I went hiking with some Trump supporters. What happened next was surprising

OpinionNovelist, author and commentatorSeptember 10, 2026 — 5:00amSeptember 10, 2026 — 5:00amWe were about to spend five days walking through the Cotswolds and had just met our two guides. The weather was glorious, every garden and meadow in the south of England seemed to have burst into flower, and there were no clouds on the horizon as far as we could see. However, like most travellers embarking on a tour, our biggest potential niggle was about those who would be joining us.“Who else is on the tour?” I asked one of the guides.“Four Americans,” came the reply.The niggle of doubt got a little more niggly: “As long as they’re not Trump supporters.”“Oh no,” said our guide, “They don’t travel.”Famous last words. It turns out some do, including the four we were about to spend almost a week with.Contrary to what our guide told us, Trump supporters do like to travel.APAt first, the married couple, her sister and their friend seemed perfectly nice, even kind. It wasn’t until dinner the first night, after a 10-kilometre hike through breathtaking scenery and quaint honey-stone villages, that we realised our charming travel companions had another side to them.My husband and I were restrained, I promise you, as no doubt our travelling companions were with us. None of us wanted to ruin the next few days. After our differences became apparent, we all stuck to safer subjects. I could feel our guides relax.That night, I wondered how we’d keep it up for nearly a week. I loathe Trump and find it hard to understand how anyone supports him. Mind you, I have only come across one other Trumpist, so I decided I should approach this as an opportunity to understand why seemingly decent people could support such a man.I was surprised by the level of vitriol directed at the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris by our companions, including falsely claiming she had slept her way to the top. I’d heard this before from my only other Trumpist acquaintance, who followed it up with the claim that Harris wasn’t black. What was Orwell’s warning? That we’d have to deny the evidence of our own eyes and ears? Even more puzzling was that one of our party had a trans daughter who, to her credit, she supported.Over the next few days, we discovered our companions were lifelong Republicans, so there was something tribal about their political loyalties. I wondered if the rather odd American habit (to this Australian, anyway) of being a registered Republican, Democrat or Independent leads to a my-party-right-or-wrong mentality that I don’t think we see as much of here.The Americans were also wealthy, and Trump’s economic policies had not affected them. In fact, his bullish sharemarket had made them money.Two women in our party then revealed that they too had lost adult sons; the grief the little plaque unleashed was real.JANE CAROThere was some self-delusion, in my eyes anyway. They compared Trump to Churchill (they’d just been to the War Cabinet rooms in London), saying both mavericks and unpopular outsiders. There is some truth in that but, despite my good intentions, I couldn’t help point out that Churchill, for all his faults, had won a real Nobel Prize – for literature. I doubt A History of the English-Speaking Peoples can be compared with The Art of the Deal, but maybe that’s just me.But it was something we came across on the last day of our walk that stopped me, literally, in my tracks. As we climbed a stile in a meadow, we saw a bench which carried a plaque saying it had been gifted to ramblers by a woman in memory of her son, who had been killed by thieves in Africa. Two women in our party then revealed that they too had lost adult sons; the grief the little plaque unleashed was real.It also reminded me of something – the only other Trump supporter I knew had also lost an adult son. I’m not saying all Trump supporters have lost sons, obviously. But the coincidence did make me think that the Right has proved brilliant at weaponising pain. Not hate, exactly, but pain.Maybe when life does not go according to plan, when bad things happen to good people who have tried hard to follow the rules, when even God has let them down, grief unleashes an inchoate rage in some. After all, why should other people, especially people who are worse-behaved, who don’t fit the mould of “good, law-abiding citizen” – poor people, drug pushers, immigrants, “illegals” etc – keep their sons (or job, or business, or marriage), when they lost theirs? Why shouldn’t they suffer, too?Maybe there is some of that in Trumpism, because even among ordinarily kind people, the cruelty does sometimes seem to be the point. The only thing I know for sure is that while we may have shared five days admiring the same views, our world views remain oceans apart.Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up for our newsletter.From our partners