Julia Elliott on Small-Town Voters and Trump’s Tariff Trap

Fiction writer Julia Elliott joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V Ganeshananthan to talk about why President Trump’s tariff policy appeals to voters in small towns in the Midwest and South, which have been economically devastated for the past couple of decades following the North American Free Trade Agreement. Elliott considers Democrats’ failure to articulate their own successes using tariffs to bring jobs back to the U.S. Elliott, who is from South Carolina, talks about conservatives who are hesitant to criticize Trump. She also reads from and discusses her new story collection, Hellions.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/. This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, and Hunter Murray.

Julia Elliott

Hellions • The Wilds • The New and Improved Romie Futch

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Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5, Episode 2: Julia Elliott and DaMaris B. Hill on Writing Rural America

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH JULIA ELLIOTT

Whitney Terrell: The other thing, I think the reason Democrats— and I’d be interested to know what both of you think about this— don’t talk about this, and that Trump does— Trump will say, “Have you been to small towns in Pennsylvania? Have you seen what’s happened there? It’s devastating. These towns have been destroyed, and we are going to take it back and fix it, right?” Democrats never show any anger at all about loss of jobs and economic devastation in small towns. They just don’t.

Julia Elliott: So they’re not appealing to the emotions of the people.

WT: Yeah because they don’t know. Molly Jong-Fast has never been to a small town that’s lost manufacturing. She grew up in New York. She doesn’t know anything about that. She can’t speak emotionally about it.

JE: Well locally here, the only politician that I’ve heard talking about the tariffs in any kind of passionate way is James Clyburn who’s the representative from the sixth district in South Carolina. But the way things are divided up here— he’s a black man who’s elected, reelected every time, and has been there for a long time. Then you have Joe Wilson, who’s a big Trump supporter. Basically, anyone who’s a Republican voter would probably just dismiss Clyburn before they even listen to a word that comes out of his mouth. But he was actually talking about soybean exports and what the tariffs are going to do to the auto industry in a kind of nuts and bolts way in some town halls and a few interviews. But like I said, I’m not sure if he would be reaching the people who need to hear it most, maybe in South Carolina.

WT: The Democrats can’t just say that Trump’s plan to do tariffs is stupid.

JE: Oh, yeah.

WT: You have to offer something else. Like, what the fuck are you gonna do to help out people here? They don’t ever talk about that.

JE: They need to stick to the facts and the data instead of— yet, Trump is a highly, I don’t know what word to use. He can be an overwhelmingly charismatic, grotesque, weird figure to focus outrage on.

WT: That’s the trap.

JE: Exactly.

WT: This is what I was talking about, to get Democrats suddenly defending free trade and talking about how great free trade is and it’s a wonderful thing. The people that he is talking to do not believe that, right? They’re not going to buy an NYU Professor like Scott Galloway telling them how great free trade is, which is another person who’s out right now.

JE: So are you also talking about the tendency for Democrats to call Trump stupid?

WT: Yes, yes.

JE: So, the parallel thing that I’ve been frustrated by recently is not just calling Trump stupid, but calling Trump voters stupid. A lot of times on social media, I’ll have a friend that will share an article about something that Trump has done that is harmful. It could be involving the tariffs or NIH grants or ICE or anything, and then they’ll say something like, “You caused this. Any Trump voters, you created this. You’re basically idiots.” And I’m wondering, what are you trying to accomplish by sharing an article that has some information and then calling the people who need to receive that information idiots? I’m just trying to think, what is a new way for you to open up a discussion that is critical of Trump policies in a way that does not call Trump and by extension, his followers stupid in a way that’s going to alienate them?

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s interesting because you mentioned Clyburn, and the fact that you know people wouldn’t necessarily listen to him because of who he is. I’m just starting to think of who are the elected representatives, who are Democrats, who are from small towns? Who are the politicians? When I think about the Democrats who get me riled up, I’m like, Adam Schiff. When Adam Schiff gives an impassioned speech, I’m like, Yeah, Adam Schiff. Or Chris Murphy. Chris Murphy is from Connecticut. I was born in Connecticut. When he says scathing things, I’m like, That’s my brand of scathing. So who are the politicians?

JE: What I think also that politicians around here could do is— Nikki Haley ran against Trump in the primaries, and she was anti tariff, right? And I think maybe 40% of South Carolinians voted for her. So, another thing that politicians could do is actually quote Republican politicians and their views on tariffs to the Republicans, and that’s going to be more persuasive than quoting a Democrat that they’re going to automatically write off.

WT: I mean, the problem that Sugi is talking about is that all the Democratic leadership is all coastal.

JE: You mean they’re all kind of unpassionate and—

WT: Even if they were passionate, they don’t seem to know or care anything about the Midwest or the South.

JE: Let me rephrase that, impassionate.

VVG: We need someone who’s evangelical about this, right? And we need someone who’s a Democrat, and we like, right? If we’re saying that people can’t listen to James Clyburn—

JE: I watched some clips of him, and he is very persuasive, but I don’t know how many people he’s reaching. When I was growing up and I was a teenager, my Republican relatives would talk about Clyburn, and they just dismissed him as the person that the black people in the area voted for, just wholesale. So those people are not going to listen to him, even though he’s, as far as I can tell, doing a great job of talking about the specifics of what’s happening economically— could happen economically, or is happening— with the soybean exports and the international automobile industry in South Carolina.

VVG: I haven’t seen Clyburn speak that much, but when I have seen him speak, he has been really persuasive. I hope that an older generation’s racist dismissal of him is replaced by a younger generation’s openness to someone who, I think, is really persuasive and interesting.

JE: I’m not sure how widespread it is. He’s having town halls. Some of the clips I looked at were from town halls and then there were a few interviews. I have no idea how widely this would be disseminated. But the other politicians, main ones in the— like McMaster was just appointed to some 10 person Governor’s Council by Trump, that’s our governor. So he’s not going to be saying anything against Trump, right? And then Joe Wilson, as far as I know, he’s the one who’s famous for saying, you lie to Obama. Remember that? So he’s not going to be—- but my suspicion is that Republicans who were involved in agriculture and who have jobs at Amazon fulfillment centers or auto plants like BMW, Volvo or Mercedes are worried about the tariffs, and they need to hear criticisms of it, but then at the same time, they’re highly polarized when it comes to politics. I mean, Republicans in the South almost see liberals as some kind of— they see them as sinful communists.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of Julia Elliott by Forrest Clonts.