Richard Luscombe took a look at The Villages in Florida, where last week’s video showed a resident spewing racism, retweeted by the president. It has long been the country of Trump, but minds may be changing
It promotes itself as “Florida’s friendliest hometown,” a playground where older adults spend their golden years in a carefree world of golf and swimming, dining, drinking, and nightly dancing in the town square.
But a reckless and controversial retweeting of Donald Trump, featuring some ugly racism of a resident in a golf cart, and the carefully crafted image of The Villages as a peaceful utopia for retirees began to dissipate. As older white voters, one of Trump’s key voting blocs in 2016, show signs of abandoning the erratic president, some are even wondering if the door has been opened for Democrats here, an area that so far it has been blatantly “Trump’s country”.
“He’s definitely turning down some of the older voters at The Villages,” said Chris Stanley, president of the Democratic Club in the 32,000-square-mile retirement community of 125,000, and a resident of almost six years.
“They are concerned about their plans for Medicare and social security, of course, but they also did not allow their children to behave like this, they do not allow their grandchildren to behave like this, and they are very subdued by this.
“This is the generation that saw Walter Cronkite, had John F. Kennedy and Eisenhower, when politics was a completely different animal. When even if your party or your chosen candidate did not win, you were never afraid of the harm done to your family or your country. And now? Who thought we would see something like this now?
The resident captured in the video yelling “White power! White power! A protester was participating in a golf cart parade, the preferred mode of transportation in The Villages, organized by villagers for Trump, a group of right-wing residents claiming a membership of 2,000.
Although the group distanced itself from the comment and claimed that the person is not a member, there are other allegations that the president’s most fervent supporters misbehaved.
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