Love in a Time of Political Rancor? A Rosman Family Shows How It's Done
Clarence Bentley's store is a shrine to former President Donald Trump. His grandson may be Transylvania County's most prominent young Democratic activist. They get along great.
ROSMAN — Clarence Bentley has been all in for Donald Trump from the moment the former president announced his candidacy at New York’s Trump Tower in 2015.
“When he came down that escalator, I said, ‘This is the man we need to be president,’ and he proved to be a great president,” said Bentley, 79.
A flag outside his Rosman antique store, J & S Trading Post, touts a not-yet-official 2024 Trump run for president. A nearby banner proclaims, all evidence to the contrary, “TRUMP WON. DEMOCRATS CHEATED!”
But despite his loyalty to a man who now, basically, is the Republican Party, Bentley said he’d be just as supportive of a future Democratic presidential candidate, his 17-year-old grandson, Johnathan Meeks.
Bentley wouldn’t just stump for him, he said, “I’d Trump for him.”
Considering the shared depth of their political convictions, the two seem less like total opposites than mirror images.
The tail of Bentley’s white mullet flows from under the back of his camo ball cap. Dark curls tumble over the top of Meeks’ wire-rim glasses. Bentley’s staunch and concise opinions come out in a slow rumble. Meeks’ equally passionate views sound like nuanced, well-crafted position papers.
Bentley broadcasts his politics with his signs that, along with a 20-foot-high water wheel, have made his compound of home, shop and utility buildings on Pickens Highway a landmark as prominent in Rosman as the old Transylvania County Courthouse is in Brevard.
Meeks, in July, got to share his thoughts as a liberal Senator representing North Carolina at the annual Boys Nation gathering in Washington DC. He has served as a page in the North Carolina Senate and was recently elected vice president of the senior class at Rosman High School. He’s openly gay, the school’s student-body spokesperson, and a youth delegate with the community mental-health initiative, TC Strong.
And Bentley didn’t pull the idea of his grandson’s pursuit of high office out of thin air. It’s right there in Meeks’ email address: “futurepresmeeks@gmail.com.”
But despite their differences, Meeks says, they get along great. He calls his grandfather “Papa.” His grandfather fondly refers to Meeks by his middle name, Brock.
Readers “will see two people who disagree fundamentally on politics,” Meeks said, after pulling on a light-blue “Democrat” sweatshirt for the above photograph. “But then they’re going to read this article and see how cordial they are with each other, and how loving.”
And this, they say, can be a lesson for the rest of us in the midst of another contentious election season: Political disagreements don’t have to be hateful, and we might find more common ground if we got to know and understand our counterparts on the dreaded other side.
“A lot of time it’s lack of familiarity with people who disagree with you that creates these really strong, evangelical positions,” Meeks said. “You’ve got to to expose yourself to people you disagree with if you’re ever going to be truly open-minded.”
The Shrine to Trump
Grandfather and grandson discussed their relationship Friday evening, sitting in high-backed leather chairs in Bentley’s shop in front of a television airing Fox News, which is actually Bentley’s second-favorite media outlet. The far-right One America News Network “has the best reporters,” he said.
They were surrounded by merchandise — old cast-iron bells, Andy Griffith-show era North Carolina license plates, a washboard and a collection of several dozen pool cues — as well as evidence of one source of their bond: a dark line about two feet up on the shop’s wall showing the high-water mark of the flooding from the remnants of last year’s Tropical Storm Fred.
They agree that the government was right to provide aid for damaged properties and they used this money to renovate Bentley’s home, where Meeks has lived since his mother moved to South Carolina in 2020.
“He painted my whole house, picked the colors and everything,” Bentley said of his grandson, who has also transformed himself into an excellent student and taken over the management of a household budget that relies almost exclusively on Bentley’s monthly $1,700 Social Security check.
“He’s that smart. Why hold him back?” said Bentley, who was formerly the maintenance director at a large plastics-parts factory in Easley, S.C., where he supervised a large team of workers he judged not on who they were but what they did.
“He’s responsible because he wakes up every morning and goes to school, and I don’t have to shake him and shake him,” Bentley said of his grandson. “I know a brilliant person when I see one and I told him I would have hired him down there where I used to work in a heartbeat.”
Democrats unfairly label Republicans as racist and homophobes, he said, and he never had a problem with his grandson’s sexuality.
“He’s his own man.”
Meeks’ other family members, all of them conservative, have been similarly supportive, Meeks said, driving him to events and, when he traveled to Boys Nation, to the airport.
“Those things look simple in retrospect, but at the time they were very important — having the assistance from Papa and my grandma, uncles and so forth,” Meeks said. “There’s a lot of stuff I learned a lot from that I would have missed out on if it weren’t for them.”
Not that he and his grandfather discuss the ideas Meeks brings back from these events.
“A lot of times, it’s like what are we going to get when we go grocery shopping or what will we do for this room after we get done renovating this one,” he said.
His biggest conflicts with his grandfather, he said, have nothing to do with politics, but “are humble differences on how to train our dog.”
Meeks tries to keep their young male husky, Akira, restrained. Bentley, eyeing a promising future litter, lets him out to play with his female German shepherd.
“I think it would make a beautiful dog,” he said.
So the meeting of the minds that Meeks said is possible when worldviews collide? Because they don’t talk much about such views, it hasn’t really happened, at least not on national issues.
This is Bentley on his main worry, immigration:
President Joe “Biden came into office and had a really good situation and started changing everything that Trump did, and it blew up,” he said.
“That’s the cause of the crisis we have now, with all the immigrants coming in . . . That’s what’s causing the inflation.”
Meeks, as an economically disadvantaged outsider in a conservative community, sympathizes with immigrants trying to seize opportunity. He also pointed to the United States’ alleged backing of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1973 as evidence of America’s role in creating the chaos in South and Central America that many immigrants are trying to escape.
“They are fleeing destabilized nations that have gone through military coups. Their governments are in shambles; their economies are in shambles.
“I recognize that that a lot that historically was due to the actions of the U.S. Government during the Cold War,” he said. “I can relate to wanting to get away from that problem and wanting to build an environment where your family and your descendants can be successful.”
He also keeps up with local news and said his biggest concern is the emergence of a county Moms for Liberty group that “equates education with indoctrination.” This idea, Meeks said, is “insulting” to dedicated and caring educators “doing the most important job in civilization.”
One example is Rosman High Principal Jason Ormsby, who Meeks said recently took time out to drive him to a state Department of Motor Vehicles office to get his driver's license.
“The teachers I have met at Rosman and the teachers I know of at Brevard (High School) — they are hard-working, honest Americans. They’re teaching students to the best of their ability pretty straightforward and pretty fair topics,” he said. “There is nothing I see that is indoctrinating kids.”
Which conservative education activists would learn if they would just listen to students, he said.
“They are missing the key demographic that would actually validate their arguments,” he said. “I don’t think if you ask any student at Rosman right now you’re going to hear them talking about being taught porn in school or being taught (critical race theory) in school.”
Bentley suspects teachers in other parts of the country are spreading liberal ideology. But when it comes to the local situation, at least on this issue, he trusts his grandson.
“I figure they aren’t doing it over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of nearby Rosman High. “I go by Brock telling me what’s going on in schools.”
Great article Dan, it's a relief to know that there are still people capable of disagreeing with each other without the need to hate each other. Heard of so many stories about families breaking apart over their political beliefs, glad that stories like this one, of understanding and support, are being told.
Well written article, but also lets me know where NOT to shop.