You can feel fear, anxiety and anger emanating like rippling waves of South Carolina heat when people start talking about the state of America months after Donald Trump started his second presidential administration.
You feel it at a local demonstration in Brittlebank Park. You hear it in tense voices in quiet, casual conversations. You read about it in stories about attacks, such as just a few days ago after a man shot a flamethrower in Colorado at people marching to support hostages in Gaza.
And it’s front and center now after authorities arrested 80 people over the weekend in Ladson in an immigration raid.
The local Latino community is on high alert about Big Brother.
This atmosphere of anxiety so horrified a 22-year-old construction worker in Anderson County that he wrote a 25-page policy document about how to combat the Trump administration and its changes.
“I have watched over the course of my lifetime, institutions like the Supreme Court and presidency, be degraded to such a degree that somebody like Donald Trump can show up and push against it and have nothing pushing back,” said Thomas Cantor, author of what he calls The Sabilist Manifesto.
“Watching basically the American Caesar show up and do what he did and continue to do it — it just hurt and horrified me, and I had to do something about it.”
A Mount Pleasant artist is worried, too — particularly for veterans who fought for American democracy. She said she feared that what they sacrificed for is slowly becoming obsolete.
“The men and women who died to give us this freedom and protect our democracy, and I’m watching it slip away every day,” she said.
A polarized America
According to an April poll by Winthrop University, feelings regarding the Trump administration are polarized in South Carolina. Some 44% of respondents viewed the administration positively, but 43% expressed unfavorability regarding the administration’s current policies.
Winthrop Poll founder Scott Huffmon told the Charleston City Paper that the reason for polarization and anxiety among residents comes from the two parties viewing each other in a growingly negative light.
“Each side thinks the other side is really extreme, and they think the other side isn’t going to govern ethically,” Huffmon, a professor of political science at Winthrop University, said. “And if you believe the other side is unethical and extreme, then you’re going to be terrified if they’re in power.”
The City Paper interviewed more than a dozen people over the last week about the fear and anxiety some feel are gripping the area. Several asked to be not named — because they were worried about what might happen to them.
Anxiety about the economy and tariffs
A 42-year-old store owner from James Island said he worried about people not being able to open up new businesses due to high interest rates.
“Nobody wants to take out a loan at 9% right now as they’re not going to be able to pay it back,” he said.
Meanwhile, Daniel Einhorn, owner of Bilda Bike on upper King Street, is similarly anxious about businesses like his not being able to take bolder risks in the future because of Trump-imposed tariffs.
“The current administration has made it worse in that respect by continuing to double down on the uncertainty,” he said. “You made this bet [of opening a business], and you thought, ‘I’m going to make this amount of profit,’ and all of a sudden it changes in a heartbeat.”
Sources of information
Several people say they are worried about how the country is more divided than before. Some like Mike Lowry say they think it’s because people will only commit to listening to one side of the news.
“They immediately think they need to go full-fledged onto the side they have an allegiance to,” said Lowry, a data engineer visiting from Boston.
Huffmon said this lack of media literacy is one of the root causes behind the political division. His concern is the lack of expanding beyond short blasts of news from social media sites like TikTok.
“You’re not going to get a lot of information, and whoever is giving that information has an incentive to make it seem as dire as possible,” Huffmon said.
Lowry also said he fears the trend of right-wing media influencers pushing rhetoric of fear-mongering to college campuses.
“When you do that to 50% of the country, no matter what side you’re on, it causes distress which turns into anger, and that turns into hatred,” Lowry said.
Some aren’t worried
One Charleston antique shop owner said he’s not concerned about price increases from Trump’s China tariffs. When asked how much more he would pay for foreign goods, he said, that as long as China is out of the equation it doesn’t matter to him.
“If we get rid of China tomorrow, and they [America] make it [goods] here, I don’t care,” he said. “It’ll all adjust itself out.”
An underwater diver from Pittsburgh said concerns over tariffs were unwarranted. He said prices for foreign goods haven’t changed.
“Everyone says, ‘Good thing you bought that foreign car before the tariffs,’ or, ‘Good thing you bought that Chinese battery before the tariffs,’ when those things are actually the exact same price if not less,” he said.
The need for change
Derek Ward, a Navy veteran who lives in North Charleston, said he views “human action” in local community groups as being more effective than government intervention, citing their lack of timeliness.
“An hour of human action is worth more than 100 hours working towards getting a bill signed to get money scraped together that might only last a few months,” he said.
Cantor said he wrote The Sabalist Manifesto as an appeal to Americans to participate in defending their rights and calls for unity in building a better future for all.
“We commit ourselves to the defense of civil liberties and rights of all Americans no matter their background,” Cantor wrote in the manifesto’s preamble.
“We will fight to make America a greater nation.”
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