10 months ago
BEDFORD, N.H. — “This,” Ted Johnson told me, “is what I hope.” We were here the other day at a bar not far from his house, and we were talking about Donald Trump and the possibility he could be the president again by this time next year. “He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”
“For everybody?” I said.
“Everybody.”
“For you?”
“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”
The notion that somebody might wish for the country’s dismantling would have sounded shocking coming from anybody, but it was especially jarring coming from Johnson. Because I was at a Nikki Haley town hall at the VFW in nearby Merrimack in the first week of September when Johnson stood up and asked her a question. He introduced himself as an independent voter and a retired soldier and said it felt like the nation was “in a civil war” and that some of his neighbors would hate him if he so much as put up a sign for her in his yard. On his mind, too, was his estrangement from his older brother — a rift the former president had done nothing but widen. He wanted to hear Haley’s plan “to pull us all back together.”
Haley at that moment was beginning to become the top non-Trump pick in the Republican primary process, slowly, steadily replacing Gov. Ron DeSantis. She pitched conservative policies with a more moderate mien, a split-the-difference escape hatch for MAGA movables to not have to outright denounce Trump but still turn the page. Could she finish second in Iowa? Could she win New Hampshire? Could she actually topple Trump? To do any of that, though, she needed a mix of GOP-leaning independents, Trump-averse Republicans and at-all-open-minded Trump voters. She needed Ted Johnson. And Ted Johnson was listening.
So Johnson’s journey from that VFW last fall to how he says he’s set to vote this week — a four-and-a-half-month turnabout from literally wanting to “pull us back together” to literally wanting to “pull it apart” — offers as instructive an insight as I’ve yet encountered into how on earth we are where we are. Trump could be just a disgraced ex-president facing time in prison. Instead, at least for now, he is a durably dominant political force credibly eyeing a return to the White House. And if Trump wins in New Hampshire on Tuesday (and polls say he probably will), and if he beats Joe Biden come November (and polls say he certainly might), it will be because of Johnson and the many thousands of others like him who looked for ways to quit Trump but ultimately couldn’t, didn’t and haven’t — and not remotely reluctantly but with an explicit sense of vengeance.
“He’s a wrecking ball,” Johnson told me here at the place he chose called the Copper Door.
“Everybody’s going to say, ‘Trump is divisive,’” he said, “and he’s going to split the country in half.” He looked at me. “We got it,” he said.
It’s what the Ted Johnsons want.
He’s 58. He’s married to his second wife and has three young adult sons. He was in the Army for 22 years — he retired as a lieutenant colonel — and now he is a senior project manager for an IT security company and works from home. He lives in a classic three-bedroom house he bought almost four years ago for $485,000 that’s now worth roughly a quarter-million dollars more. He’s originally from Centralia, Illinois, a town like too many towns in the more rural interior of the country that isn’t what it was. He was born in a hospital that no longer delivers babies. His father’s gallbladder several years back broke during a snowstorm and so he couldn’t be airlifted to the closest suitable medical facility in St. Louis. “So we just watched him die,” he said. Before he voted for Trump twice, he told me, he voted for Barack Obama twice. By September of 2023, though, he was thinking he was ready for someone else and so he went to the event for Haley.
Her answer was long. Too long. “You have to be able to take the divisions,” Haley said at one point over the course of nearly 10 minutes, and get people “to see the best of themselves to go forward.” The reaction in the room was mixed. But Johnson liked it. He had given her a few small donations before the town hall, according to FEC records, and he gave a few more after the town hall — adding up last year to $120.90 — not a mint but a show of support.
For Johnson, Trump had shifted from “being the rebel” to “being a rebel without a cause,” he told me then. But Haley? He called her “a leader.” He called her “more than qualified.” He was “behind her,” he said. “I’m looking for somebody that can bring us together and move us forward,” he said. “If we redo everything in the past, the country’s going to stay in the past, and it’s going to stay divided.” It was his hope, he said, that “she gets more momentum.”
In retrospect, though, some of what he said during our couple of conversations in the aftermath of that town hall should have been a warning. “You do your own reading and your own research, and you’re like, ‘What the hell’s happened to this country?’” he told me. He told me about one of his last conversations with his brother, Fred, very much anti-Trump. “He goes, ‘Well, what do you think about Jan. 6?’ And I said, ‘I thought it was Patriot’s Day.’” And we talked about polling. Trump’s “going to win, man,” he told me. “I’ve been watching the news tonight, and I was, like, ‘Holy shit, he’s 10 points ahead of Biden.’”
So I wasn’t totally surprised by the text I got earlier this month. But it was still kind of remarkable.
“Going with Trump,” Johnson told me.
He referred to Haley as “a flip flop RINO.” He said she “speaks to one side then to the other and thinks we are not paying attention.” Republicans were “just as crappy” as Democrats, and Trump, he said, “is really the new 3rd party.”
“Our system needs to be broken,” Johnson had concluded, “and he is the man to do it.”
“What happened?” I asked him now at the Copper Door.
“You know what happened?” he said.
“I got pissed.”
The rift with his brother remains — Ted and Fred Johnson don’t talk — but Ted and I talked for more than three hours.
