stopped needing me … oh, how strange.”