The author sitting across from "Bunchanumbers" at their meal at Parkway Deli in Silver Spring, Maryland.
This article is obviously written by a lunatic that is more brainwashed than most! This woman should be ashamed of herself! She is a race baiting bullshitter! It’s Fake News by a Fake Hater! Trump supporters are great people that help others. We are what America needs! MAGA
I was pretty sure this tweet, sent in response to a recent essay I published on HuffPost detailing my summer interviewing people at Donald Trump rallies , was written by a bot. It had all the telltale signs: mudslinging; a username consisting of a first name followed by a bunch of numbers; and the “MAGA” sign-off.
“Thank you for your comment, name bunchanumbers!” I replied ― to which the account responded: “You are welcome. I have lived in MD a long time and have never seen anyone as biased and full of shit as you are. MAGA.”
We continued to tweet back and forth at each other a few times. I asked for croissant recipes and answers to math questions in hopes of getting the AI I believed to be running the bot to reveal itself. Instead, I eventually got a reply I never saw coming: “Let me take you to lunch next week and discuss how you can help Make America Great Again! My treat. MAGA.”
This was a first for me. As a journalist and researcher who has spent much of the past decade studying the psychology of far-right movements, I’d interacted with countless MAGA die-hards, but none of them had ever invited me to a meal. I was intrigued, so I agreed, and within an hour we had exchanged cell numbers and made a date.
We met on a late Tuesday morning just outside D.C. at Parkway Deli in Silver Spring, Maryland, a beloved institution tucked into a strip mall that is almost always packed with a cross-section of society — lawyers and construction workers having lunch, retirees lingering over mugs of coffee, and running groups refueling after a workout. I arrived early enough to secure a table on the quieter back patio, and awaited the arrival of my new acquaintance.
My friends and colleagues know about the work I do, but when I told them I was lunching with a MAGA guy I met on X (formerly Twitter), they were worried for my safety (and, in a few cases, my sanity). Two people offered to come to the restaurant and covertly keep an eye on the situation. I later learned that his friends were also opposed to our meetup. He told me they were convinced I was going to doxx him and ruin his life. That is never my goal when I meet with a subject — no matter what their political beliefs are — so I’m not using his name in this essay. Instead, I’ll only refer to him as “Bunchanumbers.”
Bunchanumbers is an energetic family man in his mid-50s with swept-back silver hair who looked comfortable in his shirt and tie. We kicked off our conversation noting that we both split our time between homes in Florida and Maryland. We ordered bagels, plus bacon and iced tea for him. We chatted about how long we’d each been married, where we went to college, and how he takes care of his aging parents and finds fulfillment in helping people.
We sat across from each other for two hours and discussed his positions and where he gets his “information.” We probably would have gone until dinner if I hadn’t had to catch a plane to a Trump rally on Long Island.
Bunchanumbers is earnest in his belief that Trump’s policies are best for the country, and that we will be more united and prosperous under a second Trump term. I was impressed with how much he reads and internalizes information (and, yes, misinformation). He easily pulled up figures, names and chronologies over the course of our discussion, and he had justifications for every position he held — the antithesis of the clueless MAGA people that we see in late-night TV “gotcha” segments.
Unlike in his responses on X, he engaged with me in good faith, answered all of my questions, allowed me to record our conversation, and gave honest consideration to the points I raised.
Despite being a die-hard Trump supporter who wished he could have been at Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, 2021 (though he says he would not have gone to the Capitol), he consumes a range of news sources, but does not watch Newsmax or OAN. Unlike in his responses on X, he engaged with me in good faith, answered all of my questions, allowed me to record our conversation, and gave honest consideration to the points I raised. We continued to text and share links for two weeks after our in-person conversation.
We did not shift one another’s positions even a bit, but I did gain insight into why it is so difficult to have conversations across the MAGA divide.
When I asked Bunchanumbers why he sent me angry tweets about my article, he told me he was offended that I reported that Trump supporters say racist things at rallies. “I felt like you were talking about me,” he said. He defended the MAGA community: “There are not 75 million racist Americans that voted for Trump because he’s a racist.” He added that Trump “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”
I responded with a list of racist things Trump has done — the false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets (“Those [comments] are just for illegal immigrants, ” Bunchanumbers replied), the Barack Obama birtherism (“That was just political stuff,” he said), his questioning of Kamala Harris’ race (“He treats everyone the same. He treats Nancy Pelosi just as bad as he’ll treat Kamala,” he claimed, mispronouncing the vice president’s name).
I pushed him on the false claims that Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, have made about Springfield, Ohio, which have led to threats against the community, including bomb threats to local schools . Bunchanumbers never conceded that Trump was lying, but he did try to justify the former president’s deceitful comments as a successful strategic campaign move.
“He’s trying to prove a bigger point, that we need to secure that border, right? And if there’s people eating cats, well, guess what? Everyone’s ears are open now, right?” he told me. “Just because he said that, people are looking at the border ... You gotta just take Trump with a grain of salt when he says crazy shit like that, because he made this point.”
When I pointed out that the immigrants in Springfield were here legally, he argued that “asylum has laws that weren’t met when we brought those Haitians over.”
