CNN

By Elle Reeve and Samantha Guff, CNN

Christiansburg, Va. (CNN) — Jo Anne Price wears a button that reads, “You find it offensive. I find it funny. That’s why I’m happier than you.” Price is a black woman who runs a store in Christiansburg, Virginia, that sells pro-Trump items. She is 72, wears black-rimmed glasses, her gray hair is slicked back, and she has been lifting weights for 20 years. She says, “Racism is a made-up word,” and “I don’t know what it is because it doesn’t exist,” and “If I don’t accept it, it doesn’t apply to me.” At the register, she sells credit card-like items, one of which reads “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD.”

“If you give them to a cop, he’ll let you go. He’s not going to give you a ticket,” Sebriam Vannoy said of the cards, laughing. Vannoy, an older black gentleman, wore a head-to-toe camouflage-print outfit with “Trump was right” and three Christian crosses on his chest. He said the card worked for him. “He laughed about it and didn’t give me a ticket,” he said of a police officer who pulled him over. (There was at least one similar incident: In Alaska, a woman showed a cop a “white privilege card” instead of her driver’s license in 2022, and she said he let her go.)

Vannoy and Price support former President Donald Trump and his re-election, knowing that it is unusual to be black and support Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, even as both Republicans and Democrats try to gain support in communities of color.

“I hear from some black ladies who say, ‘Well, he never did anything for black people,'” Vannoy said. He says he responds, “No, he’s not a president for black people. He’s a president for all Americans.”

Price, a former chairwoman of the Montgomery County Republican Party, said she didn’t mind Trump’s campaign claiming that blacks identified with him because he was a convicted felon. “I worked as a prison chaplain for five years. When you’re a convicted felon and someone else is a convicted felon, there’s a camaraderie,” she said. She blames the mass incarceration of black men in the ’90s on “Biden’s Laws,” the controversial 1994 crime bill whose chief proponent was President Joe Biden.

Although the merchandise represented an explicit rejection of the way liberals talk about race, gender and social justice, beneath the surface, identity still mattered to the people in the Trump store on that rainy August afternoon.

Vannoy’s support for Trump did not waver after Biden said he would not seek re-election. The issue was not race, but gender. “Because of what happened in the Garden of Eden, there will never be another elected woman – black or white – to occupy the White House that God would ever stand behind,” he said.

The Rev. Merrie Turner heard those comments. “I’m not sure America is ready for female leadership,” said Turner, who is white, saying she has witnessed that resistance first hand. “It’s not easy being an ordained woman in the priesthood either. There’s a male leadership mentality in the church, and so I’ve experienced some rejections over the last 20 years.” She said she believes in equal rights for women to run for public office, even when others don’t. “It would be wonderful to have a female president, if and when one comes along, who represents conservative values,” she said. But Harris was not that person.

Dawson Ladd, a younger white man who wore a Carhartt T-shirt while shopping, said Harris was not for him. “She’s more for the office job in the city, you know, ‘let’s let everyone starve.’ And I’m more of a blue-collar type. … She doesn’t support our kind of people,” Ladd said, explaining that he works in construction. “Trump is for the working class and for helping those in need, and the people we have there now are not that.”

Another customer, Joe Shannon, said he voted twice for Barack Obama and then twice for Trump, but was not impressed with Harris. “I just don’t think she has the experience. I think she was only chosen because she’s a woman,” said Shannon, an older white gentleman with a neatly trimmed beard. He was waiting for a shirt he had ordered, a button-down with stars on one side and red stripes on the other and “TRUMP” in the middle.

Regarding Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance, Shannon said: “This is young blood, young, fresh blood for the Republican Party. I think we need that. And I think the Democratic Party needs young blood too. I think a lot of people are fed up with some of us older guys.”

One of the most striking things about interviewing strong Trump supporters is how many defend his most controversial statements. Price said she has no problem with Trump questioning whether Harris is actually black. “He’s just saying she’s not a black-black person,” Price argued, because Harris’ father was Jamaican and her mother was Indian, which sets her background apart from people whose parents were born here. Price said there are mixed-race families in her own family, but “I’m not that bothered by” Trump’s comments. She concluded, “He has every right to free speech to have a point of view if he wants to have that point of view.”

Price also defended some of Trump’s other inflammatory racist comments, such as that immigrants “poison the blood” of America. She said she did not see the remark as racial animosity, but that it was referring to illegal immigrants who break the law. “It poisons our communities for our children because they are less safe. And the way I interpret that is that any time you poison something, you make it useless. Or you make it dangerous,” she said.

Price said she was once a Democrat because her parents were. But in the 1980s, she began to question her party loyalty because of abortion. “I’m not going to live on a Democrat plantation. I’m not going to live on a Republican plantation. And that’s what I love about President Trump, OK? He’s taking us out of those two plantations and he’s pulling us into this one big area, which is Americanism,” Price said. Trump is unifying, she said.

Price says she’s a forward-thinking person and “there are so many positive things that we’re going to experience once we get through this little difficult time.” That’s why, she says, most of her merchandise is more pro-Trump than anti-Harris. But there are still anti-Harris items, embedded in images of Trump’s mug shot and his defiant “fight!” call as he stood up covered in blood after the attempted assassination.

“This is for the people who like a little rum in their Coke,” Price said.

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