Adam Wren is a contributing editor at Indianapolis Monthly.

TERRE HAUTE, Indiana—On the first Saturday of Donald Trump’s presidency, as protesters and marchers stormed the nation’s capital and cities around the country, Dick and Jane Ames threw a party. Four days earlier, they visited a Party Mania store and purchased two big red balloons, $11 apiece, one in the shape of the number 4 and the other in the shape of a 5. For $50, they purchased a cardboard cutout of the guest of honor. Jane, 74, prepared a tantalizing, if at first blush random, spread of food. She whipped up a tamale casserole, a tossed salad with tomatoes, tips of asparagus and tacos—any dish she could conceive of that began with the letter “T”.

By the time Saturday night in Terre Haute rolled around, in the sunroom of their three-bedroom house, the Ameses and eight of their closest friends and family members feted the newest occupant of the Oval Office.


“Oh, Trump—I’m still all Trumped up,” Jane, a retired insurance broker, told me, reveling in the memory of that night one recent weekday afternoon over lunch at Logan’s Rib-Eye, a wood-paneled budget steakhouse situated in Terre Haute, a town along the Wabash River at the intersections of U.S. Highways 40 and 41, just off Interstate 70. Terre Haute proudly calls itself the “Crossroads of America,” a title Indiana would later adopt as its state motto. Across the table, her husband Dick, 73, a former air traffic controller, smiled and nodded. Trump, as far as these longtime Republicans were concerned, had already delivered on some of his biggest promises.

More than 600 miles to the east, in New York City and D.C., people’s Twitter feeds were clogging with breathless posts about the nascent administration’s seemingly disastrous first 24 hours: Trump’s false claims about crowd size at the inauguration, his dystopian inaugural address, and his rambling and self-referential address to CIA officers at Langley, to name only a few. Not here. While Sean Spicer was reaming out the press, the Ameses listened to Fox News, and followed their “T” feast with a “T” dessert, sipping tea while noshing on tea cakes, careful to keep the party’s elements on theme.

Almost a month into Trump’s administration, Vigo—population 108,000, the nation’s swingiest swing county—seemed to be an ideal place to take the temperature of voters. This year, Vigo swung for Trump (who took 55.4 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 40.2 percent), continuing a 60-year streak as the nation’s most accurate bellwether county. In the past 16 elections stretching back to 1956, the candidate who has won Vigo has turned out to be the next president: It went for Reagan, Bush, Bill Clinton, Bush, and then Obama, both times. When I first visited Vigo, well in advance the 2016 primaries, I’d found surprising enthusiasm for the outsider New York real-estate mogul, long before the political establishment was giving him a real shot. They liked his business-minded approach to politics, though Jane conceded at the time that Marco Rubio had a “cute smile.” Now, I was curious: Were the Ameses, and voters like them, happy with Trump so far? Did they feel any buyer’s remorse? Had their lives changed substantively since Inauguration Day?

What I heard, in conversations with nearly a dozen Trump supporters, is that like the Ameses, most of Vigo County is still “Trumped up.” All around town, folks are still buzzing about the county’s winning streak and Trump’s surprise win. You hear it in chatter at eateries like Logan’s and in coffee shops and diners such as Boo’s Crossroads Cafe & Corner Grind, which could pass as a knockoff of Luke’s Diner in the show “Gilmore Girls.” And the grist of the coastal media’s hot takes? The lies, the fumbles and faux pas that have rattled the D.C. establishment and global allies? None of it seems to resonate here.

“I think Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do,” said Keith Kindsvatter, a 64-year-old system specialist with the Federal Aviation Administration, as he chomped on his BLT sandwich at Boo’s. He was catching up with an old friend, Anna White, 60. The two, I had gathered from eavesdropping, once played in a garage band together, though their last big show was at the Little Italy Festival in town several Labor Days back. They played hard rock—Anna on the drums and guitar, and Keith on the guitar—and had called themselves“Daze of Misspent Youth. I sat down next to them and introduced myself. “What brings you to Terre Haute?” Kindsvatter asked me. “Lose a bet?”

To a person, the Trump voters I talked to in Vigo offered a similar refrain as they assessed Trump’s first days in office, almost as if they were reading from a fresh batch of talking points issued by the president’s director of Surrogate Outreach: “He’s doing exactly what he promised he would do,” Kelly, 48, a pharmacist in Terre Haute who felt uncomfortable divulging her last name, told me when I asked her about Trump’s controversial immigration executive order, as she ate a slice of cheese pizza at the food court in Honey Creek Mall. Nor are voters like Kelly lamenting his Twitter tirades: “He’s speaking directly to the people. Like Reagan!” Dick told me over lunch. Trump’s brusque, shoot-from-the-hip conversations with world leaders and allies? “We’re not going to go to war with Australia,” Kindsvatter said.