Beyond the almost cliched “don’t take Trump seriously” sentiment, what stood out to me the most from this particular exchange was our inability to agree on what qualifies as “racist.” I have seen his interpretation of racism a lot over the years, including in the conservative Midwestern community where I grew up. Many of these people believe that if you have a Black friend, or you aren’t unkind to non-white people in public, then you can’t be racist. They refuse to acknowledge systemic racism — even when it’s obvious — or how dangerous comments like Trump’s can be.
I told Bunchanumbers that we seemed to be working with different definitions of racism and that’s why we were talking past each other. He agreed, and said: “You’re still going to think it’s racist, and I’m going to think it’s just politics.”
As our conversation continued and he shared well-worn conspiracy theories with me, it became clear that trust in legacy media was also an issue for him. Like most Trump supporters I talk to, Bunchanumbers believes the 2020 election was stolen. We spoke about the false claim that “suitcases of ballots” in Georgia were actually fraudulent votes that were counted after observers left the room. He vigorously defended his position, posing questions about what happened that night and why Democrats would fight Trump in court when all he wanted was the truth. I offered to send him sources debunking this conspiracy theory, and he welcomed it. “If you’re right and it is misinformation, I will thank you. I’ll never even mention it again. Honestly,” he said.
The next morning, I sent him articles from FactCheck.org , PolitiFact and WSB-TV Atlanta , as well as CBS News’ interview with a Republican election official in Georgia debunking the claims.
“The fact checker you sent is totally false,” he replied. Despite the careful and gentle dismantling of the “stolen election” story, in the end, he did not trust my sources.
It can be difficult for those who largely trust the mainstream media to wrap their heads around the MAGA distrust of the free press. When I write about Trump supporters, people ask me things like: “How can they believe all that when it’s been so thoroughly investigated and disproven?” But legitimate mainstream sources will rarely be believed by Trump supporters who think media outlets deliberately treat Trump unfairly.
I wanted to better understand how Bunchanumbers made decisions about which media to believe, and I pointed out that he himself had sent me an article from The Associated Press before we met. I asked him when, or how, he decides that a mainstream source like the AP is reliable.
“[If] it’s coming from AP, Politico, CNBC, CNN... and it’s good [about Trump], I imagine it’s true,” he told me.
I wasn’t astounded by his response, as I’ve heard this line of reasoning before, but I was nonetheless troubled by his nonchalant approach ― shared by so many other MAGA supporters ― to cherry-picking the truth.
I walked away from my lunch with Bunchanumbers realizing this meetup had been a distillation of my nearly 10-year project investigating the juxtaposition of the sometimes misaligned online and offline behavior within the MAGA community. After years of reading pro-Trump social media, I have spent most of this past year attending the presidential nominee’s rallies and interviewing his supporters. The views are the same no matter where they share them, and similar misinformation, conspiracy theories, and rhetoric persist on the internet and off.
Despite the online vitriol that almost always exists in MAGA spaces or is lobbed by MAGA supporters, these same people were friendly and polite in person.
The difference I’ve found is that despite the online vitriol that almost always exists in MAGA spaces or is lobbed by MAGA supporters, these same people were friendly and polite in person. Bunchanumbers reflected this exact dichotomy I observed in the larger group. He sent tweets that were angry, insulting and stereotypically MAGA, but in person he was amicable. He has fully bought into right-wing ideology (though he wouldn’t call it that), and his views were consistent no matter where he exchanged them with me. But the delivery of those views was much different online than it was offline.
He and I left lunch with our minds absolutely unchanged, and without really connecting beyond small talk. But we did recognize one important thing. We may have been unable to discuss issues from a place of shared understanding, but we were able to agree, in real time, about where and when we were talking past each other, and why.
Our meeting clarified for me that the challenge of reaching across the MAGA divide is not only about our ideological disagreements, but about the reasons we don’t hear each other. The gulf between Bunchanumbers and me remained wide, but we were able to look across the vast distance between us, see the other side, and acknowledge why we couldn’t connect. And in the 2024 political hellscape, a little shared understanding on anything is a victory.
What’s more, I am convinced that the more we engage — especially offline — the more opportunities we have to see each other as human beings who behave the way we do because of a complex collection of desires, pains, anxieties and outside influences. The more we try to untangle these things and interrogate how they came to be, the more we can understand each other and, hopefully, get closer to peace (or at least move further away from violence).
Still, I know we have a long way to go, and I’m not under any illusions that a single meal or a handful of not-entirely-combative emails or texts is representative of true progress.
Two days after our lunch, I noticed Bunchanumbers had reappeared in my mentions on X. He’d asked me what I thought about Clarence Thomas, whom he called “America’s first black Supreme Court Justice.” When someone reminded him that the first Black Supreme Court justice was actually Thurgood Marshall, he replied: “ He is Black and you people are racists. MAGA.”
Jen Golbeck is a professor at the University of Maryland, where she studies extremism, social media, malicious online behavior and artificial intelligence. She writes the MAGAReport , a newsletter reporting on the far right with a focus on trends and plans for violence. She splits her time between Washington, D.C., and the Florida Keys.
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