The more he watched Haley, the less he liked her. She was too “scripted,” he said. She was “weak on the border,” he said. She was “a corporatist,” he said. She was “all in on Ukraine,” he said — echoing knowingly or not some of Trump’s attacks. Chris Sununu, the governor here, endorsed her. “That was a negative,” Johnson said. “He’s an elitist.” He liked the way Haley talked about abortion — “she threaded the needle, and she did a very good job on that.” But he came to not like her tone in her tussles with DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy during debates — a forum many felt she excelled in and credited for fueling her rise. “She should’ve took some higher ground when she started sparring with Vivek,” Johnson told me. “She came off worse because he doesn’t know any better,” he said.
“You know what made a big difference? A lot of the ads” that he saw mainly on Fox News, he said. Particularly successful on Johnson was an ad from a pro-Trump super PAC that had Haley “saying that illegal aliens were not illegal,” he told me. “I’m a black-and-white guy. You break the law, you break the law,” he said. “If I go out there and break the law, ain’t nobody going to help Ted Johnson. I’m going to jail.”’
Johnson started talking about “Russia-gate” and “Biden’s scandals” and Hunter Biden. What, I wondered, did Hunter Biden have to do with Nikki Haley? “She’s not going to hold anybody accountable for what they’ve done,” Johnson told me. “People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”
“Nikki said — she said it — ‘We’re moving on,’ forget the past and what she called the chaos. Trump’s the chaos creator. But I don’t see her holding any of this accountable. I see her getting back in line, being a party swamp creature, continuing business as usual, but not holding all this mess that I see accountable. And I think a lot of people think like that.”
A lot of people do think like that. Not so long ago, though, Ted Johnson wasn’t one of them.
“What happened?” I asked again.
“They started prosecuting Trump for a bunch of crap. And I’ll be honest. I started feeling for the guy. I says, ‘Holy shit, what are they doing to this guy?’”
“Can you help me understand more why the legal actions against President Trump have bothered you so much?” I asked.
“January 6th,” he said. “January 6th was staged.”
“By?”
“The Democratic Party,” he said. “Nancy Pelosi.”
“Did you always think that?”
“At first I thought it was bad,” he said. “Until time came on and I’m starting to watch …”
“What are you starting to watch?”
“The hearings.”
“The actual hearings,” I said, “convinced you not that it was very terrible but that it was …”
“A setup,” he said. “They cherrypicked what they wanted to show. They cherrypicked what Trump actually said.”
And Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the part of the Constitution that prohibits people who tried to overthrow the government from running for office? “He didn’t do that,” Johnson said. “There was no insurrection. He said, ‘Go over there peacefully and protest.’ And so, for a guy like me, I am looking, and I’m saying, ‘Why is everybody so hellbent on getting Trump in jail or getting him not to win?’”
“What’s your answer to that question?” I asked.
“They’re afraid as hell, because this time around he’s going to take the DOJ, he’s going to take the bureaucracy of the FBI, the CIA, all the stupid intel agencies that don’t do shit, and he’s going to upset the apple cart,” he said.
I referred to the argument Trump is now making over and over that he’s going to go after them because he says they’re going after him but really they’re going after you — his supporters.
“That’s exactly the way I feel,” Johnson said.
“Did you feel like that before he said that,” I said, “or did he say that and you said yes?”
“He said that, and I said yes,” he said.
“And trust me, the guy’s a pig, he’s a womanizer — arrogant a-----e,” Johnson said of Trump. “But I need somebody that’s going to go in and lead, and I need somebody that’s going to take care of the average guy.”
“But is taking care of the average guy and breaking the system the same thing?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Because they’re all in it for themselves.”
“And if you break the system, what does that look like?”
“Accountability,” he said.
And so I asked about the four criminal indictments against Trump — the attempts to hold him accountable.
The federal election interference case in Washington? “I don’t see it,” he said. “There was no insurrection.” The porn star hush money case in New York? “Totally ridiculous.” The sweeping election interference case in Georgia? “Jury’s out on what’s going on there.” And the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case in Florida? It’s the one that gives Johnson a modicum of pause. “You don’t f--- around with classified material. Whoever advised him he could have that — he should have gave that s--- up,” he said. “But he was being the stubborn, arrogant person that he is.” And he added, “I didn’t like the way the FBI did it. The raid was ridiculous. And that just emboldened me.”
“What if that went to trial and he was convicted?” I asked. “Should he still be electable?”
“What’s the law say?” he said.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “That’s what the law says.”
“Accountability is accountability. But they’re throwing so much stuff at this guy, and it’s almost like I’m rooting for him,” he told me. “This is a whole system of government going after one man who, probably, I bet, right now, 85 million people want to be president.”
“But accountability is accountability,” I said.
“Accountability is accountability,” he said.
“Whether it’s Hunter Biden or Donald Trump,” I said.
“But do I trust the system?” he said. “I don’t.”
“You’re a veteran,” I told him. “You are somebody who doesn’t trust the system that in the broadest sense you served.”
“I have no trust,” he said.
“The system you served,” I said again.
“That’s right. I swore an oath,” he said. “I believed in that oath.”
“When did you stop believing?” I asked Ted Johnson.
“About when Trump became president,” he answered.
English (US)