“I think he’s pretty much following The Art of the Deal,” said Ken Warner, 60, who works in the finance industry. “He’s got the price of fighter jets down. It’s not something we’re used to. It’s a little unorthodox. Listening to his Carrier negotiation, you have to shrug on the means but can’t disagree with the ends. You don’t want to be picking winners and losers. You don’t want to see a president calling out people on Twitter. However, the results so far have not been bad. So I can’t say it’s wrong.” (“I’m disappointed in some of the tweets he does,” Warner, who voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich in Indiana’s May primary, did allow. “He should stay away from things with his daughter’s brand, and criticizing the courts.”)

The flap over the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd? “It does not matter,” Jane said. “There were thousands there! His rallies set records. Most of the U.S. is thrilled.”

“He’s done more in the two weeks he’s been president than the other president did in eight years,” Dick told me.

It’s a completely different view of Trump’s early performance than you’d get in any coastal city, or even 75 miles away in the urban center of Indianapolis—where thousands of women descended on the statehouse on the same Saturday afternoon when the Ameses were preparing for their “T” party. And it's an important barometer of whether America is really souring on Trump. If Trump is going to lose momentum, he’s going to have to lose it in places like Vigo first. And as far as Vigo is concerned, Trump is delivering the goods.

That doesn’t mean everyone here is thrilled. Even in Trump County, U.S.A., a county with a lot of demographic and cultural homogeneity, tensions between Clinton and Trump voters run raw, mirroring the fissures in the civic fabric at the national level. At the cafe, as Kindsvatter filibustered for a few minutes on how good a job he thought Trump was doing, White stopped pecking at her cottage cheese and fruit. When I asked Kindsvatter about Trump’s controversial executive order banning travel—and he told me that “there’s nothing in the order that mentions religion”—White catapulted out of her chair, stepped away from the table and made a beeline to the door. She looked back at Kindsvatter and me.

“Are you leaving, Anna?” Kindsvatter asked.

“He’s not my president,” White said, pushing open the door. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

“It was good seeing you, Anna,” Kindsvatter said, but White had already disappeared around a corner.

“We’ve been friends for years,” he told me, turning back to his sandwich. “She’ll get over it.” He added that she was an Egyptologist and had already purchased a temple-like mausoleum in a cemetery at the edge of town, apropos of nothing, as if the political opinion of Egyptologists couldn’t be trusted.

Back at the steakhouse, Dick and Jane were finishing up their chicken breast and burger, but still far from done singing Trump’s praises. The only missteps I could get the Ameses to cite? “I don’t really like the nickname Mad Dog,” Jane said of James Mattis, Trump’s secretary of defense. “That really sounds violent.”

“I do!” Dick shot back. “He’s like Patton!” Dick did admit, though, that he was bothered by Trump’s response to Bill O’Reilly’s pre-Super Bowl interview question about Vladimir Putin being “a killer.” There are a lot of killers,” Trump said. “You think our country’s so innocent?” “He shouldn’t have said that,” Dick told me. He wouldn’t say more. “He just shouldn’t have said that.”

By the end of his first 100 days, Trump will begin construction on a border wall, the Ameses hope. When I asked if they were at all concerned about an estimated $15 billion price tag, they scoffed.

“I’d love to make a donation,” Jane said. When Trump visited Terre Haute’s Indiana Theatre during the state’s heated primary last April, she pondered purchasing a brick and bringing it the rally to give to Trump—the symbolic first brick it would take to build the wall. When she saw security at the theater, she thought better of it.

“You are going to make a donation,” Dick responded. “It’s going to come out of your taxes.”

“The people we’ve talked to are thrilled,” Jane relayed, ignoring Dick. She has noticed a change in her daily mood since Trump was elected. There’s a lightness now that she hadn’t known for the past eight years during the days of Obama. “I feel happy. I’m happy. I like what he’s doing. You don’t feel like someone is selling out the country—”

“Or selling Christians down the river!” Dick said, finishing Jane’s sentence.

As our lunch came to an end, I asked the Ameses what they would tell the president if they could send him a message.

“Stand strong,” Dick said, as he took the last bite of his cheeseburger.

“Stand strong,” Jane said not more than a second later, stabbing her sweet potato with her fork. “We’re with you!”

