On Tuesday, the Washington Post published an article about the investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” a long and deeply reported appraisal of the frayed and fraught relationships within the Trump White House. Among the book’s story lines is the increasingly adversarial dynamic between Donald Trump and his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, formerly the four-term junior senator from Alabama, where, in the 2016 election, Trump won roughly sixty-three per cent of the vote. Woodward writes in the book that, at one point, Trump said to a White House staff secretary, about the Attorney General, “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.” Later, Trump tweeted a denial. “The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘a dumb southerner,’ ” he wrote. “I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing. He made this up to divide!” In fact, Trump has called various people “retarded,” including on the radio. Woodward reports that Trump mocked Sessions’s accent as well.

Before Trump’s denial, I spoke with Cam Ward, a Republican state senator in Alabama. He was inclined to believe the reporting, he told me by phone, because Woodward’s “not the disgruntled ‘Fire and Fury’ guy.” (Michael Wolff’s best-seller, published in January, has been described as “a rehashing of gossip,” as my colleague Masha Gessen put it, earlier this year.) “It’s a bad situation, this god-awful feud,” Ward continued. “The President is obviously wildly popular in Alabama. And Jeff Sessions is well thought of here, too.” Ward offered a mild rebuke as well as a tepid defense of Trump. “I think he does the Presidency disservice when he says this stuff. But I don’t think it’s an ‘all Southerners are stupid’ or ‘mentally retarded’ ” thing, he said. “I think the President is used to ‘smash-mouth’ New York-style politics. He tends to punch down a lot. I don’t agree with it, how the first thing off the top of his head is the weapon he uses that day, or the tweet that day. But I don’t think he was attacking Southerners.”

I mentioned the “dumb Southerner” line, from the Woodward book, to Ward. He sighed. “I think it’s this ‘That’s-how-we-do-it-in-New-York, we’ll-cut-you-off-at-the-knees’ approach,” he said.

Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, John Merrill, backed Trump’s Presidential run in 2016. “As far as Southerners being identified as slow or not capable of processing things like individuals from other parts of the country, let me just say that we’ve made a living for a long time on being underestimated,” he told me. He added, of Sessions, “He truly defines character and integrity in public service. He’s not mentally impaired.”

Merrill hesitated to condemn Trump, however, saying that he needed “more evidence, more information” about what the President said. “I think there are a number of people in our state who have been disappointed in the way that the President has chosen to express himself from time to time,” he told me. “That will probably continue. But the basic values which the President is promoting are Southern at heart—financial responsibility and moral leadership—and they are why our people voted for him. Not because of the way he chooses to express himself, which can be embarrassing.”

Michael Bullington, a twenty-four-year-old financial analyst in Birmingham, co-hosts the “Young Alabama” podcast in his spare time. Bullington did not vote for Trump or support the right-wing Senate candidate Roy Moore, but he is “strongly conservative and supportive of Jeff Sessions on most issues,” he said. “I’m pretty livid right now,” he told me, citing not only the Woodward book but also Trump’s recent anti-Sessions tweets and a Politico story reporting that Trump told aides that Sessions talks like he has “marbles in his mouth.”

“I’m not very old, but I remember a time when a New Yorker making fun of Southern accents and calling Southerners mentally retarded would have been condemned by a lot of people here,” Bullington said. “I’ve been very disappointed to not see the Party and other leaders in Alabama do the bare minimum to support Sessions.”

If a tape emerged of Trump mocking Alabamians, how would people there likely respond? “I think there’d be some anger, but also questions about whether the tapes were actually legitimate, even if Trump said they were,” Bullington said. “If he were to disparage Nick Saban, then we’d have more of an issue,” he added, referring to the coach of the University of Alabama’s football team. Bullington told me he plans to discuss the issue on the next episode of his podcast.

Elizabeth BeShears, a Republican political-communications consultant in Birmingham, also regards it as unfortunate “that more Alabamians aren’t up in arms” about Trump’s comments. “I think there are many Alabamians, particularly politicians, who find what the President said to be distasteful, but are worried they will lose voter support if they stand against him,” she explained.

Not surprisingly, Doug Jones, the Democratic junior senator from Alabama, who defeated Moore in an election upset, last fall, offered a more blunt appraisal than most of the Republicans I spoke to. “I haven’t read the Woodward book yet,” he told me. “But I read the alleged quotes in the news. If they are true, the President is not only mocking and insulting his own hand-picked Attorney General, he is mocking and insulting all of those millions of voters and people who continue to support him throughout the South. It’s élitism, not recognizing the value of the hardworking people of the South.” He went on, “I get tired of people like Donald Trump making fun of people in the South, perceiving us as second-class citizens.” Did he think Alabamians would react? He wasn’t sure. “There will be a segment who will respond,” Jones said. “There will be a segment who won’t believe it,” he added.

“Everybody sees why he wants Sessions gone. It came pretty clear yesterday in that remarkable tweet undermining the Justice Department’s indictments of two sitting congressmen,” Jones continued. “He should have the guts enough to go ahead and fire Sessions if he doesn’t want him rather than being a bully and just whining about him. Be the Commander-in-Chief. Just do it and let the consequences begin.”

I asked Cam Ward, the state senator, if he thought firing Sessions would damage Trump’s support in Alabama. He thought not. “It’s pretty well accepted here that Trump, at some point, will get rid of Sessions,” he said. “But, through every controversy of the last two years, you never see the President’s numbers dip below the mid-sixties in Alabama. They haven’t moved the needle. If him going after Jeff Sessions the way he has already doesn’t move it, I don’t think firing him is gonna move the needle any further. The battle lines are pretty hardened. The middle ground is as small as it’s been in the modern Presidency.”

Later, I spoke to a prominent attorney in Montgomery, who calls himself an Independent, and who asked to remain anonymous. He told me that, in his view, Trump was “destroying the position of the Presidency” and that he was “not surprised by anything he says.” He added, “But the fact that he would demean an area of the country that one hundred per cent supports him . . . ” Then he trailed off. After a pause, he added, “Maybe everything Trump says about Alabama is true, because only a dumbass would vote for that idiot.”