Maggie admitted, however, that like other Republican women she had developed “mixed feelings.” “I have shifted my focus from Donald Trump to Ivanka. I read her book Women Who Work twice, and I look at her as a role model. She juggles a lot and yet remains true to traditional feminine values.” And what would “traditional feminine values” be? “She has a strong sense of self and family and doesn’t feel the need to apologize for who she is,” Maggie said. “Even though I did not have a traditional family myself, I still believe in the traditional family and the benefits it brings to society.”

Maggie’s father, a Marine Corps officer, had moved out of their family home on New Year’s Eve when she was six and her little sister was four. “My mom looked in the closet and all his stuff was just gone,” she said. She rarely saw him after that. “But honestly,” Maggie said, “I could not imagine my life with a dad. My mom is a great mom, she’s the best. People like to say, ‘You must be a conservative because your father’s a conservative’; well, I was raised by my mother,” whose own father had been a sergeant in the air force, “so that refutes that myth.”

At a protest that took place on the sloping lawn at the entrance to the university a few days later, I asked U.N.C. students, “What do you think of when I say ‘conservative women’?” “Ignorant,” “confused,” “dependent,” “narrow-minded,” “calling the cops on innocent black kids,” “brainwashed,” were some of their answers.

Around 250 students, professors, and people in the community had gathered to demonstrate against the neo-Confederates who had come from surrounding towns to stand vigil beside the empty pedestal of Silent Sam. The statue was donated to the school by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and erected in 1913 with a speech by a prominent local Klan supporter who bragged that, “100 yards from where the statue stood,” he had “horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds.”

The students chanted: “Nazis, go home!” and “Cops and the Klan go hand in hand!” The self-described “preservationists,” a few dozen of them, stared stoically into the night, one of them waving an oversize Confederate flag. Students posted their videos to social media and danced in a drum circle with glow sticks. And then, as the cops tried to escort the neo-Confederates back off the campus, things seemed about to turn violent. Students swarmed the procession, pushing, shouting, giving the neo-Confederates the finger; cops blew their whistles, pushing back with their bikes. The stench of pepper spray filled the air. Students went reeling, coughing.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is racist,” said Caitlyn McKinney, one night in September over dinner at the Top of the Hill, a Chapel Hill restaurant with a view of the mountains. “He’s just making himself a consumable product,” said Cammie McMahan. Like Maggie, Cammie and Caitlyn said they believed the president’s stoking of race hatred was just politics—a kind of “branding.”

And didn’t that bother them? I asked. “Morally, I don’t stand with him,” said Cammie. “He’s not moral,” said Caitlyn. “But what he represents for the Republican Party, I strongly support,” Cammie said. “He was against the Establishment, against having to do the bidding of special interests. He got people off their feet to care—because we were just on a downhill spiral!”

“We were!” said Caitlyn.

To their minds, the Obama years, with their economic recovery, passage of health-care reform, and the ending of the war in Iraq, among other wins for the Democratic president, had been a disaster. Originally a Ted Cruz fan, Caitlyn said that when Trump won the Republican presidential primary, “I started listening and I just liked what he said. He doesn’t care what people think about him. Like, he’ll tell it straight. And our jobs are coming back, the economy’s growing. When he says he’ll do something, he gets it done.” Although both of them were too young to vote for Trump in 2016, they said they will in 2020 if he runs for re-election. “I would say I’m a big Trump fan,” Cammie said, grinning. “I have TRUMP 2020 stickers. I have a WOMEN FOR TRUMP T-shirt my parents got me when they went to Trump Tower.”

“I would sit with my grandfather and we would watch Fox News and he would say, ‘Never trust anybody that trusts a Clinton.’”

Both young women said their political views had brought them the derision of their fellow students. “I can’t wear my College Republicans T-shirt to class because I will get dirty looks,” Cammie said. “I can’t have a political sticker on my laptop because if somebody sees it in the library they’re gonna say something to me.” When they were attacked for their conservatism by students in class, their professors, they claimed, never rose to their defense. “They agree with them!” said Cammie.