My Coffee with Charlie: A Republican and a Democrat Manage to Have a Civil Conversation about Trump

An outspoken supporter of Donald Trump agreed to sit down for a discussion about his presidency. We found some common ground on policy, but more on the need to keep talking.

Charlie Brendle talks Trump at a downtown coffee shop last week

BREVARD — Charlie Brendle and I talked about the late, great Asheville author, Thomas Wolfe.

He’s one of my all-time favorites. Brendle owns a historic house in Pisgah Forest where Wolfe did, actually, come home again, or at least back to the mountains, regularly visiting another famous writer who owned Brendle’s property in the 1930s.

We talked sports. Brendle, 84, was a very good college athlete. I’m very good at being a fan.

Then there was President Donald Trump, the world’s most polarizing human being. It probably would have surprised anyone who saw Brendle and me amiably yakking at a downtown coffee shop on Friday to learn that this was the reason for our meeting, that Trump was the main subject of our conversation.

Brendle, the retired director of sales and marketing at the former Ecusta paper mill, has become a prominent, if unofficial, local Republican commentator. He regularly writes letters to the Transylvania Times and was one of several readers who posted objections to my column about historian Dan Carter’s grim take on Trump’s inauguration.

But, significantly, he was the only one of those commenters who took me up on my offer for an interview, because he, like me, believes we need to keep talking, need to keep in mind that, no matter how much we differ politically, we remain fellow citizens.

Division, rather than any single elected official, is the country’s greatest political threat, Brendle wrote in an upcoming guest editorial for the Times, an advance copy of which he shared with me.

Trump’s “landslide victory” will allow him to pursue policies with so many obvious benefits that not even Democrats will be able to deny them, he wrote. The potential for a large swath of Americans to unite in support of Trump is so great, in fact, his column compares his election to the falling of the Berlin Wall.

“Good News!!” he wrote. “We have finally entered a new era of hope and optimism.”

Since the point of this column is to maintain open dialogue, I’ll stay away from sarcasm in my counter argument.

The people who tore down the Wall were rejecting, not embracing, authoritarian rule. Trump doesn’t have a mandate; he received slightly less than 50 percent of the vote against an extremely weak Democratic candidate. Trump has done nothing so far that shows he has any interest in bringing his opponents on board.

And if he does eventually build consensus, I think it will happen in the opposite way Brendle predicts: Even some Trump hardliners might start to have their doubts once it becomes clear he’s running the country into the ground.

Not that I’m rooting for this to happen, which is one reason Brendle and I could keep talking. Also, I acknowledged missteps of Democrats and what Brendle considers the liberal media.

As much as I respect and depend on conventional news sources such as the New York Times, I told him I’ve seen their tendency to magnify the slightest grievances of marginalized groups.

Forgive some student loans? Fine. But to extend this to families making up to $250,000 annually, as former President Joe Biden proposed? Obscene.

I can see how such narratives and policies cause resentment among working-class Trump voters, with whom, I think, I’ve had more interactions than many embubbled liberals, both as a local reporter and as a rural postal carrier during most of Trump’s first term.

I liked and respected most of my coworkers. I, likewise, found Brendle funny, direct and open-minded about at least some of Trump’s actions.

Brendle said he is “fundamentally opposed” to Trump’s pardons and commutations of Jan. 6 rioters “because of the violence.”

He blasted Trump for his haste to blame the previous day’s airplane/helicopter crash on diversity requirements.

“He’s come out with cr— that’s total speculation,” Brendle said. “Sometimes he ought to keep his f—--g mouth shut.”

Trump cabinet nominees Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr., he said, both carry “a lot of baggage.”

So, some common ground, but not a whole lot.

Brendle said he was impressed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s appearance at his nomination hearing and criticized Democratic senators for asking “gotcha” questions. I thought they were right on point.

One of his big criticisms of Biden is, unsurprisingly, that he allowed immigration to rage out of control. The degree to which this has recently been contained, he said, can be attributed to the prospect of Trump’s get-tough proposals such as sending deported migrants to Guantanamo Bay.

“I think that’s a great idea,” he said.

Maybe immigration was out of hand, I said. But it’s been trending down for months because Biden imposed tighter border controls. Too tight, probably, because of the pain it inflicted on families and our economy’s reliance on immigrant labor.

I brought up Trump’s now-delayed executive order to indiscriminately freeze $3 trillion in federal grant funding.

Brendle said, “I don’t know enough to talk intelligently about the nuts and the bolts and the down-in-the weeds of that.”

I told him about my narrow window on the potential impacts of this decision, now paused by a court order. My older son leads a research program at Louisiana State University that develops resilient and productive crop varieties.

It’s part of the long tradition of advancing and sharing science that has helped feed billions of people, that allowed the United States to become the world’s largest exporter of agricultural products, that provided — and provides — an economic lifeline to impoverished rural areas full of the voters who expect help from Trump.

With the funding freeze — without grants from the US Department of Agriculture — it would come to a sudden, disastrous end.

Did I convince Brendle? I don’t think so. But at least he listened.

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